Tuesday, June 07, 2011

Kill a Camel for Al

Dave has sometimes expressed the lengths he goes to to offset my profligate carbon ways. Here though is something spectacular. Killing camels to get credits so you can do something else more important than camel farts. Now as far as I can tell camels in Australia, like horses and burros in the American West are non-native invasive species. I have zero problem with hunting them for useful purposes like meat and skins. But the global warmers of my experience are not much into such projects.

In point of fact if you slaughtered all million camels in the outback, China would build enough coal plants to counter that in about a week. The entire premise that you can, by electing the right people, and installing the right macropolicies keep the world at the optimal temperature (which you of course know) is the end of limited government and an act of hubris beyond imagining. Today it is the camels who suffer. Tomorrow it may be those purveyors of flatulence-the cabbage sellers.

Update: Hi, Dave S. here. The original link JJV provided was blocked to unregistered users of the site (which will remain unnamed, although I understand Breitbart is working some leads. It would be irresponsible not to speculate) so I replaced it with what I presume to be a similar piece, all without noting that I would really prefer that links appear in the text of the post and not under the title. While I'm here let me offer a few thoughts:
  • Wow, that's a lot of camels.
  • PETA finds itself in the position of defending non-native wildlife against a primarily aboriginal population. I'll bet that was a tedious debate.
  • Are those advocating barrier controls prepared to build a much more robust version of this? Per the Wikipedia article, will the fence be patrolled by carts pulled by rabbits?
  • Perhaps it's not such a similar article. There is absolutely no mention of reducing methane emissions as a stated goal of the camel cull in the Guardian piece I linked. But hey, Al Gore is fat!
  • I was hoping we would go after Canada next, but it looks like Ukraine's number has been called.
Thank you, good night and God bless the United States of America.

Update 6/8/11: Dave S. again. OK, as painful as this is, I owe JJV an apology. A very similar article to the original may be found here. Not only was he correct in his comments on the original post (concerning carbon credits for camel culling), but JWT sent me that last link as I was discussing the very post with JJV. As a final humiliation, the article I found is from 2009 so is really not germane to the discussion at hand. Sorry about that. The lesson to be learned is to always check your links before posting, and to not barge into other people's blog posts.

3 comments:

JWT said...

"To Serve Camel"

Reuters Africa reports that there actually is a methane credit angle to this story. Australia is using that approach to entice investors in its camel culling enterprise. Now that this clever stealth taxing scheme is out there, I wonder how long I'll have to wait for similar measures to come to my county.

Dave S. said...

Yep, noted that in my update - thanks for passing that along. I was unaware of the feral camel problem in Montgomery County but will avoid the ICC as a precaution. I can't imagine that the carbon offset for a squirrel would make it economically attractive.

JWT said...

I was thinking more of the camel's nose under the tent.