THE US REPORT

Indigenous children in a rainforest. (For link and credit see 'references' beneath story.)Colombia’s vice-president Francisco Santos told the Associated Press people should realize if they use cocaine, they’re destroying the rain forests. The AP cited some astounding statistics in that story: The Colombian government says four sq. meters (4.8 sq. yards) of rain forest have to be cleared to produce a gram of cocaine—and 2.2 million hectares (5.44 million acres) of Colombian tropical forest have been cut down to grow coca in the last twenty years.

Not only does cocaine destroy a resource that benefits the whole planet, it’s a drug that can be deadly. In her book, ‘How Not to Die,’ Dr. Jan Garavaglia says cocaine is the most commonly abused illicit drug she encounters in the morgue.

When I hear global warming alarmists like Al Gore talk about carbon credits and offsets, it’s all I can do to listen. Anyone who has worked in a close relationship with nature or wildlife learns quickly the greatest threat to the planet is loss of habitat. Anyone who reads extensively about global warming—now that’s been disproved, they’re calling it ‘climate change’—knows there is not a way to truly offset carbon and carbon isn’t the problem Gorians claim it is. More than 31,000 scientists agree on that and Gore refuses to debate any of them. Lawrence Solomon’s book ‘The Deniers’ is the most scholarly work on theories about the effects of manmade emissions and the manner in which politics have hijacked common sense. On Monday, Drudge carried a link to an article run in The Telegraph (England)—NASA admitted a big mistake in their warming theory calculations.

The Telegraph reported: The error was so glaring that when it was reported on the two blogs - run by the US meteorologist Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre, the Canadian computer analyst who won fame for his expert debunking of the notorious "hockey stick" graph - GISS began hastily revising its figures. This information was largely ignored by U.S. media as our President-Elect declared climate change an issue of paramount importance. Obama’s opponent, Sen. John McCain fell for the theory too—after all, the climate change crisis sounded good on the stump.

You won’t find many Americans who disagree about our need for alternative energy, myself among them. But that need is economic—it’s in our financial self-interest. Science by consensus as Gore and Obama endorse is an old political trick. Of course, Gore invests in alternative energy so it benefits him for climate change to be up front and center. Meanwhile Gore built his mansion in an ecologically sensitive mountain area and elitists in California clearcut with abandon and build homes in areas that are not conducive to tinsel abodes. Isn’t it hypocritical that so many Hollywood glitterati wring their hands over climate change, yet in many hip movie scenes and among many hip types, cocaine is the drug of choice? Remember Kate Moss doing those lines?

Remember something else as well. In 1974 now left-leaning Time Magazine ran a story under the header, “Another Ice Age?” Time said: [a] growing number of scientists are beginning to suspect that many seemingly contradictory meteorological fluctuations are actually part of a global climatic upheaval. However widely the weather varies from place to place and time to time, when meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing. Whoops. Houston, we have a reversal.

The World Rainforest Movement says on its website about a session of the Conference of Parties on Climate Change : The closing session confirmed the scant will of governments and parties in seeking real solutions to the climate crisis. However what did stand out was interest in promoting the use of strategies invented to solve the climate problem based on market mechanisms. Among these, the group of tree plantation projects as greenhouse gas sinks were the most notorious.

To read the full articles cited here, follow the links under 'References' below.

Next time you see an actor doing little white lines in a movie or next time you’re at a party and see some wanna-feel-good type do a few lines in the bathroom, speak up. Because that person just inhaled the rain forest and no carbon offset can remedy those 4.8 square yards it takes to produce a single gram of cocaine.