January 22, 2006
They’re Still At It…
…at least columnist Bruce Britt is, with this article at Bet.com, where he blames global warming on human activities, blames Katrina and future powerful hurricanes on his man-made global warming and then turns it into a racial issue.
If you thought Hurricane Katrina was a once-in-a-lifetime fluke, think again. Concerned environmentalists say that unless the United States gets real about the threat of global warming, African Americans and other people of color can expect a repeat of disasters like Katrina.
“When you look at the trends and put them all together, it’s undisputable that the sea levels are rising,” says Ansje Miller, director of the Environmental Justice and Climate Change Initiative (EJCC). “Warmer seas mean more intense hurricanes…. You’re going to have intense flooding like we have never seen before. Katrina is really the hurricane of the future.”
So blacks and “other people of color” can expect a repeat of disasters like Katrina. Thank G-d the rest of us have nothing to worry about — as the mainstream media established in New Orleans four months ago, severe hurricanes like Katrina blow right by us white folks because they’re somehow our creation, white folks causing the racism spawning global warming. Yeah, blame Bush and Cheney, who are, if so many left-thinking pundits are to be believed, the producers of all that is evil or disasterous in the world.
Environmentalists blame the fierce new storms on global warming – the increase in the average temperature of the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans. Scientists attribute the phenomenon to gases produced by fossil fuels like gasoline, petroleum and coal. Though critics dismiss global warming as junk science, reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have continually found a discernable human influence on world temperatures.
That’s bad news, especially for African Americans. Citing Katrina as a case-in-point, some environmentalists say global warming impacts minorities and the disadvantaged harder than other groups. If global warming gets worse, many African-American communities will be more vulnerable to breathing ailments, insect-carried diseases and heat-related illness and death. But asking Black folks to give up gas-guzzling SUV’s and other bling is a tough sell.
I’m not insensitive to the disaster that befell New Orleans, by no means — the Crescent City, where I once lived for many years, has remained close to my heart, and I contributed what I could to the Red Cross and a couple of religious organizations in the aftermath to help obtain relief for some of those poor souls who lost their homes and possessions — but I am also completely aware that as many white people, by population ratio(there were a lot more blacks living in Nawlins than whites), lost their homes as well, but this fact was played down by the left leaning media so as not to detract from the playing of the infamous “race card”.
There are a whole lot of poor white families in the Crescent City, many I have known well whose adult members are/were totally illiterate and who scraped to get by. We saw little coverage of their post Katrina plight, simply because the media, in their complicity with the rest of the left in their War On Bush, preferred to make the disaster homogeneously racial, all assignable fault somehow leading to the Bush Administration.
This entire debacle is utterly shameful — disinformation coming from the folks trusted to report the entire story, delivering all the facts, in order to attack the Bush government to preserve a political agenda.
Now we have a “journalist” at Bet.com who is essentially telling us that by not supporting the Kyoto Accords, the Bush Administration will be singularly responsible for the future hurricane deaths of black Americans, putting a racist spin on the global warming issue.
Further,
Relatively, Blacks are environmental Good Samaritans. Per capita, we emit approximately 20 percent less carbon dioxide than Whites – well below 2020 targets set by the U.S. Climate Stewardship Act. Not only do we use more energy-conserving public transportation, we spend considerably less per capita on energy-intensive material goods.
Yet Blacks are exposed to worse air pollution than Whites in every major metropolitan area. Some charge that the Bush administration has made matters worse by creating new policies, like the Clear Skies Act and the Healthy Forest Initiative, that allow utilities and industries to pollute more. President Bush enraged environmentalists when he opted out of the Kyoto protocol global warming treaty, saying it would harm the U.S. economy.
Where, we have to ask ourselves, does Mr. Britt obtain his “evidential” statistical data?
And when, we must also wonder, will black America wake up to the fact that the party they trust and the party they vote for is not only the party that keeps racism alive just to keep on enjoying the majority of their votes, but also the party from whence sprang the Ku Klux Klan?
Perhaps after another few wasted years of being lied to by the Democrats and shysters like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Louis Farrakhan, this powerful voting bloc will realize how propaganda and empty promises from the left are hindering their community more than helping it, and that this is by design — as long as the Democrats are able to maintain a wall of distrust between blacks and whites, continuing to blame everything on racism and being believed by the black community, they’ll continue to keep their votes.
Hat Tip; James Taranto.
http://hardastarboard.mu.nu/wp-trackback.php?p=327
November 25th, 2006 at 1:34 pm
First of all, I think that you need to take a step back, a few deep breaths and just relax. Mr Britt’s article isn’t suggesting that Global Warming and other environmental issues are a plot by racist white folk to somehow keep the Black Man down. He’s making several valid points, the first being that global warming, severe storms and other natural disasters are conclusively linked to the destruction and misuse of our world and its natural resources. The second is that because a large portion of minorities, especially African Americans, live and work in high density urban areas that are more industrialized (and therefore more polluted), minorities are tending toward a higher incidence of pollution based illnesses such as asthma, allergies and eczema to name just a few. (You want examples??? - check out “The New England Journal of Medicine”, “The Lancet” or practically any reputable newspaper.) The third point was that eventhough African Americans are suffering in greater numbers from the environmental causes, they are the smallest contributors to the problem. Because the federal government is run predominantly by white non-minorities, the plight of non-whites is often overlooked.. and sometimes (in the case of Katrina for example) blatently ignored.
You should recognize that the article that you are citing was written for, and appeared in BET magazine and BET online editions. It’s obvious that Mr Britt wrote the article for a specific audience.. BET’s audience, which consists mainly of African Americans. To criticize his points seems a bit short-sighted, in my opinion. What does stick out to me is that you seem upset that Mr Britt would want to educate the African American readership of BET to the travails of the planet as a whole that are directly and dramatically effecting their wellbeing and livelihood.
If anything, perhaps he limited himself when he stated:”.. African Americans and other people of color can expect a repeat of disasters like Katrina.” But the point is valid, especially considering the percentage of minorities that were negatively impacted by Katrina’s destructive power and the pathetic response of the Bush Administration to prevent, or at least prepare, and the deal with the problems that arose prior to, and then after landfall.
I’m actually a bit hopeful that now that Congress is no longer controlled by the Republicans that there will finally be some positive changes in our country’s social service policies.
Oh, and NO, I am not a Democrat, but I’m extatic that they have control of the House and Senate. It’s _About Damn Time!!!_
November 25th, 2006 at 4:59 pm
Ocean –
As my grandfather used to say, “With all that there…” there has been no solid, irrefutable scientific evidence that man has anything to do with so-called “global warming”. Pure and simple, it is conjecture supporting a political agenda.
1. To admit that they (scientists and foundations feeding on the government teat) can find no absolute proof would dry up millions of dollars’ worth of freeflowing grant money (our hard earned tax dollars being shovelled to these parasites).
2. A world that refuses to learn from its past errors continues to lean toward the ever-failing concept of socialism, and our very form of government stands in the way of a global political agenda (not for long, if you read a couple of my more recent posts). The damage Kyoto acquiescence would do to our economy would be significant — as an industrialized nation, unlike many that voted on the above agenda, we stand to lose the most, while said voting nations stand to lose nothing (or so they believe - drying up their ATM would have a negative impact on them as well).
As far as preaching to blacks about how much the “white man’s” agendas are harmful mostly to them, this is simply more leftist racial dividism, which like most modern Democrat (I say modern, because this isn’t the Democratic Party I grew up in, it has been hijacked by the far left and is no more supportive of the principles that made America the greatest political success story in history than the Soviets were — in fact, virtually all American Communist Party members have come from the ranks of liberals) offerings are totally false.
To that end, I would like to recommend a highly revealing book by Peter Schweizer titled Do As I Say (Not As I Do).
The Democrats didn’t gain the majorities in the House and Senate because of any public mandate, nor do they possess any sort of pro-active plan to improve anything. They were elected because my fellow Republicans (I became a conservative during the Carter Administration, and Reagan was my first vote ever cast for a Republican — I was 25) became complacent and failed to listen to what America wanted.
But I digress: I published the above post last January, and have since read scores of opinions all over the place on “global warming”. There is exponentially more historic evidence out there confirming that our climate changes in cycles, and that we are presently going through a warming cycle. Glaciers melt and glaciers form according to these cycles, despite the rantings of Al Gore.
In the last chapter of her book Slander, Ann Coulter referred to the global warming issue as the only agenda the left can come up with that will take the Republicans a thousand years to disprove, LOL.
On Nawlins — I lived there for many years and have a lot of friends and acquaintances there. I also know the city quite well. One conspicuous absence in mainstream media “reporting” was the destruction of homes and displacement of the tens of thousands of white families during the Katrina event. Leave it to a politically biased liberal media to turn a natural disaster, poorly managed by primarily responsible Democratic state and city governments into a racist Republican, anti-Bush kerfuffle.
If you do a little research, you’ll learn that according to actual law, the federal government is forbidden to take over disaster management until asked to do so by the governor of the state involved. Blanco delayed doing so, even after Bush offered…