Earth Day, things to do for

• Get birthday card for Lenin
• Call member of Congress through the Capitol switchboard on Earth Day and ask them to oppose the Markey Waxman climate bill, or American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (ACES). (No point, but might as well.)
  
• Submit comment to EPA on the Proposed Endangerment and Cause or Contribute Findings for Greenhouse Gases under the Clean Air Act, which would allow the EPA to regulate CO2 as a pollutant. (A smidgen of hope for this one, but only a smidgen. It's a huge power grab, and will be irresistible.)
• Go to park after rally, pick up litter.
  

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Iain Murray has a bunch of Earth Day links over at The Corner: link to Myron Ebell's testimony on ACES; comment on CrunchyCon sneering; link to John Tierney contra the Ehrlichites, Use Energy, Get Rich and Save the Planet; link to comedian Lewis Black's take on TV companies marketing Earth Day to kids. (Near the end of the Lewis Black video there is a Sesame Street clip with a rock band of kids singing "Turn it off!" about water and lights and TV; of course they are using electric instruments and microphones, and are on a TV show themselves. Environmentalists don't appreciate irony.)

The TierneyLab blog followup to the Tierney piece above has a rich turnout of Malthusians and Ehrlichites in the comments. They all seem to be well-fed computer users. If their reasoning were correct, the whole world should have starved to death by now. Is comment #100 the prize-winner?

The U. S. is not finally turning green because it’s richer, but because leadership finally believes that the future matters.

Cuba is among the greenest countries on earth, according to a study by the Global Footprint Network. It is not wealthy in the monetary terms that Mr. Tierney measures, although it does have high levels of human development indicators such as health, science, education, arts, and culture. It also has a low ecological footprint (or level of ecological damage), according to the study.

It also has leadership focused on measures other than private profit.

There's your example to follow, kids! If we can only get the right leadership, we can be just like Cuba! Political prisons and all. Comment #135 for the runner-up:

How about measuring some more pertinent variables, like the amount of un-built land, old-growth forest, grassland… even the number of tropical beaches that don’t have hotels and hordes of drunken tourists. ["…" is in the original]

If somehow all those other people, you know, the annoying ones who just don't care about Gaia, would just disappear, wouldn't everything be wonderful! We could have those tropical beaches all to ourselves. And we don't sleep in hotels, no, we sleep right on the beach, and bury our poop in the sand.

I'll close up this Earth Day post by noting that President Obama chose to honor conservation and all that by taking Air Force One to go to Newton, Iowa, for a few hours, to make a campaign stop deliver a speech. (Thanks to Glenn Reynolds, who also has this: CNN's Marciano to Obama: 'Let's Park the Jumbo Jet' for Earth Day, and links on the amount of fuel consumed.)

Here earlier: Planning a newer New Deal and a new Depression to go with it, and Energy, among others.