Into the Abyss

There are times I can comprehend why Nikolai Tesla fell in love with a pigeon. Humanity can at times seem unloveable. There was method in Tesla's madness. His nemesis, Edison, was busily taking someone else's half-done inventions and patenting them for himself. Buggered if Tesla was going to confide his plan for ambient and infinite free energy to humans.

Dan Carlin's latest Common Sense podcast has brought these thoughts to the fore with his musings on Bill Gates' radical statement in The Atlantic, where Dan was enthralled by Gates' idea to speed up the innovation spiral.

The plot goes like this. Climate change is an existential threat to humanity. Without alternate forms of energy, we're all going to die as a species. If humanity can focus its brains and brawn like the Yanks did for the Manhattan Project, we might just live.

Carlin describes it as a big asteroid on a ten-year deadline to wipe out life on earth, or the nuclear arms race during WWII. If only humanity can focus its talents on this threat, we might get a pass. We should be so lucky.

My unbounded pessimism is well established. After the Copenhagen round of climate yakka, it was clear that capitalism and human nature had trumped collective action, responsibility and long term survival. In the long run, we're fucked.

We can't all live like Americans, yet they have set the gold standard for copious consumption. Energy is just one part of the puzzle, albeit a large one. Oil will still fill the middens with packaging and hollow marketing shill, regardless of whether we're walking on sunshine with pV cells or not. WALL-E and Idiocracy shared the same plot, with contrasting levels of profanity.

The other problem is climate change is more a slow boiled frog than a clear and present asteroid threat. Entropy is all whimper, no bang. Earth will be caught between flood and famine, alluded to here in a post which was popular with many spy sub-stations at the time. Tl;dr is there's life in the Westphalian nation state yet.

The TPP is precisely the opposite of a cure. Instead of freeing general knowledge, we have chained it, pimped it out for outrageous entry fees. Science has been privatised, ideas imprisoned for Life plus 70 years.

There will be no collective action. At least, not until we're utterly exhausted by resource wars. We've forgotten what a post-war consensus looks like. Looks like we're going to need another war to discover it again for the first time.

In the meantime, Indonesia is still on fire. There goes another carbon sink.

News Drought

We're into the second week of news drought here in NZ. Nothing continues to happen. In lieu of news, mirages are common. They look like news at a distance, but upon closer inspection are nothing but the shifting sands of time.

For example, a Kiwi Sleb's Lear jet joins the search for the AWOL MH370. It looks like a match made in clickbait heaven, but turns out to be less than the sum of its parts. Traces of the missing Malaysian airplane continue to elude the search team over the South Indian Ocean, who have only found an ocean full of unrelated human flotsam and jetsam so far. Alas, the man-made Plastic Gyres of inorganic refuse are not news either.

Another cyclist is dead. Police are considering whether to press charges against a 70 year old truck driver who ran over and killed a 22 year old student nurse cyclist.

Sharla Haerewa was wearing a reflective vest and bike lights for Africa, as well as apparently riding in the designated cycle lane. If the police don't charge this truckie with careless driving causing death, THAT would be news.

It would be even better news if the Dutch way of law was introduced here, where the burden of proof always lies with the person in charge of the multi-ton speeding hunk of metal. Fair trade for the freight-friendly Roads of National Significance, eh.

The thinking person's gym bunny, Rachel Smalley, Punk'd herself with a live mic, inadvertently setting off a wrestling match with some self-identifying heifers. It's a fight as old as nerd versus jock but, like alcohol and other drugs, it is a cleavage that feminism has yet to resolve to its satisfaction.

It looks like I picked the wrong week to join Twitter. Just as I join in search of news and novelty, Herald journo David Fisher calls it quits. I can see his point. The signal to noise is so lopsided, I get an idea what SETI must feel like. It's like being in a Kakrafoonian Pub.

At least Towel Day is only a month away. A hopeful thumbs up til then. You're never lost as long as you know where your towel is.

The Black Abbott

Back when I was going bananas in Queensland, the Oz grape vine hummed about how the Great Barrier Reef was dying. Arguments could be had whether the farmers or the tourist industry was to blame, but no-one argued that something was killing it. If nothing changed for the better, within fifty years or so, the Great Barrier Reef would be as real as the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. That is, not at all.

Sometime between then and now, someone wisely threw a World Heritage Site designation upon the Great Barrier Reef. This has not stopped newly-minted Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott blacking up the place with one of the world's largest coal ports on its doorstep, nor permitting it to infinitely crap on its front lawn:

Unfortunately, soon a massively destructive coal port will be built just 50 km north of the magnificent Whitsunday Islands. The port expansion was approved by the Abbott Liberal National government on Wednesday 11 December, and it will become one of the world's largest coal ports.

The coal export facility is ironically located on Abbot Point. The construction of this port will involve dredging 3 million cubic metres of seabed. The dredge spoil will be dumped into the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area.

To give you an idea of the scale of this dredging, if all of the spoil was put into dump trucks, there would be 150,000 of them lined up bumper to bumper from Brisbane to Melbourne.

This is the desperation of a mining industry grasping at a downward spiral, Dutch disease by environmental hari-kari. NZ learned a less harsh lesson with Solid Energy.

Dagg knows what a disappearing Great Barrier Reef will do to Oz weather patterns. Here's hoping those Queenslanders have their nonsense on reinforced stilts.

And now, here's an Xmas message from the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Atkinson. This message managed to become the most complained-about thing on Brit TV for the year.

Happy Summer Solstice, whinge pom pom pom pom.

Dire Straits of Malacca

Poor bloody Philippines, the Poland of the Pacific Rim.

When it is not being invaded, colonised, or genocided, its many, many inhabitants are the world's labour pool. Where the Irish or African-American once toiled, today you'll find a Philippine. Whether it's hanging from a scaffolding on a dubious Dubai building site, or slaving away over a hot stove in the bowels of a luxury cruise liner in the Caribbean, you'll find a Flippino.

And, to add injury to rampant Catholicism, now the Philippines are home to a theoretical Category 6 Typhoon (the scale usually goes to 5. This poon went to 11, so to speak).

As ill-timed as Russel Norman's cut n paste of a Philippine climate change spokesperson on Parliament's floor appeared, Norman of Queensland had a point. The funneling effects around the convoluted Straits of Malacca is fairly well-known. As far as climate change canaries in the mine omens go, any prick in chaotic weather systems has a very welcome home here.

What is to be done is another point entirely. According to Kim Stanley Robinson's so-so novel 2312, we are still in the the early years of the Great Dithering. So NZ sends aid packages as says there there, putting off the great migration for at least another electoral cycle. Hercules Returns indeed.

Butterfly Beats Whale

There is a sure-fire gambit I use on Climate Change Deniers (CCDers) that has yet to be confounded, and which doesn't involve all that tedious mucking about with graphs and arguing with religious nutters.

Does the CCDer accept the existence of chaos and complexity, encapsulated by Lorenz and Merilees as the Butterfly Effect? i.e. A flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil can set off a tornado in Texas (In the unlikely event that the CCDer denies the existence of chaos, refer them to the laws of thermodynamics).

OK, that was the hard part. Once the CCDer accepts the Butterfly Effect's existence, it's a fairly short step to point out that digging up carbon deposits built up over hundreds of millions of years and squirting it into the biosphere over a couple of centuries is bound to have an effect.

Our House

Housing is shaping up to be one of this year's main political themes, with all parties announcing their reaction to focus group pressure. Labour and Greens have announced complementary policies that would give a certain amount of golden tickets to a few lucky families, possibly in marginal constituencies.

National has bowled Tremain Heatley and in goes Smith, in the nick of time. Bill English has shown his Grave Concern eyebrows on the matter, looking perturbed at zoning regulations and local Councils.

And, like army maneuvers, where there's smoke, there's fire. The cost of housing has reached stupid levels, with no signs of stopping. Regional development has all but given up the ghost as Auckland boils over. Increasingly, households are dividing into those who have family help them into a house, and those who forever rent.

This isn't so bad in some respects. NZ is a new country, and its townships were founded for various reasons, some of which have not stood the test of time. For example, the only reason New Plymouth exists is because a ship load of settlers heading north out of Wellington trying to find a place to set up shop were told by all the Maori from Poneke to Whanganui to piss off. The oil and gas came later. Let those who have their family silver tied up in bricks and mortar, let Otautahi be a lesson to you.

But by and large the outlook is ridiculously bad if you're one of the population who really insists on having a roof over your head to sleep under. Even in some of the provinces, rents are steep for even a house of sticks.

My neighbours invited me over for Xmas drinkies, wherein they explained the history of Pook Farm, its former tenants, former owners. I was stunned at the price tag for the bach, and no longer feel any guilt for the government accommodation supplement. In truth, it's more of a house-sitting fee for someone else's tax free capital gain. I'm just the janitor, keeping it tidy and squatter-free until the real estate market recovers.

And land? How did land inflation go from beads and nails for acres in 1840 to hundreds and thousands for feet a bare 160 years later? It's not as if it's Singapore or Hong Kong.

Among all the bright ideas out there on housing, none is more overlooked than the punk angle. I wish I had had one of these 3D glass printers at the beginning of my drinking career. I could have recycled enough bottles to build a bloody mansion and matching glass house by now. Or how about this Adobe Brick Maker? Some assembly required, but at $US4000 for the parts, who wouldn't chip in for an infinite House of Lego machine?

We've got to look outside the box, and make it for ourselves.

UPDATE: This just in. HT Nandor.

Economists Gone Wild

Back in the day, I enjoyed the talking heads orchestra known as The Ralston Group, not least because I could spend some quality time with my father who was an irregular guest on a show full of them. That's how I was introduced to Gareth Morgan, a fellow seat jockey for the show.

Over the years, Gareth Morgan has impressed with his insight and work. The triumphs and his tragedies of policy and sheer bloody-minded kite-flying in the face of a lightning storm of public opinion are part of the package. For every Big Kahuna, there's bound to be a few missable tiddler waves.

Every man and their cat has taken umbrage with Gareth Morgan's latest idea to exterminate all the cats in New Zealand. Not surprising really, seeing how NZ has one of the highest cats per capita rates in the world. Many people prefer cats to people, for example the mad old cat ladies with toxoplasmosis.

At the very least, I expect a Cats that Look like Gareth Morgan meme or something to pop out of the affair. At the most, someone with a lot of petty cash might want to fund a few free cat speyings at the SPCA. It's the single, most direct ways to root out Morgan's alleged problem; lower the cost barriers to kitteh castration.

But that's it. I was going to raise a personal defence for my own cat, Professor Hunter Gonzales. He's an SPCA eunuch, and a feline physicist specialising in the momentum of tossing dead animals and the thermodynamics of dripping taps. And he's taught me a thing or two. For example, no-one else but him has taught me that rats can scream.

There were other defence prongs; the lack of snakes here, the pet snobbery, the ecological Reductio ad Absurdum of Bender's Law (Kill All the Humans). But an economic parable might be the best medicine.

My old man also hated cats. He once swore blind that there was a nest of feral cats living under our house in central Palmy, and set about shooting any cat that trespassed onto the property from his bedroom window with a .22 rifle. All part of his bulleted menu of imported fair game; possum, rabbit, duck, quail, deer. All these pests gave him an alibi to kill.

The circular logic of colonial sporting habits that this presents is not the point. The point is that my old man was responsible for releasing Dagg knows how many kilograms of lead into the NZ bush. In and of itself that mightn't be a problem, but the sheer number of NZers who love shooting things shares the same ground as any other tragedy of the very finite Commons.

Sometimes, it just depends on what you classify as an externality. I attempt to minimise my carbon footprint as much as reasonable. I haven't bred, I don't have a substitute penis and abide the preservation of penguins by vowing never to hoon past them on a custom-made motorbike. Each to their own.

Dig This

It was a fine day for the Friends of Wharemauku Stream to plant 1300 native plants along Drain 6. Not so long ago, Drain 6 looked like this:



Over winter, with a little help from Kapiti District Council, the drain was landscaped. Today was the day to lay the plants that will help leach all the farmer and other human toxins out of the drain as it meets Wharemauku Stream and then on to the sea at Raumati Beach.



Paraparaumu Mayor and Ruth Richardson look-alike Jenny Rowan opened the Big Dig, explaining that the town was investing in the things that will enhance the future city. Although she didn't call them Maori footpaths or desire lines, she did recognise this particular public commons as cycling and pedestrian infrastructure. She mentioned the nearby Aquatic Centre being built. Personally, I'm looking forward to a proper town centre. At the moment Pram's hub is the private carparks of Coastlands Mall or Kapiti Lights. There's no room for civic freedoms there.

Political animals may recognise Transpower's Patrick Strange. Transpower had funded the purchase of the plants, as well as providing some human capital for the day's labour.



Friends of Wharemauku Stream organiser Lyall Perris talks to the kids from Raumati South School. The Young Ones had volunteered their time as well and the 'dults, avoiding National Standards for one day and doing something useful instead. Some of them helped in the last planting five years ago, which is now well-established and some of it can be seen on the right of the photo.





Fortunately, someone had splashed some cash on a hole borer. And lunch. And even little bamboo cloches to protect the tender plants from the wind and Pook predation.



Nice one.

Food Fight

Anyone who grows or eats food should have a listen to food activist Raj Patel's Feeding Ten Billion. It's about 45 minutes long and covers the myth of the Green Revolution, Mathus, Food Sovereignty, Feminism and the Malawi Food Crisis. Stay tuned til the end, where a question is answered with a Time Bandits reference.

Or you can read Patel's essay in Foreign Policy here.

And now, here's various post-WWII conflicts played out by national dishes of their combatants:

Five gyres not one

It seems that there's not one (North Pacific) gyre, not two (North Atlantic) gyres, but five, five gyres of plastic soup poisoning its way through the food chain. Here's what the average teenage mutant injured turtles are eating:

The environmental desk is now on self-medication leave.

Random thoughts

# Looking through all the footage of the Pakistan floods, one thing sticks out. Where are all the women? There's a few dotted throughout the coverage, but it's mainly men and children in the lens. I can't escape the possibility that many women were abandoned to the waters in much the same way as the Tongan ferry sinking.

# The first thought that jumps into my head over the legal challenge by the newly minted charitable trust Climate Science Coalition against NIWA is the Scopes Monkey Trial. The second thought that jumps to mind is from the Book of Heroic Failures:

[I]n 1897, the General Assembly of Indiana passed a bill ruling that the value of Pi was four. This ensured that all mathematical and engineering calculations in the State would be wrong. It would, for example, mean that a pendulum clock would gain about fifteen minutes every hour.

# Judging from noises coming out of Key and cabinet over liquor reform, it seems that the age of purchase is set to go to a conscience vote in parliament. Not that it will make a blind but of difference to drinking habits, pre-loading or otherwise, but something must be done and this looks like something. Good luck with that. What will 18 year olds do on a Friday night now?

# Compulsory superannuation looks almost a certainty as well. Doing so will partly neutralise noises from Cunliffe, but also to shut down any resurgent NZ First platform too. Even after emptying several magazines of silver bullets into Winston Peters prior to the last election, the old wolf will not die. Perhaps starving him of political oxygen might keep the beast at bay. Whatever happens, it'll be Generations X & Y picking up the tab.

# And finally, an alternative opening scene to Return of the Jedi has surfaced, showing how much potential the third episode had, before merchandising and those fucking Ewoks ruined everything. Full story here:

Slow news day links

# From the Environmental Desk, there's the ongoing bleeding sore of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Big Picture has some bloody depressing shots of over-lubricated flora and saturated fauna. Latest news is that the head of BP is passing the clean-up over to the US government, partly to stem the Brit-bashing. Strangely enough, no-one has had a bad word to say for ages about the other culprit in all of this; Halliburton.

# Boing Boing points to a leaked BP document showing that the company knew exactly what kind of fallout a leak would have. The part that really creeped me out was:

Corexit oil dispersant toxicity has not been tested on ecosystems, according to the Oil Spill Response Plan. "Ecotoxilogical effects: No toxicity studies have been conducted on this product."

# Meanwhile in Guatemala, there's a bloody great sinkhole which has appeared. It's a fairly good chance that neglected stormwater pipes assisted the subterranean implosion.

# With these man-made disasters in mind, it's worthwhile revisiting Cracked's 6 Natural Disasters That Were Caused By Human Stupidity. Top of the list is the tale of Centralia, Pennsylvania. A rubbish burnoff that started in May 1962 is still burning to this day. Most of the town was paid to move away, a bit like Springfield in The 200th Simpsons episode Trash of the Titans. Wikipedia goes on to mention that the government has revoked the town's postcode, and that the fire is expected to burn out 250 years from now.

# Moving on from stupidity to cupidity, Q&A producer Tim Watkin calls out John Key as a wimp on the Great Grey Gorilla of boomer superannuation. There's a lively thread, with Public Address' Graeme Edgeler highlighting how loose NZ's super policy is compared to its introduction. Point Two, the requirement that recipients must have lived continuously in the country for 25 years beforehand contrasts sharply with today's policy, where one doesn't even have to reside in the country to collect it. I think it's a 10 year minimum residency requirement now.

# Which still won't help Rocky Horror Show creator Richard O'Brien get permanent residency here, and fair go too. He hasn't lived in NZ for 46 years. No disrespect, but you're way too late mate. NZ isn't the Catholic Church. We don't accept recantations of kiwiness on the near-death bed.

# In domestic drug news, there's the latest on the Switched on Gardener raids, with talk of asset freezes and counter-litigation:

The company director said he understood why the Government had introduced the civil forfeiture law, and had no problem with his house being frozen.

"You can't have people accused of major crimes selling their assets off. But I'm not guilty of any crimes and I don't intend to sell my home."

However, he said, he had instructed his lawyers to apply to get the $189,000 back.

"We are going to fight that. The bank had instructed me to use that money to prop up the business.
"If I can't get that money and we go bust, then we win the court case, we'll be going after the Crown for our lost earnings."

# The government is rejoicing in the 101 convictions under the new drug driving laws. This is in spite of yet more research (controlled, double-blind, placebo, the works) demonstrating that smoking marijuana doesn't affect driving performance.

# But stupid driving laws are very much in fashion. Mobile phones bans, tight control of speeding offences, blah blah blah. David Farrar calls it naked revenue gathering. Lindsay Mitchell agrees, with a personal impact statement thrown in for good measure.

# And finally, a bit of light-hearted Geopolitik from The Economist. HT Inquiring Mind:

Three Green Fingers

Three totally sound pieces of Green media:

1. Paul Krugman sums up the whole climate change thing very well. HT No Right Turn.

2. James Lovelock writes with just the right amount of misanthropic humanism, saying humans are too stupid to do anything about climate change. HT Kerry on Facebook.

3. Good green advice from street-level America. HT Andrew Sullivan:

Blood from a stone

Two tales of water usage in exactly the wrong places:

Karl du Fresne looks at the explosion of dairy farms in the parched lands of Canterbury and Otago.

Yasha Levine at eXiled online looks at the 2009 opening of a Dr Pepper bottling plant on the edge of the Mojave Desert.

The mire in the gyre looks increasingly dire

If a butterfly's wings beating in the Amazon rainforest affects a tornado in Texas, you can be pretty sure that an estimated 3 million tons of plastic crap in the North Pacific will affect the future of marine life, and therefore all life. If you're not depressed enough with this, there is growing evidence of a similar trash heap in the North Atlantic. Because these catastrophic messes are in international waters beyond the shores of the litterbugs, not one thing will be done about it.

Ayn Rand and the fundy funders

One of the great victories for civil society will be when all the black boxes have been turned to glass. The black boxes of government to the people, the black boxes of corporations to the investors, and the black boxes of the NGOs who lobby the former and spin for the latter.

Take, for example, the climate change deniers. From Information is Beautiful:

I'm surprised to see so many physicists in the petition. What with the second law of thermodynamics and chaos theory and everything, anthropogenic climate change should be a no brainer. Maybe the numbers were polluted by the aerospace mob, which would be like asking a blacksmith to sign a steel subsidy petition. The maths geeks sure ain't having a bar of it.

But the large chunk of signatories are the engineers and general science mobs. Systems control freaks, in other words. New Scientist's Five Laws of Human Nature corroborates this with the Salem hypothesis, which shows a correlation between engineering students and creationism. I wonder if you could include architects in that list?

MoJo looks into who is paying this small but extraordinarily vocal climate denier audience, finding that many NGOs around the world have been polluted by the usual suspects:

Founded in 1981 and named after Ayn Rand's free-market amorality tale, Atlas Shrugged, the Atlas Foundation has spent more than $20 million seeding some 200 libertarian think tanks across the globe as part of its Atlas Network. Much of its money has come from Phillip Morris; foundations tied to the Koch family, oil magnates who are leading funders of denier groups; and the Earhart Foundation, which was created from the profits of the now-defunct White Star Oil Company. Since 1998, ExxonMobil and its foundations have given Atlas nearly $1 million. Between 2002 and 2008, the last year for which tax records are available, Atlas' budget more than tripled, nearly hitting $7 million, with the largest single portion going to grants for "think tanks in different regions of the world."

But wait! There's even a NZ connection:

In 2007, the Chicago-based Heartland Institute, which has received money from Exxon, granted $135,000 to four skeptic think tanks in Canada and New Zealand, followed by $182,000 to foreign groups in 2008, according to tax filings (it didn't say which groups received the money).

On a whim, I had a look where the money might have ran. Exxon Secrets sez that NZ's Owen McShane and Queensland's Bob Carter have shown support for the Heartland Institute. There's more on Bob at Hot Topic. Good looks at the Meridian Project Hayes windfarm before it was killed. Bob Carter had been pulled across the ditch as an expert witness against climate change.

There's also this from The Listener:

In November, three members of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition – Bryan Leyland, Owen McShane and Vincent Gray – spoke at UN climate talks in Denpasar in support of a US-based conservative group, the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT).

Oh yeah, MoJo mentions CFACT too. I bet there's a whole Jimmy Carter farm of shell games where the slick can spread.

Desmogblog has a go at it and throws up Muriel Newman's cult:

New Zealand Centre for Political Research
No funding records from ExxonMobil, Scaife, or Koch.

That explains a lot. In the market of ideas, the libertarian right have sold out. Their opinions on climate change count for naught. Anything with a whiff of Rand is hereby tainted. They've shat on their Ayn brand.

I only hope some sunlight could penetrate the funding of not only the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition and the New Zealand Centre for Political Research, but those MSM mouthpiece go-to guys Garth McVicar and Bob McCroskie. I reckon the truth is spookier than the Exclusive Brethren.

Failing upwards

MANA
MANE
MACE
FACE

George Monbiot sheets home the blame from Copenhagen:

The British and US governments have blamed the Chinese government for the failure of the talks. It's true that the Chinese worked hard to mess them up, but Obama also put Beijing in an impossible position. He demanded concessions while offering nothing. He must have known the importance of not losing face in Chinese politics: his unilateral diplomacy amounted to a demand for self-abasement. My guess is that this was a calculated manoeuvre guaranteed to produce instransigence, whereupon China could be blamed for the outcome the US wanted.

Sun sets on Copenhagen

I've been angsting over a well-written, comprehensive posting on why the Copenhagen summit was doomed from the start, and so are all of us. I was poised to drop in some nice images like a Keeling graph, or a wry summary of just how much air and water this planet has to play with.

However, New Scientist has just save me a whole lot of bother by listing Five Laws of Human Nature.

1. Parkinson's Law. eg. The US and China's pissing competition.
2. Student Syndrome. eg. Until it's a catastrophe, we don't have to do anything.
3. Pareto Principle. eg. The wealthy North will always dominate the poor masses of the South.
4. Salem hypothesis. eg. We're rich because God made us rich, therefore we're going to tell everyone else how to live.
5. Maes-Garreau Law. eg. Hey, what's the worst that can happen?

Stuff it, here's the facts:

Let's hope the octopii do a better job than the humans did. Look at this Einstein go:

Access all areas

Thom Yorke crashes the Copenhagen conference to see what is happening, since the NGOs have all been kicked out:



From Grist.

White people caused by white bread

At the other end of this year, I had a go at the figment of racism based entirely on UV exposure levels. So I'm particularly pleased to find my intuition reinforced with facts such as why white people are white:

People who live in low latitudes, where they can live off grains, get plenty of sunlight. People who live in dim sunlight cannot grow grains, and so they get vitamin D from the meat and fish that they eat.

The exception? There is only one spot on the planet where grains will grow despite sub-arctic sunlight.

It is where the warm waters of the Gulf Stream wash ashore. The Baltic is the only place on earth where ocean currents keep it warm enough to grow grain despite dim sunlight.

This is crucial news for all the fascist racist BNP supporters and other European neo-Nazis. If anything mucks up that Gulf Stream, it'll be the end of the "white race". In order to preserve their identity, they must support the Climate Change debate or face extinction. Gaia has a great taste in irony.