Genocidal Green Quotes

By Alan Caruba

As Earth Day 2012 occurs on Sunday,  April 22, I offer a selection of quotes from leading figures in the environmental movement that are worth reading so that you can draw your own conclusions.

In 1970, the first Earth Day generated the following quotes:

“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” - George Wald, Harvard Biologist

“We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.” - Barry Commoner, Washington University biologist

“Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.” - New York Times editorial, the day after the first Earth Day

“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” - Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation.” - Denis Hayes, chief organizer for Earth Day in 1970.

Truth meant (and means) little to environmentalists.

“What we’ve got to do in energy conservation is try to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, to have approached global warming as if it is real means energy conservation, so we will be doing the right thing anyway in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.” – Timothy Wirth, former U.S. Senator (D-CO)

“It doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true.” – Paul Watson, co-founder of Greenpeace.

Many of the environmental movement’s leaders harbored genocidal dreams as the best way to “save the Earth.”

“We have wished, we eco-freaks, for a disaster or for a social change to come and bomb us into Stone Age, where we might live like Indians in our valley, with our localism, our appropriate technology, our gardens, our homemade religion—guilt-free at last!” – Steward Brand, writing in the Earth Catalog.

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

“I suspect that eradicating smallpox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems.” - John Davis, editor of the Earth First Journal

“The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable but a good thing….This is not to say that the rise of human civilization is insignificant, but there is no way of showing that it will be much help to the world in the long run.” - An editorial in The Economist.

Al Gore

One could devote an entire column to quotes by former Vice President, Al Gore, but one of my favorites is from his 1993 book, Earth in the Balance. “It ought to be possible to establish a coordinated global program to accomplish the strategic goal of completely eliminating the internal combustion engine over, say, a twenty-five year period.”

He was talking about the engine in every car, every truck, every tractor, every motorcycle, and every airplane, among other uses. Gore won a Nobel Peace Prize, shared with the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and an Oscar for his apocalyptic documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.”

There are, of course, voices of reason who have sought to warn us against the true agenda of environmentalism.

“The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false.” --Paul Johnson, historian

And, finally, this warning from the President of the Czech Republic, Vaclac Klaus: “They hate us, the humans, they consider us selfish and sinful creatures who must be controlled by them. I used to live in a similar world—called communism—and I know that it led to the worst environmental damage the world has ever experienced.”

Sources:
1970 Earth Day Quotes:  http://www.ihatethemedia.com/earth-day-predictions-of-1970-the-reason-you-should-not-believe-earth-day-predictions-of-2009

Green Quotes:
http://pushback.com/issues/environment/ecofreak-quotes/

More Green Quotes:
http://redneckusa.wordpress.com/2012/04/16/in-their-own-words-the-truth-about-their-real-motivations/

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Overthrowing Environmentalism

By Alan Caruba

In 1517 Martin Luther set off the Protestant revolution against the Catholic Church that led to the spread of the then-new movement as a response to the corruption of the Church. It took time for it to establish itself as an alternative and was greatly aided by the invention of printing and spread of literacy, but mostly because ordinary people had grown weary of the Church’s extravagance, poor governance, and resistance to change.

The selling of worthless “indulgences” as a means to wipe one’s sins clean was the final straw.

Environmentalism has become a modern religion and its “cap and trade” scheme to sell worthless permission slips for the emission of so-called “greenhouse gases”—based on United Nations Kyoto Protocol calling for a reduction of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the Earth’s atmosphere—is being rejected by many nations .

As it has become common knowledge that CO2 is vital to all life on Earth and plays no role in affecting the climate, ordinary people have concluded that global warming in particular and environmentalism in general is a giant fraud.

No one argues that nations should not attend to the basic maintenance of clean air and water. That view predates the environmental movement, but the stranglehold on nation’s economies and the ability to engage in any form of commerce has reached a breaking point. The fact is, the U.S. has made great strides over the years and there are limits to how “clean” the air and water can or even should be. The EPA wanted to regulate “dust” at one point until Congress put an end to that insanity.

The lies required to maintain environmentalism and its vast matrix of laws and regulations are being publicly rejected and a recent example is a letter sent to NASA administrator by fifty present and former astronauts, scientists, and engineers who work for NASA is a seminal moment, not unlike Martin Luther’s 95 theses nailed to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg.

The NASA employee’s letter demanded that its Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) “refrain from including unproven remarks in public releases and websites. We believe that the claims of NASA and GISS, that man-made carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on global change are not substantiated, especially when considering thousands of years of empirical data.”

It should be noted that the global warming hoax can be dated to testimony by James Hansen before Congress in 1988 and he is still the GISS administrator! His apocalyptic predictions helped launch a U.S. response currently seen in the Environmental Protection Agency power-grab, based on the false CO2 claims, that will eliminate one fifth of the coal-fired plants providing electricity to a large swath of the nation and likely end the building of new comparable facilities.

On April 9th, Rasmussen Reports, a polling organization, release the results of a poll that found that 52% of likely voters “think there’s a conflict between economic growth and environmental protection, thoough 31% disagreed." Rasmussen stated that “support for investing in fossil fuels like oil and gas is also at a new high amidst near-record gas prices and the on-going development of the Keystone XL pipeline which President Obama blocked for environmental reasons.”

The following day, April 10th, Rasmussen released results of another poll that found that 44% of likely voters “believe, generally speaking, that the EPA’s regulations and actions hurt the economy. Just 17% disagree.”

On February 21st, Steve Milloy of JunkScience.com, was published in The Washington Times in an opinion about EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson’s testimony before Congress writing that “Over the past three years, the Obama EPA has conducted a scorched earth campaign against fossil fuel producers and users, especially the coal-fired power industry, with multibillion-dollar rules that provide no meaningful environmental or public health benefits.”

The environmental revolution—a Communist agenda—is being resisted piece by piece by scientists and others who no longer will submit to its utterly false “science” and its UN-inspired Agenda 21 plans to impose control over all aspects of life on planet Earth. A June Rio conference will largely abandon the fear-mongering of global warming in favor of “sustainability”, a matrix of controls that will enslave the world’s population with the worst totalitarian precepts since the rise of Communism and Nazism in the last century.

Agenda21 has been at work in America for decades at this point and few have any idea what it represents. It is destroying property rights in America and that’s just for starters.

On Earth Day—April 22nd—the birthday of Vladimir Lenin, the dictator who imposed Communism on Russia in 1917, the various elements of the environmental movement will flood the world with propaganda. The connection between these two events should not be ignored.

Environmentalism should be soundly rejected and the emerging movement to overthrow it should redouble its efforts.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Obama's Eco-Lies

Editor's Note: All this week in the run-up to Earth Day, this blog will post commentaries exposing environmentalism as the totalitarian ideology it has always been.

By Alan Caruba

As the nation and the world closes in on Earth Day, April 22nd, a tsunami of Green propaganda will overwhelm us with all the usual lies about global warming—now called climate change—and calls to reduce the use of all fossil fuels in order to reduce “greenhouse gas” emissions.

This Big Lie ignores the fact that there is no relationship between carbon dioxide (CO2) and the climate. CO2 reacts to climate change. It does not drive it. The Big Lie ignores the fact that the Earth has been cooling for fourteen years.

The past three and a half years of the having Barack Obama as President have been filled with constant crisis, not the least of which was the nation’s financial crisis which he constantly reminds us he “inherited.” He has not, however, solved it with proven ways to put millions back to work and turn around a stagnant economy.

Instead he devoted his best efforts to a takeover of one-sixth of the nation’s economy, the healthcare industry. His administration has waged a steady war on access to energy reserves vital to the nation’s economy. The result of these policies are being felt at the gas pump as prices rise to historic highs while billions of barrels of oil in the U.S. remain underground.

His devotion to all the eco-lies was seen in the millions wasted on “green jobs” with his failed “stimulus” and loans to “green industries”, primarily wind and solar power. Other schemes included high-speed trains where none are needed or wanted. To this day Amtrak has never made a profit. And electric cars remain impractical and unaffordable.

His environmental commitment was perhaps best seen and heard when Obama attended a United Nations Conference of Parties in Copenhagen in March 2010. His speech to the delegates and world press contained all the lies associated with “climate change” and the failed policies he was pursuing two years ago and earlier.

“We come together here in Copenhagen because climate change poses a grave and growing danger to our people. You would not be here unless you—like me—were convinced that this danger is real. This is not fiction, this is science," said Obama.

Aside from the fact that the climate has always been in a state of change for Earth’s 4.5 billion years, the science employed to frighten people about such change does not bear any resemblance to real science which is an impartial blend of data based on replicable experiments.

Real science does not have a political agenda. The bogus science of global warming was revealed in November 2009 when the world learned that a handful of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) “scientists” had systematically distorted the scientific process, conjuring up false computer models that ignored significant elements of climate history. The revelations would be dubbed “Climategate.”

Never one to not criticize America, Obama reminded the delegates that America was “the world’s second largest emitter” of greenhouse gases even though such gases do not function as a greenhouse, trapping and holding heat. If they did, how would one explain the fact that the Earth has been in a natural cooling cycle since around 1998?

What is the mark of a developing or successful economy? It is the use of energy!

Obama promised that the U.S. would work “to phase out fossil fuel subsidies” and promised “historic investments in renewable energy” and his intention to put Americans “to work increasing efficiency in our homes and buildings; and by pursuing comprehensive legislation to transform to a clean energy economy.”

Such a transformation is ludicrous. America runs on oil, on coal, on natural gas, on hydroelectric and nuclear power. The investments in wind and, in particular, solar power, have wasted millions of taxpayer dollars. Combined, wind and solar provide less than two percent of the nation’s electrical power while coal provides nearly half. It has been the use of coal that the Obama administration’s Environmental Protection Agency has been determined to reduce or end, falsely claiming CO2 is a "pollutant."

Typically, Obama said “There is no time to waste.” In reality the Obama administration has wasted every opportunity to increase access to America’s vast energy reserves. Even when bragging about oil production, Obama never admits that it is occurring on private land. His administration has virtually shut down access to exploration and extraction on federally owned and managed land.

Environmentalism is the mask of communism, concentrating ownership of all property and productivity in the hands of the government. Even when addressing the need to ensure clean air and water, it has been used as a blunt instrument of power to limit economic development.

These are well established environmental lies and they are Obama’s environmental lies.

The Copenhagen conference came to a hasty end as the world’s leaders fled the city to avoid being trapped there by a massive blizzard. The global warming they all warned against in 2010 was not occurring and is not occurring.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

The Environmental Terrorizing of Children

By Alan Caruba

In many ways, the worst aspect of environmentalism is why Greens not only feel free to terrorize children with doomsday scenarios, but feel compelled to do so.

I have been reviewing books for some fifty years and with the publication of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” in 1962 and books such as Paul Ehrlich’s “Population Bomb” have been offering scenarios intended to move people and governments to take action that, in retrospect, were based on bad “science” and absurd doomsday predictions.

If you were fooled by global warming, they are counting on you to be fooled again by "sustainability", their reworking of Marx’s communism in the form of a grandiose scheme to control all of the Earth’s bounty. In June the United Nations will hold a Rio+20 conference that will declare that governments exist to ensure "sustainable well-being and happiness." The Declaration of Independence offers the opportunity to pursue happiness. It does not guarantee it, nor does it suggest that it is government's job to provide it.

A key element of the Green’s endless indoctrination schemes has been to reach children, the most vulnerable among us and for this reason our schools have been turned into Green prisons where their version of the Earth is pumped into the minds of children here and around the world.

Their primary teaching tool is fear. Fear that the oceans will rise and wipe out entire cities. Fear that the rainforests are disappearing. Fear that entire species are being destroyed by the hand of man. Fear that the use of any kind of fuel, coal, natural gas, and oil is despoiling the planet.

I have reviewed books for some fifty years at this point and I could not put a number on the books for children that hammer home these and other terrifying themes. One crossed my desk the other day, “Our House is Round: A Kid’s Book About Why Protecting Our Earth Matters” by Yolanda Kondonassis and illustrated by Joan Brush. It has been called “the perfect children’s introduction to environmental issues” by Fred Krupp, the president of the Environmental Defense Fund.

The author is not a biologist, a geologist, a meteorologist, or any other kind of scientist. She is a Grammy-nominated classical harpist. A harpist!

“Our Earth has gotten messy. What should we do?” she asks her young reader. What does she mean by “messy”? Her answer is that “cars, trucks, and factories make pollution, a kind of dirty gas or liquid that goes out into the air and into our rivers, lakes, and oceans.” This book is written for children age five to nine!

Imagine now what it must be like to be that age and be told that the air is polluted and the water is as well. This verges on child abuse.

“Pollution goes up into the sky and forms a blanket of gas that holds heat within Earth’s atmosphere. That makes our whole Earth warmer and leads to unclean air for breathing, melting polar ice caps, rising sea levels, and extreme weather patterns. Scientists call this warming of our Earth’s temperature CLIMATE CHANGE.”

It is a LIE. The Earth has been cooling for fifteen years.

Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. It is a gas as vital to all life on Earth as oxygen is to the life of living creatures. Without it, not a single blade of grass or tree or the vegetation we call “crops” would not grow. Livestock and wildlife depend on that vegetation. If you are age five to nine, you likely are unaware of this.

This book and all the others that incorporate these lies are a form of psychological terror.

The same week I received “Our House is Round”, I also received “The Big Green Book of the Big Blue Sea” and “Earth-Friendly Buildings, Bridges, and More.” You could stack all the environmentally-themed children’s books I’ve seen and it would reach up several stories.

They are a corruption of geophysical and biological science. They have nothing to do with “saving the planet” and everything to do with distorting children’s understanding of the real world.

It does not matter that the Ms. Kondonassis thinks she is serving humanity. The great lie of communism is that it will create a collectivist utopia. In reality it has always depended on terror to maintain itself and it has failed wherever it has been tried. Environmentalism is its latest permutation.

It is the same reason that communism derides religion for its emphasis on life and morality.

It is the same reason Americans are being subjected to government imposed limitations on energy and transportation, and coerced social change, altering and secularizing our society.

I have devoted my life to freedom of the press, freedom to publish, freedom to speak out, and to urge participation in the life of the greatest nation on Earth, but some books like “Our House Is Round” are the worst kind of mental pollution.

Environmentalism, like all tyrannies, begins by indoctrinating children.

Editor's Note: In 1974 Alan Caruba was a founding member of the National Book Critics Circle.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

"Earth Hour's" Global Propaganda Campaign

By Alan Caruba

On Saturday, 8:30 PM local time, everyone will be invited to turn off all their electrical devices and presumably sit in the dark. According to the World Wildlife Fund, Earth Hour is intended to “encourage American cities to prepare for the costly impacts of climate-related extreme weather and reduce their carbon footprint.”

Earth Hour is an example of the enormous funding available to the Greens and of their continued assault on the world’s population to encourage and maintain its message that the Earth is imperiled by mankind’s activities, i.e., the use of energy. Earth Hour is a huge piece of international propaganda. Millions of dollars and man-hours have been expended to get the lights turned off from the Eiffel Tower to the Empire State Building, the Leaning Tower of Pisa to Australia’s Opera House.

You may have noticed there is no longer any reference to “global warming.” That’s because a growing percentage of Americans have concluded that global warming is a hoax. The same charlatans behind Earth Hour and the forthcoming Earth Day on April 22nd have mostly abandoned any reference to global warming and are now lying to you about “climate change” and, soon enough, will shift their message to “sustainability.”

On December 21, 2012, you will find the same people who have drunk deeply of the global warming Kool-Aid sitting on mountaintops waiting for the end of the world as predicted by a Mayan calendar. You will not find any Mayans there because that civilization is long gone.

More recently, Pastor Harold Camping predicted the end of the world in 1994 and then revised his prediction to May 21, 2011. People have been predicting the end of the world for a very long time. They have all been wrong.

Earth Hour fits into this pattern, but its insidious purpose to maintain the same levels of anxiety and fear that has driven the environmental movement since it began in earnest back in the 1970s when it was predicting an ice age would arrive. A decade later they switched gears and began predicting global warming, projecting the end over periods of time from a decade to fifty years or so.

Global warming—a dramatic rise in the Earth’s temperatures—did not occur for two reasons; (1) it was a hoax based on computer models created by charlatans and, (2) largely due to a natural cooling cycle that set in around 1998 as the Sun’s sunspot activity began its own natural cycle in which fewer such magnetic storms occurred. Scientists have long known that a reduction of sunspots has always been accompanied by cooling on Earth.

The Green’s claim that a build-up of carbon dioxide (CO2) would plunge the Earth into a period of warming is the greatest lie of the modern era. The Earth has had periods in which the level of CO2 was much higher. Vital to all life on Earth, CO2 is to all vegetation what oxygen is to all animal life.

The notion that “man made” CO2 portends disaster is false and is directed at forcing the reduction of the use of all “fossil fuels” for industrial and all other uses. It is the greatest scam ever perpetrated because the Greens use it to sell “carbon credits”, worthless pieces of paper that could be sold or traded in the same way as the “indulgences” that were sold as a way to buy a ticket into heaven.

I recommend that you read a short book that explains how and why the environmental movement is a huge scam and a hideous attack on mankind. “Roosters of the Apocalypse” by Rael Jean Isaac ($8.95) is published by The Heartland Institute and can be purchased from its website. In less time than it takes to watch “Dancing with the Stars”, you will learn everything you need to know about the global warming scam and all the ways you and everyone else are being robbed by the schemes tied to it, to “climate change”, and to “sustainability.”

Ms. Isaac tells the story of how, in today’s South Africa, the Xhosa tribe destroyed its economy in 1856. Based on a prophecy of a 15-year-old orphan girl, they killed an estimated half-million of their own cattle, ceased planting crops, and destroyed their grain stores. “By the end of 1857 between thirty and fifty thousand of them had starved to death—a third to a half of their population.”

Turning off all electricity during Earth Hour is no different from what the Xhosa tribe did and refusing to allow the drilling for oil and natural gas, or mining coal, all of which the United States has in sufficient abundance to make us energy independent and exporters of these energy reserves, is an act of national suicide; one that this international symbolism portends for any nation that abandons the energy that sustains economic growth and the welfare of millions.

The Earth is 4.5 billion years old. Human activity, mostly in the past five thousand years that we call civilization, has not had a thing to do with its existence, but some humans are foolish creatures, easily spooked by prophecies that do not come true or claims that they are responsible for its existence and future. Some of them will turn off their electricity on Saturday.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

The Greens Think You're Stupid

By Alan Caruba

Every day EcoWatch.org sends me an email that features links to several articles on issues they regard as urgent and important. If I had no knowledge of science or much else, I would be spending my days in a state of panic and that would be just fine with the EcoWatch folks.

In late February, one of the articles to which one could link was “Top Earth Scientists Warn of Global Ecological Emergency” that was the epitome of everything that is wrong with the environmental movement in general and the machinery of the United Nations whose goal is to be the single global government with which to rule the Earth. Towards this end, the UN has an Environmental Program whose most recent gift to humanity has been three decades of lies about “global warming.”

Now the UN has its eyes set on “transforming” the world’s economic system in general and the destruction of capitalism in particular. That is what the upcoming Rio+2- Earth Summit in June is all about. Why anyone would believe anything these people have to say defies explanation.

“Ecological Internet (EI) reiterates is declaration of a planetary ecological emergency, first issued two years ago. Since then abrupt climate change has revealed itself in all its fury. Habitat loss and extinction have intensified, food and water have become increasingly scarce, and human inequity and injustice have grown.”

This kind of Chicken Little blather is the very lifeblood of environmentalism.

If individuals and nations cannot be driven to pay dearly for “carbon credits” in order to emit carbon dioxide, than some new scheme must be devised and driven by the same scare tactics and campaigns that worked for global warming until it became apparent that it was a complete fraud and those who advanced it little more than criminals with PhDs.

Parenthetically, it is precisely the Big Lie of carbon dioxide as a “pollutant” that is at the heart of the Environmental Protection Agency’s rule-making that would destroy the nation’s manufacturing and energy production sectors.

Americans and others around the world are largely unaware of the massive propaganda machine, aided and abetted by the news media and even Hollywood, that works relentlessly to shape public perceptions and opinion.

In just four day’s time, EcoWatch emails provided twenty-four links to stories, some of which had the following headlines:

“Who’s Funding Climate Change Denial?”

“Overfishing leaves Swaths of Mediterranean Barren”

“Water Scarcity Impacts at Least 2.7 Billion People Each Year”

“As Fracking Boom Hits Ohio, Deceptive Industry Practices Squeeze Landowners”

“10 Ways Monsanto and Big Ag Are Trying to Kill You—And the Planet”

“School Lunchrooms Put Planet and Kids at Risk”

“7 Dangerous Lies About Plastic”

There are common environmentalist themes in just these few examples. All corporations are evil, but those seeking to provide sources of energy are more evil than, say, those providing farmers the means to grow more crops to feed more people. Anything that might improve the economy or enhance the lives of Americans is vigorously opposed.

The use of deliberate deception is a constant factor in environmental claims.

The assault on America’s children continues unabated, especially in their classrooms where they are routinely taught that humans are to blame for destroying entire eco-systems, the climate, and everything else.

The latest abuse of young minds is “The Lorax”, an animated film that one critic said “all but shouts its disdain for capitalism” as the Lorax proclaims “I speak for the trees.” Another critique concluded that the film “is relentless in propagandizing how the use of natural resources to create consumer products is inevitably catastrophic.”

In sum, environmentalists, the vast matrix of eco-organizations, and the United Nations, all think you’re stupid. They are counting on it, but they are taking no chances as they overwhelm the news media, motion pictures, the Internet, and every other form of communication with their message that we must abandon common sense for their brand of Green slavery.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

"Fakegate" Blows Up in Warmist Faces

By Alan Caruba

On February 16, I published “Anatomy of a Global Warming Hoax” concerning the theft of the private records of The Heartland Institute’s board meeting  and the creation of an alleged forged document intended to harm its reputation as a long time advocate of the real, not fake, science that has been the basis of the global warming—now called “climate change”—hoax.

The Feb 21 issue of The Wall Street Journal published an editorial, “The Not-So-Vast Conspiracy” noting that “As for ‘the largest international science conference of skeptics’ Heartland will, according to the documents, spend all of $380,000 this year on the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change. That’s against the $6.5 million that the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) costs Western taxpayers annually, and the $2.6 billion the White House wants to spend next year on research into ‘global changes that have resulted primarily from global over-dependence on fossil fuels.’” (Emphasis added)

The global warming hoax has cost taxpayers billions since it was initiated and earned the purveyors of “carbon credits” millions as industry and others paid for the privilege of emitting “greenhouse gas”—primarily carbon dioxide—as part of doing business. Currently the European Union is trying to shake down the airline industry by charging them a surtax on their emissions as they fly tourists and businessmen to that benighted continent. Most of the exchanges that sold the credits have since closed.

The infamous “Cap-and-Trade” legislation that thankfully died in Congress was part of this scam.

We now know that the document theft was either perpetrated or abetted by Dr. Peter E. Gleick, a water and climate analyst, and founder of the Pacific Institute. A contributor to Huffington Post and prolific castigator of global warming “skeptics” and “deniers”, Dr. Gleick has admitted his part in the effort to depict The Heartland Institute, its board and its donors as part of the worldwide conspiracy to debunk the hoax.

Since 2008 Heartland  has sponsored six conferences that brought together scientists and others who presented ample evidence of the absurdity that carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse gases” was causing the Earth to heat up. Unfortunately for the real IPCC conspirators, the Earth entered a natural cooling cycle in 1998 and, in 2009, thousands of email exchanges between the IPCC scientists were posted to the Internet revealing their growing panic over the failure of Mother Nature to cooperate with their lies, most if not all of which were based on bogus computer models.

Even The New York Times that had trumpeted the false allegations based on the purloined documents, published a Feb. 20 article, “Activist Says He Lied to Obtain Climate Papers” reporting that “Dr. Gleick distributed the documents to several well-known bloggers and activists who support the work of mainstream climate scientists and who have documented the Heartland Institute as a center of climate change denial.”

The Times is incapable to not slandering organizations and individuals who have fought long and hard to rip the mask of respectability from the perpetrators of the hoax. The “mainstream scientists” to whom it refers are, of course, the IPCC scientists behind the hoax. “Climate change denial” is nothing less than the propagation of the truth about the hoax.

For me, the most interesting aspect of all this has been the way The Heartland Institute has responded to Dr. Glieck’s chicanery. From the moment that documents, real, altered and fake, were posted on sites like DeSmogBlog.com and others, Heartland’s president, Joe Bast, went after the then-unknown identity of the person who secured the documents threatening legal action.

When Dr. Glieck publicly admitted his part in a Huffington Post statement, Bast released a statement saying, “Gleick’s crime was a serious one. The documents he admits stealing contained personal information about Heartland’s staff members, donors, and allies, the release of which has violated their privacy and endangered their personal safety.”

The key word in Bast’s statement is “crime.” As John Sullivan, a British-based attorney and an active “denier”, author and blogger, noted, Bast said “A mere apology is not enough to undo the damage”, adding that Dr. Gleick faces being financially ruined by a civil prosecution and “is also liable to a criminal investigation as such falsification of documents is a well-known brand of white collar crime.”

Some time ago I wrote a commentary saying that some of the global warming conspirators needed to go to jail for their crimes. As events unfold, that yet may occur insofar as they were the recipients of public funding and United Nations support as the IPCC published their false “science” amidst alarmist global warming claims.

Perhaps their greatest crime was the debasement of meteorological and climate science. Beyond that, their attacks on the reputation of the brave scientists who stepped forward to refute them is the very definition of slander and libel. The New York Times, Newsweek, Time, the National Geographic, and other “mainstream” news publications will unfortunately be given a pass for advancing their lies even to this day.

The Heartland director’s meeting was devoted to a program to deal with the torrent of false teaching in our nation’s schools intended to warp the perceptions and knowledge of students regarding global warming. That, too, is part of the crime committed against a national and worldwide population that was deliberately misled.

The warmists are in retreat and for that everyone owes a great debt of gratitude to The Heartland Institute and all the others who joined in the effort to refute the greatest hoax of the modern era.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Greener Than Thou

By Alan Caruba

The most obnoxious and hypocritical people are those who are always preaching a “greener” way of life, insisting that anything that constitutes our modern lifestyles is destroying the Earth and depleting its natural resources. Never mind that we depend upon oil, natural gas, coal, and a host of minerals and chemicals for that lifestyle, the absence of which caused people in earlier eras to live shorter, far more unpleasant lives.

Oil, other than ust an energy source is also a component in countless products, starting with plastic, and is so vital to modern life that its value goes far beyond just being able to drive our cars to visit grandma.

Greener than thou has replaced holier than thou ever since Rachel Carson penned her pernicious and seriously flawed attack on DDT and other chemicals, fertilizers and pesticides in 1962. The result has been the needless deaths of millions from malaria in Africa and subtropical nations after the U.S. banned DDT and other nations followed suit. If there was a comparable pesticide available today, the U.S. would not be suffering a biblical plague of bed bugs.

A bone fide environmentalist, David Owen, has written a book that quite literally filets environmentalism, “The Conundrum: How Scientific Innovation, Increased Efficiency, and Good Intentions can Make Our Energy and Climate Problems Worse.” ($14.00, Riverhead Press, softcover).

Owen, who has authored 14 previous books, examines the way environmentalism frequently makes no sense at all. This is not to be confused with conservation, the earlier movement that led to the preservation of some of the nation’s natural wonders.

To live an environmentally acceptable way of life is the same as striving to be a saint, avoiding “sin” in order to secure a place in heaven. It is not only virtually impossible, but to be human is to consume what Nature provides. If you think about, all of Earth's creatures are consumers, depending on where they are on the food chain.

For example, when environmentalists convinced Congress to reduce the amount of water in toilet tanks, the only thing they accomplished was to require that the newer, smaller tanks had be flushed twice to rid he toilet of feces and urine, i.e., more use of water, not less. The EPA has just issued a ruling they claim is necessary to reduce mercury emissions despite the fact that your average volcanic eruption puts more into the atmosphere than any human imposed restrictions could ever achieve. Congress, however, passed a law banning 100-watt incandescent light bulbs, thus requiring people to purchase mercury-filled ones that, if broken, require a hazmat team to clean up after.

Environmentalism is essentially irrational.

It believes that humans actually have anything to do with “saving the Earth” when the natural forces of the Earth are so far beyond any “control” that it routinely reminds us of this fact. We have zero impact on the climate and, as for carbon dioxide, the villain of all “global warming” claims, humans exhale about six pounds of it every day. And there are seven billion of us. Even so, it constitutes barely 0.033 percent of the atmosphere.

Owen begins by posing the question, “How do we truly begin to think about less—less fossil fuel, less carbon, less water, less waste, less habitat destruction, less population stress—when our sense of economic, cultural, and personal well-being is based on more?”

The real question at the heart of all environmentalism is what do we do when there are seven billion humans using the resources of the Earth and the real answer for environmentalists is how do we reduce the Earth’s population and how do they grow rich in the process? That is what lies at the heart of all the “solutions” put forth by the United Nations environmental program; an enemy of the human race if there ever was one.

What environmentalists want is “a vast, unprecedented transformation of human behavior in our relationship with energy and consumption.” The next time you hear anyone call for a “transformation” know also that they are a charlatan seeking control over your life.

The environmental assumption is that the Earth is running out of the sources of energy and that consumption is bad. Both are equally wrong because the Earth is not running out of the sources of energy and consumption is what humans and all other species on Earth do every day.

Owen believes that humans are “the world’s main emitter of manmade greenhouse gases” and this is utterly false. The so-called greenhouse gases are the ones in the atmosphere that not only keep the Sun from turning the Earth into a desiccated version of Mars or the Moon, but in the case of carbon dioxide, it is responsible for every single element of vegetation upon which all life depends.

Owen and many environmentalists would prefer that all of humanity live packed side-by-side in crowded cities, using mass transit or bicycling to work to save the Earth, but anyone who gives two thoughts to the amount of energy consumed to maintain a city knows this too is yet another idiotic environmental conceit.

Indeed, Owen notes that “There are many downsides to density, including the fact that squeezing people and their destinations close together makes diseases, wars, and natural disasters more efficient, too.”

That, says Owen, is a conundrum. Indeed, his book is filled with environmental conundrums that he tries to resolve while overtly and inadvertently exposing the idiocy of environmentalism.

Simply put, farmers are the world’s natural environmentalists, relying on the weather—which they cannot control—and the stewardship of their land to feed themselves and others. They must, however, have a means to move their crops to places where other humans can acquire them and that requires a massive system of transportation which, in turn, requires the affordable use of energy.

Environmentalism’s goals, clean air and water, are laudable, but a massive governmental bureaucracy to require that people use less energy and consume less is not.

Time and time again we see examples of environmentalism that only manage to kill people, whether it is the banning of beneficial chemicals or the use of the least efficient forms of electrical power, wind and solar energy.

The least reported story out of Europe these days is the extreme cold that is literally killing people because it puts the lie to all the environmental “solutions” advanced since the 1960s. Environmentalism has been decried as a religion and, for those who want to deny a greater power, Nature or God, it remains their holy grail.

© Alan Caruba, 2012.

The Green Jobs, Clean Energy Scam

By Alan Caruba

There will probably never be a definitive calculation of how much money the United States (and other nations) has wasted on Green programs, litigation, grants, research, and projects such as those involving “renewable” or "clean" energy. It will surely add up to several trillion because it has been going on for a very long time through administrations reaching back to Jimmy Carter’s and Richard Nixon’s.

A recent article in Washington Examiner.com revealed the amount of money taxpayers pay out to Green organizations that sue the EPA and other government agencies. In point of fact the EPA encourages such law suits in order to use the court system to affirm regulatory efforts that might otherwise by stopped by Congress.

As this is being written, there are several pieces of proposed legislation in Congress to keep the EPA from utterly and completely destroying the economy and the ability to provide Americans with electricity.

Following an request from Republican Sens. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma and David Vitter of Louisiana, the Government Accountability Office undertook an investigation regarding the cost of environmental litigation and while it proved daunting, the GAO reported that “the Department of Justice spent at least $43 million from 1998 to 2010 defending the Environmental Protection Agency in court, while the Department of Treasury paid about $14.2 million from 2003 through 2010 to successful plaintiffs for attorney’s’ fees and associated costs. The EPA paid about $1.4 million from 2006 and 2010 to plaintiffs”

Earlier, in a special report, the Washington Examiner noted that “the major players in the environmental movement are lavishly funded by private contributions from individuals and foundations. And many of them also receive hundreds of millions more dollars in government grants and contracts, so it’s not as if these groups are unable to pay their legal legions out of their own coffers.”

But no, the taxpayers are stuck with the bill.

The cost of Green “solutions” to non-existant environmental problems is proving particularly evident as reports reveal that “renewable energy” companies rapidly fail when federal subsidies are ended or spent. A case in point was the Senate vote in June to end billions of dollars in subsidites for the U.S. ethanol industry.

Ethanol, also known as “moonshine” had been ordered by the government to be added to every gallon of gasoline consumers use despite the fact that it produces less energy, reducing mileage, and adds to the cost at the pump. It was, of course, another Green lie about reducing “greenhouse gas emissions” said to be the source of a “global warming” that was not occurring. Ethanol producers have been closing their doors in droves now that the tap has been shut off. In a world afloat on billions of barrels of oil, the need for ethanol never existed.

In a similar fashion U.S. manufacturers of solar panels are also closing their doors, sustained initially by U.S. subsidies and loan guarantees. The latest is Solyndra, a California firm that just declared bankruptcy.

President Obama had touted Solyndra as a shining example of Green jobs and technology, offering $535 million in loan guarantees. China, however, has captured much of the market for solar panels. Touted as a way to help reduce electricity costs, left unsaid is that they are expansive to purchase and install. The average homeowner would have to wait ten or twenty years to amortise their investment.

Without similar subsidies and mandates, the wind power industry would rapidly collapse as well.

The impact of Green initiatives and mandates has been particularly onerous at the state level. As I noted in an earlier commentary, “In July, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie pulled out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a consortium that would have required renewable energy use for the provision of electricity.

In Pennsylvania, Gov. Tom Corbett has been aggressively de-emphasizing renewable energy use and energy conservation. He has shut down the state department of environmental protection’s office of energy and technology development.

The President has been touting Green jobs since he took office and, if he does so in the course of his speech to a joint session of Congress, you will know that this Big Green Lie is still part of his continuing failure to address the real causes of unemployment in America, taxation, regulation, and a general assault on the energy industry and others..

Word is that Obama still hasn’t installed solar panels on the roof of the White House despite promises to do so. The last President to do that was Jimmy Carter and they were removed by President Reagan.

Green Lies have cost Americans trillions of dollars since the environmental movement began in earnest in the 1970s.

This is written prior to President Obama’s address, but if you hear him speak of “Green jobs” or “clean energy” or “renewable energy”, feel free to turn the channel to anything else because this is the most duplicitous and incompetent President to ever hold the office.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

What Greens Really Believe

By Alan Caruba

Earth Day was established in 1970 and millions of Americans and others around the world have been steadily brainwashed to embrace the impression that environmentalism is about protecting the Earth, but when Greens talk among themselves, it is a very different story and a frightening one at that.

The massive propaganda program that supports the Green agenda is impressive in its scope. Its locus is the United Nations whose Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was revealed in 2009 to be a complete hoax based on the manipulation of computer models to predict a warming due to excess carbon dioxide. There never was any threat from CO2. It is a gas that is vital to the growth of all vegetation on Earth. It represents a very minor, even miniscule, part of the Earth’s atmosphere.

Nothing, however, deters the Green agenda and, since the first Earth Day, it has penetrated the nation’s schools and, of course, its politics, deliberately deterring and thwarting access to the nation’s vast reserves of oil, coal, and natural gas; the greatest such reserves in the world! It is a drag on business development. It is the ultimate nanny state seeking to alter people's lifestyles through coercion, legislation, and persuasion.

What most people are unaware of is the fascistic hatred of mankind that underlies the philosophic basis of environmentalism.

Kenneth Boulding, originator of the “Spaceship Earth” concept, was quoted by William Tuck in “Progress and Privilege”, 1982, as saying “The right to have children should be a marketable commodity, bought and traded by individuals, but absolutely limited by the state.” Lamont Cole, an ecologist, has said, “To feed a starving child is to exacerbate the world population problem."

Stewart Brand, writing in the Whole Earth Catalog, wrote, “We have wished, we ecofreaks, for a disaster or for a social change to come and bomb us into the Stone Age, where we might live like Indians in our valley, with our localism, our appropriate technology, our gardens, our homemade religion—guilt-free at last!”

I doubt most people are wishing for a disaster and, when they occur such as the earthquakes in Haiti and in Japan, the first instinct of decent people worldwide is to mobilize to help those affected. This is a very human reaction, but it is not a Green one.

Helen Caldicott, co-founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility, characterized capitalism, saying “Free enterprise really means rich people get richer. They have the freedom to exploit and psychologically rape their fellow human beings in the process…Capitalism is destroying the earth.”

It is no coincidence that Earth Day is also the birthday of Vladimir Illich Lenin, the founder of the former Soviet Union and devotee of Karl Marx, the creator of Communism. The Communist revolution worldwide led to the murder of an estimated one hundred million throughout the last century.

At the heart of environmentalism, aside from its wish for far fewer humans, is a hatred of capitalism. The failures of communism and socialism everywhere attest to the way state control of all aspects of life is ignored by Greens.

David Foreman, founder of Earth First!, said, “We must make this an insecure and inhospitable place for capitalists and their projects…We must reclaim the roads and plowed land, hold dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled rivers and return to wildness millions of tens of millions of acres of presently settle land.”

Thus, agriculture, the key to civilization, is decried as harming the Earth and all manner of business and industrial enterprises, dependent on the provision of energy, is regarded as evil.

Major environmental organizations, Friends of the Earth and the Sierra Club to name just two, oppose the use of coal, oil, and natural gas to provide energy.

So much of what environmentalism preaches and claims in its propaganda is utterly false, but telling lies is part and parcel of the Green message.

Timothy Wirth, a former U.S. Senator (D-CO) said, “What we’ve got to do in energy conservation is try to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, to have approached global warming as if it is real means energy conservation, so we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.”

Virtually everything being advocated by the Obama administration represents this willingness to take action and tell lies about the nation’s need for energy, with the exception of the worst ways of producing it, wind, solar, and biofuels. Even before gasoline prices climbed to new highs, negatively affecting all aspects of life in America, Dr. Steven Chu, the Secretary of Energy, was advocating higher prices.

The few quotes cited here do not begin to illuminate the horrors that environmentalism would visit on mankind or the nihilistic view it holds, but they represent a far greater body of Green writings and statements over the years that indicate the extent of the threat it poses to humanity.

A deluge of environmental propaganda will precede Earth Day, April 22, 2011. It should be seen as a warning to all who believe in the Creator and all who wish to advance a world at peace, one in which humanity benefits from trade, prosperity, and modern technology worldwide.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Warning! Just About Everything Will Kill You

By Alan Caruba

According to a new book, “The Healthy Home”, every single room in your home or apartment is lethal. You would be better off living in a tent in the woods somewhere as far as the authors are concerned.

Among the life-threatening hazards is the need to remove your shoes before entering your home to avoid walking around “unwittingly in car oil, pesticides, animal waste” and other “toxins.”

And did you know that “non-stick pots and pans release potential hazardous fumes and particles into the air such as toxic gases, carcinogens, and global pollutants”? Cook a meal and die!

And, please, get rid of those wrinkle-free sheets because they can “expose you to the chemical PFC (perfluorochemicals)” that are “linked to reproductive and development toxicity, as well as cancers of the bladder and liver.” There you are, getting what you think is a good night’s sleep and, instead, you’re under attack by your sheets!

This hideous book goes on to explain why fluorescent light bulbs “will make you feel drained and lethargic” and “electrical appliances create EMF’s (electromagnetic fields).”

It’s not just one book. There’s “Raising Elijah: Protecting Our Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis.” We are informed that “From bug spray, to ‘tuna salad, the new lead paint’, to her own deck made of pressure-treated wood (which contains the carcinogen—and developmental neurotoxicant—arsenic)”, the author goes off on a paranoid bender.

As we all know, everything is an environmental crisis. Air! Water! Fossil fuels! Nuclear energy! Food! If you believe Al Gore, the seas are rising, the poles are melting, and we just have to reduce carbon dioxide, a gas upon which all life (along with oxygen) depends.

Those of my generation enjoy sending around lists of things we did when we were growing up in the 1930s and 40s. They remind us that we slept in baby cribs covered with bright colored lead-base paints, there were no childproof lids on medicine bottles, and when we rode our bikes we did not wear helmets.

We ate cupcakes, cookies, white bread, real butter, and bacon. We did not have play stations, Nintendo’s and video games, or televisions with 150 channels. This list goes on, but the point is that, unless it was raining, we were outside playing! We got tons of exercise, lots of sunshine, and no one was constantly warning us against everything, real or imagined, that could kill us except against playing in the street. And we did that, too.

Life Expectancy at All-Time High

So what are we to make of the latest news that says that life expectancy in the United States is at an all-time high?

The latest report from the Centers for Disease Control says that, in 2009, life expectancy exceeded 78 years for the first time ever. When my Father was born in 1901, life expectancy was 47.3 years. He lived to age 93. Mother lived to 98!

How insane are all those people producing research study reports like a recent one from Wageningen University in the Netherlands noting that insects produce far less greenhouse gases than cattle and pigs do, and would be “a viable alternative to eating meat”? That’s right—the Greens want you to start eating bugs to save the Earth.

The latest big scare is nuclear radiation from the Japanese nuclear reactors, the result of the biggest earthquake to hit that nation in years. In the U.S., you will get more radiation just getting a suntan in your backyard this summer.

It may not kill you, but a $14 trillion debt may kill the economy of the United States if Congress doesn’t get around to cutting the insane waste of money the government spends every day such as the $60 million that the U.S. Department of Agriculture is giving three public universities, $20 million each, in Florida, Iowa, and Idaho to study the “impact that global warming will have” on crops and forests? Only there is NO global warming. The Earth has been in a perfectly natural COOLING cycle since 1998.

I am all for a healthy lifestyle. Too much of anything is likely to be bad for you, but the odds are that you are among the millions of Americans who will live to age 78 and well beyond.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Morons Who Hate Oil

By Alan Caruba

It may seem harsh to call people who actively spread lies about oil “morons”, but that assumes they do so out of ignorance as opposed to those who do so for some crazed “environmental” reason that is so out of touch with reality it invites scorn.

A case in point is a new book by Steve Hallett with John Wright, “Life Without Oil: Why We Must Shift to a New Energy Future” ($25.00, Prometheus Books). Suffice to say that Hallett is an associate professor in the Department of Botany and Plant Pathology at Purdue University while Wright is “a journalist specializing in energy and environmental issues” who is the Latin America news editor for Energy News Today. Wright’s previous book was “The Obama Haters.”

How does Hallet get from botany to a supposed expertise on oil, an energy source more associated with geology? As for Mr. Wright, there is a strong possibility that he is a liberal and an environmentalist, and therefore beyond all hope when it comes to things called FACTS.

The prologue of their book is nauseating in that it regurgitates every environmental lie including “global warming”, a hoax that was revealed in November 2009 to have been the invention of colluding “scientists” working for the U.N. International Panel on Climate Change. Suffice to say their leaked emails demonstrated their panic when the Earth, beginning in 1998, began to cool.

“We seem to have quite a few problems,” wrote the authors. “Global climate change, peak oil, overpopulation, collapsing fisheries, desertification, wealth inequity, species extinctions, freshwater shortages, hapless governments, deforestation, disease epidemics, and agricultural failures top the list.”

Okay, scratch “global climate change” because the climate has been changing for 4.5 billion years on planet Earth, moving between ice ages and warmer periods well known to climatologists and meteorologists. The rest is mostly bogus, but what caught my eye was “wealth inequity” which is not an “environmental” problem, but is the keystone of a document called The Communist Manifesto.

Here’s another gem from their book. “We don’t know exactly when our fossil fuels will run out, but we can predict it to within a few decades. By the end of this century, our oil and natural gas supplies will be virtually nonexistent, and limited coal supplies will be restricted to only a handful of countries.”

Whoa! Does anyone recall how the all those “experts” on global warming kept predicting it was coming in thirty years, fifty years, by the year 3,000? This is the same scam being perpetrated by these two morons. And who is to blame for this coming disaster? “We are to blame.” That’s right, the horrid human race is to blame for this, just as it is for everything else environmentalists want to ban.

There is no denying that we horrible human beings have been using oil now for a while now, primarily since around the 1850s, ever since we discovered its marvelous properties, the energy stored in its molecules, and its extraordinary ability to be part of more than 6,000 products.

A single 42-gallon barrel of oil creates 19.4 gallons of gasoline and the rest is used in the manufacture of motor oil, diesel fuel, floor wax, asphalt, transparent tape, deodorant, dyes, rubber cement, water pipes, aspirin, toothbrushes, heart valves, bandages, and the other 6,000 things we use in some fashion or other. Suffice to say that all plastic begins as oil.

Are we running out of oil? No. Let me repeat. No. There is no such thing as “peak oil” because every time someone has made the prediction that we are using up all the oil, we find some more. This not to say the Obama administration will let oil companies drill for it in America. Not only do we pay less for domestic oil as opposed to importing it, but we have so much domestic oil we wouldn’t have to import it.

There are, for example, 40 billion barrels of oil in the Gulf of Mexico and estimates of approximately 14 billion barrels off the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts. In the Bakken shale beneath North Dakota, in just the western third of the State it is estimated that there are more than 500 billion barrels that can be extracted.

According to the US Geological Survey and the Minerals Management Service at the Department of Interior that regulates America’s on and off-shore oil reserves, they estimate that America holds more than 21 billion barrels of “proven” conventional oil reserves. Add to this the estimated 100 billion barrels of oil reserves in the postage stamp-sized proposed drilling area of the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge.

According to the Congressional Research Service, America’s combined energy resources, oil, coal, and natural gas, are the largest on Earth!

It is insane that Americans will be paying $4, $5 or more for a gallon of gasoline and it is insane to believe environmentalists when they tell you the Earth is running out of oil “by the end of this century.”

It is a kindness to call environmentalists “morons.” They are deliberately lying to everyone, using a massive, international propaganda machine, because in the end they want what Karl Marx and Barack Obama want, a redistribution of your money to other people.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The Organic Food Scam

By Alan Caruba

Once, years ago, I was in a Midwestern State talking with a farmer. I raised the question of how much pesticide he used on his crop to ward off or kill insect predators or, in the case of weeds, how much herbicide.

“Look, my family and I eat a part of what I grow,” he said. “Do you think I am going to put anything on the crop that would endanger them?” Good answer.

I thought about that encounter while reading a really extraordinary book by an organic crop inspector that just blows the whole scam about organic foods wide open. “Is It Organic?” is a 599-page book by Mischa Popoff that comes with a wonderful history of farming while revealing why the public is being conned into believing that organic foods are safer and better for them when all they are is more expensive.

The book is available from http://www.isitorganic.ca/. If you’re a consumer interested in environmentalism, the history and politics of organic foods, or you are involved in agriculture the price is worth it. If you like plain talk and honest outrage, every fact-filled page will prove far more educational than most of the literature about environmentalism, energy, socialism, and agriculture than you will find anywhere.

“I believed in the principle of producing top-quality food and letting the market decide if it was worth more. Still do in fact,” writes Popoff. “But I learned the organic industry abandoned living up to that principle long ago.”

The secret this multi-billion dollar industry doesn’t want anyone to know is that “there is no field testing on certified organic farms to ensure synthetic fertilizers and toxic chemicals are not being used and to ensure harmful pathogens from animal waste are safely eliminated. The excuse I was given is that field testing is too expensive; something I later learned is patently false.”

“Testing in the field goes straight to the heart of what organic farming always meant throughout its vibrant history, until it was ruined by political activists. You’ll hear talk of end-product testing, but it’s a BIG waste of time. Synthetic chemicals dissipate if you wait long enough.”

“Honest organic farmers want field testing and so do consumers; so why is it rejected in this multi-billion dollar industry at the same time as it’s talked about as if it was the routine?”

Popoff explains that, “Organic food sold from one end of this continent to the other, whether grown locally or overseas, becomes ‘certified’ based on paperwork refereed by activist private-sector bureaucrats who make money hand over fist by giving their stamp of approval.”

Like global warming, organic food is a scam and it is run by an “unscientific, undemocratic, radical socialist movement” that eclipses the organic farmer “and bilks consumers in order to underwrite a political revolution that is about to impact your ability to feed your family.”

Food Pornography

Popoff calls it “food pornography”, an industry that calls itself organic, “but which is really just pure marketing from start to finish, promising everything and delivering nothing.”

“The genius of claiming that private companies test organic food,” says Popoff, “before they accept it as truly organic and put their corporate brand on it lies in the fact that there’s no possible way to know if it’s true.”

This is a very refreshing book to read on many levels and it’s worth knowing the author did not grow up in some suburban enclave and lived a privileged life. He was a farm boy “My family didn’t have a phone ‘til I was seven and I got my first horse before we got a television. I learned to drive a tractor and the bail truck when I was ten, and I got my first car, a three-speed standard, at the age of twelve.”

Far from the usual story of some PhD holding forth based solely on academic study and research, Popoff worked his way through college “grinding hamburger on the graveyard shift at a local grocery store.” He earned a bachelor’s degree in 1991 with honors in history and a minor in philosophy.

I doubt that “Is it Organic?” will leap onto the bestseller lists, but it deserves to be widely noted and widely read. It’s the literary equivalent of a lighted dynamite stick, exciting to read and thrillingly honest, a dangerous book in the best possible way.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Turning Off the (Incandescent) Light of Liberty

By Alan Caruba

What if the government banned air conditioning? What if flat-screen televisions were determined to use too much electricity and were ordered phased out of production? What if the use of all plastic grocery bags were banned? What if the incandescent light bulb, one of the greatest inventions of Thomas Edison in the 1870s was banned? Oh wait, it has been banned!

In a nation where the Medicare “reform” requires Americans to purchase health insurance they may not want and may not be able to afford, was rammed through Congress, what can stop the government from dictating just about any choice you have regarding any purchase you make? The answer? Nothing.

Only it would no longer be a Constitutional government, a nation of laws that reflect anything resembling the truth. The ban on incandescent light bulbs turns off the light of liberty throughout America.

Here are some truths to keep in mind. (1) Carbon dioxide (CO2) along with other “greenhouse gas emissions” does not cause global warming. (2) There is no global warming. (3) The Earth has gone through known warming and cooling cycles for millions of years. (4) The Earth is in a cooling cycle.

(5) Beginning January 1, 2012, government rules will make it impossible to purchase a 100-watt incandescent light bulb. After that, in time, all such light bulbs will be phased out leaving Americans with only dim, over-priced, mercury-filled light bulbs. And (6) they will be made overseas, primarily in China.

By 2012, by order of the government, Americans will no longer be able to purchase any incandescent light bulbs. Why? Because Congress banned them, citing the need to reduce “greenhouse gas emissions” to reduce global warming that isn’t happening.

It’s the same Congress that had already determined how much water your toilet can use to flush. It’s the same Congress that determined “cafe” rules that determine how many miles per gallon your automobile must achieve. It’s the same government that requires ethanol be added to gasoline, thus reducing the mileage a gallon of adulterated gasoline can produce, while also driving up the cost of gasoline as well as of corn, a food product, used to produce ethanol.

It’s the same Congress that has blessed a Renewable Electricity Standard that requires utilities to use electricity produced by wind and solar power even though both sources also require 24/7 backup by traditional coal-fired, natural gas, or nuclear plants because they cannot be relied upon to generate electricity in a predictable fashion or during periods of peak capacity.

It’s the same Congress that initiated Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two “government entities” that purchased the sub-prime mortgage loans that banks and mortgage loan firms were required to make to people who clearly could not afford to repay them. The result is the financial crisis that occurred when those “bundled” mortgages turned out to be “toxic”, worthless paper sold to investment firms and banks as assets.

In early September, The Washington Post, published an article, “Light bulb factory closes; End of era for U.S. means more jobs overseas.” It reported that “The last major General Electric factory making ordinary incandescent light bulbs in the United States is closing this month…the remaining 200 workers at the plant here (Winchester, Virginia) will lose their jobs.”

In June, The Washington Times reported that the Federal Trade Commission earlier this month (released) 91 pages of regulations that will force manufacturers to revise their packaging and make costly compact fluorescent bulbs appear more appealing to consumers,” that they have refused to willingly purchase them. “Congress wants to force the pale, cold fluorescent curlicue fixtures on everyone because it makes members feel that they are doing their part to ‘save the planet’.”

While the ban was initiated in 2007 before the Obama administration took power, it has not gone unnoticed that the CEO of General Electric, Jeffrey Immelt, “sits on Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board.” And recovery is no where in sight while GE closes its factory making incandescent light bulbs.

There’s more. GE was the recipient of bailout funds and, according to an article on FrontPagemag.com, “stands to benefit from current and future contracts with the U.S. government.” Connect the dots. GE owns MSNBC, a cable news channel famous for its adulation of Obama before and since his election.

The issue, however, is far less about GE than it is about the vast global warming fraud, the equally vast matrix of U.S. laws and regulations that is based on it, and most importantly, the way they are being used to undermine and destroy the U.S. economy along with the freedoms that Americans take for granted.

One of the many tasks facing a Congress in which Republicans are expected to regain control in November is to repeal the ban on incandescent light bulbs. After that, the mountain of other laws and regulations strangling consumer freedom and even threatening the health of Americans must also be repealed.

All nations must evolve, but America is moving toward less freedom of choice; more control over the choices that a free market requires. It is rejecting its founding principles and it is doing so based on environmental lies.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Green Global Warming Editorial Gets it Wrong

By Alan Caruba

It’s rare to come across a newspaper editorial in which virtually every assertion is false, but is absurdly titled “Face Facts.”

Since 1988 the movement behind the global warming fraud has labored long and hard to mislead the citizens of the world to believe what is surely the greatest "science" hoax ever perpetrated.

However, when the leak of emails between the handful of climate scientists who conjured up the deliberately misleading data the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) used hit the Internet, the November 2009 event was quickly dubbed “Climategate.” In one exchange, they worried over the fact that, since the late 1990s, the Earth was demonstrably getting cooler.

It is hard to believe that any journalist could not know about Climategate or the subsequent failure of the IPCC’s Copenhagen climate conference that even the President attended as the entire hoax came unraveled.

“The wildfires in Russia, the floods in Pakistan and the record heat this summer in New Jersey have one thing in common: They are exactly the kind of symptoms scientists predicted we’d experience as global warming occurs.”

Only there is no global warming. The Earth has been in a decade-old cooling cycle.

Which scientists are being cited? What kind of scientists? The current IPCC Chairman, Rajendra Pachauri began his career in an Indian diesel-locomotive factory. The Wall Street Journal pointed out that, “As an academic, he staunchly defended his country’s right to burn coal.”

And what do isolated natural events that occur in a brief time span have to do with alleged climate trends that can only be measured in centuries? Did the editorial writer ever hear of the Medieval Warm Period or of the Little Ice Age that followed it? Both were spread over centuries, not a single summer.

“Glaciers that have been stable for centuries are now melting at an alarming rate.” No, they’re not. Indeed, many are melting less as the result of the current cooling cycle. The cooling is due to lower solar activity; the result of a significant reduction in solar storms that are commonly called sunspots. This is the stuff they teach in Meteorology 101.

“Hurricanes are becoming more severe as ocean temperatures rise.” You mean like the Category 4 Hurricane named Earl that in a matter of two or three days became a Category 1 and then fizzled out as a tropical storm? The hurricane named Katrina was an anomaly, a category 5, and they don’t occur that often. Consider the relatively tame hurricane seasons we’ve had since then.

“A rational person would look at this evidence and listen to the scientists who are warning of catastrophic impacts over the next few decades, such as coastal flooding and the collapse of rain-fed agriculture in many regions, especially Africa.”

It’s too bad the writer of this editorial didn’t display enough rationality to even question what the unnamed “scientists” were saying; much in the same way Al Gore has been telling everyone the same thing only to be revealed as a charlatan seeking to enrich himself from hoped-for climate legislation. The Chicago Exchange that sells “carbon credits” is close to failure as this bogus “market” collapses from the revelation that there is no global warming.

Scientists constantly challenge one another’s work. That is part of the scientific method. Journalists are supposed to exercise a healthy skepticism, but in the case of the scientists who did express skepticism, they were labeled “deniers” until the truth could no longer be hidden from the public.

“Republicans in Washington have killed any chance for climate change legislation, for now. Polls show that while most Americans believe climate change is occurring, most Republicans do not.” So, apparently, the climate is determined by one’s political affiliation. The polls show increasing doubt about global warming along with the trend that most Americans disapprove of the job President Obama and the Democrat-controlled Congress have done.

“The Environmental Protection Agency under Lisa Jackson is preparing to impose regulations on carbon emissions, as the Clean Air Act requires.”

Wrong again. The Clean Air Act does not include carbon dioxide, even though the Supreme Court mistakenly called it a “pollutant.” Carbon dioxide does not need to be regulated because it plays no role whatever as regards the planet’s climate and because it is a gas that is vital to all vegetation on Earth in the same fashion oxygen is vital to animal life. The editorial writer is a complete moron.

“As the world dawdles, this problem will grow worse, and the solution will have to be more drastic, more expensive and disruptive. For that, we will have climate-change skeptics to thank.” This editorial reeks of the same eco-lunacy that could be found in the Unabomber’s manifesto or the Internet declaration posted by the lunatic who took hostages in Maryland a week ago, threatening to kill them unless the Discovery channel gave him a show of his own.

The newspaper was completely within its rights to publish the repetition of the kind of alarmism contained in the editorial, but it also has an obligation to get its facts right.

It reminded me of a comment by my friend, Dr. Richard Lindzen. He is one of the world’s most respected climatologists, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor of Atmospheric Science.

"Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century's developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age."

The journalist H.L. Mencken had it right, "The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule."

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Nazi Dreams were Green Dreams

The gates of Auschwitz, an infamous Nazi concentration camp

By Alan Caruba

In a week when Jews will celebrate Rosh Hashanah, the New Year--5771, the connection between the Nazi’s rebellion against the Judeo-Christian worldview and the present-day ideology that drives the environmental movement needs to be exposed.

Anti-Semitism is on the rise in Europe and elsewhere around the world, driven in part by the Islamic hatred of Jews, but also reflected in the liberal antipathy to corporations and the financial community, often portrayed as “Jewish bankers”, as history’s favorite scapegoat for economic problems. The situation mirrors Germany in the 1930s.

Few know of the connection, but it is spelled out in “Nazi Oaks” by R. Mark Musser ($12.75, Advantage Books, softcover, via Amazon.com). Thanks to his research we learn that “the highway to modern environmentalism passed through Nazi Germany. By 1935, the Third Reich was the greenest regime on the planet.”

“It is no coincidence that sweeping Nazi environmental legislation preceded the racially charged anti-Semitic Nuremburg Laws.”

In the decades during which I have seen the rise of the environmental movement in America I have also seen its inherent totalitarian drive to not merely alter society, but to completely control the lives of all Americans. It is fundamentally an attack on the American credo of individual freedom and it has become commonplace to suggest that environmentalism has become a pseudo-religion.

Mark Musser is a 1989 graduate from the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, widely regarded as one of the premier environmental institutions in the nation. In 1994, he received a Master of Divinity from Western Seminary in Portland and, for seven years, was a missionary in Belarus and the Ukraine. He is currently a pastor.

The history spelled out in Musser’s book needs to be understood in terms of what is occurring in America today. The title of the book comes from the fact that, “With the oak tree being such a powerful symbol of German nationalism and the German natural landscape, Hitler had oaks planted all over the Reich in hundreds of towns and villages.” The practice was dubbed by Nazi environmentalists as “concordant with the spirit of the Fuhrer.”

Just as America is passing through a period of economic stress, the Nazis in the 1930s sought to tap into the German psyche and a “return to nature” myth was seen as a unifying measure. The same regime that would later create the means to systematically kill Europe’s Jews shared a lot in common with any number of present-day environmentalist leaders and academics.

Peter Singer, a professor of bioethics at Princeton University, is on record saying, “Christianity is our foe. If animal rights is to succeed, we must destroy the Judeo-Christian Religious tradition.”

Maurice Strong, Secretary General of the United Nations Environmental Program, said, “Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our duty to bring that about?” When you contemplate the many measures taken by the U.S. government against the mining of coal, the drilling for oil, and even the shutdown of a nuclear waste repository, is it not obvious that denying America the energy it requires is one way to destroy its economy?

In one chilling way in particular, the hatred of the human race, does the environmental movement reflect the Nazi’s merciless destruction, not only of Jews, but of millions of others consigned to its concentration camps and the relentless killing wherever they sought conquest.

This is why the Club of Rome could say, “The earth has a cancer and the cancer is Man.” How does this differ from Hitler’s many expressions of hatred for Jews and others, Africans and Asians that he deemed to be “sub-human”?

This is the naked face of environmentalism.

Remember, too, this did not happen a long time ago. The “greatest generation”, some of whom still live, fought the Nazi regime a scant seventy years ago.

President Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic warns that “it should be clear by now to everyone that environmental activism is becoming a general ideology about humans, about their freedom, about the relationship between the individual and the state, and about the manipulation of people under the guise of a ‘noble’ idea.”

Couple that with a torrent of falsified “science” and you have the modern environmental movement.

The single greatest threat to freedom in America is the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s current efforts to acquire the authority to regulate a gas that is responsible along with oxygen for all life on Earth, carbon dioxide (CO2).

If the EPA gets that control, it will be able to determine every aspect of life in America because it is the use of electricity, industrial and all other machine-based technology that generates carbon dioxide.

And it is the Big Lie that CO2 is causing global warming that is being used to justify the agency’s quest. There is no global warming. The Earth is in a natural cooling cycle.

The Nazi regime was made up of animal rights advocates, environmentalists, and vegetarians, of which Hitler was all three.

And it led ultimately to mass murder.

© Alan Caruba, 2010