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thedrifter
04-28-08, 08:17 AM
April 26, 2008, 9:00 a.m.

Chickenfeedhawks
Global warm-mongering.

By Mark Steyn


Last week, Time magazine featured on its cover the iconic photograph of the U.S. Marine Corps raising the flag on Iwo Jima. But with one difference: The flag has been replaced by a tree. The managing editor of Time, Rick Stengel, was very pleased with the lads in graphics for cooking up this cute image and was all over the TV sofas talking up this ingenious visual shorthand for what he regards as the greatest challenge facing mankind: “How To Win The War On Global Warming.”

Where to begin? For the last ten years, we have, in fact, been not warming but slightly cooling, which is why the eco-warriors have adopted the all-purpose bogeyman of “climate change.” But let’s take it that the editors of Time are referring not to the century we live in but the previous one, when there was a measurable rise of temperature of approximately one degree. That’s the “war”: one degree.

If the tree-raising is Iwo Jima, a one-degree increase isn’t exactly Pearl Harbor. But General Stengel wants us to engage in preemptive war. The editors of Time would be the first to deplore such saber-rattling applied to, say, Iran’s nuclear program, but it has become the habit of progressive opinion to appropriate the language of war for everything but actual war.

So let’s cut to the tree. In my corner of New Hampshire, we have more trees than we did a hundred or two hundred years ago. My town is over 90 percent forested. Any more trees and I’d have to hack my way through the undergrowth to get to my copy of Time magazine on the coffee table. Likewise Vermont, where not so long ago in St Albans I found myself stuck behind a Hillary supporter driving a Granolamobile bearing the bumper sticker “TO SAVE A TREE REMOVE A BUSH.” Very funny. And even funnier when you consider that on that stretch of Route Seven there’s nothing to see north, south, east, or west but maple, hemlock, birch, pine, you name it. It’s on every measure other than tree cover that Vermont’s kaput.

So where exactly do Time magazine’s generals want to plant their tree? Presumably, as in Iwo Jima, on foreign soil. It’s all these third-world types monkeying around with their rain forests who decline to share the sophisticated Euro-American reverence for the tree. In the Time iconography, the tree is Old Glory and it’s a flag of eco-colonialism.

And which obscure island has it been planted on? In Haiti, the Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis was removed from office on April 12. Insofar as history will recall him at all, he may have the distinction of being the first head of government to fall victim to “global warming” — or, at any rate, the “war on global warming” that Time magazine is gung-ho for. At least five people have been killed in food riots in Port-au-Prince. Prices have risen 40 percent since last summer and, as Deroy Murdock reported, some citizens are now subsisting on biscuits made from salt, vegetable oil and (mmmm) dirt. Dirt cookies: Nutritious, tasty, and affordable? Well, one out of three ain’t bad.

Unlike “global warming,” food rioting is a planet-wide phenomenon, from Indonesia to Pakistan to Ivory Coast to the tortilla rampages in Mexico and even pasta protests in Italy.

So what happened?

Well, Western governments listened to the eco-warriors, and introduced some of the “wartime measures” they’ve been urging. The EU decreed that 5.75 percent of petrol and diesel must come from “biofuels” by 2010, rising to 10 percent by 2020. The U.S. added to its 51 cents-per-gallon ethanol subsidy by mandating a five-fold increase in “biofuels” production by 2022.

The result is that big government accomplished at a stroke what the free market could never have done: They turned the food supply into a subsidiary of the energy industry. When you divert 28 percent of U.S. grain into fuel production, and when you artificially make its value as fuel higher than its value as food, why be surprised that you’ve suddenly got less to eat? Or, to be more precise, it’s not “you” who’s got less to eat but those starving peasants in distant lands you claim to care so much about.

Heigh-ho. In the greater scheme of things, a few dead natives keeled over with distended bellies is a small price to pay for saving the planet, right? Except that turning food into fuel does nothing for the planet in the first place. That tree the U.S. Marines are raising on Iwo Jima was most likely cut down to make way for an ethanol-producing corn field: Researchers at Princeton calculate that to date the “carbon debt” created by the biofuels arboricide will take 167 years to reverse.

The biofuels debacle is global warm-mongering in a nutshell: The first victims of poseur environmentalism will always be developing countries. In order for you to put biofuel in your Prius and feel good about yourself for no reason, real actual people in faraway places have to starve to death. On April 15, the Independent, the impeccably progressive British newspaper, editorialized: “The production of biofuel is devastating huge swathes of the world’s environment. So why on earth is the Government forcing us to use more of it?”

You want the short answer? Because the government made the mistake of listening to fellows like you. Here’s the self-same Independent in November 2005:

At last, some refreshing signs of intelligent thinking on climate change are coming out of Whitehall. The Environment minister, Elliot Morley, reveals today in an interview with this newspaper that the Government is drawing up plans to impose a ‘biofuel obligation’ on oil companies... This has the potential to be the biggest green innovation in the British petrol market since the introduction of unleaded petrol…

Etc. It’s not the environmental movement’s chickenfeedhawks who’ll have to reap what they demand must be sown, but we should be in no doubt about where to place the blame — on the bullying activists and their media cheerleaders and weathervane politicians who insist that the “science” is “settled” and that those who query whether there’s any crisis are (in the designation of the strikingly non-emaciated Al Gore) “denialists.” All three presidential candidates have drunk the environmental kool-ethanol and are committed to Big Government solutions. But, as the Independent’s whiplash-inducing U-turn confirms, the eco-scolds are under no such obligation to consistency. Finger-in-the-wind politicians shouldn’t be surprised to find that gentle breeze is from the media wind turbine and it’s just sliced your finger off.

Whether or not there’s very slight global cooling or very slight global warming, there’s no need for a “war” on either, no rationale for loosing a plague of eco-locusts on the food supply. So why be surprised that totalitarian solutions to mythical problems wind up causing real devastation? As for Time’s tree, by all means put it up: It helps block out the view of starving peasants on the far horizon.

Ellie

thedrifter
04-28-08, 08:25 AM
Time Magazine Admits Its Climate Change Bias
by Jeff Poor (more by this author)
Posted 04/28/2008 ET


It’s wasn’t the first Time and it won’t be the last Time.

Showing an utter disregard for ethical journalism, the editors at Time twisted American patriotism into an ad for the green movement to promote “winning the war on global warming.” Green is the new red, white and blue we are told by editors who never liked the old red, white and blue.

The magazine used the historic Iwo Jima flag raising photo as a global warming marketing gimmick for its April 28 issue. The flag the Marines were raising was replaced with a tree to equate the evils our veterans overcame with the struggle now allegedly needed with climate change.

“One of the things we do in the story is we say there needs to be an effort along the lines of preparing for World War II to combat global warming and climate change,” Time Managing Editor Richard Stengel said on MSNBC on April 18.

Stengel’s analogy was ridiculously flawed. It’s not as if planes piloted by angry polar bears bombed Pearl Harbor or that the caribou had invaded the Aleutian Islands. To even consider such a comparison mocks the sacrifice of our veterans.

More than 6,000 American lives were lost just at Iwo Jima with more than 28,000 total casualties. Equating the two shows how little Time understands about real war. Yet, in Stengel’s eyes, they’re equal threats and we need the naïve public need to realize it.

“Obviously many people have – were offended by it,” Stengel said to a group journalism students on April 21 at the University of Mississippi. “But, I do think, and I have made this case and I’ve made the case to people who have talked about it, is that climate change and we can even discuss the merits of it or not – climate change is going to affect every living human being.”

Translation: It doesn’t matter if you found our cover offensive and we’re even going to show off our Photoshop skills so we can force global warming alarmism down your throat.

Just in the past 12 months, Time has shown its true agenda by trotting out the global warming boogeyman on seven separate occasions with a cover story. That would have been the most common topic had it not been an election year, which made Time’s cover 13 times in the last 12 months.

Included among those issues was the April 9, 2007, “Global Warming Survival Guide.” That’s a handy one to have around in the event you find yourself near a glacier about to collapse. It had other useful information, including 51 of “the planet’s best ideas, with an assessment of their impact and feel-good factor.”

Yes, the all-important “feel-good factor” – essential because it props up the emotional attributes of your liberal sensibilities.

A year before, Time told us to “Be Worried. Be Very Worried.” The April 3, 2006 issue warned readers “the climate was crashing” and suggested increased 2005 Atlantic tropical activity was just a sign of things to come.

That didn’t work out as the editors warned it might. Tropical activity in the Atlantic hasn’t even come close to 2005 levels. The last two seasons have produced only nine named storms (five hurricanes) in 2006 and 16 in 2007 (six hurricanes) versus 27 (15 hurricanes) in 2005.

Numbers don’t really matter to the magazine. Time has a blind faith in this cause and combined it with an intellectual elitist snobbery only found in the mainstream media. They’re the “experts” and we should just shut up and do as we’re told.

“I didn’t go to journalism school,” Stengel said. “But this notion that journalism is objective, or must be objective is something that has always bothered me – because the notion about objectivity is in some ways a fantasy. I don’t know that there is as such a thing as objectivity.”

Some of that mentality is held by other media outlets, but at least many journalists embrace some sort of ethical guidelines. Not at Time, we they “make it up as we go along,” according to Stengel.

He should take a peek at the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics and note these guidelines before spouting off about journalistic ethics. Journalists should:

• Examine their own cultural values and avoid imposing those values on others.
• Distinguish between advocacy and news reporting. Analysis and commentary should be labeled and not misrepresent fact or context.
• Be sensitive when seeking or using interviews or photographs of those affected by tragedy or grief.

National Press Photographers Association’s Ethics & Standards Committee Chair John Long said it best.

“It’s not so much unethical in the sense of digital manipulation since the original photograph is so obviously changed, but it's an insult,” Long said. “It’s another example of the lack of respect photojournalism gets in the world of word journalism. If they respected the photograph in the same way they respect the written word, this would never happen.”

A lack of respect of photojournalism wasn’t the only thing Time showed a lack of respect for. The last issue of Time with a cover story paying respect to U.S. military veterans was an “Anniversary Special” on May 31, 2004 marking 60 years since the D-Day invasion and the men who were there.
Jeff Poor is a Staff Writer for the Business & Media Institute, a division of the Media Research Center, a non-profit media watchdog.

Ellie