Earth Day 2012 - Measuring Cow Farts

This is an example of how stupid the entire cult of environmentalism is. Some "scientists" measured the amount of methane in cow farts by way of saving the Earth from something or other. If you look closely at virtually everything environmentalists say about any subject, you will conclude that it closely resembles cow farts.

Alan Caruba,
Earth Day 2012

Eco-Communism Celebrated Annually on Earth Day

By Alan Caruba


Sen. Joe McCarthy

I came of age in the 1950s during a period when Joe McCarthy was raising hell about communists in the federal government. He was spectacularly inept, often made intemperate and inaccurate charges, but for the most part he was right. He managed to alienate his fellow Republicans and earn a slap-down from then President Eisenhower. By around 1953 his fifteen minutes of fame were up. His bombastic personality undermined the seriousness of the issue.

McCarthy was all bluster, but the publication of “The Venona Papers: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America’s Traitors” in 2001 revealed that his charges of widespread infiltration of the State Department and even the White House during the Roosevelt and Truman years were true. Venona was the U.S. code name given secret Soviet spy communications that had been recorded during and after World War II. In 1995, the National Security Agency began releasing the documents.

In 2000 Reed Irvine and Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media wrote about a conference, “Rethinking McCarthy” devoted to the myths surrounding McCarthy that were disputed by journalist M. Stanton Evans, a director of the National Journalism Center. Chief among them was that McCarthy never named any names of suspected communists in government, but Evans revealed a file of material showing that he had. The other myth was that those named had been cleared by congressional committees or were just mildly leftist. They were not.

It is not surprising that Rep. Allan West who recently said that there are some eighty communists in Congress today, members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, drew the same response that McCarthy did in his era. Rep. West characterized the response as “A lot of buzz and inaccurate reporting.” Politico.com called him a McCarthyite.

In the run-up to Earth Day on April 22nd—the birthday of Vladimir Lenin, the Soviet Union’s first dictator—Brian Sussman, author of the bestselling “Climategate”, has a new book, “Eco-Tyranny: How the Left’s Green Agenda Will Dismantle America” ($25.95, WND Books). If you read no other book about the relationship between environmentalism and communism this year, you must read this one.

Sussman has brought together all the relevant facts. “Karl Marx founded a philosophy that inspires dictators and demagogues,” writes Sussman. “Commencing with the Russian Revolution in 1917 to the present, Marx’s tyrannical ideology has been responsible for the documented deaths of more than 110 million individuals around the world.”

“Pollution,” writes Sussman, “never has been Earth’s most troubling foe—Marxism had. And Marxists have always seized upon pollution, both real and imagined, as an effective weapon in their unrelenting war on freedom.”

Americans are the victims of blunders by a succession of presidents, but it was Richard Nixon who kicked off the plundering of the nation by the environmental movement when, in 1970, he quietly signed into law the National Environmental Policy Act, followed by the Clean Air Act. “Nixon’s Clean Air Act expanded the ’67 law to autocratically allow the federal government to limit both industrial and mobile sources of air pollution. It set up the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Today, the EPA has become a rogue agency, barely controlled by Congress. “Today the EPA is eighteen thousand full-time employees strong, with an annual budget of $10 billion”, notes Sussman.

“From a legal perspective,” writes Sussman, “what Nixon did in signing the Clean Air Act was flatly unconstitutional. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution limits the power of the federal government to the basics, none of which includes regulating the atmosphere.” The EPA engages in the most bogus scientific “research” seen since the days of the Soviet Union

The locus of the environmental movement is the United Nations whose Intergovernmental Panel on Climatic Change (IPCC) has been issuing reports that were used to support the global warming hoax and, when it was exposed as a massive fraud, has since changed its message to “sustainability” whose purpose remains the establishment of a global government run out of the UN. It advances every element of the communist movement in its attack on capitalism and the foundation of the freedom enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.

We have seen the systematic dismantling of the U.S. Constitution and our economy by our elected representatives, the latest being Obamacare’s effort to takeover one sixth of the nation’s economy while twisting the Commerce Clause to impose a mandate on everyone to purchase health insurance whether they want or need it.

Sussman’s book provides a time-line for the eco-tyranny at work in the nation today. The threat to our freedom and to the position of America as the protector of freedom worldwide is real.

Think about that when you find yourself drowning in the propaganda that will surround and augment the message of Earth Day and the forthcoming UN conference, Rio+20.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Greenwashing America

By Alan Caruba

Every time you see some product being sold as “Green”, allegedly safer or beneficial for the environment, you can be sure that it is more expensive than a comparable product that does the same thing without making this claim.

Everything you eat, drink, wear or use begins as a “natural” product. It is absurd to think that calling it “Green” improves it in any fashion. Countless inspections before anything reaches the marketplace ensure product safety. To put it another way, a carrot is a carrot is a carrot.

Recently I received a news release from a public relations firm touting clients selling Green products such as “Parsley Plus All-Purpose Cleaner”, along with “stylish organic bed linens, “natural and organic clothing”, a “99.6% natural line” of shampoos, and, “100% Bamboo towels.”

In a similar fashion, every time you hear a corporation claiming it is concerned about the environment you can be sure that it is trying to protect itself against lawsuits from environmental groups or Environmental Protection Agency action that will eat into its profits and dividends.

A recent Wall Street Journal article, “Misleading Claims on ‘Green’ Labeling” cited a study asserting that “more than 95% of consumer products examined committed at least one offense of ‘greenwashing’, a term used to describe unproven environmental claims, according to TerraChoice, a North American environmental-marketing company that issued the report.”

“Environmental-marketing company”? By reading further down in the article, one learns that “TerraChoice was recently acquired by Underwriters Laboratories, an independent product-safety certification organization”, adding that both companies “could benefit if more manufacturers seek third-party verification of the eco-claims.” You think?

Consumers Union, an independent testing company, has built its reputation on its review of various products. Underwriters Laboratories has done the same, but there is no reason to believe any Green product claim, particularly since TerraChoice has announced it is probably a scam. Not surprisingly, third party certification has been offered by some major environmental organizations as yet another way to raise a few bucks.

It is no accident that the term “greenwashing” is akin to “brainwashing”, a term that came out of the Korean War when it was learned that American prisoners of war were subjected to “re-education” by their captors.

Communists have always been big on re-education, a practice of nations such as China, Vietnam, North Korea, Cambodia, and others where you were expected change your mind and learn to love Big Brother. The alternative was that you either stayed in their concentration camps or were systematically murdered for the crime of having been an intellectual, a landowner, or a bourgeois capitalist.

Communism murdered more people in the last century than all its wars combined.

Environmental organizations, in league with an unquestioning mainstream media, have been greenwashing and brainwashing the public for decades. It usually takes the form of scare campaigns and, in the case of supermarket products, it is directed at chemicals, plastics, how livestock is raised, or some other totally superfluous “issue” that has nothing to do with the quality, price or safety of the product. The object is always the same, to lay a guilt trip on the consumer, i.e., to greenwash them.

Green product claims go hand-in-hand with the metastasizing Green regulations whose bottom line raises the costs of everything in America these days. Angela Logomasini of the Competitive Enterprise Institute is an expert on regulatory affairs. When it comes to the environment, Congress passed 1,163 new laws between 1973 and 2006. Ms. Logomasini found that only 85 of those statutes reduced government regulation, while 795 increased it. The remaining were deemed to lack significant regulatory impact.

Five of the fifty volumes containing the federal regulatory code are devoted exclusively to environmental regulation and an additional twelve also address environmental regulation in some respect. The Small Business Administration concluded that environmental regulation is the leading regulatory expense for businesses with fewer than 20 employees, averaging $3,296 per worker.

Currently, the Environmental Protection Agency that generates the new laws and regulations is totally out of control. It has been on a regulatory binge anticipating a Congress controlled by Republicans. Nothing rational explains President Obama’s continued reference to greenhouse gas emissions, Green cars, and, especially, Green jobs when so many Americans are out of work..

The EPA, created by Richard Nixon with an executive order in 1970, has to be downsized to its original mandate, ensuring clean air and clean water. When it began to define rain puddles as navigable waters and ordinary dust as a pollutant, you have to know just how crazed and dangerous it has become.

It will take a generation or two for Americans to shake loose of the insanity that is environmentalism. Long seen as a religion, it seeks total control over every aspect of your life.

© Alan Caruba, 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