Is that a mutation?

Click image for full Tom Tomorrow cartoon.

Only you can cause forest fires

If the global temperature trend were headed downward instead of upward, what would we do to forestall another ice age?

We'd burn every bit of slash and plant scrap we could lay our hands on to pump up the greenhouse effect of CO₂ in the atmosphere.

Turning that into policy would be as easy as falling off a (burning) log, except that perhaps the oil industry would lobby for a cut of the burning program.  Hey, something for Republicans to do to gum up the works in favor of their corporate sponsors!  Even ethanol producers would start to ballyhoo the carbon footprint of their fertilizers, cultivation, and product transport in hope of having it both ways.  Bipartisan subsidy too!

No doubt someone - maybe me - would whinge about the disproportionate Chinese contribution to solving global cooling.  Why do they get to have all the campfires!?  I remember when America led the world accidentally sparking forest fires!

Bonus graphic:

When I first saw a graph like this in the late 1970s, it wasn't even called the Keeling Curve, but it was already cause for worry.  In the meantime, propaganda, not science, is the only force diminishing that concern.  CO₂ keeps right on trucking.

Some logic required

Click image for full Ted Rall cartoon.

Global harming

Why bipartisanship is a bad idea...

Click image for full Tom Tomorrow/Salon cartoon.

While we were building Hummers

... Europe was serious about green jobs.

Let's see. We shipped our manufacturing jobs to China for low wages. When we couldn't provide enough high-tech guest workers, we shipped our software jobs to India and anywhere else that would take them. We put religious taboos in the way of biotech, so that's happening in Europe and Asia. Our auto industry could be down to the Big One soon.

What we did was use the borrowed proceeds of China's industriousness to inflate a real estate bubble that we used to finance consumption. We pushed investment paper at each other like so many Big Macs. Now we're truly and thoroughly screwed.

And we still can't build a passive house.

Update: Bob Herbert says it better: "Stop being stupid."

News judgement

Can anyone give me a single good reason to interview a discredited has-been gasbag like Newt Gingrich on the subject of energy? One good reason? And, no, being a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute is a good reason not to interview him.

Obama, pro-person - McCain, pro-corporation

Have a look at their technology-related policy positions. In practically every case where Obama and McCain differ, McCain takes the pro-corporation position, and Obama takes the pro-person position:

• Net neutrality? Obama's for; McCain's against.
• H1-B visas? Obama says enough; McCain wants more.
• Outsourcing? Obama wants to end tax breaks that reward it; McCain doesn't.
• Renewable energy? Obama wants to research it; McCain at best pays lip service to it.

Update (10/23): Didn't I tell you this right here two days ago! I like my headline better. Skip that synecdoche.

Please sir, I want some more

Newsweek begs for some of the $58 million T. Boone Pickens is spending for his PR campaign. That kind of money will buy a lot of hagiography like this fluff piece.

I wouldn't for a minute dismiss all the ideas he has cribbed from other people, but I don't trust him.

"It's like these guys take pride in being ignorant"

Glenn Beck, come on down. You're an idiot selling drivel to idiots. Your parents must be so proud.

CNN, when will you lance the boil of this ratings disaster?

Commando heiress

The McCain campaign is bragging that Paris Hilton supports their energy plan, even though that's bullshit. It's a pretty lame response to being mocked.

If you want to understand my headline, click the image to see it full-size and take a close look. Keep your pants on, girl!

Oh, crap, now I've succumbed to the August silly season.

Image used under CCA 2.0. Thanks!

Drilling fish in a barrel

A proper Obama response to McCain's bullshit:

I challenge Sen. McCain to show up and vote instead of just standing on airport runways calling for gifts to the oil industry.

Hot air shortage

When McCain parrots "drill here, drill now," he's trying to fill the gap with a great renewable resource, the hot air (and methane) boiling off his bullshit:

McCain has missed Senate votes since April, including several involving major energy measures – one of which, a summer gas tax holiday, was a standard element of his spring stump speech.

If you're a Republican, it's a do-as-I-say world, not a do-as-I-do world.

Then he says energy independence is an "all of the above" problem, but he mocks conservation efforts, despite the undeniable fact that they are the fastest short-term remedy.

More balance from McCNN

Conservative Republicans (is there any other kind?) stage a bit of political theater in the House chamber, and McCNN gives the Democratic response at the very bottom of the story from a passing citizen.

"I was not impressed at all," said Sue Miller, from Memphis, Tennessee. "Democrats did not have a chance to defend themselves."

Not that Miller didn't handle the task well, but shouldn't Nancy Pelosi get a chance to make insulting remarks back at the Republicans?

Nah, reporters who would give the Republicans a pass with passive voice aren't going to be fair.

A strange partisan divide evolved during the event. The tourists who were signed up for tours with Republican congressmen and senators were frantically ushered in to fill seats on the chamber floor. But tourists with passes from Democratic offices watched from above, in the balconies.

This partisan divide didn't evolve. It was designed, and any reporter worth the name would have said so.

How many shares of CNN does Pickens own?

Recently, CNN has taken great pains to put T. Boone Pickens in front of our eyeballs. For example, here Lou Dobbs puckers up an plants wet, sloppy smooch after wet, sloppy smooch on T. Boone's well-tailored posterior. (A billionaire is not so plebeian as to have an ass.)

Hint: This spate of publicity ain't because he's purty. So it must be the billionaire thing.

The news hook is grafted on like a primitive prosthesis over the embarrassing stub of his walking out on the $1,000,000 faux pledge in defense of his Swift Boat Liars. The hook is that T. Boone has a plan for reducing our foreign oil dependency. Of course, it's mostly warmed over Democratic positions, though Lou Dobbs conveniently forgets that.

When T. Boone says, "We have not had a plan in 40 years, Lou," what he means is that we have not had an approved Republican plan. Now, like many wealthies before him, he wants to take credit for the ideas of others, in this case Jimmy Carter, who did have a plan 30 years ago before oil men (no doubt including T. Boone) shouted him down.

"What I want to do is to fold in the great resource we have in the central part of this country, which is wind," says T. Boone. I'm sure readers are thoroughly capable of inserting their own jokes about windy rhetoric, Texas blow jobs, and breaking wind. Have at it in comments.

Update (7/22): Yet another story from CNN. At least this one mentions the Bushist connections, and its headline IDs him as a Swift Boat "backer".

Blast from the past

John McCain's electric car is probably something he saw on the cover of Popular Science in the 1970s.


Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.

What!? Comics on Friday?!

Hey, why not? If the woman across the street, in this suburb where we don't even have sidewalks to roll up, can start a party at 10:00 p.m., I can post some random comics panels.

Click images to see full cartoons.

Shooting straight in every direction

John McCain routinely gives emphatic answers that contradict what he said yesterday or last year. He's not so much a flip-flopper as just generally flippity-floppy.

Yesterday, he said we'd never have to fight again in the Middle East if we were energy independent. Never, not seldom. Today, no, no, no, he was talking about Gulf War I. But, if we had by some miracle become energy independent between the wars, would that mean we would never have "had" to fight in Iraq? Uh, no.

Y'see, the Congressional Record shows that McCain was after WMD when he voted authority to Duhbya. Does he think we found those? Tomorrow, he'll remember that deposing Saddam was why he wanted to go.

What if we became energy independent during McCain's beloved 100-year stay in peaceful, democratic Iraq? Never mind how we get that counterfactual to happen; could we come home then? Or do we really have to wait until McCain's grandkids are giving up the ghost?

When will it again become a requirement of American politics that a candidate make basic sense?

Wrong even when he's right

Never mind that Thomas Friedman has been lousy with error on Iraq. Every day is a new day, and today he got solar energy incentives right.

What's my problem then? Friedman blames Congress as a whole.

Look, the problem here is Republicans in Congress, allying with Duhbya to continue subsidizing big oil as the priority order of bidness. They're not the Gas and Oil Party for nuthin'.

When the media prefers bullshit, faux bipartisanship as its highest good, it won't tell the truth about who's to blame.

Bugs we really need

I'd like to see a microbe make natural gas out of the air. Fuel and a solution to global warming. Then maybe oxygen would become a pollutant!

Transparent bullshit

Anyone older than about six should be able to see through Samuel Bodman's lame "It is wrong to single out an industry, the oil industry or any industry" for new taxes. So, it's perfectly fine to single out the oil industry for sweetheart tax breaks but immoral to repeal them?

The Bushists still count on Americans to be idiots. For a long time, they got away with it.

I'm not a fan of ethanol, however...