Here at the Hopey Changey Roosh household, we are concerned for the environment too.

We’re all wearing Green to celebrate the coming rescue by Brrr Ack! Obanana of our besieged Mother Earth.

After reading Mitch’s alarming post, I convened an ad hoc family symposium! Starting today, we only turn on our L.E.D. Christmas (er – sorry to offend) X-Mas lights during off-peak hours (2:20-2:40 AM) so please stop by then to enjoy their glorious splendor.

We have our thermostat set for a cozy 52 degrees, but we’re a Snuggly-Wuggly clan! Plus, we have discovered coats and snow pants aren’t just for the outdoors any more! Yay!

Our Turkey was interviewed before we chose it to make sure that it wasn’t mistreated, and we made sure to buy one that died of old age.

Yum.

In order to thwart Global Warming Cooling Change, we are walking to Church as a family this year! It’s 4.9 miles by car but we should be able to shave some of that by cutting through yards and crossing streets diagonally, like The Crosstown Highway 62. It’ll be a swell time to try out our new Vegan-Tanned Ethical Leather shoes!

Gift-giving is another way to express your rage for the Bush Administration, Corporations, Employers, Wall Street, Exxon, SUV Owners, Methane-Leaking Cows, Taxpayers, Jon Voight, God-Fearing Bible Bangers, Plumbers and Hockey Moms.

First of all, we’re really into recycling, so all of our gifts are recycled this year too!

I can’t wait to see the look on Great Grandpa’s face when he unwraps my son’s Playstation 2! We didn’t want to contribute to the slaughter of our forests so we wrapped it in Saran Wrap.

A guy in the cube next to me says he read an email from an old girlfriend whose Mom’s boyfriend knows a lab assistant that said manufacturing new gifts releases more carbon trioxide into the environment which has created a massive tidal wave of Arctic runoff that is heading towards Florida and is going to come ashore next Wednesday.

So we did our part.

Not to worry, the kids won’t be disappointed! They’re all getting their own Starter Kits for Change! Wait ’till all their little friends see this!

…a super-cool, eco-friendly, gift that keeps on giving! Packed full of green goodies that include a recycled, reusable tote bag, and arbor day tree seedling or “tree in a box”, fair trade hot chocolate, a treeless journal, soduku booklet, compact fluorescent light bulb, gratitude cards, and an envelope to end hunger.

Fun! Yay!

“Scientists” warn us that Christmas lights can harm the planet:

CSIRO researchers said householders should know that each bulb turned on in the name of Christmas will increase emissions of greenhouse gases.Dr Glenn Platt, who leads research on energy demand, said Australia got 80 per cent of its electricity by burning coal which pumps harmful emissions into the atmosphere.

Er,yeah.  Let’s not forget that wrapping paper, festive meals, gleeful consumerism and, what the heck, flying reindeer all impact the environment.

I may just have to start an astroturf scientific group to tell scientists what they can do with that Festivus pole.

The AP says we’re all already dead:

When Bill Clinton took office in 1993, global warming was a slow-moving environmental problem that was easy to ignore. Now it is a ticking time bomb that President-elect Barack Obama can’t avoid.

Since Clinton’s inauguration, summer Arctic sea ice has lost the equivalent of Alaska, California and Texas. The 10 hottest years on record have occurred since Clinton’s second inauguration. Global warming is accelerating. Time is close to running out, and Obama knows it.

Hinderaker:

This displays a remarkable level of ignorance on the part of the Associated Press. Global temperature records are nowhere near accurate enough to rank years, over a period of centuries, with any confidence. For the recent past, though, we have the world’s best data set here in the U.S. And it’s true that at one time, it was widely believed that the 1990s were the warmest recent decade. But that was before it was discovered that NASA’s James Hansen, Al Gore’s chief scientific ally, had been fudging the data, either accidentally or on purpose. NASA was forced to correct its data, with the result that the ten warmest years on record here in the US are as follows: 1934, 1998, 1921, 2006, 1931, 1999, 1953, 1990, 1938, 1939.

The AP apparently hasn’t gotten the word, perhaps because it is relying on the report of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But the IPCC report was a political document, not a scientific one, which deliberately ignored the most current research in the field.

Global Warming:  the first utterly un-falseable, un-testable theory in the history of science.

Hybrid automobiles are ugly. The Honda insight, which will presumably be successful, is no exception.

Uhhh-gly.

The Honda insight is a mirror image of the Toyota Prius and equally hard on the eyes.

By design.

People don’t buy Hybrids for the energy savings; at least those that can do math. Relative to comparably-sized cars, you can’t drive a Hybrid enough miles to make up the difference in cost or to mitigate the environmental impact of manufacture and disposal.

Anyone want Nickel Metal Hydride in their back yard?

People buy Hybrids because they want to make a statement. They want a pat on the back and a place to put their Franken sticker.

Honda acknowledged poor sales of the previous generation Honda Accord Hybrid and ceased its production: they had not adequately “differentiated” the Hybrid variant. Read: not ugly enough.

Even the Cadillac Escalade Hybrid was accompanied by a memo to dealerships assuring them that the unsightly “Hybrid” monikers and badges could be removed without cosmetic damage for well-heeled but less conspicuous tree-huggers.

Being “Green” – or at least looking “Green” is big business and consumers willingly pony up, even when the costs are too high and the benefit negligible.

…it was AIDS that was going to reach across all divides – national, affectional, behavioral – and kill us all.

Or, y’know, maybe not:

As World AIDS Day is marked on Monday, some experts are growing more outspoken in complaining that AIDS is eating up funding at the expense of more pressing health needs.

They argue that the world has entered a post-AIDS era in which the disease’s spread has largely been curbed in much of the world, Africa excepted.

“AIDS is a terrible humanitarian tragedy, but it’s just one of many terrible humanitarian tragedies,” said Jeremy Shiffman, who studies health spending at Syracuse University.

Roger England of Health Systems Workshop, a think tank based in the Caribbean island of Grenada, goes further. He argues that UNAIDS, the U.N. agency leading the fight against the disease, has outlived its purpose and should be disbanded.

“The global HIV industry is too big and out of control. We have created a monster with too many vested interests and reputations at stake, … too many relatively well paid HIV staff in affected countries, and too many rock stars with AIDS support as a fashion accessory,” he wrote in the British Medical Journal in May.

AIDS in its day was a dreadfully scary epidemic, and it killed an awful lot of people.  It was also a political football, and one of the first examples of systematic politcally-correct groupthink dominating policy on a key issue.  AIDS became a politically-correct policy football from the very beginning, costing scads of lives in the process.  Case in point; nations that followed the same sorts of rigorous public-health practices that the US had in attacking all sorts of epidemics in the past – like, say, Cuba – and had the political courage (or lack of political opposition, in Cuba’s case) to focus their national policy on the real causes of the epidemic (behavioral vectors like sharing needles and unprotected sex practices) escaped the worst of the epidemic.  The US and much of the western world wasted much time on politically-correct diversions; “Anyone can catch AIDS”, we were warned throughout the ’80s and ’90s, even as the evidence mounted that straight, non-IV-drug-users who eschewed promiscuity and approached sexuality with a certain amount of prudent, albeit unerotic and less-than-romantic clinical due diligence, were actually quite unlikely to be at especial risk. 

The reason given was to avoid stigmatizing gays.  And gays rightly feared stigmatization; one would be willfully obtuse to say gays haven’t suffered from discrimination.

But how many lives was that feel-good exercise worth?  Because it certainly sacrificed many, and diverted much funding, awareness and effort early in the epidemic’s course.

The UN bureaucrat who would lose his job if that were universally recognized begs to differ:

Paul de Lay, a director at UNAIDS, disagrees. It’s valid to question AIDS’ place in the world’s priorities, he says, but insists the turnaround is very recent and it would be wrong to think the epidemic is under control.

As with any deadly epidemic, it’s legitimate to avoid complacency.  But there’s a real question:  does AIDS need to have the same level of global mobilization that it has had, and still has today?

It’s not a loaded question.  I’m genuinely curious.

…(we) must make this January to begin an emergency rescue of human civilization from the imminent and rapidly growing threat posed by the climate crisis – Al Gore

…and

This here map.

Dork.