A tent of Hollywood hot air

NATURAL gas is the most benign of all the fossil fuels. A big statement, true, but it appears to be unchallengeable.
A slew of Hollywood stars however, are opposed to building this pollution-reduction facility if cutting greenhouse gases has to begin in their back yard.
Former US vice-president Al Gore was in Australia a fortnight ago, lecturing us about global warming and insisting that we had to sacrifice Australian jobs for the sake of the politically correct Kyoto protocol.
Check the ABC website: Gore was on every talk show and news show (even Kerry O'Brien shut up and let him talk uninterrupted), warning about rising sea-levels and cataclysmic storms unless we did something now.
Well, we are doing something. We are offering the world the opportunity to scale back on coal-fired power stations and the chance to reduce greenhouse omissions - yet the very people who insist we should do something want to do nothing.
Natural gas is way cleaner than coal or oil, which make up 60 per cent of US energy consumption. It's central to California's strategy to reduce harmful emissions and improve air quality, but the stars don't want it if it means their real estate values may be affected.
Former James Bond star Pierce Brosnan is heading the push, but Danny DeVito, Rhea Perlman, Sting, Dick Van Dyke, Jane Seymour, Dylan McDermott, Martin Sheen, James Brolin, Kenny G, Ted Danson, Mary Steenburgen, Cindy Crawford, Daryl Hannah and Ed Harris are among the gasbags riding along.
Most of these has-beens would turn up for the opening of an envelope if it got their name intothe news, but now they're fighting against the environment - our environment - to keep their environment pristine.
This is Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY) action at a grand level.
How often have we seen a Hollywood star - who rides in a private jet that dumps megatonnes of pollution as it flies from one hypocritical environmental promotion to another - feigning concern for the fate of the planet?
About as many times as we've seen Greenpeace representatives fly to Australia to tell us what we should be doing, or heard Greens MP Bob Brown and his little band of exotics lambast us for wasting energy when he steps off a kerosene-guzzling jet.
Liquefied natural gas (LNG) is the most reliable, least polluting fuel this side of nuclear energy, but you can imagine how the Malibu Mafia would react if they were told they had to live next door to a safe nuclear site.
Let's look at LNG again. It produces lower amounts of greenhouse cases and pollutants than other fossil fuels. It's not a big contributor to acid rain.
It's not much of a factor in smog formation, either, but the stars don't want it. Not in their neighbourhood, anyway.
Further, if the US - which produces very little LNG and doesn't use much in its fuel mix - began increasing its consumption, the world energy price would begin to stabilise.
But, hey, does Tom Hanks give a damn? Apparently not - not if he has to take that first step Al Gore wants us to take.
Last year, a group of Californian legislators and energy administration officials visited Australia and enthusiastically embraced the import of our LNG.The downside was minimal,despite the long seavoyage involved.
But California was strong on talking the environmental talk until it came to walking the environmental walk.
It said any fuel landed on the US east coast would be sucked up by the midwest states en route; it said it was impractical, for security reasons, to build a terminal in Mexico or Canada; and it predicted that environmentalists would fight to prevent such a terminal beingbuilt at sea, which is the current option.
The best solution, it said, would be to unload LNG from a space transporter hovering 20km over the California desert. Californians would be able to dealwith that.
Interestingly, California filed a suit against six car manufacturers last Wednesday, alleging that greenhouse gases from their vehicles have cost the state millions of dollars.
Attention-seeking Californian Attorney-General Bill Lockyer wants to hold car-makers liable for the damage caused by their vehicles' emissions, but he should be suing the Malibu Mafia for blocking efforts to reduce California's pollution problem.
With the exception of Ronald Reagan, almost every Hollywood star has been dead wrong on every serious political question, from the closet communists of the Cold War to Hanoi Jane Fonda's appearances with a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft battery. The present battle shows nothing has changed.
Al Gore could have saved a lot of hot air and greenhouse emissions if he had stayed home and lectured his pals on the Left Coast of the US.
If he's as serious about global warming as he claims, he'll take his tent show down to Malibu pier and picket the local crowd.
Mel Gibson knows how to get some press in Malibu; maybe he could help.