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Posts Tagged ‘Monster Storms’

Do you drive a "death engine"?

January 29th, 2010 4 comments

<<this question refers to a fairly old article, but it came to my attention as the author of the article has recently bought out a really silly new book: "The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness In a World In Crisis", so i Googled him and this article came up >>

Jeremy Rifkin, a lecturer at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, accuses Americans in particular and westerners in general, of driving "death engines" that were responsible for Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. In a guest article for a newspaper, he wrote [QUOTE]

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""Katrina and Rita, then, are not just bad luck, nature’s occasional surprises thrust on unsuspecting humanity. Make no mistake about it. We Americans created these monster storms. We’ve known about the potentially devastating impact of global warming for nearly a generation. Yet we turned up the throttle, as if to say: "We just don’t give a damn." What did anyone expect? SUVs make up 52% of all the vehicles owned in America, each a death engine, spewing record amounts of CO2 into the earth’s atmosphere.

Shame on the United States of America and the peoples of other countries – we’re not alone – who have put their personal, short-term whims, desires and gratifications ahead of the welfare of the rest of the planet.""
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So, do you drive a "death-engine" and do you support the author’s business venture with Greenpeace and others to push forward proposals for hydrogen power?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2005/sep/23/usnews.hurricanes20051
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EDIT – @ Littlerobbergirl:

All due respect, it says "death engine" in the article and even in the little bit of it that i quoted, so i don’t know how you missed it. Try reading it again (especially this sentence: "SUVs make up 52% of all the vehicles owned in America, each a death engine, spewing record amounts of CO2 into the earth’s atmosphere.) 😉

I am a hypocrite who drives a death engine (Hyundai Santa Fe) AND believes that AGW is happening. I’m such a hypocrite that I took 3 cross-country road trips with my dogs in 3 consecutive summers. It was fun. I’d do it again if I still could afford it and my dogs were still alive. Having dogs is also environmentally irresponsible. But we have lives to live, so I’m not going to give up everything I enjoy just because I’m contributing 0.00000000001% of the world’s pollution.