RUSH: ‘Free-market principles to global warming.’ Really sounds nice, doesn’t it? Free-market principles to global warming. After you’ve accepted a hoax, after you’ve accepted it’s indisputable that man is causing it? Free-market principles to global warming is a contradiction in terms. If there was manmade global warming, the free market would already be responding to it in a more vigorous way. Instead what we have is government telling industry what must be done, and industry reacting to it, because the Drive-Bys have convinced so many customers of all businesses that we face a dire threat, and these customers have been made to believe that they can stop the threat, and they can stop the warming, and they can make their lives matter, and they can count, and they can have meaning in their lives if they go with all this green stuff. And so businesses are simply going green as a marketing technique. This is what people think, fine, we’ll give it to them. The free market doesn’t respond on its own to false science, by the way.
A free market would reject false science, for the most part, by definition. Now, this is all about attracting young voters, this is all about McCain — you talk about independents, social minded conservatives, it’s about getting younger voters as well, ’cause they’re among those that have seen Gore’s movie. They really think that all this is manmade. So you have Senator McCain echoing Algore and pretending there’s no dispute about manmade global warming. See, to me, this is historical. This is an historical chance to drive a wedge between the liberal environmental radicals and the blue-collar workers that Obama cannot get. Now this is the time for McCain to enhance the party, but instead he’s pandering.
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RUSH: Wall Street Journal today: ‘The US is fighting the clock as the earth warms to dangerous levels, Sen. John McCain says in a speech today in environmentally conscious Oregon. Reaching out to independent and moderate voters, he repeats his call for a cap-and-trade system whereby carbon-emitting companies would have to reduce emissions or pay for credits that allow them.’ This is almost a dead ringer for one of the first tax increases that Bill Clinton proposed in 1993. Remember the famous carbon tax? That’s what it was called and it was basically a cap-in-trade program.
The way it works is some government entity is going to decide what the carbon footprint of each business can be, and that business can meet those limits or trade those limits with another company that’s not going to use all of its limits, or it can buy them, or it can pay a tax to exceed the limits. It’s a tax increase! By the time you slice it all up, it’s a tax increase that corporations are going to end up passing on all down the line, eventually reaching consumers. To say that the US is fighting the clock as the earth warms to dangerous levels, folks, the earth isn’t warming. The earth hasn’t warmed since 1998. Even global warming scientists last week put out a warning that because of natural variations in ocean currents there will be no warming for another ten to 12 years, but after that look out ’cause it’s going to skyrocket. So there’s no warming predicted for the next ten to 12 years. How in the world can it be said that we’re on the clock. All of this is just maddening. I see Algore out there. Algore is out there trying to say that this hurricane in Myanmar is a result of global warming. There was a worse hurricane in Bangladesh in 1991. There have been worse hurricanes than this.
Now I am just waiting for somebody to say that all these tornadoes that are wracking the United States’ midsection are due to global warming. I got in touch with our official climatologist, Dr. Roy Spencer at the University of Alabama Huntsville, today, and he said, ‘Well, Rush, 2008 could set a record for the number of tornadoes if the current trend continues, but it would be the last kind of severe weather you might expect to associate with warming. In fact, the number of strong-to-violent tornadoes in America has actually decreased since the 1950s when tornado stats began, and this is probably because of persistent El Nino conditions since the late seventies, El Nino associated with global average warmth. Instead, the greatest number of tornadoes actually occur during La Nina conditions in the Pacific, which favors persistent cold air masses over North America.’ So the bottom line is, all of these extreme tornadoes are being caused by cold air. They’re being caused by unusually cold air, and you can look at a map the past weekend and see how cold it was in a number of places, that cold air comes south, meets the warm, moist air, bammo, you’ve got the recipe for big-time tornadoes. But it’s cold air masses that cause this, not global warming.
Huge numbers of tornadoes occurred in 1998-99 during strong La Nina conditions. La Nina also associated with the super outbreak of April 3rd and 4th in 1974 which saw 148 tornadoes in 18 hours. Now, we’re going back 34 years, April 3rd and 4th, 1974, 148 tornadoes in 18 hours, 330 people dead, 5,500 injured. As of today, the unusually stubborn cold air mass over most of North America looks like it’s going to continue to cause above-normal tornado activity over the central and eastern US for at least another two weeks. The stubborn cold air mass. Now, you remember that when you hear that global warming is responsible for this or climate change or what have you.
To the phones, Livingston, Montana. This is Barb. I’m glad you called. You’re up first. Great to have you on the program today.
CALLER: Hey, good morning, Rush.
RUSH: Hi.
CALLER: Regional cooling dittos from Montana.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: We’ve had a really wet, cold, snowy spring here.
RUSH: Yes, I know. I track it. I track all weather everywhere.
CALLER: Yeah. Well, the reason why I’m calling is I’ve been listening to you since about 1988, I think. Anyway, the last couple of months I’ve been listening to you trying to glom everybody that’s into this green that is a conservative as believing in global warming. And I know a lot of people that are conservative that are not buying this global warming, but they’re getting green because they want to eat better foods and have pesticide-free meals at home. We raise natural lamb out here, and there are so many people that want to buy local because they want to support local businesses, and it has nothing to do with that they are trying to stop global warming. I just thought I’d share that with you.
RUSH: Well, I have noted this on several occasions. It’s like if you want to go out and by a hybrid, I’ve always said, go ahead, just don’t think you’re saving the planet; do it. If you want it because you like the style, if you want it because you want to save gasoline, fine. If you want to pollute less, fine, but the idea that you’ve become part of a great social cause by doing such things is unnecessary. But the green evangelicals are political with this and these were the people I was referring to here that the media is praising that McCain is now courting.
CALLER: Well, I know a lot of evangelicals who are kind of greenish, I would say, and they are not necessarily buying —
RUSH: By the way, what’s wrong with pesticides? Have you ever heard of DDT?
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: Have you heard about the ban of DDT?
CALLER: Oh, yeah.
RUSH: Did you hear what happened because of the ban of DDT?
CALLER: Well, we have a lot of eagles here now, I guess. I don’t know what else would happen.
RUSH: No. Basically, in Africa, DDT has been responsible for how many malaria deaths — (interruption) around the world?
CALLER: You know, I wouldn’t know.
RUSH: About 50 million people have died because of malaria-related diseases since the ban on DDT took place with Rachel Carson back in the 1970s. She’s still a heroine. I’m not suggesting you go out and put DDT or any kind of pesticide on your food and eat it. The eagle thing was a myth. It did not destroy the eagle eggs, didn’t destroy pelican eggs, didn’t destroy condor eggs; all those things are myths. DDT didn’t do it. The reason the pelican is protected, the eagle is protected and the condor was protected is because their eggs were supposedly made so thin that the young hatchlings died before they hatched, actually, and all that turned out to be a myth. Now, I could understand wanting to go organic and go green but you gotta understand the terminology, going green means you are actively involved politically in stopping manmade global warming. So you gotta be careful of the terminology that you accept and glom onto.
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