By Alan
Caruba
In the
1980s I devoted a lot of effort to debunking a torrent of Green lies about
pesticides and herbicides. This was before the Greens latched onto “global
warming” which has since become “climate change” and the subject of a recent
White House report filled with dire predictions of planetary doom and disaster.
Nobody
died from using pesticides or herbicides in the 1980s or since unless they
drank it straight from the bottle. When I talked with farmers they would
frequently say “Do you think I would put this stuff on the crops my family eats
if I thought it would harm them?” The Greens have always attacked anything that
would increase crop growth by limiting the real harm of weeds or the predation
of insect species. These days genetically modified seeds are a target for
environmentalists though studies have amply demonstrated their crops are safe
to eat.
Less food
means less people and that has always been a major goal of the people leading
the nation’s and the world’s major environmental organizations. The same
formula applies to denying energy to people worldwide.
As for
pesticides, we all use them to keep our homes and workplaces free of insects
that are the key vectors for all manner of diseases. In a world before their
invention, millions died from mosquito-borne diseases such as Yellow Fever,
Dengue Fever, Encephalitis, West Nile virus and Malaria. Millions still die
from malaria and these diseases because one of the most effective pesticides
ever invented was DDT and it was banned because of the lies Rachel Carson told
in her iconic, environmental book, “Silent Spring.”
The world
is a very complex place and it is essential to have a fundamental understanding
of how it works. One of the best new books on this subject is Robert Bryce’s
“Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper” ($27.99, Public Affairs). What Bryce
doesn’t know about energy is probably not worth knowing and, happily, he has
authored several books on the subject. His latest provides wonderful and useful
insights to the world we share today with seven billion other human beings.
Bryce
quotes Edward Abbey, “one of the patron saints of American environmentalism”
who, in 1971, said, “We humans swarm over the planet like a plague of locusts,
multiplying and devouring. There is no justice, sense or decency in this
mindless global breeding spree, this obscene anthropoid fecundity, this
industrialized mass production of babies and bodies, ever more bodies and
babies.”
This is
the kind of thinking that is the hidden justification for genocides. Not
surprisingly the leaders of the Nazi regime were all dedicated
environmentalists. At the heart of much that passes for environmentalism is an
attack on the energy sources that enhance or lives and agricultural practices
that feed us.
It’s not
by accident that environmental groups all trumpet the same doomsday lies at the
same time. Their leaders get together to coordinate their efforts and the
current one is aimed at what they call “de-growth”, the reduction of economic
growth by any means.
With
President Obama blathering about “climate change” threats, it should not
surprise anyone to conclude that the horrible economic conditions he has
imposed on our nation was not an accident, nor that he focuses on thwarting the
provision of energy, the most vital component of economic growth.
“The
prescriptions put forward by the degrowth crowd,” says Bryce, “are familiar.
Nuclear energy is bad. Genetically modified foods are bad. Coal isn’t just bad,
it’s awful. Oil is bad. Natural gas—and the process often used to produce it,
hydraulic fracturing is bad.” And it is
no surprise that the Environmental Protection Agency—the most anti-growth
governmental agency—has just announced steps to require the disclosure of
chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing, a technology that has been in use for
more than a half century and one that has unlocked access to vast reserves of
natural gas and oil.
It is
essential to understand who the enemy is and it is groups like the Sierra Club,
Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and the Worldwatch Institute, to name just a
few.
The next
time some environmental spokesman is busy spreading fear, Bryce says it is
necessary to keep in mind that “Their outlook rejects innovation and modern
forms of energy. It rejects business and capitalism. We must move past the
climate of fear to one of optimism. We must move past fear of technology to an
understanding that technology isn’t the problem; it’s the solution.”
© Alan
Caruba, 2014
2 comments:
Good summary Alan. Agree with all that. Just thought I'd mention Robert Zubrin's book, Merchants of Despair. It gives a good summary of the history of the environmental movement starting with Thomas Malthus and his sad views. Zubrin describes how this thinking had been picked up by Hitler and then the Chinese, and so on. Zubrin too, promotes a more positive view of the future based on our increasing ingenuity and discovery. Best regards, Robin.
It's ridiculous to claim that environmentalists are in intention "anti-growth", and the fact that you can only pose them as such shows that this is the only part of their claims that you comprehend. The fact is, most of these environmentalists are pointing directions towards considerable innovation in the marketplace. They are not anti-growth, because they are pushing a different type of agriculture, which I might note has become big business. Larger companies using GMO dont' want the competition, nor do they care at all about innovation.
This is what has always confused me the most about conservatives: they want to defend free markets to the death, but this usually just means the interest of large companies who do not want to be forced to innovate or who want protection from competitors.
Lastly, if you have any intellectual integrity, please retract that moronic statement about linking environmentalists to Nazis. Most environmentalists are pretty liberal, which means that they are concerned with equal rights, except that they want to extend them to animals. Therefore, they could not be Nazis, who could accept no concept of equal rights. Secondly, even if all Nazis were environmentalists (just because Hitler was a vegetarian you think he was an environmentalist! ha!), that would be at best a link by association, but obviously not in any essential sense.
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