Tuesday, October 27, 2009

World War 350   [Henry Payne]

My travels took me to Washington University in St. Louis last weekend where students were coincidentally prepping for a local rally supporting the International Day of Climate Action (billed by 350.org as the “most widespread day of environmental action in the planet's history” with 5,200 events worldwide).

With temperatures on Friday hovering in the low 40s — some 20 degrees below normal in a Midwest that has seen record lows all year — the students shivered in hats and mittens as they passed out literature warning of global warming Armageddon. The scene reminded me of DC National airport years ago where young Hare Krishna hippies used to aggressively peddle their religious literature (the difference being that today, the religion is backed by the U.S. government).

Fortunately for the organizers, Saturday’s temperatures were a more seasonable 60 degrees, encouraging a few hundred disciples, pols, and businessmen to come to the St. Louis arch and warn of the floods, drought, and locusts that awaited us if CO2 levels passed 350 parts per million (too late — we’re already at 387 ppm).

One female student, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported, wore a “Power Shift T-shirt emblazoned with the group's logo of silhouetted figures raising a wind turbine, a play on the iconic World War II photograph of the flag raising on Iwo Jima.”

“What that represents is that shifting the ’s power grid to clean, sustainable energy sources will require a concerted effort on the scale of what it took for us to win World War II,” said the 18-year-old.

If only her green professors taught her how essential was the cheap oil infrastructure that helped her forefathers pump out the thousands of incredible planes, tanks, and weaponry needed to defeat the very real plague of German and Japanese fascism.

10/27 07:15 PMShare