How they are turning off the lights in America
by Edwin X Berry, PhD
On October 31,2009, the once largest aluminum
plant in the world will shut down. With it goes another American
industry and more American jobs. The Columbia Falls Aluminum Company
in
How did this happen in
Columbia Falls Aluminum negotiated a contract
with Bonneville Power Administration in 2006 for Bonneville to
supply electrical power until September 30, 2011. But, responding to
lawsuits, the 9th US Circuit Court ruled the contract was invalid
because it was incompatible with the Northwest Power Act. Therefore,
the combination of the Northwest Power Act and a US Circuit Court
were the final villains that caused the shutdown of Columbia Falls
Aluminum.
But the real reasons are much more complicated.
Why was it not possible for Columbia Falls Aluminum to find sources
of electricity other than Bonneville?
We need to look no further than the many
environmental groups like the Sierra Club and to America's elected
officials who turned their backs on American citizens and in essence
themselves, for they too are citizens of this country. These
officials bought into the green agenda promoted by the heavily
funded environmental groups. Caving
to pressure, they passed laws and the environmental groups filed
lawsuits that began turning off the lights in
They began stopping nuclear power plants in the
1970's. They locked up much of our coal and oil resources with land
laws. They passed tax credits, which forces taxpayers to foot the bill
for billionaire investors to save taxes by investing in less
productive wind and solar energy projects.
In 1988, the Environmental Protection Agency
called a meeting of atmospheric scientists and others with
environmental interests. I remember well the meeting I attended in
the San Francisco Bay Area. The meeting was in a theater-like
lecture room with the seating curved to face the center stage and
rising rapidly toward the back of the room. Attending were many
atmospheric scientists whom I knew from Lawrence Livermore
Laboratory, Stanford Research Institute and some local colleges.
The room became silent when a man walked up to
the lectern. He told us that the next big national problem was
global warming. He explained how human carbon dioxide emissions were
trapping the earth's radiation like a greenhouse and causing the
atmosphere to heat beyond its normal temperature. He said this will
lead to environmental disasters. He finished by saying the EPA will
now concentrate its research funding toward quantifying the
disasters that would be caused by our carbon dioxide.
The room was silent. I was the first to raise my
hand to ask a question, "How can you defend your global warming
hypothesis when you have omitted the effects of clouds which affect
heat balance far more than carbon dioxide, and when your hypothesis
contradicts the paper by Lee * in the Journal of Applied Meteorology
in 1973 that shows the atmosphere does not behave like a
greenhouse?"
He answered me by saying, "You do not know what
you are talking about. I know more about how the atmosphere works
than you do."
Not being one to drop out of a fight, I
responded, "I know many of the atmospheric scientists in this room,
and many others who are not present but I do not know you. What is
your background and what makes you know so much more than me?"
He answered, "I know more than you because I am a
lawyer and I work for the EPA."
After the meeting, many of my atmospheric science
friends who worked for public agencies thanked me for what I said,
saying they would have liked to say the same thing but they feared
for their jobs.
And that, my dear readers, is my recollection of
that great day when a lawyer, acting as a scientist, working for the
federal government, announced global warming.
Fast forward to today. The federal government is spending 1000 times more money to promote the global warming charade than is available to those scientists who are arguing against it. Never before in history has it taken a massive publicity campaign to convince the public of a scientific truth. The only reason half the public thinks global warming may be true is the massive amount of money put into global warming propaganda.
The green eco-groups have their umbilical cords
in the government's tax funds. Aside from a few honest but duped
scientists living on government money, the majority of the alarms
about global warming - now called "climate change" because it's no
longer warming - come from those who have no professional training
in atmospheric science. They are the environmentalists, the
ecologists, the lawyers and the politicians. They are not the
reliable atmospheric scientists whom I know.
Nevertheless, our politicians have passed laws
stating that carbon dioxide is bad. See
In the year 2000,
And now you know the real reason the Columbia
Falls Aluminum Company had to shut down.
I used to belong to
the Sierra Club in the 1960's. It used to be a nice hiking club. In
the late 1960's the Sierra Club began turning its attention toward
stopping nuclear power. Then I quit the Sierra Club.
It continues to prosper from the many subscribers who think
they are supporting a good cause. What they are really supporting is
the destruction of
Inherent in ecology are three assumptions:
"natural" conditions are optimal, climate is fragile, and human
influences are bad. Physics makes no such assumptions. By assuming
climate is fragile, the global warming supporters have assumed their
conclusion. In fact, the climate is not fragile. It is stable. The
non-adherence to physical logic in the global warming camp is what
makes many physical scientists say that global warming is a
religion.
So we have a new age religion promoted by
environmentalists, incorporated into our laws and brainwashed into
our people that is now destroying America from the inside.
Like a vast ship,
References:
* R.
Lee: "The 'greenhouse' effect"
J. Appl. Meteor.
12,
556-557 (1973)
Gerhard
Gerlich and Ralf D. Tscheuschner:
"Falsification of the Atmospheric CO2
Greenhouse Effects
Within The Frame Of Physics," Version 4.0 (January 6, 2009)
International Journal of Modern Physics B, Vol. 23, No. 3 (2009)
275-364.
http://www.worldscinet.com/ijmpb/23/2303/S02179792092303.html
Page 37: "Lee's paper is a milestone marking the day after which every serious scientist or science educator is no longer allowed to compare the greenhouse with the atmosphere."