Satireday on Eco-Crap

Make you Fink on Friday

Coca Cola, Heinz And Other Major Food Companies Warn Climate Change Threatens Business

But as ThinkProgress noted at the time, the real story was not a guacamole shortage, but the emerging reality of doing business in a warming world. While politicians continue to bicker over whether or not climate change exists, companies now have no choice in the matter — they must acknowledge the science and the risk and disclose the reality of that risk to their investors’ pocketbooks. Whether that risk actually manifests itself is another matter, but the fact that companies are increasingly putting climate change on their threat lists speaks volumes to the severity of the problem.

Here are seven other big food companies that disclose to investors that climate change poses a threat to their products and bottom lines.

Read more on ClimateProgress

My source: Garry Rodgers Nature

Opinion:

Isn’t it nice, these big multinational companies are worried about their profits… the risk to their investor’s pocketbooks.

Bugger you and your health, this isn’t an issue for them.

I don’t care one iota about their investor’s pocketbooks, they can all go broke as far as I am concerned. These companies are pure greed at our expense.

Make you Fink on Friday

Monday Moaning

The Skeptics versus Science.

The facts are clear.

Doing this and going “nah, nah, nah” doesn’t change the facts.

Get your fingers out of your sanctimonious arseholes and face the reality.

Make the New Year one of action, come down hard on politicians, wipe the sniveling noses of the skeptics, make things happen!

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Make you Fink on Friday

Here’s something to make you think!

Are our respective governments trying to kill us?

No, I’m not being silly, seriously!

It would be an ideal solution to the over population problem. Are we looking at a genocide issue? If planned obsolescence is possible for 60 or 70 years without us knowing, any thing in the realm of diabolical is possible.

I ask this because everything I read says GM crops are bad, but the governments insist they are not. Nobody can be that stupid, or could they.

FSA ‘endangering public health’ by ignoring concerns over GM food

French researcher who claimed GM food caused cancers in rats says UK should review food safety and assess long-term toxicity

GM maize, like the one above, and other GM crops should be put through rigorous long-term testing, according to Professor Gilles-Eric Seralini. Photograph: Jean-Pierre Muller/AFP/Getty Images

The French researcher who caused a scientific storm when he claimed to show that some GM food led to tumours and cancers in rats has accused the UK Food Standards Agency (FSA) of “recklessly endangering public health” by not demanding long-term testing of the foods.

In a series of parliamentary and public meetings held this week in London, Edinburgh and Cardiff, Prof Gilles-Eric Séralini has challenged UK politicians and safety authorities to review the way safety is assessed.

Séralini, a molecular biologist at Caen University, said: “Our research found severe toxicity from GM maize and [Monsanto pesticide] Roundup. The British Food Standards Agency has uncritically accepted the European Food Safety Authority’s dismissal of the study, even though many of EFSA’s experts have been exposed as having conflicts of interest with the GM industry. At the very least, the British government should demand long-term mandatory safety testing on all GM foods before they are released onto the market,” he said.

“The British scientific authorities are deliberately misleading their government and are recklessly endangering public health in ignoring the findings of our research.”

Séralini’s study found that rats developed much higher levels of cancers and died earlier than controls when fed a diet of Monsanto’s Roundup-tolerant GM maize NK603 for two years, or were exposed to Roundup over the same period. The usual industry tests last for 90 days.

The former member of two French government committees assessing the safety of GM foods suggested that the results could be explained by the endocrine-disrupting effects of the pesticide Roundup, and over-expression of the transgene in the genetically modified organism (GMO).

Read more

Opinion:

The prevalence of GM around the world is growing to catastrophic proportions. flying in the face of nearly everything we know; and nearly everything we DO know tells us it’s bad for us. So why do governments accept it?

Is there some diabolical plan?

“The British scientific authorities are deliberately misleading their government and are recklessly endangering public health in ignoring the findings of our research.”

This statement alone, makes me question the status quo; sending a red flag shivering up my spine. It should be doing the same to you.

Maybe we should be asking questions, demanding answers.

 

 

Change the World Wednesday – 22nd May

The difference between a boss and a leader: a boss says, ‘Go!’ -a leader says, ‘Let’s go!’. – E. M. Kelly

— Daniel (@QuotePlayground) May 22, 2013

You could of course extrapolate that to “Go green!” and Let’s go green!” and then it has a lot of meaning for the whole process of CTWW. The people who participate in CTWW challenges are leaders. The ‘goers’ are the politicians. The leaders get things done, the politicians wait for things to be done.

So, stealing Small’s thunder for a bit; let’s get more things done!

My torre serving more as a liquor cabinet

Moving along…

My torre arrived and is installed; as predicted it came wrapped in plastic and had some thin polystyrene pieces protecting the layers. The main package was cardboard, so the pollutant waste was less than I had thought.

On Thursday, I bought a new coffee table. I won’t bore you here with the whole story, should you feel the need to be bored click on the link for the full saga; I can assure you that the first half of that post is less than boring, you may be shocked or indeed it may pique your interest.

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Having got this far… I need more coffee.

BRB

Out of yesterday’s coffee for a quick fix; have to brew some more.

Oh, so you’re just going to have to sit there and wait.

If you think I am going to write something of interest before the coffee is ready, then you’re wrong; with a capital WR!

I don’t care, it’s just the way things are.

If you try to get anything tangible from me at this point, you are wasting your time and placing your life in danger.

And, don’t start with that “you’re addicted to coffee routine” again… I am NOT!

The crisis has been averted, coffee is ready, resume your places everybody, the post can continue.

*as if nothing untoward happened*

Yesterday, I bought one of those economic lightbulb thingies. Basically, it was in a fit of pique because my last incandescent burned out in less than two months. I also gave a fleeting thought to economising.

It wasn’t one of those squiggly ones, they are terrible; everytime I see one, I want to reach for another bottle of wine.

Gone is the soft warm glow of my 60w incandescent. Instead, this post is being brought to you by the harsh white glare of austerity; I feel like a Greek… maybe I could get an EU bailout, they seems to be all the fashion.

Click on the banner for the full post

This week’s CTWW.

Level 1 (The Green Novice) – This week, for at least one full day, disconnect from the Internet except as needed for work (this includes hand-held devices).

 

OR …
Level 2 (The Advanced Greenie) – Disconnect from the Internet, except for work, for the entire week.

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There are more Levels, but in the need to economise, you’ll have to click on the banner to see them, that is should you feel the need to seek a higher plane than us lowly beings down here.

A blathering wreck

This one is terrible. In 24 hours I would be a blathering wreck without even considering the consequences of a whole wekk. (Typo left to show how nervous I am) I would feel like Oklahoma, devastated. I don’t want to look like Hilary Clinton!

Seriously, my PC is 24/7, even when I am sleeping my PC is working. How else am I going to pirate English textbooks like a responsible teacher? Of course, I can do without the movies and music, but my pursuit of perfecting the English language is my greatest virtue… in fact, it is my only virtue.

I am going to have to claim ‘work’, not because of the overnight downloads, but because of my blogs. I drink coffee, I am a serious blogger. Many of you may/may not be aware that I have eight blogs and they take a lot of work to maintain my target of a daily post on them all; as it is I don’t always achieve my tally.

Probably more important is the high possibility of a systems failure if I switch the PC off; sometimes it restarts good, but other times I have a bitch of a job. You see my PC is a girl and suffers from PMT = PC mental tantrums.

Not Lixo, but you get the idea

I do, however, switch off the monitor physically overnight because Lixo can’t sleep; he sits up all night in my chair trying to catch the status bars on the downloads as the creep across the screen.

Then he spends all day sleeping on my clean shirts. He says he is ironing them, but I don’t believe it, because an iron doesn’t leave cat hairs over the black one.

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Some of this post has been serious, some parts not so serious. That’s what happens when you overcaffeinate.

Monday Moaning

I get so annoyed, I am so sick and tired of corporations buying politicians to do their bidding.

Look at this example. I know it’s more of a political rant, and this blog isn’t a political platform, but the two are inextricably mixed. Until we fix this problem there is NO GREEN!

Stop this culture of paying politicians for denying climate change

Protecting the environment requires a sweeping reform of political funding, only then corporations will stop throwing big money at senators.

Republican senator James Inhofe told the environment and public works committee ‘climate change is a hoax perpetrated on the American people’. Photograph: Bill Clark/Getty Images

 

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.” These words, from WB Yeats’s poem The Second Coming, came to mind as I read the testimony from Wednesday’s Senate hearings on climate change.

They’re not a precise description of what took place, as the two most eminent climate scientists who testified before the environment and public works committee, Christopher Field and James McCarthy, were not lacking in conviction. But they were, as scientists should be, careful and meticulous, laying out their evidence calmly and sequentially, saying nothing that was not supported by the data.

By contrast, the Senate committee’s ranking member (its most senior Republican), James Inhofe, spoke with the demagogic passion of a revivalist preacher. “The global warming movement has completely collapsed … the science of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was finally exposed … The time has come to put these tired, failed policies to rest and embrace the US energy boom so that we can put Americans back to work, turn this economy around, become totally energy independent from the Middle East, and ensure energy security for years to come.”

In other words, Inhofe argued, we should take no action on climate change, which he has described as “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people”.

Never mind the overwhelming evidence that has accumulated since the last Senate hearings in 2009; never mind the crazy temperatures the US has been experiencing recently, which have alerted many Americans to what climate change is likely to deliver in the decades to come; never mind the prominent sceptic Richard Muller’s assessment of the evidence, which led to his change of heart. (It told us nothing we didn’t know already, but it should at least have caused the deniers to stop and think).

None of this makes the slightest difference to Inhofe. But how could it? Even if he were persuaded by the great weight of evidence for man-made climate change, changing his mind would be a very expensive decision. It could cost him his seat: not because it would necessarily be an unpopular shift – even in Oklahoma – but because it would jeopardise the massive flow of funds required to remain in high office in the US.

Take a look at Inhofe’s campaign funding. The major source, contributing half a million dollars over the past five years, has been the oil and gas industry.

Of his individual contributors, the biggest is Koch Industries – an oil, gas, minerals, timber and chemicals corporation, that is described by its owners, Charles and David Koch, as “the biggest company you’ve never heard of”. They fund a number of anti-environmental and anti-tax lobby groups. They set up the organisation which founded the Tea Party movement.

The second biggest contributor is Murray Energy, that boasts it is “the largest privately owned coal company in America”. The third is the oil and gas company Devon Energy. The fourth is the Contran Corporation, whose billionaire owner Harold Clark Simmons has a political profile similar to that of the Koch brothers.

If Inhofe were to change his position on man-made global warming, is it credible that he would retain all this funding? No. He receives money from fossil fuel companies because he articulates the views to which these funders subscribe, and because he advances their interests in the Senate. Given that keeping your seat means spending a fortune on television advertising and other forms of campaigning, changing your views on a matter of great interest to your sponsors is likely to be political suicide.

For people like the Kochs, Murray Energy and Harold Clark Simmons, the money they give to politicians is small change. For environmental campaigns, contributions of this size would break the bank. The money available to big business means that there will always be a massive asymmetry of this kind in the potential for political funding. As a result, a political system which imposes no effective cap on campaign finance leads inexorably to plutocracy: governance on behalf of the richest people and corporations.

The first prerequisite for protecting the environment is a functioning democracy. In any other system, those with the most money to spend or, in other circumstances, the most thugs to deploy, win the political battles. The further from democracy a nation strays, the greater the opportunities to destroy the world’s living systems, however unpopular that destruction may be.

The foremost threat to democratic values in countries like the US and the UK is the freedom with which billionaires and corporations can pay people and parties to represent their views. Protecting the environment, like protecting the welfare of a nation’s poorest and weakest people, requires a sweeping reform of political funding, on both sides of the Atlantic.

GeorgeMonbiot’sBlog

Opinion:

Yes, the greatest threat to, not only democratic values but the planet, are the billionaires and hence the corporations.

It’s about having a life

This is not only about climate control (as above, that’s just one example), it’s also about big oil, it’s about noxious substances in our food, it’s about anything that affects our lives and well-being that are contrary to nature.

Until the voters (Yes, people, that’s YOU) retake and wrest control of the political system from the money grabbing politicians, the wanna-be billionaires, then the rest of the world is going to suffer.

There is only one answer: Any politician who accepts a dime from a corporation is not worthy of your vote. Is not worthy to represent the people. That applies from the president down.

Only the voter can take this stance.

The politicians who accept these bribes ah, donations think they are getting rich, but the money they get is pennies compared to what the corporations get by having a politician in their pocket.

Until the voters start to vote for the little politician, the independent, and show these repugnicans and democraps that their millions of dollars are being wasted on fruitless campaigns, the status quo will remain.

If you are a repugnican and vote for repugnicans. or a democrap who votes for a democrap, you are responsible for destroying the planet!

What you do at home, recycling, selective rubbish collections, buying green or at the farmers market, is like paddling the canoe with a spoon; you’re going NOWHERE! You only think you’re making headway.

This year in November, you have your chance, throw these assholes out of government. Get the two-party system out of politics.

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This applies not only to Americans, it applies to any country where the corporations control the world.

If you want to be green, vote green!

 

Saturday Satire on Eco-Crap

Why Rio +20 will Fail

Rio +20 will fail, just like Rio before, Johannesburg, Kyoto, Copenhagen.

All failures.

Unmitigated failures.

and Rio +20 will follow suit.

Why?

Until there is a mechanism that controls the duplicity of politicians and punishes them heavily for consorting and being funded by corporations and vested interests, all will be a failure.

For there to be any future progress in these types of conferences politicians need to be kept as far away as possible, banned from the event.

The event participants need to be independents and have the powers to dictate to the politicians the results that will benefit mankind and the planet.

Politicians, and I don’t give a tinker’s cuss if he’s a president, ought to be fined; or tried for treason and imprisoned or banned from holding public office for life.

Corporations who flout the laws, should be fined heavily and I am talking 1bn+ for each and every infraction; or have their companies closed. Put the executives on the dole queue.

Until this happens, we, our descendants and the planet are doomed.

Monday Moaning

Warning: This is a Rant! “They will infect your soul, curve your spine and stop the country winning the war!” – George Carlin

Don’t just dismiss this as a rant and not worth reading. If you care about the environment, if you consider yourself ‘green’, then this is of vital interest to you.

Recently (past few years) there have been many snippets pointing to things like “Dumbing of America,” “corporations controlling the mainstream media,” “governments and agencies lying,” “the discrediting of science and scientists by agencies,” etc. The ‘etc’ means many many other aspects of keeping the people stupid. We have to face reality and the mainstream media won’t give us the information.

I have commented on them piecemeal in this blog and it’s predecessor, the original Eco-Crap and also on Shit Happens and its predecessor. Both of which were shut down without explanation from Google.

Heartland Institute propaganda, paid for with your money

But just in the last week some serious evidence and accusations have been made. Canada muzzling its scientists, Heartland Institute documents leaked, and just yesterday an article in The Guardian about outright attacks on the veracity of the scientific communities; Attacks paid for by big business are ‘driving science into a dark era’.

All this is something that I have gradually read and formed my opinions on what is happening on a worldwide scenario.

I am going to post some excerpts from The Guardian article, you can go and read the rest fully.

“Last week Nina Fedoroff, the president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), broke ranks in a spectacular manner.

She confessed that she was now “scared to death” by the anti-science movement that was spreading, uncontrolled, across the US and the rest of the western world.”

Affecting the whole world

Here you have the president of the AAAS raising the issue. A person of this stature does not make idle guesses.

“set against a background of an entire intellectual discipline that realises that it, and its practitioners, are now under sustained attack.”

The scientific community as a whole feel the threats, it is not just the opinion of one person.

“university and government researchers are hounded for arguing that rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are changing the climate. Their emails are hacked while Facebook campaigns call for their dismissal from their posts, calls that are often backed by rightwing politicians. At the last Republican party debate in Florida, Rick Santorum insisted he should be the presidential nominee simply because he had cottoned on earlier than his rivals Newt Gingrich or Mitt Romney to the “hoax” of global warming.”

Santorum's infallible reasoning

Right wing politicians obviously are the enemy, with Santorum boasting that he was the first, what an asshole. Santorum is believing the bullshit, and ignoring scientific evidence, which is absolutely typical of your Bible bashhers and the very reason why they should be kept as far from politics as possible.

We spent 500 years getting religion out of politics for a very good reason.

“These institutions [inc Heartland Institute], acting as covers for major energy corporations, are responsible for the onslaught that has deeply lowered the reputation of science in many people’s minds in America. This has come in the form of personal attacks on the reputations of scientists and television adverts that undermine environment laws.”

Paid and funded by those whose industries and interests will be hurt by the truth.

“the decision by the United States supreme court to overrule the law that allowed the federal government to place limits on independent spending for political purposes by business corporations.”

The greatest criminal decision made against the electoral system.

Mainstream Media

“methods used by corporate businesses to attack their targets: harassing individual scientists, ghost-writing scientific articles to raise doubts about government research, and undermining the use of science to form government policy.”

Blocking science from reporting to the people.

“should be based on the advice of experts who have carried out robust and rigorous analysis of the evidence, or if they should be guided by lobbyists who appear driven by narrow ideological dogma.”

Should we believe the truth, or the bullshit by the vested interests that appears in the mainstream media?

“massive organised attempts to undermine scientific data by people for whom that data represents a threat to their status quo.”

Science is being dominated by those whose only interest in money at whatever the cost to humanity and the planet.

The world and humanity are on a very dangerous course.