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Green New Deal Flunks the Limits Lesson

February 3, 2019

Green New Deal Flunks the Limits Lesson

The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman claims to have invented the idea of the Green New Deal in 2007.[1]He’s back to enlighten us about what it should mean now.

Friedman deserves credit as one of the few mainstream pundits who takes climate breakdown seriously. But mainstream methods created the problem, they won’t solve it.

For Friedman the Green New Deal is all about innovation. “Clean energy is a problem of scale” that requires “a massive, urgent response.” To accommodate a billion new people by 2030, “clean power, clean cars, clean manufacturing, clean water and energy efficiency have to be the next great global industries.”

But massive is not the cure for massiveness. Clean is a relative term. Energy efficiency is wonderful, right and indispensable, but it only makes massiveness a little less massive; the energy and money saved by efficiency tend to get used somewhere else.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change gives humanity till 2030 to get our act together and curb the rise in average global temperature. Meanwhile greenhouse gas emissions are rising, not falling, both in the US and worldwide. The climate is telling us something we don’t want to hear: If you burn mass quantities of coal and oil and methane gas, the waste gases will heat the atmosphere and there will be consequences. This is one of the Limits your finite home planet imposes on you.

Everyone who’s serious about climate change agrees that we have to stop burning fossil fuels, but those fuels made possible a productive system that thinks the economy can grow forever — that there are, as the advertisers like to say, No Limits. Friedman’s “next great global industries” sound like part and parcel of the growth economy because they are, but they’re supposed to be different because they’re “clean.”

 …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Unbelievable How Mainstream Media Has Become Just Liars

February 23, 2017

Unbelievable How Mainstream Media Has Become Just Liars 

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Thomas Friedman of the New York Times demonstrates why mainstream media is just becoming so bought and paid for. You have to wonder if they should not be in prison for attempting to overthrow the government and start a revolution. Here he is still ranting about how Russia hacked the election and asserting that this is somehow a Pearl Harbor and 911 event. I suppose this is implying we should start world war III because Hillary lost.

The Homeland Security and the FBI both said that Russia’s hack of the DNC did not involve altering the vote. In fact, it was his own paper that reported on November 25, 2016: “The Obama administration said on Friday that despite Russian attempts to undermine the presidential election, it has concluded that the results “accurately reflect the will of the American people.”

PulitzerHearstWarYellowKids

Spaniards_search_women_1898The constant lies and manipulations seem intent upon creating war exactly as took place with the Spanish American War. We have returned to yellow journalism which is based upon sensationalism and crude exaggeration. Pulitzer and Hearst went head to head. I remember grade school history class blaming the Spanish American War on fake news. There is one such story that male Spanish officials were strip searching American woman tourists in Cuba looking for claimed messages from rebels. This was the front page of Hearst’s newspaper showing what has become known as “yellow journalism” whereby the illustration was by Frederic Remington published in the New York Journal, February 12th, 1897.

Hearst’s New York Journal was called out for this fake news by its rival Joseph Pulitzer’s, New York World,  reporting that this story was erroneous and its graphically illustrated strip-search of a woman aboard U.S. passenger steamer was fake.

 

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Framing Iran: Thomas Friedman’s War Wish

July 10, 2015

Framing Iran: Thomas Friedman’s War Wish

Thomas Friedman, the New York Times op-ed-page representative of the foreign-policy elite, is unhappy with how the soon-to-be-completed Iran nuclear talks are going. He says President Obama, like his predecessor George W. Bush, hasn’t been tough enough. Obama holds all the cards, Friedman says, but somehow the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is dictating terms. He writes:

It is stunning to me how well the Iranians, sitting alone on their side of the table, have played a weak hand against the United States, Russia, China, France, Germany and Britain on their side of the table…..

For the past year every time there is a sticking point … it keeps feeling as if it’s always our side looking to accommodate Iran’s needs. I wish we had walked out just once. When you signal to the guy on the other side of the table that you’re not willing to either blow him up or blow him off — to get up and walk away — you reduce yourself to just an equal and get the best bad deal nonviolence can buy. [Emphasis added.]

Friedman glosses over the fact that it is not “him” (foreign minister Javad Zarif perhaps?) who would be blown up in a war against Iran. It would be countless ordinary Iranians, who have done nothing to harm the American people. Those same innocent people would be harmed, admittedly in more subtle ways, if the P5+1 “blew off” Iranian negotiators because that would mean no relief from long-standing U.S.-led sanctions that have devastated the Iranian economy, creating food and medicine shortages among other inhumane consequences. Sanctions are acts of war. Would someone tell Friedman?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

Saudis Claim Conspiracy Theorists, Not OPEC, To Blame For Oil Price Crash

March 18, 2015

Saudis Claim Conspiracy Theorists, Not OPEC, To Blame For Oil Price Crash

A top Saudi official said on March 15 that Thomas Friedman and other conspiracy theorists are to blame for the crash in oil prices.

Rather than an oversupply and weak demand causing an imbalance in global oil markets, Dr. Ibrahim Al-Muhanna, the advisor to Saudi Arabia’s Petroleum Minister, said that excessive speculation drove the oil bust.

“The recent price fall was due largely to expectation and perception about future supply and demand… and the ever-present – and incorrect – belief in conspiracy theories,” Al-Muhanna said at the Institute of International Finance Spring Membership Meeting on March 15.

Al-Muhanna admitted that supplies were building over the course of 2014, but said that demand “remained strong” and that the price fall was unjustified given market fundamentals. After prices started to fall, the media and market analysts drove the narrative to unfounded levels.

Related: Misleading IEA Statement Sends Oil Prices Crashing

In fact, Al-Muhanna said, in October 2014 when Saudi Arabia adjusted its price for oil heading for Asia – a conventional practice that occurs every month – western media began talking up Saudi Arabia’s “price war,” and he even singled out New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. “Then an article by Thomas Friedman suggested Saudi Arabia’s policy – in coordination with the Obama administration – was aimed at hurting Russia by lowering the oil price. This idea was a rehash of assumptions that first reasoned the oil fall of the 1980s. All complete fantasy.”

 

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This Has Utterly Corrupted Our Economy |

November 15, 2014

This Has Utterly Corrupted Our Economy |.

The Power of Simple Ideas …

Not much market action on Wednesday. The Dow was flat. Gold was flat. TV screens are flat. Some singers are flat. Cakes come out flat. Tires go flat. Prizefighters are laid out flat. Dead men, too. Sooner or later, we all go flat.

One of our favorite columnists, Thomas Friedman, wrote a book about it, The World Is Flat. You can count on Friedman. He’s bound to have something to say on almost any subject.

He has so many thoughts because they come so cheaply to him. He is not a deep thinker. He is in over his head in a parking lot puddle.

But we have no quarrel with superficial thoughts. They are better in many ways. Easier to understand and repeat at dinner parties. And much more easily put to service by men of action.

That’s the real benefit of all superficial thinking: It’s the unleaded gas that purposeful jackasses put in their tanks. Forget the nuances. Ignore the paradoxes. Don’t overthink it. Give them a simple idea, and they can use it to make a grand mess of anything.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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