Hi Steve,

At the risk of getting this thread shut down, we are indeed stewards of creation. But that is not the point. And there is nothing wrong with either thrift or caution, individually or in tandem, per se. But who will accept accountability for the unintended consequences of the hysteria that has become the environmental religion, this most recent dogma of secular humanism masquerading as science.

In my original post in this thread I alluded to the children's story of Chicken Little.

"The globe is warming! The globe is warming!" cried Greenie Weenie.

Do you recall what happened to Henny Penny and the rest that blindly followed Chicken Little? They were killed, devoured by the wolf.

The same thing will happen to us if we blindly follow the AlGore crowd down this primrose path to the Day After Tomorrow. If we implement the Kyoto Accord, how drastically will our economies be crippled?

I remember when the environmental movement in this country had reason to be concerned. I remember seeing images on television of rivers catching fire because of the contamination. So we cleaned up the environment.

But now the environmentalists, the people who put the "mental" in "environmental," want to go further than reason would dictate. And they justify their demands by asking, "What's wrong with caution?"

The EPA requires the use of "reformulated" gasoline in certain urban areas. There has been observed a marked increase in the incidence of brain tumors in those areas coorelated directly to the imposition of reformulated gasoline. But who accepts accountability for that consequence?

The EPA decreed that a particular town, I believe it's in Colorado (though I'm not certain), had to clean up the slag hills left over from an abandoned lead mine. They could measure levels of lead contamination in the slag hills that they decreed to be unsafe. The EPA said that children played on those slag hills and that they were a health hazard. It didn't matter that four living generations of children living there had grown up playing on those slag hills with none of the EPA's asserted health consequences being manifest. The EPA came in and effectively bankrupted that small town. Who accepts accountability for that consequence.

Erik has astutely and repeatedly made comment about "know how." Today you can hadly get an electronic product manufactured this side of China, or somewhere in the Pacific Rim. Why? Because if the EPA can measure a concentration of anything in your effluent, they decree it a hazardous level and regulate you out of business. And this isn't just a problem for the electronics industries, but for all manufacturing industries. So who will accept accountability for the consequences of losing all of this "know how?"

In South America the price of corn is going up such that people are finding it difficult to afford to eat. In this country the price of corn and other foods are also being inflated by the effect of the artificial tax-dollar created demand for ethanol. Who will accept accountability for this consequence? Who will answer to those people who now go hungry that otherwise would have been fed?

We in the United States and Europe enjoy some of the best lifestyles in the world, as a direct result of our economies. What will happen to our economies when we let the environmentalists demand that we adopt the Kyoto Accord? Will it have been worth the sacrifice of dramatically increased infant and child mortality as we give up our industrial advances? Who will accept accountability when it's my child that suffers a premature death?

You said, "We are burning off millions of years of valuable hydrocarbon deposits, and the readily accessible reserves will be gone very very soon, possibly in the lifetime of our children." But you can not support this assertion because we do not know how long it takes oil to form. It might be millions of years, but it might only be hundreds. We haven't answered that question yet.

And that is only one of a myriad questions the environmentlists haven't answered, except to the extent they try to impugn anyone who asks the questions. They also try to evade the questions by answering them with attention diverting questions, like "What's wrong with being cautious?"

And you ask, "What's wrong with thrift and caution?" And I reply by pointing out that your question cuts both ways. That it portends untold, unforesees and unintended consequences.

For a group of people who would so feign a devotion to science, the environmentalists do exhibit a deep rooted loathing, perhaps even an actual phobia, of quantitative empirical data. They rely instead on "hand-waving proofs" of their hypotheses, and the "louder equals righter" school of debate. So I ask, will any devotee of the environmental religion please give a quantitative straight answer to any of these most basic of simple questions?

How much greenhouse gas is required to raise the temperature of the globe 1°?

Assuming an average daily operation time of 2 hours, how many SUVs would it take, based on 2007 CAFE standards, to reduce the volume of the Antarctic ice sheet by 1 cubic meter in 1 year?

What is the chemical and physical process by which crude oil is produced, and how long does it take?

If it's concensus, it ain't scientific. And once again, a louder voice does not a point make, and grander gesticulations do not a proof make.

Joe