The ROG Report

Michael G. Haran, Proprietor

WATER FOR OIL

Posted by on Jan 30, 2014

Healdsburg Tribune

1/23/2014

By Michael Haran

In December I went to a Regional Climate Protection Authority presentation at the Healdsburg City Council chambers. The RCPA was created in 2009 to improve coordination on climate change issues and efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as was mandated by the ten county government’s partnership with the Climate Protection Campaign in 2005.RCPA #1

I was expecting a sit-down presentation on RCPA’s progress but instead there were only charts ringing the room and index cards for suggestions. When I asked one of the RCPA staff members why there wasn’t a formal presentation she said that they decided to forgo one because of the disruptions they had encountered at the Windsor presentation.

It seems that there is a group of climate deniers in the county who attend these meeting as concerned citizens. They pretend not to know each other and then disrupt and dispute anything the RCPA’s staff has to say. I was told that these people are not polite and their sole purpose is to take over the meeting for their own agenda.

Regardless of the fact that the deniers tend to be rather obnoxious and since none of us have done the science ourselves who’s really right about climate change, the deniers or the believers?

On the deniers side the earth warms and cools about every ten thousand years. Eventually we will once again have glaciers in the middle of North America. In pre-historic times we had forest fires that burned from the Pacific coast to the Rocky Mountains and at one time the earth was covered in volcanos spewing tons of magma gases into the atmosphere. Humans have only been spewing for about a hundred years and affecting the climate for even less than that.Volcano #12

Research published in the journal “Science” on September 8, 2013 stated “Abrupt climate change has been a systemic feature of Earth’s climate for hundreds of thousands of years and may play an active role in longer term climate variability through its influence on ice age terminations.”

On the believers’ side, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950’s, many of the climate changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, sea level has risen, and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased. In the Northern Hemisphere, 1983–2012 was likely the warmest 30-year period of the last 1400 years.

During those “hundreds of thousands of years” climate anthropologists have been able to identify six major species die-offs most likely caused by CO2. This is probably what killed off the dinosaurs some 60 million years ago and let’s hope that we’re not the next with the amount of CO2 humans are currently releasing into the atmosphere.

1309967253-pipeline_mapNo matter whether climate warming is real or not, oil is a foul, dirty energy source that pollutes our streets, water-ways and air so we should just ban it as soon as we can. Most products that are petroleum based can be made with synthetic alternatives and that $5 billion a year we give to the oil industry, for whatever reason, would go a long way in feeding the children of the working poor.

So once we get rid of oil what should we do with all the oil and coal slurry pipelines crisscrossing the country? I say fill them with water. Now I don’t know the feasibility or the cost of such an undertaking but with the Great Lakes being the world’s largest deposit of fresh water it stirs the imagination. Drought in the Midwest? No problem. Drought in the West? No problem. Water for oil – pump, baby, pump!

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IS TED CRUZ A MORON?

Posted by on Dec 2, 2013

IS TED CRUZ A MORON?

Commentary

A recent letter-to the-editor of a local newspaper took a columnist to task for calling Ted Cruz a moron. The reader said that Senator Cruz has “advanced degrees and honors from prestigious universities” and that such “derogatory sophomoric” terms are a “departure from civility.”

As most people know it doesn’t matter if a person has advanced degrees that person can still be a moron and for that matter they can also be a hypocrite, sociopath, obstructionist and all around idiot. When someone throws their hat into the ring and runs for public off all is fair, the gloves come off and name calling is part of it. Politics can be a nasty business and if a person doesn’t have tough skin they better not play the game.

Ted Cruz is the type of Politian that comes along every generation or so. The last one like him was Joe McCarthy the communist witch hunter (it’s a little scary how much Cruz even looks like him). Cruz is an opportunist. He is riding the libertarian ideology of small government expounded upon by the Tea Party movement. To the casual observer it would look like Cruz is a moron if he has serious plans to run for president. Presidential elections are determined by the independent vote. Independents can go either center left or center right but they don’t like extremes and will never vote and extremist into the White House.

In true con-man fashion Cruz has been raising a ton of money from his base. You know that base, the people who scream “get the government out of my Medicare!’ and continually vote against their own self-interests (those are the real morons). Maybe Cruz’s goal is to raise as much money as possible so he can hang with the Koch brothers, the high priests of Libertarianism, but one thing is for sure he doesn’t give a damn about governing. Even his hometown newspaper, the Houston Chronicle, has disavowed him. The Tea Party of today is not even remotely concerned with the Middle Class, they are all about money going to money and finding whatever ways they can to keep it for themselves.

The Liberians primary belief is that the market will dictate the human condition. They believe that the federal government should be so weak that it can’t interfere with business. If the one-percent controls so much wealth that the U.S. turns into a banana republic so be it. If a person doesn’t have a job it is their fault because they are lazy and just sucking off the system. Let’s cut $40 billion from food stamps, most of which goes to children, but keep the subsidies for big oil.

What’s sad is that the Republican Party has been hijacked by extremist like Cruz and we have no one to balance check the political Status Quo. With our aging population we are going to need serious entitlement reform but it also has to include serious tax code reform of the wealth’s entitlements and we can’t find compromise with elected officials like Cruz who read “Green Eggs and Ham” on the Senate floor and spout ridiculous conspiracy theories about George Soros secretly partnering with the United Nations to come into our cities and eliminate our right to play golf.

Fortunately the majority of Americans are not morons. Con men have to work in the shadows and as the true agendas of these shills for the rich get exposed to the light of day they will once again slink back under their rocks just like what happened to Joe McCarthy. As Michael Ciric said in his blog, “So believe me, that ain’t no Green Eggs and Ham Ted Cruz is serving up. If anything it’s Green Eggs and Political Scam!”

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