Inconvenient Logic

So, Bono has this to say:

In dangerous, clangorous times, the idea of America rings like a bell (see King, M. L., Jr., and Dylan, Bob). It hits a high note and sustains it without wearing on your nerves. (If only we all could.) This was the melody line of the Marshall Plan and it’s resonating again. Why? Because the world sees that America might just hold the keys to solving the three greatest threats we face on this planet: extreme poverty, extreme ideology and extreme climate change. The world senses that America, with renewed global support, might be better placed to defeat this axis of extremism with a new model of foreign policy.

Poverty. Ideology. Climate Change. Apparently Bono is all impressed with Obama's "Millennium Goal" of the eradication of extreme poverty in our time.”

And then there's instances such as this:

2005, the couple traveled to Romania with a mission. It was being reported in the European press that a greedy western mining corporation was invading the quaint, idyllic Romanian village of Rosia Montana to extract the regions’ gold deposits and exploit its people. For Phelim and Ann, both experienced documentarians, this seemed like a story worth telling. The problem, as they soon learned, was that the story was a lie. Far from quaint and idyllic, Rosia Montana was a badly impoverished village that modernity had largely passed by. “These people weren’t making a lifestyle choice. They were in deep, deep poverty. They couldn’t wait for the mine to open and inject fresh money and jobs into the local economy. But stopping that were activists from Switzerland and Belgium. These rich western environmentalists didn’t care. They were content to watch people live in misery and view it as a “culture” that needed to be preserved, but if you talked to the local people they viewed poverty as a curse that was killing their children early and needed to be eradicated as soon as possible.”

What Phelim and Ann discovered was a far bigger story – one that would give their film, and their lives, a whole new shape. It was the largely untold tale of western activists advancing Marxist ideology under the guise of environmental protection. “This romantic notion that starving people are ‘poor but happy’ has to stop. Someone needs to tell these environmentalists that humans are actually part of the environment.”

Eradicating extreme poverty and Marxist ideology go hand-in-hand.

It's difficult to reconcile the idea that Al Gore and company really want to save the earth when they continue to jet around the country, spewing more carbon into the air that my family ever will (let's not forget about that endangered Chilean Bass he served at his daughter's wedding), added to the fact that the man stands to personally profit from any Carbon trading scheme.

They hypocrisy is not to be stomached.

Then there was this last week:

Apple today resigned its membership in the Chamber “effective immediately.” That’s a harsher tone than the other departures—three utilities said they’d let their membership lapse at the end of the year, and Nike simply quite the Chamber’s board of directors.

At issue, again, is the Chamber of Commerce’s opposition to the Obama administration’s climate policy, most notably the Environmental Protection Agency’s decision to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions.

Mighty brave and bold stance there for Apple and Nike.

Where do they do all their manufacturing?

Apple - China
Nike- Their majority of their output today is produced in factories in China, Indonesia, and Vietnam, but they also have factories in Italy, the Philippines, Taiwan, and South Korea

Despite recent articles that China is going to "get serious" about Global Warming concerns (touted big in the headlines), all they have done is to promise to lower greenhouse gas output. Think they're going to cripple their economy with Cap and Trade schemes? Ha.

Now, back to the issue of eradicating "extreme" poverty:

If free-markets, trade, and employment are the only tools ever used to effectively end poverty, then what would it mean to take those tools off of the table, as the modern environmental movement seems bent on doing? Who will suffer and who will gain? According to Phelim and Ann, who will suffer is everyone, especially the poor. Who will gain is Al Gore and the rest of the multi-billion dollar Big Environmental Businesses. And of course, America loses the most. Says Ann, “China produces more genuine pollution than any other nation on Earth, but none of the international regulations on the table do anything to curb them.China’s cities are badly polluted with dirty fumes. If Greenpeace wanted to stop global pollution they should move all their offices to China. And I’m talking about genuine pollution – not CO2 which is essential for life and one of the elements that keep our crops growing and our children healthy. But Greenpeace is not in China because there is a strong anti-business, anti-capitalist and above all anti-American element to the environmental movement.

Ann McElhinney and her husband Phelim McAleer just produced the documentary Not Evil, Just Wrong. Go here to check it out.