Earth Day 2008. Get Over It!

By Alan Caruba

Of the many things most people do not know about Earth Day is that it is also the anniversary of the birthday of Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Soviet Union. Coincidence? I doubt it.

These days most people know little of history. We are witnessing a new generation who know little or nothing about the Soviet Union and the Cold War it waged against America and the world for the supremacy of Communism in the latter half of the last century. These are kids who don't even known when we fought our Civil War and for whom Korea and Vietnam are just names of places where there were wars, the latter of which we lost.

When we finally left Vietnam, we lost something else too. We lost the willingness to wage war the only way it can be waged, by killing as many of the enemy as possible to make them lose the will to continue. That includes destroying as much of the enemy’s homeland too. It involves overwhelming force and that involves a massive military presence. You can't do that with just volunteers.

The actual financial cost of the war in Iraq has been small compared to the size of our gross domestic product that is measured in trillions of dollars. It’s small, too, in terms of the casualties of the war. In World War Two, we lost more than 4,000 men taking a single Pacific island. Truman dropped two atom bombs on Japan because it was estimated we’d lose a million men to take the main island. He was right to do it.

Americans have grown soft. That’s one of the reasons Osama bin Laden thought he could destroy the Twin Towers, drain a trillion dollars out of our economy, and disappear into the hills of the border country between Afghanistan and Pakistan. He expected the U.S. to respond, but he also knew he had time on his side. We would grow tired of chasing Taliban around. Our allies would grow tired, too.

So we come to Earth Day 2008 and, despite the many good things to be said of America, we have let ourselves be trapped by the many lies of the Greens, incrementally allowing them to decide everything from how much water we can have in our toilet tanks to whether we can buy an incandescent light bulb. Like bin Laden, they knew they could wait us out.

They also know how pliable our politicians are. All three of the candidates for president believe global warming is happening even though a kid in Meteorology 101 can cite the data since 1998 that documents a cooling trend. It’s going to get a lot colder because we are all on the forward edge of a new Ice Age. We’re due one. Any climatologist will tell you that.

So Americans will blindly go along, not understanding why the food costs more and the cost of gasoline and other energy like natural gas keep climbing even though common sense says that if the government does not permit access to our own reserves—for all the blather about energy independence—the price will go up in ways beyond our control.

Americans will blame Big Oil whose combined ownership of worldwide oil reserves represents a scant 4% of the world’s known reserves. That’s right, ExxonMobil, Shell, Conoco Phillips, BP and the rest own very little of the world’s oil.

One of the many nations who does own oil is Russia, our former adversary in the Cold War. Now they have so many oil billions they want to buy American businesses with the surplus. There's something very wrong with that! Under Putin, they have returned to a dictatorship. The Russians seem to prefer that.

Americans will blame our farmers—the 2% of the population that feeds the rest of us and whose exports represent a significant part of economy—but why blame people who the government literally pays to not plant crops? Why blame people whose own costs of planting, fertilizing, harvesting, and transporting their crops to the market cost more thanks to a crazed government mandate to turn 40% to 60% of the corn crop into moonshine and then requires oil refineries to add that moonshine to every gallon of gasoline you buy? And then taxes us for every gallon of that inefficient blend!

Earth Day. What an absolutely idiotic notion.

Anyone who has ever traveled around the planet will tell you that it’s filled with forests, jungles, deserts, mountains,and mostly oceans. We have pretty much used every bit of arable land we can to feed the population. Only the Green Revolution of genetically modified seeds has made it possible to get greater yields per acre of farmland. Otherwise people would have died off in the millions in recent times.

They are likely to do so now if this artificial food shortage created by an idiotic “biofuels” program isn’t junked as fast as possible.

The Greens will just have to be content with killing millions of Africans by denying them DDT to protect against malaria or millions more around the world from dengue fever. Add to that the third of the world’s food supplies that are lost every year to insect and rodent predation because the Greens cannot ban pesticides fast enough.

Then there's that problem of refrigeration to preserve foodstuffs since the Greens got Freon, the cheapest and best refrigerant every invented, banned.

Earth Day makes me want to puke.

Everyone who runs around complaining about plastic supermarket bags makes me want to puke.

Everyone who thinks we should all crowd onto trains and buses and not drive when we want and where we want makes me want to puke.

Everyone who cries about endangered species when 95% of all the species that ever existed on Earth are extinct make me want to puke.

People who don’t care that a billion people on Earth live on about $1 a day or that a billion people do not have electricity make me want to puke.

People that won’t let Americans build more coal-fired or nuclear plants to generate the electricity we need make me want to puke.

A government that throws billions at studies of climate change makes me want to puke.

The climate is changing. The climate has always changed. The climate will continue to change. Get over it!