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Earth Day is a Holiday for Liars
Since 1970, April 22 has been celebrated as Earth Day. It is generally regarded as the date of the birth of the modern environmental movement. There are several common attributes of environmentalism. High on the list is its barely hidden contempt for the human race, the view that the world’s population has to be drastically reduced and that our consumption of everything from energy resources to agricultural and livestock production threatens the planet. The food riots occurring around the world are the direct result of environmental mandates for biofuels, based on claims of global warming, but the Earth is cooling, not warming. Earth Day had its antecedents in the United Nations that has long maintained an international environmental program. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has generated the current climate alarmism whose “science”, based on flawed computer models, has been totally discredited as often as not by the scientists it pretends to represent. The incessant Green protests of everything and anything that might advance the welfare of the human race, from nuclear power to the Green Revolution that has insured sufficient food for the current and future population of the Earth, is the third element. These protests, too, are based on deliberate distortions of science and fact. Fear mongering has always been the movement’s instrument of choice to influence public opinion and policy. A simple case in point was the reversal of an extensive campaign in the 1970s warning of a coming Ice Age to one that began in the 1980s about “global warming.” Early Greens spread lies across a vast spectrum of issues, invariably causing incalculable harm. An example was Rachel Carson’s claims about DDT that resulted in its ban. Millions have since died for lack of the protection it affords against malaria and other insect-borne diseases. A full-scale attack on all pesticides and herbicides, critical to disease control and the world’s food supply, continues. In 1968 Paul Ehrlich’s book, “The Population Bomb”, included the claim that “the battle to feed all of humanity is over.” He later claimed the Green Revolution, based on the modification of crops to resist drought and predation, would fail. Wrong again. The linking of population and food consumption is a consistent environmental theme. The claim that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions must be drastically reduced is an attack on all forms of industrialization, i.e., corporations and the globalization that require the use of energy resources such as coal, natural gas, and oil. Energy is the single reason for America’s and the world’s economic growth and the enhancement of life through all manner of technologies involving transportation, communication, and agricultural advances. By blocking access to energy such as the ban on oil extraction in ANWR or off the coasts of the United States, by lobbying against the building of coal-fired and nuclear electricity generation plants, by arguing for inefficient, highly subsidized solar and wind alternatives, Greens are creating a national energy crisis. How insane is it to ban the purchase of incandescent light bulbs? There is no scientific justification for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Carbon dioxide represents a miniscule 0.038% of the Earth’s atmosphere and increases in CO2 always follow climate change. It does not initiate it. The Greens are lying. The increasing food riots occurring worldwide are a direct result of the way the price of corn and soy has been artificially driven upward by environmental demands for “biofuels.” When Congress set in motion the mandate that countless bushels of corn be diverted as a food source for humans and livestock to the production of ethanol, it started a cascade of food shortages worldwide that were further exacerbated by weather related crop failures. Environmentalists have spread lies about all manner of food consumption. Eating beef is high on their list of grievances. Not incidentally, corn is a major feedstock for beef and other animals that are part of our daily diet. The Associated Press recently reported that “Worldwide demand for corn to feed livestock and to make biofuel is putting enormous pressure on global supply.” From prehistoric times to the present, meat has been one of mankind’s most invaluable sources of our health. Visit my daily blog and then invite your friends to visit, too. Do You Want to Pay Higher Gas Taxes? My friends at the National Center for Public Policy Research recently released the results of new nationwide survey. They asked people if they were willing to pay higher taxes on gasoline in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Before I give you the response they received, let us understand that the primary greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide (CO2), has virtually nothing to do with climate change. It is a tiny 0.038% of the entire atmosphere and scientists tell us that any increase or decrease in this minuscule amount always follows climate change. Thus, it plays no role in either increasing the warming or cooling of the Earth.
The Center’s poll found that just 18% of Americans were willing to pay 50 cents or more in additional taxes per gallon of gas for the stated purpose of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. U.S. Representative John Dingell (D-MI), the chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, has called for a 50 cent per gallon increase in the gas tax. It is a fact of governance that once a new or increased tax is imposed, it never goes away. Politicians always find ways to spend the money and, in the United States, very little of it has found its way to the maintenance of our highway and bridge infrastructure. There’s not much drama in telling constituents that you’re repaving a stretch of highway or fixing a bridge in need of repair. The environmentalists, along with the politicians in their pocket, i.e., the Democrat Party and some bewildered Republicans, keep telling us we are in imminent danger of global warming, but drivers who encountered this winter’s often record-setting snowfall nationwide might reasonably and rationally conclude that is hogwash. The frost line has been steadily moving southward and is now somewhere beyond Tallahassee. As the Center points out, “According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, transportation accounts for 33% of the U.S.’s man-made carbon dioxide emissions.” About 20% of all emissions result from burning gasoline in personal automobiles. Some of the rest comes from those awful plants that generate electricity. Don’t want to drive? Don’t want electricity? By framing any increase in terms of conservation or a threat to the environment, American drivers are being set up by the plunderers in Washington, DC. Picking the pockets of American drivers with an increased gasoline tax is very tempting, but the reason given is without any scientific merit or defense. No one is going to drive less. In Europe, where they pay $4 and $5 per gallon of gas in taxes, they are still driving around despite these prices. Americans understandably do not want to spend more for gasoline. The world does not lack for oil, but America lacks sufficient refining capacity for our needs. We are actually importing gasoline. A new refinery would cost at least cost a billion dollars and take five years to come online. The government doesn’t build refineries. Oil companies do and how encouraged do you think they feel when one of the candidates for president openly says she wants to take away their profits and their spokespersons are hauled before a Congressional committee on the absurdity of “Energy Independence and Global Warming” to be blamed for prices over which they have no control? We are way behind the curve on this because environmentalists have created a matrix of EPA laws and regulations that make it extremely difficult to build a refinery. At the same time, the same Congress that would want to raise gasoline taxes has banned the discovery and extraction of the oil reserves we possess in places like ANWR or off the U.S. continental shelf. If “Big Oil” had real influence with Congress, this would not be the case, but it does not. If the public has anything to say about it—and Congress has long since stopped paying any attention to voters—Congressman Dingell’s proposal to raise gasoline taxes would be dead-on-arrival. As the Center’s vice president, David A. Ridenour, says, the question isn’t whether Americans want action on global warming, but whether they are willing to pay for it. Americans have been told they have to spend money recycling everything theyuse and throw away when all it does is needlessly add to the cost of waste management. They’ve been told that our national forests are disappearing when we still have 70% of those that existed when the Pilgrims arrived. They’ve been told they can and should save all manner of species when the natural order of things is that species go extinct. Wilson Policy Research conducted the poll February 24-26. For results, visit the Center at www.nationalcenter.org and download the pdf. The Center is a non-partisan, non-profit educational foundation established in 1982. It supports commonsense, market-based solutions to environmental problems. The problem is that there is precious little commonsense when it comes to the environment. The EPA isn’t even permitted to consider the cost of many of its mandates when it imposes some new insane standard for “cleaning” the air or water. Almost nothing about the claims and demands of environmentalists make sense, unless you look behind the curtain and discover that most of them involve destroying the U.S. economy. The Center depends heavily on your donation to maintain this website and our communications program. Please help. Thanks!
©
2008 Alan Caruba. |
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Earth Day is a holiday for liars. I have followed the apocalyptic claims and the legislated mandates of the environmental movement since the 1970s and their single unifying factor has been the lies told to achieve various elements of the Green agenda.
I know you have been told otherwise, but the people telling you this are lying. Al Gore is lying. Members of Congress are lying. Candidates for president are lying. And a President who tells you that Americans are “addicted” to oil is lying. You cannot be addicted to something that is required for the functioning of the entire economy.