Green Weenies All Around

You can’t make this stuff up. From the AP:

Lima Climate Talks Set for Record Carbon Footprint

The Lima conference is expected to have the biggest carbon footprint of any U.N. climate meeting measured to date.

At more than 50,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide, the negotiations’ burden on global warming will be about 1 1/2 times the norm, said Jorge Alvarez, project coordinator for the U.N. Development Program.

The venue is one big reason. It had to be built.

Eleven football fields of temporary structures arose for the 13-day negotiations from what three months ago was an empty field behind Peru’s army’s headquarters. Concrete was laid, plumbing installed, components flown in from as far as France and Brazil.

Standing in the midday sun here can get downright uncomfortable, but the Lima sun is not reliable. That’s one reason solar panels were not used.

For electricity, the talks are relying exclusively on diesel generators.

Organizers had planned to draw power from Peru’s grid, which is about 52 percent fed by non-polluting hydroelectric power. “We worked to upgrade transformers and generators but for some reason it didn’t work,” said Alvarez. . .

Nor is there a guarantee that the 580 square miles (1,500 square kilometers) of forest — the size of Houston, Texas — offsetting the talks’ carbon pollution won’t someday be gone. It must lie unperturbed for a half century in order to neutralize carbon emitted at the conference.

Dontcha just love these clowns? Jeepers, even the American Academy of Religion is thinking about canceling its next annual conference annual conference seven years from now to save the planet:

If the bioethicist Laurie Zoloth, the president of the American Academy of Religion, has her way, she’ll be remembered as the woman who canceled her organization’s conference, which every year attracts a city’s worth of religion scholars.

Two weeks ago, at her organization’s gathering, which is held jointly with the Society for Biblical Literature and this year drew 9,900 scholars, Dr. Zoloth used her presidential address to call on her colleagues to plan a sabbatical year, a year in which they would cancel their conference. In her vision, they would all refrain from flying across the country, saving money and carbon. It could be a year, Dr. Zoloth argued, in which they would sacrifice each other’s company for the sake of the environment, and instead would turn toward their neighborhoods and hometowns.

The Times story goes on to note that if the Academy doesn’t meet, people will be deprived of the opportunity to hear the kind of papers presented at this year’s meeting, which included “Strategic Essentialism as a Tactical Approach to an Ecofeminist Epistemology,” “The Staying Power of the Zen Buddhist Oxherding Pictures,” “‘The Path Has a Mind of Its Own’: Eco-Agri-Pilgrimage to the Corn Maze Performance — an Exercise of Cross-Species Sociality.”

This paragraph is especially ironic:

“I decided it was the core moral issue of our time,” Dr. Zoloth said on Nov. 22, the day before her big speech. “And I had one chance to really say I don’t know the answer — we don’t know the answer, and we’re faced with this. The scientists on my campus are frantic about this science. Every scientific panel I went to was filled with incredibly anxious scientists.” And they kept asking about her religion colleagues: What are you doing?

So let’s see if I’ve got this straight: the religious cult of climate change wants religious people to get with the true religion? Got it.  I expect Prof. Zoloth will be taking Zoloft before long.

CORRECTION and addition: An astute reader—or a glutton for punishment who read all the way to the end of the Times story—notes that Zoloth’s proposal is to cancel the annual meeting seven years from now.  Because nothing says “sacrifice for the planet” like thinking about skipping an academic gabfest seven years from now.

In any case, an Omnibus Green Weenie is deserved.

Green Weenie 2 copy

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