Malthusians still live! Who lets them keep scaring people?

Well, here it is, Halloween, and I can't think of a better way to remember the day than to relate a scary experience I had last Wednesday.

There is a very congenial group of business people and interested others who meet once a month at the University Club in Portland, usually on the third Wednesday at noon, to discuss economic issues affecting Portland, Oregon, and the Northwest. It's called the Economic Round Table, and the luncheon meetings are attended by both liberals and conservatives, working and retired, activists and observers. Even when there are disputes, it is a pleasant affair. Lunch is $17, prepared by the attentive and competent staff of the club. Email Guy Snyder if you would like to join the group sometime.

Well, last Wednesday (the schedule was off by a week last month), the guest speaker for the ERT luncheon was Andrea Durbin, of the Oregon Environmental Council. Her mission: to convince the ERT that going green, particularly "sustainable" green, is good for business. Never mind that she ignored the other side of the story for a moment. Let's just talk about sustainable, and what she uses as the science to justify her plea. Can you guess? I'm sure you can. Yup. The carbon footprint. It's that Global Warming Ghost, scaring all the little boys and girls with nothing more than a balloon under an old sheet, hung on a string and shaken by people with no science and a lot of desire to control economic power they don't own.

Never mind that the Antarctic set a sea ice extent record this year, some 16.3 million square miles -- John Christy actually managed to get it said on CNN -- while the media only focused on the Arctic melt. Never mind that every single ice core study confirms -- and not even the Global Warming Ghost-shakers dispute this -- that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere follows temperature, not the other way around. Never mind that the earth has seen carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere 4 to 10 times as high as we now have, during a full-blown ice age, and that the earth is a about 15 degrees (F) cooler than it usually is, if you look at the paleohistory of the planet. Never mind that man's contribution to atmospheric carbon dioxide is so tiny that it is virtually impossible to do anything but make wild assertions. Never mind that if the models were right we would see temperatures rising faster in the mid-troposphere, and we aren't. Never mind that water vapor is a stronger infra-red absorbing gas, and that there is 50 times more water vapor, on average, than carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

In other words, never mind about all the counter evidence, boys and girls. Andrea would just like you to be scared enough to pretend that following the Oregon Environmental Council's ideas of how to live and operate a business in Oregon is the only responsible, adult way to live and operate a business in Oregon.

Like supporting alternative power production, replacing base load with non-constant wind and solar power. Can you say California blackouts? I'm sure you can imagine it, if you understand that the lowest power rates are achieved with long-term contracts for base-load demand, filling the peak loads with more flexible, and higher cost, generation capacity. Adding wind and solar generation capacity sounds all warm and fuzzy, but the problem is first that they are more expensive, and second, they don't always provide the power when people are using power. So, the utilities end up buying less base-load power, so that those wind and solar generators can be used when they are working. And that makes the costs rise even more. It was nice to have a retired power company economist at the lunch to at least raise that objection.

So there she sat, after reciting a litany of all the wonders of green business, and how important it was to be sustainable, and I accused her of using a tired old Malthusian argument, promising doom if we don't toe the line, noting that while it was perfectly wonderful to stop dumping sewage in the river, claiming we were going to run out of resources or over-carbon the atmosphere was just as wrong now as it was when Malthus, Ehrlich, and the Club of Rome prophesied their own doomsdays.

And the scariest part of the story? Hardly another critical word about her agenda, based as it is on bad science and lots of emotion, from the others in the room. One attendee even asked if we couldn't just get past the argument about whether Global Warming was man-caused or not, and just start solving it. Isn't that simply an amazing statement?

Andrea is very personable, and seems like a nice person. Even made a point to come over and shake my hand when the luncheon was over, a gesture not as common as it should be between adversaries. But there, then, saying what she did, with not a hint that she gave any credence to the possibility that this scare, like the others that have preceded it, was just as wrong... well, that's just scary. But I'm not whining. I'll just keep telling people the other side of the story, louder and louder.

What? Like a cop shouldn't hide child rape?

Out here in Oregon the Blue Goo just keeps getting deeper. Multnomah County Sheriff Bernie Giusto has finally admitted that he knew, at least as far back as 1989, about Neil Goldschmidt's repeated rape of a 14-year-old girl -- why, that's just an "affair", right? -- while he was mayor of Portland. The girl was messed up for life, but the Blue Crew just kept it all quiet. And their buddy Neil just kept on running political plays in Oregon and Washington, DC, until the rape finally became public a while back.

One can only hope that the Goo will finally stick to the shoes of all the criminals in this tragedy. I can't even begin to count all the unindicted crimes in Goldschmidt's past, not to mention the conspiracy to cover it all up, because there is simply no way Goldschmidt didn't have help keeping the lid on. Pity some of those Blue-nosers didn't help him keep his PANTS on, instead.

Now Giusto has had to admit getting some of that Blue Goo on his shoes. Is it too much to suggest that there might be some on Governor Kulongoski's shoes, too? And how about President Carter, who hired Neil as Secretary of Transportation? Anybody going to suggest that an investigation for a high-level administration security clearance wouldn't have spotted such a vulnerability? Well, it's a big pile of goo. Plenty to go around, and it sure stinks.

That child-rape/conspiracy goo is pretty tough to scrub off, even if you are part of the everything-consensual-is-OK party. But I'm not whining. I'm just not going to forget it, either.