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RUSH: We’ll go to Scott in Monterey, California, one of the absolute most beautiful spots in the world, and maybe the most beautiful to play golf. Yes, Scott, welcome to the program.
CALLER: Great honor to speak with you, Rush.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: I need help convincing my new bride — very beautiful and very intelligent — need help convincing her, persuading her that volcanoes are spewing more contaminants into the air than cars or anything else man made. She’s listening at home, by the way. Can I say hi?
RUSH: Yeah, you better, after this.
CALLER: I love you Amy. Now, pay attention.
RUSH: (Laughing) How long you been married out there, Scott?
CALLER: I’m a newlywed. I got married New Year’s Eve.
RUSH: New Year’s Eve, ah, well, good, good, good. Tell me, how long were you engaged before you got married?
CALLER: Oh, roughly about six months.
RUSH: Six months. So when you were down to the last 75 or 60 days, planning the wedding, did you say to yourself, “Ah, can we just get this wedding over with? I hate sending out the cards. I hate sending out these invitations.” Did you go through any of that, frustration, just get it over with?
CALLER: Actually she was on the same page as me, as not wanting any of that stuff. We went up to Yosemite. It was just me, her, and a judge.


RUSH: Well, good. So nothing’s really changed then since you got married from the recent days prior to your wedding?
CALLER: No, not much, just love her more every day.
RUSH: Great. Playing your cards right here.
CALLER: Yep.
RUSH: Now, let me ask you this. How long have you known that she disagrees with you on a fundamental issue here like on the environment?
CALLER: From day one, shortly after dating we realized that we were on opposite ends of the political spectrum. I’m far to the right. She’s far to the left.
RUSH: Well, obviously then those core values do not cause confrontations to occur, otherwise you wouldn’t have lasted long enough an engagement to get married?
CALLER: No.
RUSH: Okay. I just like to take these survey question opportunities.
CALLER: She’s great. We agree to disagree all the time, and it doesn’t affect anything else.
RUSH: I hope it lasts. Now, the question about the volcanoes and so forth, where can you go to establish this? I am an authority on this. I have reported this. Amy, if I say it, it’s true. You have to learn to accept this. I’ll give you one volcano, for example, Mt. Pinatubo. Mt. Pinatubo — this was in the early nineties — erupted and spewed pollutants and ash and all the stuff that comes from a volcano, and it spread around the world, and the amount that came out was far in excess of all the so-called automobile pollution since the invention of the machine, but the larger issue here, Scott, is not specifics like that because some people are going to remain closed to the truth on things like this.
I was talking to a liberal the other day which I do frequently and this liberal said, “Well, you know, you always sound happy and optimistic. How can that be?”
I said, “It’s because the way I am, and you can’t be that way because as a liberal you just can’t do it. You can’t go through the day without feeling miserable. It’s required. You see nothing but environmental destruction. You see suffering. You see hunger. You see thirst. You see inequality. You see social injustice. You see all these things, and you think that there’s a lack of equality spread across the world, culturally, societally, economically, and so forth, and so you’re not able to be happy about things. So you have a world view, and the world view is that life is unfair and that there are some people in charge of making it unfair and those are the people who are happy and those are the people who are wealthy and those are the people that have succeeded in life.”
So the world view can’t be tampered with because then the whole equation that equals liberalism would fall apart. So this volcano business is really nothing other than — I don’t want to speak specific because I have not talked to Amy, but liberals who don’t believe facts like the power of the environment. We can’t control it. We didn’t cause global warming, so we can’t stop it. You know, the earth warms itself. We know this. There were ice ages before there were automobiles, and yet we’re alive today and not living in a glacier. Common sense here does not enter into the equation because the world view will be tampered with, and then crisis will set in, and once the world view — once this little cocoon that people have built to surround themselves by has chinks in it — then they rather not deal with that.


The illusion that they have created to describe the world and all that they see it as gives them a sense of security, makes them think that they’re better than other people because they notice these things and they have more compassion. But the answer to this is not just the specifics of a volcano, but is to ask her to seriously sit down and think about it. You went to Yosemite. How in the world anybody can go into Yosemite or any other part of nature and think that we have anything to do with it, other than properly maintaining it and stewardship and so forth, but in terms of the complexity of it all, is beyond our ability to comprehend. The power in a thunderstorm we cannot create. Maybe with a nuclear detonation we could, but the power, just the amount of electricity in a single bolt of lightning is so complex that we can’t recreate it, and we cannot comprehend it.
We think that we can change the direction of hurricanes. We have people that tell us that George Bush purposely steered the hurricane — and they believe this! There are people that actually believe this kind of thing. We can’t predict the weather five days from now but we’re convinced 50 years from now the sea level is going to rise because the glaciers are going to melt. That may happen, but it’s not because we’re doing anything to cause it. It happened long before we were here, certainly as an industrialized species. The evidence here that the power of creation and the power of nature so exceeds our meager abilities to tame it, we can’t tame it, we try, and we make fools of ourselves. The best we can do is understand it and protect ourselves, if we’re going to take risks in living certain places where certain environmental things happen.
You know, hurricanes are quite natural, and they’ve happened as long as there’s been a planet, and they always will, and there have been bad ones and there have been really bad ones, and there’s some that aren’t so bad. But they’re as natural as anything else. What’s unnatural is people building homes right in the path, which we do — and then when a big hurricane comes in and destroys everything, we think the earth is changing. It’s not the earth changing. It’s our inability to understand that we don’t have any control over it. It’s an academic argument. You could go find it if you just Google Mt. Pinatubo. Google volcanoes. You’ll find it. You’ll be able to find a story. It may even be in my Essential Stack of Stuff on my website.
It’s not arguable. The problem is that a person will have trouble believing it because, “Well, it can’t be ‘pollution’ because it’s a volcano. It’s nature! Pollution is manmade: automobile exhaust and that sort of thing.” No. What comes out of a volcano is ash, lava, dirt, all kinds of boiling mass and gunk, and when there is an eruption, there’s this giant cloud over the volcano where it happens, and the wind comes along and takes it over other parts of the country, and people say, “Oh, my! What did we do to cause the volcano?” When you go to the Grand Canyon, or when you go to the mountains of Arizona, and you have somebody explain to you how they happened, how they were formed, and somebody tells you, “Way back when, this was all under water, and the different layers in the side of the rock is how we know. You’re looking at peaks of 8,000 feet that were once under water.”
Now, what did humanity do back then to cause those floods and then what did humanity do to cause those mountains to suddenly rise up out of the water, or the water to evaporate, what happened? Nothing. The earth is a complex organism, it is brilliantly conceived, it flawlessly executes its assigned duties by God each and every day. We live with the vanity. We human beings are amazing. On one hand we think that we are inconsequential, we’re no different than rats and dogs, cats, and so forth, and on the other hand, we have the ability to destroy this. Even if we nuked the planet, the planet would survive, and the cockroaches would survive. Life would go on. Maybe not human life, but life would go on.


We can destroy our world. We can destroy ourselves. We can destroy our civilization. But the idea that human beings, using the gifts on this planet created by God, can destroy it? By enhancing ours lives, increasing our life expectancy, increasing our prosperity and our economic opportunity, making ourselves smarter, making ourselves healthier, living longer, those are the things that the environmentalist wackos say are destroying the planet. It is absurd. The most technologically and free societies are the ones that do the best job of cleaning up the mess that they make and helping to prevent as much pollution and trash and garbage. The whole argument of environmental destruction is so much more important than whether somebody believes that Mt. Pinatubo put out more pollution than all the other automobiles in history, because that’s not even arguable.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Scott in Monterey and the lovely and gracious Amy, I know you’re still listening out there because you’re not arguing because you’re not together, the argument will come later, but I Googled Mt. Pinatubo — exactly what I told you to do. I Googled it — and I just want to read you some facts about the 1990 — and there is a picture, and, Amy, if you just Google Mt. Pinatubo, and go to the link, “Pinatubo Volcano: The Sleeping Giant Awakens,” you will see the cloud that I’m talking about. The picture might help put things in perspective, but here are some facts.
“In June 1991, after more than four centuries of slumber, Pinatubo Volcano on Luzon in the Philippines erupted so violently that more than 5 billion cubic meters of ash and pyroclastic debris were ejected from its fiery bowels producing eruption columns 18 kilometers wide at the base reaching heights up to 30 kilometers above the volcano’s vent. In its wake 847 people lay dead, 184 injured, 23 missing, and more than 1 million people displaced. Hundreds of millions of dollars in private properties and infrastructure lay in ruins that would require tens of billions of pesos and several years to rebuild. For months, the ejected volcanic materials remained suspended in the atmosphere where the winds dispersed them to envelope the earth, reaching as far as Russia and North America.
“This phenomenon caused the world’s temperature to fall by an average of 1 degree Celsius.” Clearly Pinatubo’s eruption signals the world’s most violent and destructive volcanic event of the twentieth century. One volcano, Amy, reduced the temperature of the world one degree Celsius for that year. The global warming people say it’ll take 50 years for us living our lives the way we do to maybe raise the temperature a half a degree. Here’s earth with a bunch of absolute junk being piled into the air, restricting sunlight, cooling the temperature one degree Celsius, a volcanic eruption. No matter what we do, Amy, we don’t know how to cause this short of a nuclear bomb. But going about our lives as we normally live our lives, we don’t do this. We can’t do this.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: All right, I just went to my own Essential Stack of Stuff at RushLimbaugh.com, and, lo and behold, we have the information I just shared with you on Mt. Pinatubo there, but I also discovered something else from December 2004. Scott and Amy in Monterey, I know you’re still there. Listen to this. Amy, this is for you. “The state of Washington has made it official. ‘[T]he biggest single source of air pollution in Washington isn’t a power plant, pulp mill or anything else created by man. It’s a volcano. Since Mount St. Helens started erupting in early October, it has been pumping out between 50 and 250 tons a day of sulfur dioxide, the lung-stinging gas that causes acid rain and contributes to haze. ‘Those emissions are so high that if the volcano was a new factory, it probably couldn’t get a permit to operate,’ said Clint Bowman, an atmospheric physicist for the Washington Department of Ecology. All of the state’s industries combined produce about 120 tons a day of the noxious gas. Mount St. Helens? More than twice that.” I mean, these are just little feeler eruptions. This is nothing. This is not even the big one. This thing is just burping.
END TRANSCRIPT

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