The Relentless Greening of America

By Alan Caruba

The late comedian, George Carlin, did a riff on environmentalists in which he castigated them and everyone else who thinks humans should or can “save the planet.” He reminded the audience that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old, that 95% of all the species that ever lived are extinct, and that the Industrial Revolution is barely two hundred years old. The notion that, somehow, humans are destroying planet Earth is absurd.

The planet is just fine and totally indifferent to anything humans do. Humans over the past 200,000 years have learned how to build shelters and raise food. With regularity, the Earth reminds them who’s really in charge by providing them with earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic irruptions, floods, fires, hurricanes, tornadoes, and blizzards.

Anyone who has spent any time experiencing nature knows it can be inspiring, but also too wet, too cold, too warm, and comes with a full supply of bugs and other creatures that think you’re dinner.

If people only experience nature from films and television, they have a scant notion of the reality. When you add in a total lack of knowledge or understanding of the weather, the climate, the atmosphere, how the Sun functions, the role of the Moon, and a thousand other things that constitute our environment, the fact that they can be led to believe lies about the environment should come as no surprise.

Like the proverbial fish in water, most people are utterly clueless about how anything works. It makes them vulnerable.

Then, when you add in a fulltime, non-stop, massive and multifaceted propaganda campaign, the odds that people will believe that the Earth is running out of oil or that coal is “dirty” or that it’s wrong to raise livestock to feed people or wrong to eradicate the many insects or weed species that attack wheat, rice, apples, cotton and every other crop on which we depend. Fully 80 percent of infectious diseases that kill off humans are transmitted by insect and rodent species.

All this leads me to take note of “Hollywood Goes Green”, a summit meeting to be held December 8-9, that has the lofty goal of “Helping Hollywood increase profits and lower costs in today’s volatile economy through sustainable innovation and corporate responsibility.” Other than the reference to increasing profits and a volatile economy, this is gobbledygook and gibberish. The only responsibility a corporation has is to make a profit, pay its workers a fair wage, its investors a dividend, and produce products and services of value. Saving the planet is not a priority, but not despoiling it is.

The Hollywood summit conference brings together many elements of the communications and entertainment industries. Keynote speakers will include people from the Fox Broadcasting Company, General Motors, HP, and the Walt Disney Studios. Other speakers and panelists will represent more than 40 enterprises that include News Corp, Discovery Channel, MTV Networks, the Southern California Edison Company, and Twentieth Century Television, to name just a few.

This great group hug is sponsored by iHollywood Forum, an entity that exists to put these confabs together so dedicated Green advocates can rub shoulders with technology executives and others. It is a mix of proselytizing and the opportunity for corporate folks to demonstrate how Green they really are.

Little wonder there is virtually no evidence of “the other side of the story” when Americans wonder why, if global warming is real, the Earth is actually in a decade-old cooling cycle that is going to get colder and last easily to 2050 or beyond. When you’re being force-fed Green lies by representatives of Hollywood, the news media, and major manufacturers, it is just so hard to know what is true.

What is true is that General Motors is on its last legs unless it declares bankruptcy and restructures itself. If not, it will take a big chunk of the staggering U.S. economy down the toilet with it. What is true is that the Southern California Edison Company had better build some more power plants or its customers are going to soon experience brown-outs and black-outs on a regular basis. And I am not talking about solar panels and wind turbines. I am talking about coal and nuclear.

What is true, too, is that Americans looking for a bit of entertainment from the film and television industry will continue to find all manner of Green messages intended to introduce and reinforce both old and new lies. The news industry has long since abrogated any allegiance to the truth.