The numbers are from http://www.opensecrets.org, and there's another website that provides incredibly valuable stats on specific members and specific donor corporations–www.followthecoalmoney.org (Oil Change USA and Appalachian Voices). It then correlates that with how members have voted on pertinent legislation. It's interactive, and kind of fun :)

The numbers are from http://www.opensecrets.org, and there's another website that provides incredibly valuable stats on specific members and specific donor corporations–www.followthecoalmoney.org (Oil Change USA and Appalachian Voices). It then correlates that with how members have voted on pertinent legislation. It's interactive, and kind of fun :)

The numbers are from http://www.opensecrets.org, and there's another website that provides incredibly valuable stats on specific members and specific donor corporations–www.followthecoalmoney.org (Oil Change USA and Appalachian Voices). It then correlates that with how members have voted on pertinent legislation. It's interactive, and kind of fun :)

Saying that Lester Brown (and all the United Nations climatologists who agree with him) are to be ignored about the need to reduce our footprint on the planet because the world didn't totally collapse in 1990, is a strange argument.

I didn't say that. In fact, I explicitly said (and strongly believe) that we must take the problems of environmental degradation and overuse of resources very seriously. The problem with Brown, in my view, is that his breathless pronouncements of imminent collapse, which he has been making year after year for decades now, cause people not to take those problems seriously when his predictions of the demise of the species don't occur when he says they're going to. I remember using quotes from him in debate from the early 70s predicting the collapse of most of the world's ecosystem within a staggeringly short period of time. When those exaggerated claims turn out to be false, it undermines the credibility of those who are making more reasonable environmental claims. If you're going to continually claim, year after year, that we are on the brink of an immediate collapse in food supplies, for example, and year after year that collapse doesn't happen, it doesn't take long to become Chicken Little or the boy who cried wolf. He's not wrong to push us all to conserve and to adopt policies that reduce environmental degradation; he's wrong for continually exaggerating the extent and immediacy of every possible threat. That kind of alarmism IS the enemy of genuine environmentalism because it undermines the credible arguments being made by non-alarmists.

Saying that Lester Brown (and all the United Nations climatologists who agree with him) are to be ignored about the need to reduce our footprint on the planet because the world didn't totally collapse in 1990, is a strange argument.

Your distaste for emotion in the delivery of scientific facts in no way lessens the validity of those facts.

In the history of the planet, science has determined that the normal range of carbon in the atmosphere is between 180-300 parts per million. A panelist up on stage with Lester Brown announced, quite dryly in fact, it's 387, and rising every two years.

If a man cries, screams and rants factual information such as the statistic mentioned above, as you suggest Brown has “for decades,” you might find that distasteful or it might make you feel uncomfortable. The fact, no matter how delivered, remains a fact.

Alarmism is not our enemy. Pollution is. And when there's a fire, you sound the alarm. It's not emotional to do so. It's logical.