(Playing of ‘What a Horrible World’ Global Warming Update parody song.)
RUSH: The EIB Network here, Rush Limbaugh.
(Continued playing of song.)
RUSH: I wonder if we could convince the schools to play that song after they screen that lying piece of propaganda, An Inconvenient Truth. All right, we have big news in the global warming update today. First from Brussels, Belgium: ‘The government of Belgium’s French-speaking region of Wallonia, which has a population of about 4 million, has approved a tax on barbequing, local media reported. Experts said that between 50 and 100 grams of CO2, a so-called greenhouse gas, is emitted during barbequing. Beginning June 2007,’ that’s this year, for those of you in Rio Linda, ‘residents of Wallonia will have to pay 20 euros for a grilling session. The local authorities plan to monitor compliance with the new tax legislation from helicopters…’ They are going to have helicopters fly over people’s backyards to see if they’re barbecuing and whether they played the 20 euro tax! Black helicopters are going to be flying over people’s backyards. They think a 20 euro tax is not going to limit barbecuing? It is going to raise money!
It’s like everything else about global warming. It’s designed to get you out of guilt and shame and the feeling that you’ve committed a sin, to give these governments money to keep conducting the sin, and then Algore, your buddy, says, ‘Well, I fly around in my private jet and I got this giant house, but I’m offsetting my carbon footprint because I’m buying carbon offsets and they’re planting trees to absorb all the carbon dioxide.’ He’s not reducing any of his electrical usage, and he refused to sign a pledge to do just that, yet in his stupid movie, he’s telling everybody: ‘You gotta cut back! You gotta live no more luxuriously than the average American!’ He was asked to take the pledge to do that, and he refused to do it, at a hearing on Capitol Hill. So barbecues in Belgium will now be monitored by helicopters for compliance with a new tax — and mark my words, there’s some commie libs in this country who are gonna think this is a fabulous idea. You mark my words on this.
We’re going to get stories on have everybody in southern California alone, lit up the charcoal briquettes at the same time on Friday and Saturday afternoon, the amount of pollution, global warming pollution put in the sky at the same time — and it’s going to become a crisis. Barbecuing will become a crisis. Mark my brilliant words on this. That’s how this stuff starts. Now, the question is: is CO2 even a pollutant? Is it an air pollutant? Because if it is, then all the water vapor on this planet is a pollutant. The vast majority of CO2 that’s in the atmosphere comes from water vapor. Some of it comes from our exhaling. That’s what we exhale, and guess what, the trees and the greens and the grasses need it to live, and then they breathe in the carbon dioxide and they convert it to oxygen, and we can live! It’s a brilliant set up by God. So what we do in our natural existence, exhale, is now creating pollution. Now, folks, if you’re going to buy into this, there’s no hope for you. There’s literally no hope for you!
But even at that, manmade CO2 — even with all the SUVs, even with all the smokestacks — accounts for 4% of the CO2 in the atmosphere. Yet there’s Gore’s movie with this expanding envelope of CO2 choking, swallowing up planet earth, while the sun becomes less and less significant! It’s being blocked out and we’re going to die, and the polar bears are going to die and Greenland is going to melt, and Manhattan is going to be flooded (which wouldn’t be a bad idea), and all other sorts of calamities are going to happen, all because you do this (exhales). Now, do you actually believe that you are polluting when you breathe? I’m not talking about you people have hangovers. That maybe another matter. I’m just saying, this is absurd. You just watch. It isn’t going to be long before we get these detailed studies of how just in southern California, or someplace where they do a lot of barbecuing, if anybody lit up their grills… They’ll probably have staggered the days. You can barbecue on even and odd-numbered days based on your license plate.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: A continuing story here, global warming update. There’s a great piece by somebody who calls himself (laughing) ‘Luminous Maximus,’ who is ‘a longtime observer of the electricity industry’ at the AmericanThinker.com on banning the lightbulb. Now, you laugh at this, but they’re working on this in North Carolina, a ban on the incandescent lightbulb in ten years, to ‘save the planet.’ Incandescent bulbs are causing global warming, so we gotta go get these corkscrew, curlicue things, look like white French fries, compact fluorescents.
‘In a few weeks the US Congress is likely to vote to phase out the standard incandescent lightbulb within a decade.’ If I were you people, I’d start hoarding lightbulbs. ‘Oh, no, Limbaugh!’ Yeah, I would. This is nutcase center. They’re going to ban the old, Thomas Edison lightbulb, so start hoarding those things. ‘The frantic race to see who can best appease the global warming alarmists will claim another victim, the friendly glow of the direct descendant of Thomas Edison’s filament-based light bulb. Why would the humble lightbulb, a staple commodity that has raised the standard of living throughout the world, be in the bullseye? It was the incandescent electric light bulb that abolished the tyranny of the night. Our 19th and 20th-century ancestors believed it one of the greatest gifts of civilization because they had directly experienced life before electric lighting changed everything.
‘In 2002, former Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld briefly reminded us of this blessing when he commented on the satellite imagery revealing the nighttime darkness in North Korea, but other than this brief moment, we seem to have forgotten what’ a blessing the invention of the lightbulb has been. ‘Ironically, the lowly lightbulb became one of the icons of the New Deal, forever connected with the Rural Electrification Act of 1936. The REA and the [Tennessee Valley Authority] enabled cheap electric power to be available everywhere, even on the remotest farms and ranches. And a substantial part of the American people fell in love with big government because it brought [the lightbulb], the rollback of the night, to all Americans. But today, more than anything else, the humble lightbulb is altogether another sort of convenient symbol for big government — a technology dinosaur, perpetrator of evil crimes against the planet. Stopping the wasteful use of kilowatts by American households in the war on greenhouse gases is the new battle cry of the lovers of governmental control over our lives.
‘There are about 4 billion conventional screw-in light bulb sockets all across America.’ Four billion of them! ‘[T]he vast majority are in homes and apartments. Incandescent light bulbs are in most of these sockets, with some 2 billion or more replaced every year. It is estimated at least $15 billion of electricity is consumed by these inefficient anachronisms, and that by replacing them with more energy-efficient types of lightbulbs — primarily post-modern compact fluorescents — that $15 billion could be cut in half. We are told that as kilowatts could be reduced, we would need fewer nasty coal-fired power generating plants, while winning a major battle against global warming with little pain and even less effort. Everybody wins!’ by getting rid of Edison’s lightbulbs. ‘Well, not exactly. Once again, a nice-sounding theory overlooks significant details of the practical outcomes,’ and this is classic liberals.
They have these great intentions, but they never examine the consequences of their actions. ‘Energy conservation lobbyists conveniently overlook the obvious fact that household lightbulbs are primarily used at night — exactly opposite the time of day in which utilities experience peak load demands for daytime heating, air conditioning and commercial lighting.’ Folks, you let ’em take away your lightbulbs and the next thing they’re going to come get is your air conditioners, because if you think light lightbulbs are causing a problem, you have no idea. You know what one of the largest consumers of electricity in your house is, is your computer, and if you have servers and something? Those things eat up power. Your plasma TVs? I have 30 of them, and they’re going to tell me that I gotta get rid of my lightbulbs? So what’s really going on here? Follow the money. The lobbyists for the compact fluorescent crowd is on the way.
‘Utilities must build up their physical plant to meet the peaks,’ which happen in daytime! ‘and the capital to finance that equipment has to be paid for 24 hours a day. Thus, utilities will have to raise rates on the remainder of the kwhs we use for everything else, from washing machines to hair dryers to computers. Household power used by lightbulbs is actually dwarfed these days by major appliances and high tech consumer electronics — such as widescreen TVs, computers and video games along with internet servers, the biggest energy hogs besides cars and trucks. And since the new CFLs produce inferior light compared to incandescents, we’ll need more of them to read, shave, comb our hair and brush our teeth. Assuming literacy and personal hygiene are still hallmarks of [our country] after the global warming alarmists are done with their crusade to rid us of the blessings of the evil civilization that rapes Mother Gaia.
‘By banning the incandescent lightbulb Congress will forcibly remove a staple commodity from the marketplace, replacing it with products that are far more expensive, less reliable and more hazardous,’ because of the mercury in there, ‘notably the … compact fluorescent lightbulb (CFL). CFL lightbulbs have been around for well over a decade. Only recently have they come in enough varieties and flavors to capture about 10% of the available sockets.’ There are four billion of them out there, four billion sockets. ‘But they are still at least 5 times more expensive than regular incandescents, which if replaced in their entirety would cost consumers an extra $4 to 5 billion at the cash register. No doubt millions of Americans will enthusiastically embrace this … and be willing to pay extra to get it,’ because they’ve been convinced that they’re sinners and that they’re destroying the planet, and they’ll put any stupid-looking, crazy little lightbulbs in and go to bed at night confident and safe that they are saving the planet.
They’re a bunch of dork-idiots. ‘But millions more will not fare so well. This ban [on the incandescent bulbs] will be a tax on poor people…’ The poor and minorities will be hardest hit, here. They’ll have to come up with money they don’t have to pay for the new, compact fluorescents. How about retirees on fixed incomes? No longer will they have to choose between dog food and medicine. Now it will be a choice between dog food and medicine and light. (interruption) What, Mr. Snerdley? Yeah. Okay, I have to repeat history. We’ll have to subsidize people to get bulbs out of there and put these new-fangled ones in, since we’re gonna take them out of their houses, and you people are going to be paying for the subsidy, otherwise old people are going to be having to choose between dog food, medicine, or lightbulbs.
How about ‘low wage earners working double shifts or two jobs along with the average Joes and Marys who live each week paycheck-to-paycheck. They don’t have cable TV to watch the Home and Garden channel, and can’t afford to replace their functional if drab table lamp fixtures, much less employ a green ideology-toting residential lighting designer. For these Americans, burdens come in large packages. Relief arrives less often, and then in small envelopes… Of course, Wal-Mart is yet another enemy of the trendy affluent class that wants to dictate how the rest of us lead our lives. And guess where the extra purchase prices for these CFLs will wind up? In the pockets of Chinese manufacturers, because not a single [compact fluorescent bulb] is produced in the’ United States of America. Not one! ‘And it gets worse. As Chinese manufacturers add enough manufacturing capacity to produce ten times as many CFLs, they will need several new coal-fired power plants to run the new factories.
‘This comes on top of the already breathtaking pace today of construction in coal-fired electric power plants in China — at a clip of one new plant every week. Don’t even think about asking about what kind of pollution control will be operating on those Chinese plants,’ because there won’t be any. ‘A tax on poor people in the US so the Chinese can add more coal-fired power plants. Now there’s a bright idea… CFLs contain mercury… Just a drop you say? How about up to 5 milligrams per lightbulb. If all 4 billion incandescent sockets were filled with CFLs we’d have 20 billion milligrams of mercury spread around every single US household. By the way, 20 billion milligrams is nearly 50,000 pounds. That 50,000 pounds of mercury amongst 300 million people, if indiscriminately thrown away, will eventually find its way to your favorite landfill and public drinking water supply.
‘Knock over a table lamp and shatter a CFL in your house, and you have a toxic waste situation on your hands right in the living room, bedroom or dining room.’ You gotta call the HazMat people! ‘On the other hand, at least half of all mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants currently is captured by scrubbers, and clean coal technologies promise to eliminate 2/3rds of what remains. Not so for CFLs — which can’t operate without mercury. So there you have it. Congress will soon enact legislation to impose a tax on poor people that will directly pass to Chinese companies, contribute to lower literacy and less personal hygiene while making industrial policy that will increase greenhouse gas emissions worldwide and spread a hazardous heavy metal into the environment.’ That’s what we’re going to get with compact fluorescents, ten years ’til they ban the incandescent lightbulb, and that’s not an insignificant point… Not one of these things is made in America, and to fill the void left by the man of the incandescent these Chinese factories going to be built to the tune of once a week, and they’re coal-fired.
The Chinese don’t care about the pollution they’re putting up. They say, ‘Kyoto? (Raspberry!).’ It’s just typical, ladies and gentlemen, of the American left and the environmental movement, with all these so-called great intentions, the unintended consequences (or in this case maybe the intended consequences). This is another one of those circumstances we talked about all day, what is it about the American people that make them such dolts, sponges, to soak up all this stuff? I’m telling you, it’s easily explained. If day in and day out for 20 years you are inundated with how you are destroying the planet, and you are killing the polar bears, and you are creating global warming and you are creating sin, anything you can do to make yourself feel better such as one of those cockamamie lightbulbs, you’ll do it. Everybody wants to feel good. Everybody wants to matter. Everybody wants to contribute. Everybody wants to make a difference. Well, just remember: Hitler ‘made a difference,’ too.