It is time to face reality: communism is back. It has reappeared
nearly everywhere under the guise of radical environmentalism. This
abhorrent cult puts nature well above mankind primarily for the purpose
of controlling if not subjugating us all in the name of protecting
nature, ecosystems, or ‘Gaia.’ Take your pick; either way it’s about
preservation, not conservation. Resource development, therefore, becomes
tantamount to high crime in the eyes of radical environmentalists.
In an outstanding new book from The Epoch Times news outlet titled “How the Spector of Communism Is Ruling Our World,” the authors state:
“communist elements have commandeered
much of the environmental movement to advance their own political
agendas. Communism’s infiltration of environmentalism has been underway
virtually since the beginning of the environmental movement”.
An interesting data point was when former President of the Soviet
Union, previously General Secretary of the USSR’s Communist Party,
Mikhail Gorbachev, launched the new environmental organization Green
Cross International.
The Epoch Times’ book’s most lucid and penetrating statement, which we hope we can learn to recognize, is:
“Communism must create or use an enemy
that threatens all of humankind and intimidates the public around the
world into handing over both individual liberty and state sovereignty.
Creating global panic about looming environmental and ecological
disasters is a route toward achieving its goal.”
Read this again and think for a moment. You will notice how closely radical environmentalists follow this exact approach today.
In the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels declared
that capitalism was an enemy of the environment and perhaps were the
first to use the term ‘ecosystem.’ Marx lined up his followers to rail
against those who could be accused of despoiling the environment. After
Vladimir Lenin and his Bolshevik Party launched their 1917 coup in
Russia, they dictated that all land, forests, water, minerals, animals,
and plant resources become the property of the state. This was done to
prevent the public from using them without state authorization.
In the 1960s, popular radical books such as Silent Spring and The Population Bomb
tried to convince readers that all pesticides should be outlawed and
population growth should be controlled by the government. These books
contributed to the establishment of the first Earth Day in 1970,
followed by the United Nations Conference on The Human Environment in
Stockholm in 1972. Soon there was the formation of an alphabet soup of
environmental groups stridently demonstrating and propagandizing the
damage mankind was supposedly doing to our blue planet.
Before that decade was over, we in the U.S. were addressing our real
problems with the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
that launched seven pieces of sensible legislation to protect our
surface and groundwater and properly handle waste disposal from our
mines and agriculture. But the EPA strayed from rational policy
formulation after 1980 and little useful legislation was ever passed
again. From then on, only stringent rules were created to impede
economic progress at great cost with no benefit to the environment or
human health.
The true beginning of the current socialist/communist
surge began in 1988 when the World Meteorological Society and the United
Nations Environment Program created the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change.
It was at this point that the idea of man-caused global warming
surfaced as the most important mechanism to defeat capitalism by
requiring a one-world government to take the reins of saving the Earth
from extinction.
Two years later as the Soviet Union was crumbling, Gorbachev
addressed an international conference on the environment in Moscow,
where he called for the establishment of an international monitoring
system and a covenant to protect unique environmental zones. A majority
of the world’s environmentalists accepted his charge. It was the
beginning of rule by propaganda and the end of sound policy and
scientific research in matters of the environment, with global warming
leading the charge. When warming stopped around the turn of the century,
radical environmentalists cleverly change the fear to ‘climate change,’
knowing full well that, since the climate is always changing, their
crusade would always have its boogieman.
In 1998, an article titled Green Cross: Gorbachev’s Enviro-Communism, by the late Natalie Grant Wraga who grew up in the Soviet Union said:
“Protection of the environment has become
the principal tool for an attack against the West and all it stands
for. Protection of the environment may be used as a pretext to adopt a
series of measures designed to undermine the industrial base of
developed nations. It may also serve to introduce malaise by lowering
their standard of living and implanting communist values.”
In Marx and Engle’s manifesto, the authors resolved to:
“build a movement that can replace
capitalism with a society in which common ownership of the means of
production replaces capitalist ownership, and in which the preservation
and restoration of ecosystems will be a fundamental part of all human
activity.”
But Marx predicted that capitalism would eventually fail all by
itself. It has yet to do so, and thus communist-minded radical
environmentalists have had to keep up the war against private business
with a battle cry of ecological collapse. This was based on the
prevalent but somewhat spurious theory of the relationship between
living things and their environment. Indeed, eco-socialism is not now
simply a branch of socialism; it is what socialism has become today.
In Part two of this series, we will detail the massive damage the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has wrought upon the world.
Dr. Jay Lehr is Senior Policy Analyst with the International
Climate Science Coalition and former Science Director of The Heartland
Institute. He is an internationally renowned scientist, author and
speaker who has testified before Congress on dozens of occasions on
environmental issues and consulted with nearly every agency of the
national government, as well as many foreign countries. After graduating
from Princeton University at the age of 20 with a degree in Geological
Engineering, he went on to receive the nation’s first Ph.D. in
Groundwater Hydrology from the University of Arizona. He later became
executive director of the National Association of Groundwater Scientists
and Engineers.
Tom Harris is Executive Director of the Ottawa, Canada-based
International Climate Science Coalition, and a policy advisor to The
Heartland Institute. He has 40 years experience as a mechanical
engineer/project manager, science and technology communications
professional, technical trainer and S&T advisor to a former
Opposition Senior Environment Critic in Canada’s Parliament.
I
have been asked to talk about what I consider the most important
challenge facing mankind, and I have a fundamental answer. The greatest
challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from
fantasy, truth from propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a
challenge to mankind, but in the information age (or as I think of it,
the disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and importance.
We
must daily decide whether the threats we face are real, whether the
solutions we are offered will do any good, whether the problems we’re
told exist are in fact real problems, or non-problems.
Every
one of us has a sense of the world, and we all know that this sense is
in part given to us by what other people and society tell us; in part
generated by our emotional state, which we project outward; and in part
by our genuine perceptions of reality. In short, our struggle to
determine what is true is the struggle to decide which of our
perceptions are genuine, and which are false because they are handed
down, or sold to us, or generated by our own hopes and fears.
As
an example of this challenge, I want to talk today about
environmentalism. And in order not to be misunderstood, I want it
perfectly clear that I believe it is incumbent on us to conduct our
lives in a way that takes into account all the consequences of our
actions, including the consequences to other people, and the
consequences to the environment. I believe it is important to act in
ways that are sympathetic to the environment, and I believe this will
always be a need, carrying into the future. I believe the world has
genuine problems and I believe it can and should be improved. But I also
think that deciding what constitutes responsible action is immensely
difficult, and the consequences of our actions are often difficult to
know in advance. I think our past record of environmental action is
discouraging, to put it mildly, because even our best intended efforts
often go awry. But I think we do not recognize our past failures, and
face them squarely. And I think I know why.
I studied
anthropology in college, and one of the things I learned was that
certain human social structures always reappear. They can’t be
eliminated from society. One of those structures is religion. Today it
is said we live in a secular society in which many people—the best
people, the most enlightened people—do not believe in any religion. But I
think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If
you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form. You
can not believe in God, but you still have to believe in something that
gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a
belief is religious.
Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism.
Environmentalism
seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say
it’s a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully,
you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century
remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.
There’s
an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature,
there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of
eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there
is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed
to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability.
Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as
organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right
people with the right beliefs, imbibe.
Eden, the fall
of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday—these are deeply held
mythic structures. They are profoundly conservative beliefs. They may
even be hard-wired in the brain, for all I know. I certainly don’t want
to talk anybody out of them, as I don’t want to talk anybody out of a
belief that Jesus Christ is the son of God who rose from the dead. But
the reason I don’t want to talk anybody out of these beliefs is that I
know that I can’t talk anybody out of them. These are not facts that can
be argued. These are issues of faith.
And so it is,
sadly, with environmentalism. Increasingly it seems facts aren’t
necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief.
It’s about whether you are going to be a sinner, or saved. Whether you
are going to be one of the people on the side of salvation, or on the
side of doom. Whether you are going to be one of us, or one of them.
Am
I exaggerating to make a point? I am afraid not. Because we know a lot
more about the world than we did forty or fifty years ago. And what we
know now is not so supportive of certain core environmental myths, yet
the myths do not die. Let’s examine some of those beliefs.
There
is no Eden. There never was. What was that Eden of the wonderful mythic
past? Is it the time when infant mortality was 80%, when four children
in five died of disease before the age of five? When one woman in six
died in childbirth? When the average lifespan was 40, as it was in
America a century ago. When plagues swept across the planet, killing
millions in a stroke. Was it when millions starved to death? Is that
when it was Eden?
And what about indigenous peoples,
living in a state of harmony with the Eden-like environment? Well, they
never did. On this continent, the newly arrived people who crossed the
land bridge almost immediately set about wiping out hundreds of species
of large animals, and they did this several thousand years before the
white man showed up, to accelerate the process. And what was the
condition of life? Loving, peaceful, harmonious? Hardly: the early
peoples of the New World lived in a state of constant warfare.
Generations of hatred, tribal hatreds, constant battles. The warlike
tribes of this continent are famous:
the Comanche, Sioux, Apache,
Mohawk, Aztecs, Toltec, Incas. Some of them practiced infanticide, and
human sacrifice. And those tribes that were not fiercely warlike were
exterminated, or learned to build their villages high in the cliffs to
attain some measure of safety.
How about the human condition in
the rest of the world? The Maori of New Zealand committed massacres
regularly. The dyaks of Borneo were headhunters.
The Polynesians, living
in an environment as close to paradise as one can imagine, fought
constantly, and created a society so hideously restrictive that you
could lose your life if you stepped in the footprint of a chief.
It was
the Polynesians who gave us the very concept of taboo, as well as the
word itself. The noble savage is a fantasy, and it was never true. That
anyone still believes it, 200 years after Rousseau, shows the tenacity
of religious myths, their ability to hang on in the face of centuries of
factual contradiction.
There was even an academic movement,
during the latter 20th century, that claimed that cannibalism was a
white man’s invention to demonize the indigenous peoples. (Only
academics could fight such a battle.) It was some thirty years before
professors finally agreed that yes, cannibalism does indeed occur among
human beings. Meanwhile, all during this time New Guinea highlanders in
the 20th century continued to eat the brains of their enemies until they
were finally made to understand that they risked kuru, a fatal
neurological disease, when they did so.
More recently
still the gentle Tasaday of the Philippines turned out to be a publicity
stunt, a nonexistent tribe. And African pygmies have one of the highest
murder rates on the planet.
In short, the romantic view of the
natural world as a blissful Eden is only held by people who have no
actual experience of nature. People who live in nature are not romantic
about it at all. They may hold spiritual beliefs about the world around
them, they may have a sense of the unity of nature or the aliveness of
all things, but they still kill the animals and uproot the plants in
order to eat, to live. If they don’t, they will die.
And
if you, even now, put yourself in nature even for a matter of days, you
will quickly be disabused of all your romantic fantasies. Take a trek
through the jungles of Borneo, and in short order you will have
festering sores on your skin, you’ll have bugs all over your body,
biting in your hair, crawling up your nose and into your ears, you’ll
have infections and sickness and if you’re not with somebody who knows
what they’re doing, you’ll quickly starve to death. But chances are that
even in the jungles of Borneo you won’t experience nature so directly,
because you will have covered your entire body with DEET and you will be
doing everything you can to keep those bugs off you.
The
truth is, almost nobody wants to experience real nature. What people
want is to spend a week or two in a cabin in the woods, with screens on
the windows. They want a simplified life for a while, without all their
stuff. Or a nice river rafting trip for a few days, with somebody else
doing the cooking. Nobody wants to go back to nature in any real way,
and nobody does. It’s all talk-and as the years go on, and the world
population grows increasingly urban, it’s uninformed talk. Farmers know
what they’re talking about. City people don’t. It’s all fantasy.
One
way to measure the prevalence of fantasy is to note the number of
people who die because they haven’t the least knowledge of how nature
really is. They stand beside wild animals, like buffalo, for a picture
and get trampled to death; they climb a mountain in dicey weather
without proper gear, and freeze to death. They drown in the surf on
holiday because they can’t conceive the real power of what we blithely
call “the force of nature.” They have seen the ocean. But they haven’t
been in it.
The television generation expects nature to
act the way they want it to be. They think all life experiences can be
tivo-ed. The notion that the natural world obeys its own rules and
doesn’t give a damn about your expectations comes as a massive shock.
Well-to-do, educated people in an urban environment experience the
ability to fashion their daily lives as they wish. They buy clothes that
suit their taste, and decorate their apartments as they wish. Within
limits, they can contrive a daily urban world that pleases them.
But
the natural world is not so malleable. On the contrary, it will demand
that you adapt to it-and if you don’t, you die. It is a harsh, powerful,
and unforgiving world, that most urban westerners have never
experienced.
Many years ago I was trekking in the
Karakorum mountains of northern Pakistan, when my group came to a river
that we had to cross. It was a glacial river, freezing cold, and it was
running very fast, but it wasn’t deep—maybe three feet at most. My guide
set out ropes for people to hold as they crossed the river, and
everybody proceeded, one at a time, with extreme care. I asked the guide
what was the big deal about crossing a three-foot river. He said, well,
supposing you fell and suffered a compound fracture. We were now four
days trek from the last big town, where there was a radio. Even if the
guide went back double time to get help, it’d still be at least three
days before he could return with a helicopter. If a helicopter were
available at all. And in three days, I’d probably be dead from my
injuries. So that was why everybody was crossing carefully. Because out
in nature a little slip could be deadly.
But let’s
return to religion. If Eden is a fantasy that never existed, and mankind
wasn’t ever noble and kind and loving, if we didn’t fall from grace,
then what about the rest of the religious tenets? What about salvation,
sustainability, and judgment day? What about the coming environmental
doom from fossil fuels and global warming, if we all don’t get down on
our knees and conserve every day?
Well, it’s interesting. You may
have noticed that something has been left off the doomsday list, lately.
Although the preachers of environmentalism have been yelling about
population for fifty years, over the last decade world population seems
to be taking an unexpected turn. Fertility rates are falling almost
everywhere. As a result, over the course of my lifetime the thoughtful
predictions for total world population have gone from a high of 20
billion, to 15 billion, to 11 billion (which was the UN estimate around
1990) to now 9 billion, and soon, perhaps less.
There are some who think
that world population will peak in 2050 and then start to decline.
There are some who predict we will have fewer people in 2100 than we do
today. Is this a reason to rejoice, to say halleluiah? Certainly not.
Without a pause, we now hear about the coming crisis of world economy
from a shrinking population. We hear about the impending crisis of an
aging population. Nobody anywhere will say that the core fears expressed
for most of my life have turned out not to be true. As we have moved
into the future, these doomsday visions vanished, like a mirage in the
desert. They were never there—though they still appear, in the future.
As mirages do.
Okay, so, the preachers made a mistake.
They got one prediction wrong; they’re human. So what. Unfortunately,
it’s not just one prediction. It’s a whole slew of them. We are running
out of oil. We are running out of all natural resources. Paul Ehrlich:
60 million Americans will die of starvation in the 1980s. Forty thousand
species become extinct every year. Half of all species on the planet
will be extinct by 2000. And on and on and on.
With so
many past failures, you might think that environmental predictions would
become more cautious. But not if it’s a religion. Remember, the nut on
the sidewalk carrying the placard that predicts the end of the world
doesn’t quit when the world doesn’t end on the day he expects. He just
changes his placard, sets a new doomsday date, and goes back to walking
the streets. One of the defining features of religion is that your
beliefs are not troubled by facts, because they have nothing to do with
facts.
So I can tell you some facts. I know you haven’t
read any of what I am about to tell you in the newspaper, because
newspapers literally don’t report them. I can tell you that DDT is not a
carcinogen and did not cause birds to die and should never have been
banned. I can tell you that the people who banned it knew that it wasn’t
carcinogenic and banned it anyway. I can tell you that the DDT ban has
caused the deaths of tens of millions of poor people, mostly children,
whose deaths are directly attributable to a callous, technologically
advanced western society that promoted the new cause of environmentalism
by pushing a fantasy about a pesticide, and thus irrevocably harmed the
third world. Banning DDT is one of the most disgraceful episodes in the
twentieth century history of America. We knew better, and we did it
anyway, and we let people around the world die and didn’t give a damn.
I
can tell you that second hand smoke is not a health hazard to anyone
and never was, and the EPA has always known it. I can tell you that the
evidence for global warming is far weaker than its proponents would ever
admit. I can tell you the percentage the US land area that is taken by
urbanization, including cities and roads, is 5%. I can tell you that the
Sahara desert is shrinking, and the total ice of Antarctica is
increasing. I can tell you that a blue-ribbon panel in Science magazine
concluded that there is no known technology that will enable us to halt
the rise of carbon dioxide in the 21st century. Not wind, not solar, not
even nuclear. The panel concluded a totally new technology-like nuclear
fusion-was necessary, otherwise nothing could be done and in the
meantime all efforts would be a waste of time. They said that when the
UN IPCC reports stated alternative technologies existed that could
control greenhouse gases, the UN was wrong.
I can, with
a lot of time, give you the factual basis for these views, and I can
cite the appropriate journal articles not in whacko magazines, but in
the most prestigious science journals, such as Science and Nature. But
such references probably won’t impact more than a handful of you,
because the beliefs of a religion are not dependent on facts, but rather
are matters of faith. Unshakeable belief.
Most of us have had
some experience interacting with religious fundamentalists, and we
understand that one of the problems with fundamentalists is that they
have no perspective on themselves. They never recognize that their way
of thinking is just one of many other possible ways of thinking, which
may be equally useful or good. On the contrary, they believe their way
is the right way, everyone else is wrong; they are in the business of
salvation, and they want to help you to see things the right way. They
want to help you be saved. They are totally rigid and totally
uninterested in opposing points of view. In our modern complex world,
fundamentalism is dangerous because of its rigidity and its
imperviousness to other ideas.
I want to argue that it
is now time for us to make a major shift in our thinking about the
environment, similar to the shift that occurred around the first Earth
Day in 1970, when this awareness was first heightened. But this time
around, we need to get environmentalism out of the sphere of religion.
We need to stop the mythic fantasies, and we need to stop the doomsday
predictions. We need to start doing hard science instead.
There are two reasons why I think we all need to get rid of the religion of environmentalism.
First,
we need an environmental movement, and such a movement is not very
effective if it is conducted as a religion. We know from history that
religions tend to kill people, and environmentalism has already killed
somewhere between 10-30 million people since the 1970s. It’s not a good
record.
Environmentalism needs to be absolutely based in objective and
verifiable science, it needs to be rational, and it needs to be
flexible. And it needs to be apolitical. To mix environmental concerns
with the frantic fantasies that people have about one political party or
another is to miss the cold truth—that there is very little difference
between the parties, except a difference in pandering rhetoric. The
effort to promote effective legislation for the environment is not
helped by thinking that the Democrats will save us and the Republicans
won’t. Political history is more complicated than that. Never forget
which president started the EPA: Richard Nixon. And never forget which
president sold federal oil leases, allowing oil drilling in Santa
Barbara: Lyndon Johnson. So get politics out of your thinking about the
environment.
The second reason to abandon environmental
religion is more pressing. Religions think they know it all, but the
unhappy truth of the environment is that we are dealing with incredibly
complex, evolving systems, and we usually are not certain how best to
proceed. Those who are certain are demonstrating their personality type,
or their belief system, not the state of their knowledge. Our record in
the past, for example managing national parks, is humiliating. Our
fifty-year effort at forest-fire suppression is a well-intentioned
disaster from which our forests will never recover. We need to be
humble, deeply humble, in the face of what we are trying to accomplish.
We need to be trying various methods of accomplishing things. We need to
be open-minded about assessing results of our efforts, and we need to
be flexible about balancing needs. Religions are good at none of these
things.
How will we manage to get environmentalism out
of the clutches of religion, and back to a scientific discipline?
There’s a simple answer: we must institute far more stringent
requirements for what constitutes knowledge in the environmental realm. I
am thoroughly sick of politicized so-called facts that simply aren’t
true. It isn’t that these “facts” are exaggerations of an underlying
truth. Nor is it that certain organizations are spinning their case to
present it in the strongest way. Not at all—what more and more groups
are doing is putting out is lies, pure and simple. Falsehoods that they
know to be false.
This trend began with the DDT
campaign, and it persists to this day. At this moment, the EPA is
hopelessly politicized. In the wake of Carol Browner, it is probably
better to shut it down and start over. What we need is a new
organization much closer to the FDA. We need an organization that will
be ruthless about acquiring verifiable results, that will fund identical
research projects to more than one group, and that will make everybody
in this field get honest fast.
Because in the end,
science offers us the only way out of politics. And if we allow science
to become politicized, then we are lost. We will enter the Internet
version of the dark ages, an era of shifting fears and wild prejudices,
transmitted to people who don’t know any better. That’s not a good
future for the human race. That’s our past. So it’s time to abandon the
religion of environmentalism, and return to the science of
environmentalism, and base our public policy decisions firmly on that.
Thank you very much.
A bizarre incident at Union Theological Seminary illustrates why many Christians believe that internal forces, not external ones, represent the greatest threat to the church.
Students at this seminary prayed to a collection of plants in its chapel, which triggered a raft of criticism on Twitter. The school defiantly defended its action in a series of tweets.
"Today in chapel, we confessed to plants," the school tweeted. "Together, we held our grief, joy, regret, hope, guilt and sorrow in prayer; offering them to the beings who sustain us but whose gift we too often fail to honor. What do you confess to the plants in your life?"
Some Twitter respondents observed that the seminary and its students have lost their minds, but I think it's worse than that. Insanity might mitigate this sacrilege, but deliberately perverting theology is another matter.........To Read More....
Everyone wants the cleanest possible environment. But there are competing problems to solve and scientific issues to resolve. Climate Change Reconsidered II: Fossil Fuels(CCRII-Fossil Fuels), a 780-page report issued last year by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), looked at the variables that should be considered in the development of effective environmental protection programs. In this article, with permission of the editors and the publisher of CCRII-Fossil Fuels, The Heartland Institute, we demonstrate how complex a seemingly simple problem can be.
As a family, a town, a state or a nation, all decisions to spend economic resources (money) must be considered in conjunction with all reasonable alternatives to where the money could be used more beneficially. CCRII-Fossil Fuels explains:
“The most valuable concept economists bring is opportunity cost, the value of something that must be given up to acquire or achieve something else. Every choice has a corresponding opportunity cost. By revealing those costs, economics can help policymakers discover cost-effective responses to environmental problems, including climate change (Block, 1990; Markandya and Richardson, 1992; Libecap and Steckel, 2011).”
Those who are convinced global warming will destroy life as we know it are willing to spend anything to stop it, while those who believe it to be a non-problem do not want to spend any money on it at all. With over $1 billion spent every day on ‘climate finance’ across the world, it is clear that the alarmists have been winning so far.
The market plays a huge role in determining the actual costs of what either side wishes to be done. In the case of countering man-caused global warming, were it to exist, carbon dioxide (CO2) sequestration (i.e., capture and storage) is a major activity alarmists want governments and industry to commit to. But the public only hear it referred to as ‘carbon sequestration,’ which encourages people to think we are eliminating coal dust, lamp black, and the like, while in fact it is getting rid of life-supporting CO2.
The sequestration of CO2 carries exorbitant costs that has never been affordable, though you may hear Exxon Mobile touting it daily in radio and TV ads to show they are a ‘green company.’ That is apparently a form of ‘virtue signaling,’ which Dictionary.com defines as “the sharing of one’s point of view on a social or political issue, often on social media, in order to garner praise or acknowledgment of one’s righteousness from others who share that point of view, or to passively rebuke those who do not.” In Exxon’s case, it seems to be a cover for the fact that their primary business is the production of fossil fuels. And make no mistake about it, enforced ‘carbon sequestration’ would increase the cost of all fossil fuels, especially inexpensive coal-fired electricity. Indeed, ‘carbon sequestration’ is really a synonym for ‘no coal at all.’
The single most overlooked aspect of environmental economics is the unintended consequences of the actions we take. In our homes, there are likely few such consequences, but in towns, states, and countries operating through regulations there are always unintended consequences, most of which are not positive. Predicting how people and markets will react to new environmental laws is as difficult as forecasting the stock market for the very same reasons—there are too many variables and no one can accurately predict the response of the human mind to changes in circumstances.
Regardless, regulations often fail to achieve their objectives due to conflicting incentives of individuals and government and the lack of reliable local knowledge. Outlawing both plastic straws in California and the sale of sugared beverages larger than 16 oz. in New York City are cases in point. Government bureaucracies predictably fall victim to what is called ‘regulatory capture’ by special interests benefitting from a regulation, much of which is referred to as ‘rent seeking’ by economists.
Government’s ability to promote the goals of some citizens at the expense of others leads to resources being diverted from asset production into political action. Many argue that the real goal of today’s environmentalism is actually worldwide socialism.
Another huge worry regarding excessive government environmental regulations are policies that erode the protection of property rights, thereby reducing the incentive and sometimes the ability of owners to protect and conserve their own resources. Paradoxically, this results in a reduction in the ability to protect resources economically.
Mistakes made when the free market controls the protection of the environment on a cost basis tend to be small and quickly self-correcting. Mistakes made by governments tend to be immense and frequently have long term deleterious impacts.
The government protection of property rights always wins the day for environmental protection. It is a fact that enables the United States to be superior in environmental protection to other nations, as our property rights are ingrained in our Constitution. We are one of the few nations in which the ownership of land grants ownership to the minerals beneath that land. This is quite different to countries such as Australia and most EU and Latin American countries where mineral rights are exclusively state-owned.
Unfortunately, the public rarely studies the details involved in what they may generally see as “anything to protect the environment must be good.” They have little incentive, therefore, to become knowledgeable about the details of public policy issues. Economists call this Rational Ignorance. It has resulted in governments enabling a great deal of legislation that has done little for the environment while impeding economic progress for the nation. It is these unproductive regulations which President Donald Trump and EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler are attempting to undue for the public benefit without endangering the environment.
This is far more important that most people realize. CCR-II-Fossil Fuels shows “how prosperity makes environmental protection a higher public goal and provides the resources needed to achieve it.”The report explains:
“Once basic demands for food, clothing, and shelter are met, people demand cleaner air, cleaner streams, more outdoor recreation, and the protection of wild lands. With higher incomes, citizens place higher priorities on environmental objectives.”
CCR-II-Fossil Fuels details Environmental Kuznets Curves (EKCs), which demonstrate how environmental degradation rises with national per-capita income until a certain critical point is reached, after which the environment starts to improve.
CCR-II-Fossil Fuels cites Grossman and Krueger (1995) who:
“conducted an extensive literature review of air quality over time and around the world and found ambient air quality tended to deteriorate until average per-capita income reached about $6,000 to $8,000 per year (in 1985 dollars) and then began to sharply improve. Later research confirmed similar relationships for a wide range of countries and air quality, water quality, and other measures of environmental protection.”
Before EKCs were created, many informed people believed that wealthier countries damaged their environment more than poorer ones. The solution was to de-industrialization and reduce incomes, they maintained. But we now know that, while factors such as levels of educational achievement, income equality, and the strength of democratic institutions play a role, environmental protection is strongly linked with prosperity.
Indeed, the record shows throughout the world that environmental protection increases and thrives in the strongest economies. Anything that damages prosperity will concurrently damage the environment. Trump was completely correct when he said inhis official 2019 Earth Day statement:
“Environmental protection and economic prosperity go hand in hand. A strong market economy is essential to protecting our critical natural resources and fostering a legacy of conservation.“
About Dr. Jay Lehr & Tom Harris
Dr. Jay Lehr is Senior Policy Analyst with the International Climate Science Coalition and former Science Director of The Heartland Institute. He is an internationally renowned scientist, author and speaker who has testified before Congress on dozens of occasions on environmental issues and consulted with nearly every agency of the national government, as well as many foreign countries. After graduating from Princeton University at the age of 20 with a degree in Geological Engineering, he went on to receive the nation’s first Ph.D. in Groundwater Hydrology from the University of Arizona. He later became executive director of the National Association of Groundwater Scientists and Engineers. Tom Harris is Executive Director of the Ottawa, Canada-based International Climate Science Coalition. He has 40 years experience as a mechanical engineer/project manager, science and technology communications professional, technical trainer and S&T advisor to a former Opposition Senior Environment Critic in Canada’s Parliament. He is currently a policy advisor to The Heartland Institute.
By Alan Caruba (This article first appeared in Alan's blog, Warning Signs,here! and in 2010 in Paradigms and Demographics)
The gates of Auschwitz, an infamous Nazi concentration camp
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 ) (You may wish to follow the link to a review of this book at the end of this article. RK ). 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.
Comments will not be accepted that are rude, crude, stupid or smarmy. Nor will I allow ad hominem attacks or comments from anyone who is "Anonymous”, even if they are positive!
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…what is needed for better husbandry of ecological resources is more widespread and deeper establishment of property rights together with their enforcement. The cause of environmentalism is often associated with the Left. This is despite the fact that some of the worst environmental outcomes in the history of our planet have been associated with Communist governments. …a great deal of serious work has been produced by those who believe in market or community-based solutions to environmental problems, and a relatively small role for government. For example, Ronald Coase and Elinor Ostrom are two Nobel Prize winners in economics who have made profound contributions to our understanding of how markets and communities can promote environmental conservation. Indeed, the intellectual and moral high ground when it comes to environmentalism ought to be taken by those who believe in private property, strong community institutions and a free economy.
Philip explains why private ownership produces conservation.
If things are owned, they will tend to be looked after. The owner of a lake will not fish it to near extinction (or even over-fish the lake to a small degree) because the breeding potential of the fish would be reduced.
He then explains the downside of public ownership.
On the other hand, if the lake is not owned by anybody, or if it is owned by the government and fishing is unregulated, the lake will be fished to extinction because nobody has any benefit from holding back. Local businesses may well also pollute the lake if there are no well-defined ownership rights. The much-cited work here is Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons (1968), though, in fact, Hardin was simply referring back to a pamphlet by William Forster Lloyd which was written in 1833. In that pamphlet, a situation was described whereby common land was open to grazing by all. The land would then be over-grazed because a person would get the benefit of putting additional cattle on the land without the cost that arises from over-grazing which would be shared by all users.
He points out that one advantage of Brexit is that the U.K. can implement a fisheries system based on property rights.
Now that fishing policy has been repatriated, the UK should establish property rights in sea fisheries. Few would seriously question private property when it comes to the land. For example, it is rare these days to find people who would suggest that farms should be nationalised or collectivised or returned to an unregulated commons where anybody can graze their animals without restriction. It would be understood that this would lead to chaos, inefficiency and environmental catastrophe.
And since we have real-world evidence that fisheries based on property rights are very successful, hopefully the U.K. government will implement this reform.
So what’s the bottom line on capitalism and the environment?
If we want sustainable environmental outcomes, the answer almost never lies with government control, but with the establishment and enforcement of property rights over environmental resources. This provides the incentive to nurture and conserve. Where the government does intervene it should try to mimic markets. When it comes to the environment, misguided government intervention can lead to conflict and poor environmental outcomes. The best thing the government can do is put its own house in order and ensure that property rights are enforced through proper policing and courts systems. That is certainly the experience of forested areas in South America.
Let’s close by noting one other reason to give the market a bigger role. Simply stated, environmentalists seem to have no sense of cost-benefit analysis. Instead, we get bizarre policies that seem motivated primarily by virtue signalling.
It’s like formulating public safety policies using models based on dinosaur DNA from amber
Paul Driessen (Editor's Note: Emphasis added by me. RK)
Things are never quiet on the climate front.
After calling dangerous manmade climate change a hoax and vowing to withdraw the USA from the Paris agreement, President Trump has apparently removed language criticizing the Paris deal from a pending executive order initiating a rollback of anti-fossil-fuel regulations, to help jumpstart job creation.
Meanwhile, EPA Administration Scott Pruitt says he expects quick action to rescind the Clean Power Plan, a central component of the Obama Era’s war on coal and hydrocarbons. The US House Committee on Science, Space and Technology is reopening its investigation into NOAA’s mishandling or tampering with global temperature data, for a report designed to promote action in Paris in 2015.
Hundreds of scientists signed a letter urging President Trump to withdraw from the UN climate agency. They warn that efforts to curtail carbon dioxide emissions are not scientifically justified and will kill jobs and exacerbate US and international poverty without improving the environment or stabilizing climate.
Hundreds of other scientists told Mr. Trump he must not waver on climate stabilization efforts or make any moves to defund government or university climate research. Hundreds of businessmen and investors told the President failure to build a low-carbon economy puts American prosperity at risk.
Over in Britain, Members of Parliament say efforts to build a low-carbon economy have led to a 58% rise in electricity prices since 2006, sending manufacturing and jobs overseas, to countries that are under no obligation to reduce fossil fuel use or CO2 emissions. MPs are also angry that carefully hidden “green subsidies” will account for nearly one-fourth of sky-high residential electricity bills by 2020.
All of this is a valuable reminder that the Climate Crisis & Renewable Energy Industry is now a $1.5-trillion-a-year business!And that’s just for its private sector components, the corporate rent-seekers.
This monstrous price tag does not include the Big Green environmentalism industry, the salaries and pensions of armies of federal, state, local, foreign country and UN bureaucrats who create and coordinate climate and renewable energy programs, or the far higher electricity and motor fuel costs that businesses and families must pay, to cover the costs of “saving people and planet from climate ravages.”
Earth’s climate is likely changing somewhere, as it has throughout planetary and human history. Our fuel use and countless other human activities may play a role, at least locally – but their role is dwarfed to near irrelevance by powerful solar, oceanic, cosmic ray and other natural forces.
Moreover, real-world ice, sea level, temperature, hurricane, drought and other observations show nothing outside historic fluctuations. Unprecedented disasters exist only in the realm of hypotheses, press releases and computer models.
So there is no reason to cede control over our livelihoods and living standards to politicians, activists and bureaucrats; replace reliable, affordable fossil fuel energy with expensive, unreliable renewables; destroy millions of jobs in the process; and tell billions of impoverished people they must be content with solar ovens, solar panels, wind turbines, and health, nutrition and living standards little better than today’s.
There is no reason to honor the document that President Obama unilaterally signed in Paris. As Dr. Steve Allen observed in a masterful analysis: “The decisive action promised in the treaty that is not a treaty consists of governments, most of them run by dictators and thieves, promising, on an honor system, to take steps of their own choosing, to change future weather patterns, and then coming up with ways by which they can measure their own progress and hold themselves accountable by their own standards for the promises they have made, on penalty of no punishment if they break their word.”
Mainly, Allen continues, the Paris con is about “taking money from taxpayers and consumers and businesspeople and electricity ratepayers, and giving it to crony capitalists; and taking money from people in relatively successful countries and giving it to rich people in poor countries, to benefit governing elites.”
India alone wants hundreds of billions of dollars in climate “adaptation and reparation” money from industrialized nations that are supposed to slash their fossil fuel use, CO2 emissions and economic growth, while pouring trillions into the Green Climate Fund. Meanwhile, India, China and other rapidly developing nations are firing up hundreds of coal-fueled power plants, burning more oil and gas, and emitting more CO2, to industrialize their countries and lift their people out of abject poverty – as well they should.
So just follow the money – and power-grabbing. That is the real source of the religious fervor, the Catechism of Climate Cataclysm, behind the vehement denunciations of President Trump for having the gall to threaten the global high priests who drive and profit from climate change fear mongering.
Those forces are desperate and determined to keep their power and money train on track. They’re ramping up indignation and cranking out “research” to justify their demands. For example:
Expert Market (whose core expertise is helping companies compare prices for postage meters, coffee machines and other B2B products) has just released a study purporting to show which US states will suffer most “from Trump’s climate change denial” and America’s “climate change inaction.”
The total cost will be $506 billion by 2050, just for hurricane and other real estate damages, extra energy costs, and more frequent and severe droughts. “Vermont emerged as the state worst equipped to handle the cost,” the study contends, while Montana, Wyoming and the Dakotas are also “severely at risk.” California and New York are among those best able to endure the imminent chaos.
It sounds horrific – and it’s intended to be, the better to pressure the White House and Congress to codify and enforce the nonbinding provisions of the Paris non-treaty, and retain Obama-era anti-hydrocarbon energy policies. But the entire exercise is a classic example of Garbage In/Garbage Out (GIGO) black box computer modeling, carefully crafted to ensure the justifications required for a predetermined political outcome, especially the monumental “nationwide green initiatives” that Expert Market supports.
Thus, carbon dioxide will drive rapidly rising global temperatures that will warm the planet enough to increase sea surface temperatures dramatically – spawning more frequent, more damaging hurricanes, and melting polar ice caps enough to raise sea levels 23 inches by 2050, the Expert Market experts assert.
Global warming measured in hundredths of a degree over the past 19 years will suddenly be replaced by runaway heat waves. Seas now rising at 7 inches per century will suddenly climb at ten times that rate over the next three decades, sending storm surges far inland. Major US land-falling hurricanes that have been absent now for eleven years will suddenly proliferate to unprecedented levels.
How Vermont and the other top-five “worst equipped” states – all of them inland – will be affected by any of this is anyone’s guess. But the model says they’re at risk, so we must take drastic action now.
Soaring temperatures will increase demand for air conditioning, and thus raise household energy costs, says Expert Market. CA, NY and other “green” state electricity costs are already twice as high as those in coal and gas-reliant states. Imposing wind and solar initiatives on fossil fuel states would likely double their family and business energy costs, but that factor is not included in its calculations.
Droughts “will become more frequent and severe” in states already afflicted by arid conditions – assuming all the dire CO2 depredations, and ignoring both those states’ long experience with drought cycles and how California’s years-long drought has once again given way to abundant rainfall.
The Expert Market study is symptomatic of the politicized assumptions and data manipulation that have driven climate models and disaster scenarios since the IPCC began studying manmade climate chaos.
Indeed, the entire climate chaos exercise is akin to basing public safety policies on computer models that assume dinosaur DNA extracted from fossilized amber will soon result in hordes of T rexes running rampant across our land. We deserve a more honest, rational basis for policies that govern our lives.
Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death.
Environmental groups have declared war against Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, Donald Trump’s nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency. Don’t be surprised if Mr. Pruitt’s nomination hearing this week degenerates into a three-ring circus of obnoxious and disruptive Big Green antics, the new M.O. of the left these days.
Pruitt’s nomination and the case brought against him by the Sierra Club and others have little to do with Mr. Pruitt — whose qualifications for the job having served as two state attorney general in Oklahoma are virtually unchallengeable. What is going on here is the clashing of two opposite philosophies of left and right on how best to safeguard our air and water and our federal lands and what the greens now call “the climate.”
The green belief is that the future of the planet depends on halting all economic projects if they pose the slightest risk to the environment. This zero tolerance lunacy doesn’t balance the economy and ecology, but subjugates jobs and development to environmental purity.
We have seen this position in the extreme in recent years with green groups opposing all fossil fuel development in America under the “leave it in the ground” campaign. That is, no drilling, no mining, no oil or gas development — and certainly no coal. This strategy has already put tens of thousands of American coal miners out of jobs (even as China and India build new coal plants every week) and would put nearly 10 million Americans in oil and gas and related occupations out of jobs.
To the climate change lobby, this is a small price to pay. Once upon a time the left touted no net loss of jobs due to “green jobs,” but those have proven to be a fantasy and it turns out the solar panels are mostly made in China. A lot of good that does the out of work coal miners in West Virginia and Wyoming.
Mr. Pruitt represents a different mindset. He tells me that good environmental policy “can mean a cleaner environment with increased, not reduced economic production.” In other words, a win-win for nature and workers. It may seem pie in the sky, but it’s worked in Oklahoma where oil and gas production surged over the last decade while emissions of pollutants in the Sooner State fell. Pruitt was the attorney general when all of this happened. Yet he is tagged as pro-industry and anti-environment.
Oklahoma was no aberration. Another big energy producing state also doubled oil and gas output while cleaning up the air — with reductions in carbon monoxide, sulfur, lead and other pollutants.
Mr. Pruitt is being used by the radical greens as a piñata. The New York Times says he is unqualified because he dares question the science on global warming. He has thousands of scientists on his side. Big Green wants to derail his nomination not because he is a threat to the environment but because his philosophy is anathema to theirs. They will insist that the head of the EPA must subscribe to their religion on climate change while opposing all fossil fuel production and all development of our tens of millions of acres of federal lands.
That has been the case for eight years with EPA rules becoming a crushing burden on American small businesses and manufacturers. The EPA is now one of America’s leading job killers. It exports jobs to China, India, and Mexico where environmental protections are much worse and carbon emissions are much higher.
Pruitt wants a pro-jobs, pro-environment EPA. The left doesn’t. He wants states to have more control of their resources. The left doesn’t. Mr. Pruitt could be the best head of EPA ever, proving that free markets can lead to a safer environment. That’s what really terrifies the left
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Voters turned thumbs down on the climate change lobby and rightly so
By Stephen Moore Sunday, January 1, 2017 @ The Washington Times
The day after the presidential elections the executive director of the Sierra Club glumly called the Donald Trump victory “deeply disturbing for the nation and the planet.” Well, yes, if you’re a climate change alarmist who hates fossil fuels, you’re in for a bad four and maybe eight years.
Greenpeace executive director Annie Leonard was even more apocalyptic saying: “I never thought I’d have to write this. The election of Donald Trump as president has been devastating There’s no question, Donald Trump’s climate denial is staggering. He wants to shut down the EPA, cancel the Paris Climate Agreement, stop funding clean energy research and drill baby drill.” Ah, but if this is so crazy, why did he win?
The short answer is that Americans went to the polls and rejected environmental extremism among other things. The biggest loser on election night was the Big Green movement in America dedicated to the anti-prosperity proposition that to save the planet from extinction we have deindustrialize the U.S. and throw millions and millions of our fellow citizens out of their jobs. Voters turned thumbs down on the climate change lobby and rightly so.
It may seem an exaggeration to say that the radical leftist green groups want to throw working class Americans out of their jobs — but it isn’t. They openly admit it.
The Sierra Club actually declared “victory” last year when it helped push several of America’s leading coal production companies into bankruptcy. Sierra Club spokeswoman, Lena Moffit, took credit for destroying coal production in America, but she neglected to mention the tens of thousands of miners, truckers, construction workers, and other blue collar workers who lost their jobs due to the Sierra Club campaign. What humanitarians these people are.
Ms. Moffit promised that the Sierra Club will “bring the same expertise that we brought to taking down the coal industry and coal-fired power in this country to taking on gas in the same way to ensure that we’re moving to a 100% clean energy future.”.
Wait a minute. There are an estimated 10 million Americans who are directly or indirectly employed by the oil and gas and coal industries. The left wants to put every one of these people out of a job?
Will they use Stalinistic worker relocation programs to pull this off? And by the way, someone might want to inform these self-proclaimed scientific geniuses that natural gas is clean energy.
Fortunately, we learned on election day that voters aren’t as alarmed as the alarmists are. Almost none of the voters that I met in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Indiana, or Michigan had anything but contempt for the climate change fanatics. They view this as another attempt by Washington to run their lives and completely ignore their economic plight in favor of grandiose dreams of the government somehow changing the weather.
In so many ways climate change was one of the primary issues that allowed Donald Trump to crash through the blue wall of the industrial Midwest. The Democrats’ preposterous opposition to building the Keystone XL pipeline which could create as many as 10,000 high-paying construction, welding, pipefitting, electrician jobs is emblematic of how the party that is supposed to represent union workers turned their backs on their own members and their families.
The Paris climate change treaty puts America last and forces us to stop using cheap, reliable and abundant domestic fossil fuels while the rest of the world — particularly China and India — are all in on coal. Nobody in Washington seemed to notice that as The Wall Street Journal reported last month: “China’s government will raise coal production by as much as 20% by 2020, ensuring a continuing strong role for the commodity in the country’s energy future.” That’s more than the entire energy usage of Canada in a year. Um, does this sound like a country that has any interest in cutting its carbon emissions? Amazing that the truck drivers in Indiana, and the coal workers in West Virginia, and the steel producers in Ohio get that the rest of the world is laughing at us, and the president of the United States doesn’t.
The surprise of this election is that Democrats were surprised by the mass voter rejection of the radical climate change agenda. Every poll for the last five years at least has shown that climate change barely registers as a leading concern of American voters. Jobs and the economy were always issues number one and two, and global warming was usually close to last on the list. A 2015 Fox News poll found that only 3 percent of Americans believed that climate change was “the most important issue facing America today.” That means 97 percent disagreed with Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Bernard Sanders and Tom Steyer that global warming was the greatest threat to America. This didn’t stop Hillary Clinton from telling West Virginians that she would put every coal miner out of a job. Then she wonders why she got crushed in this unionized historically reliable Democratic state.
The issue that now confronts Democrats is whether they can reconnect with blue collar union voters by disassociating themselves from the fanatical greens that are trying to destroy union blue collar jobs. It won’t be easy. Environmental groups are said to be raising record hauls of cash from their millionaire and billionaire donors since the election. Ultra-green environmentalists like Tom Steyer may call the party’s tunes, but then don’t be surprised when millions of blue collar middle-class workers flee to the Republicans.
Something has to give in the Democratic Party. My prediction is that Democrats will only make a comeback in American politics when they throw crazies like Tom Steyer, the Sierra Club, and Greenpeace off the bus and start listening to the everyday concerns of working-class Americans again.
The day after the presidential elections the executive director of the Sierra Club glumly called the Donald Trump victory “deeply disturbing for the nation and the planet.” Well, yes, if you’re a climate change alarmist who hates fossil fuels, you’re in for a bad four and maybe eight years.
Greenpeace executive director Annie Leonard was even more apocalyptic saying: “I never thought I’d have to write this. The election of Donald Trump as president has been devastating There’s no question, Donald Trump’s climate denial is staggering. He wants to shut down the EPA, cancel the Paris Climate Agreement, stop funding clean energy research and drill baby drill.” Ah, but if this is so crazy, why did he win?
The short answer is that Americans went to the polls and rejected environmental extremism among other things. The biggest loser on election night was the Big Green movement in America dedicated to the anti-prosperity proposition that to save the planet from extinction we have deindustrialize the U.S. and throw millions and millions of our fellow citizens out of their jobs. Voters turned thumbs down on the climate change lobby and rightly so.
It may seem an exaggeration to say that the radical leftist green groups want to throw working class Americans out of their jobs — but it isn’t. They openly admit it.
The Sierra Club actually declared “victory” last year when it helped push several of America’s leading coal production companies into bankruptcy. Sierra Club spokeswoman, Lena Moffit, took credit for destroying coal production in America, but she neglected to mention the tens of thousands of miners, truckers, construction workers, and other blue collar workers who lost their jobs due to the Sierra Club campaign. What humanitarians these people are.
Ms. Moffit promised that the Sierra Club will “bring the same expertise that we brought to taking down the coal industry and coal-fired power in this country to taking on gas in the same way to ensure that we’re moving to a 100% clean energy future.”.
• Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a Fox news contributor.
Dr. Susan Crockford (email: scrock@uvic.ca) has written a well-informed and approachable book about polar bears. She has no time for the usual Warmist scare about the bears being "endangered". The book has only just been released but the Warmists are already on the case. A review by someone called "Eli" on Amazon reads:
"Caveat emptor: the author's vague self-description as "a professional zoologist who has studied polar bear ecology and evolution for more than 20 years" appears intended to mask the facts that her PhD and professional work are in the field of canine archaeology, and that she has no formal training or expertise in polar bear science. Up to you to decide whether she's the best source of information for you and your kids on polar bear facts and myths."
I would love to know who Eli is. I want to ask him whether tobacco-grower Al Gore's speeches about global warming should be disregarded because Al's qualifications are in divinity and social science.
