Monday, October 18, 2010

The Slow Death of the Environmental Movement


By Alan Caruba

“Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental.”—Dave Forman, Founder of Earth First!

“If I were reincarnated, I would wish to be returned to Earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels”. —Prince Phillip, World Wildlife Fund

If you want to understand how utterly soulless and nihilistic environmentalism is than you need only pay attention to what they say. (Click here for more such quotes)

My friend, Joseph A. Olson, PE, recently wrote of “Climate Science’s Worst Week in History” in which he noted a series of events such as the UK’s Royal Society’s step back from its former support of global warming.

This was followed by a Washington Post opinion editorial by one of its perpetrators, Michael Mann of Penn State University, pleading for a Democrat victory in the midterm elections so he could avoid being investigated by Congress.

That same week Dr. Hal Lewis, a renowned physicist, resigned from the American Physical Society, rebuking it for having been subverted to serve the global warming hoax.

Having observed the movement for decades, I think we are seeing a growing awareness that environmentalism is fear-driven, based on many false claims, a threat to the U.S. economy, fundamental freedoms, and humanity in general.

The environmental movement has its roots in what was formerly called conservation. Its great champion was Teddy Roosevelt and it was led by men like John Muir (1838-1914), a naturalist who advocated setting aside places like the Yosemite Valley, Sequoia National Park and other wilderness areas.

The objective was not only to preserve such areas, but to permit future generations to visit, enjoy, and be inspired by them. In creating national forests, it was understood they were to be managed in a fashion that yielded timber while providing opportunities for hunting, fishing, hiking and camping.

Muir founded the Sierra Club, one of the nation’s largest environmental organizations. Today there are so many environmental organizations and groups that you need a directory to sort them out. These groups, however, are now far more political than their original intent.

They are ministries of misinformation, disinformation, and outright scare mongering.

The movement as we know it today got a boost with the publication in 1962 of Rachel Carson’s book, “Silent Spring.” It was an anti-pesticide diatribe whose claims have long since been disproved, but it set in motion a tsunami of fears regarding all chemicals and, beyond that, concerns about all kinds of manufacturing and technology; indeed anything involving energy resources.

Within eight years of the book’s publication President Nixon initiated the Environmental Protection Agency that has since metatisized into a rogue government agency intent on controlling all aspects of life in America. The EPA invents most of the science it cites and has an authoritarian contempt for the fundamental principles of science, the truth, and the process of legislating and regulating as set forth in the Constitution.

The scope of environmentalism is manifest in the United Nations Environmental Program of which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the source of the global warming hoax, has been the most visible of late.

We are witnessing, if not the death of environmentalism, at least its growing marginalization. The early signs are there to be seen. It will take a lot of time to rid ourselves of its excesses and idiocy because much of academia, the judiciary, the media, some churches, and our schools have been hijacked by the environmental movement.

Like socialism/communism, a political movement closely aligned with environmentalism, environmentalism not only does not work, but imposes restrictions that run contrary to economic growth, health, and fundamental freedoms. Its solutions are as often as not are the cause of mass death as in the case of the banning of DDT.

Ultimately, environmentalism is opposed to all the technologies that protect, enhance and extend life for everyone on planet Earth.

This is why we see, time and again, environmental opposition to anything that might ensure a steady, dependable source of electricity, the power that maintains everything upon which a modern society depends.

This explains why environmental organizations like Friends of the Earth are leading campaigns against the use of coal to generate electricity and other forms of power generation.

Environmentalists oppose oil and its derivative, perhaps one of the greatest inventions of the modern era, plastic.

It is why they advocate turning food, corn primarily, into an inefficient fuel called ethanol that can damage car engines. The diversion of massive amounts of corn has only served to drive up food costs.

It is why they advocate mass transportation and do all they can to impose new costs on the manufacture and use of automobiles.

It is why they advocate wind and solar power as viable sources of energy when neither would even exist without huge government subsidies. They are touted as a source of mythical “green jobs”, but Americans want real jobs and wonder why so few factories have been built here since the 1970s.

It has been environmentalists that foisted mandatory recycling programs that have proven as great a waste in time, labor and energy as the benefits they were purported to provide.

Was it a worthy goal to clean the nation’s air and water? Yes, without question, but by almost any standard one can name, that goal has been achieved. When the EPA announced recently that it was going to regulate dust, you had to know that it’s being run by crazies. The East Coast of America receives a lot of dust blown in from Africa!

The death of environmentalism began with the greatest hoax ever perpetrated in the history of modern man, global warming. It has taken decades for it to be exposed and its demise, along with other environmental “solutions” put forth are reaching a point of widespread public rejection.

That is a very good thing because at the very heart of environmentalism is the intent to reduce the human population of the Earth. It is human “consumption” that environmentalists hate whether it is the food you eat or the energy you use in your daily life.

It will take a generation or two or three to rid ourselves of the chains environmentalism has imposed on us and the economy, but it will happen. It took some seventy years for the former Soviet Union to ultimately implode.

Just as communism killed millions, so too has environmentalism. Both still exist in various places and various forms, but they will fail. Perhaps not in my lifetime or yours, but if we remain vigilant, if we resist, they too will die a deserved death.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

9 comments:

Pat Moffitt said...

There were 3 movements prior to Earth Day. Conservationists, Preservationists whose attention centered on nature and the progressive's attention centered on health issues.

Perhaps more important was the fact conservation and preservation were already a battleground of socialism versus capitalism by the 1930s.

There was simply no way our view of the environment in which we live and how we are to live in it could have avoided becoming a proxy for political ideology.

Alan Caruba said...

@Pat: Good point!

KellyJ said...

Note all of these Enviro-whacks are all about reducing Earths human population...yet not one of them has the testiculer fortitude to practice what they preach.

LarryOldtimer said...

All those dreadful folk hate human beings and want the planet rid of humans. They obviously hate themselves, and are taking that hate out on all others. That, as you have observed, Alan, is what they actually say.

Natural forces have caused and will cause far more destruction of "the planet" than humans ever could for the foreseeable future.

Alan Caruba said...

@KellyJ. NO! We do not want to reduce the human population. That's immoral. I surely hope you didn't mean the Greens lack the guts to do this. If so, that makes you one of them. And not welcome here.

BF Admin said...

It should be dying a slow death, but is it really? They are a massive network (see WiserEarth.com ) and continue to work hard to indoctrinate our youth, so they will have a much bigger army of wackos in another ten years.

Pat Moffitt said...

Kelly J--
The population issue is still a topic that causes battles on the left. The original ZPG movment was suppressed in the 1970s because if the logic was followed it allowed blame to be apportioned to the rapidly increasing populations of the 3rd world. The Sierra Club nearly tore itself apart over this issue several times-including recently.


The problem for them is they sell a zero sum world-- and they just can't find an answer to explain why the West's "footprint" is wrong given we have stabilized our population while the 3rd world has tripled theirs and find a way to say that is OK.

This is the argument they fear- if you force a country to limited resources and zero sum- then that country must control immigration or it sets its citizens on a spiraling downward path.

Holdren and others argued that the 3rd world could not be allowed to achieve US standards or we would strip the earth bare. Logic again-- don't let immigrants into the US because they rapidly concert to our excessive level of consumption. But an anti immigration policy splits their alliances. And they have no answer for it other than trying to push the logical disconnect to the side.

I don't believe in a zero sum world and am one that thinks population growth declines with improved standards of living. However population growth issues as it relates to zero sum is an excellent tool to rattle the cage and force a focus on the logical impossibility they demand.

Pat Moffitt said...

Texmom-- its easier to look at this as a larger natural system rather that the thoughts of any one individual. The environmental movement is an adaptive system sensitive to initial conditions. It has moved over time in a predicted direction but does not do so in a perfectly linear fashion. Hundreds of ideas and campaigns have been spun off to see what resonates in the public dialog and then used in the marketing of the ideology. Those that don't work are discarded or used to reset the center. Extreme views are often an effective tactic-- it redefines politically what is considered middle of the road.

The problems we face today are a result of the proponents of the anti capitalist views espoused by the philosophies of Marcuse and Commoner organizing the First Earth in 1970 and the and the political power it gained that was then used shaping the new regulatory agency that would enforce its beliefs-- EPA. It is a belief system that says the environment must be protected against capitalist economic excess. As Commoner said- there is no reason to undertake conservation type projects (rebuilding wetlands, improving habitat etc) until the rapacious consumption is stopped. The philosophy and culture of a regulatory agency are set the day it begins. We are simply seeing the unfolding events of a regulatory system expanding in scope and power. Conservationists and Preservations still have not fully understood they were a dead ideology by Earth Day 1970's last speaker.

How that power was accumulated, the role of rent seeking and the alliances that were built are whats really important if one wants to find a way to alter this system- but way beyond this scope.

Remember one thing-- the real power over our economy and our way of life now rests in an unelected regulator and their quasi- governmental NGO agents. An Agency that has grown so powerful it can threaten Congress over CO2 regulations. Such power does not change on an election day-- unless those we elect are pushed to rein it in.
The environmental movement as I posted earlier could be about no other subject than who we are, what we want and what we may have. The declared mission now for EPA is achieving Environmental Justice. You may find it ain't easy being Green.

I write this as someone who spent their entire professional career working to improve our environment. EPA and the environmental movement however stopped being what so many millions hoped for on that first Earth a long time ago. Of late I am trying to understand how such a good idea went so terribly wrong and what we might do to correct it.

John A said...

Not quite on-topic, perhaps, but a ray of hope? IK Energy Secretary Chris Huhne, who in the past demonised nuclear and "fossil fuel" energy, has taken a lppk at actual data - and proposed killing some massive tidal-power projects. funding eight new (or replacement) nuclear plants, and said fossil-fuell energy should at the very least be looked at again.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1321492/Chris-Huhne-backs-new-nuclear-plants-Severn-Barrage-scrapped.html
---
He said: 'I'm fed up with the stand-off between advocates of renewables and of nuclear which means we have neither.

'We urgently need investment in new and diverse energy sources to power the UK.

'We'll need renewables, new nuclear, fossil fuels with carbon capture and storage, and the cables to hook them all up to the Grid as a large slice of our current generating capacity shuts down."