Make no mistake, the nature worshiping Druids
of ancient times would have been totally comfortable with the greenies
of today. The "modern" green movement has it's roots in the ancient
pagan Druidic nature worship originating in the dark forests of ancient
Germania. Embraced by 19th century German philosophers and codified into law by Nazi Germany.
Irrational, misanthropic and morally defective, the five
pillars of modern environmentalismare junk science, regulatory abuse, secular neo-paganism, insanity, and human sacrifice.
So, when I came upon an old article entitled, Global Warming must be true, Charles Manson believes in it ,
my first thought was......Manson was a greenie? Whodda thunk it?
Well, maybe that's not as strange as it seems since the greenies and
Manson have a common bond. Irrational, misanthropic and morally
defective.
Here are some of his thoughts:
'Everyone’s God and if we don’t wake up to that there’s going to be
no weather because our polar caps are melting because we’re doing bad
things to the atmosphere. ‘If we don’t change that as rapidly as I’m
speaking to you now, if we don’t put the green back on the planet and
put the trees back that we’ve butchered, if we don’t go to war against
the problem...'….On the environment, Manson said: 'Sooner or later the
will of God will prevail over all of you. And I was condemned as the
will of God.' 'We are all martyrs. Love is a martyr... I am a martyr.
But I am also a victim. And I'm a performer……I'm both. I am everything. I
am nothing.'
Yup…. he’s qualified…..he’s a greenie. Crazy as a loon and vicious as a viper!
Much of what you see being touted by animal rights and green activists
was first put into practice on a national level by the first green
government, Nazi Germany. Like the Nazi's, the greenies love the
world, its people they hate.
When I read comments from “normal” people who "know" that global warming
is "real", even after all that has come out demonstrating all the junk
science and political chicanery behind it, I wonder at which Temple of
the Church of the Warming Globe do they worship, and is smoking funny
cigarettes part of the worship service conducted by the High Priest, Al
Gore?
Do I believe in global warming? Yes, and I believe in global cooling
also. Why? Because we have more than enough historical data to show that
the Earth has warmed and cooled often in its history. That record also
shows huge swings in temperature, and mankind didn't have a thing to do
with any of it. And that's the issue. Not whether or not it's happening
or not happening, that's actually immaterial to the issue. The issue is whether or not mankind is responsible. We're
not!
What about the disasters they're predicting for today?
Did any of the disasters they're predicting for our modern times occur
when the temperatures during the Medieval Warming period, and the Roman
Warming Period, where temperatures were substantially higher than they are now?
There is
absolutely nothing in the historical record, nor any physical evidence, to show
the warming doom they're predicting for today ever happened then! Then why should we believe they will occur now?
We shouldn't!
In fact, during those warming periods mankind was
better off. It's the cold periods like the Little Ice Age which lasted
from 1300 to 1850 that killed people. And mankind is in no way
responsible for those periods either.
So, what's the "normal" temperature for the Earth supposed to be? No
one can say. No one has come forward with that temperature because
there is no standard, nor is there any science to prove what should be
"normal" for the Earth. However, for argument's sake, if we arbitrarily
decide to make the Medieval Warming Period the standard for normal,
we've yet to recover from the Little Ice Age. And not only has the
warming stopped, over 25 years ago now, there's concern we may be
heading into another Solar Minimum
, where temperatures will start dropping.
As for
Ocean Acidification
- that's just more horsepucky to push an agenda of global governance.
If it isn’t CO2, it will be ocean acidification. If it isn’t that it
will be some other high sounding complicated claim that will be as
equally un-provable as all the other horsepucky they have spewed out
over the decades.
This issue is singular. Does mankind have the ability to control the
weather, let alone the climate, in any meaningful way? The answer is no!
So why should we believe that the minute amount of CO2 mankind puts
into the atmosphere will alter the climate, especially since we know
from the data that the amount of CO2 has fluctuated dramatically over
the eons. And data also shows that the CO2 increases did not precede the
warming periods, it followed them.
But hey! Charles Manson believed in global warming, right along with King Charles
who talks to plants to make them grow better, and his father, Prince
Phillip, who hoped after he died, and if he was reincarnated, he "would
wish to be returned to earth as a killer virus to lower human population
levels."
Definition leads to clarity, and that sure makes all it all clear to me. They're all nuts.
Editor's Note: While this article is almost two years old, it is in point of fact timeless. Definition leads to clarity, and we need to understand all this misery being caused by the Biden administration in the name of global warming is in fact foundationally nature worshiping paganism in origin, thought and intent. Once we understand that, everything else becomes clear.
Many zealous greens are strongly imbued with pagan values.
Paganism is generally defined as polytheism mixed in with nature
worship. Primitive pagans frequently cowered before the forces of
nature, fatalistically resigned to being at nature’s mercy, believing
that progress was not only impossible, but a criminal offense against
nature. So complete was their submission to nature, and so foreign to
them was the idea that individual lives have value, that pagan societies
often practiced human sacrifice to appease the gods of nature,
particularly the sun god (e.g., the Aztecs).
Let’s forget about polytheism for now. What’s more important are the
attitudes toward nature and human life. In the modern scientific era,
many people – whether prompted by theistic or humanistic beliefs and
values – reject the pagan beliefs that humankind should submit to nature
and that individual human lives deserves protection. However, many
other people, particularly hardcore greens, reject those principles and
replicate primitive paganism by exalting nature and devaluing human
life.
Pagan greens insist that we cling to dependence on natural, “clean,
renewable” sources of energy, namely, from the wind and sun. Try as they
might, though, they can’t coax consistency and reliability out of those
fickle natural sources. Nor are wind and solar energy really clean or
renewable, since they depend on massive consumption of many
“nonrenewable” resources, some of them highly polluting. (They also kill
more wildlife than fossil fuels do, but that’s another story.)
Of particular concern are the sometimes rabidly anti-human beliefs of
green pagans. They have variously labelled the human race “a virus,” “a
disease” “vermin,” “a cancer.” The hatred for humanity is palpable.
Here is more: “The extinction of the human species may not only be
inevitable but a good thing”; “Human beings, as a species, have no more
value than slugs”; “Man is no more important than any other species.”
Like some primitive pagan societies, groveling in fear before the
forces of nature, pagan greens believe that some individuals need to be
sacrificed for life to go on. Thus, the founder of the Environmental
Defense Fund, favored banning DDT because the ban would, “get rid of
some of them” (in Ebenezer Scrooge’s words, “decrease the surplus
population”) via insect-borne malaria and insect-caused crop
destruction. Indeed, the human death toll from banning rather than
moderating the use of DDT has exceeded the death toll from communism,
making environmentalism the most lethal leftist ideology in history.
That shouldn’t be surprising, for communists at least paid lip service
(however dishonestly) to “the good of the people,” while pagan greens
regard human life as no better than a pestilential germ.
The anti-human animus of pagan greens even gave rise to a pejorative
term: “speciesism” – i.e., the belief that humans are superior to other
species. Well, in pagan green cosmology, humans may not be superior to
other species, but in the real world, we are. Forget about us being at
the top of the food chain. Think moon-landings, movie magic, Mozart and
McCartney. Humans are unique. Every other species pursues its
self-interest without a thought for the long-term survival of other
species. Only humans have enough foresight to take deliberate steps to
try to conserve other species. Only humans could feel regret and grieve
if a beloved species goes extinct. Only humans are clever enough to
discover or invent 57 different genders. Sorry, animal kingdom, but it’s
no contest – humans are superior.
The contrary belief to speciesism is that all species are equal. That
belief can be harmful to humans. About 30 years ago, the Environmental
Protection Agency blocked the cleanup of sewage in the Tijuana River
Basin on the grounds that the cleanup would endanger the survival of the
life forms that dwelled in that toxic (to humans) brew. Yes, federal
bureaucrats placed the survival of various bacteria above the health of
human beings. That’s pagan!
Another manifestation of anti-human green paganism is their
preference for anti-growth agendas. The deadliest environment for a
human being is poverty, yet greens work to thwart economic development
in developing countries by trying to deny them access to the very fossil
fuels that enabled the people in developed countries to climb out of
poverty and live thriving, healthy lives. You can read details of these
tragic and genocidal policies in Paul Driessen’s superb book, Eco-Imperialism.
We need an environmentalism as if people mattered. (As a counterpoise
to Friends of the Earth, we could use an environmental advocacy group
called “Friends of people who live on Earth.)
Green icon Paul Ehrlich once asserted, “Economic growth is not the
solution it’s the problem.” He is 180 degrees off-target. Growth is the solution. If it
were true that the more economic development there is, the more
polluted our environment would be, then our goose would be cooked. We
could conceivably get so prosperous that we’d pollute ourselves to
death. But the world doesn’t work that way.
Instead, there is a well-known pattern known as the Kuznets curve
(named after the late economist Simon Kuznets who explained the
pattern). What happens is that when societies begin to develop and climb
out of poverty, pollution rises. But once development gets to the point
where basic needs are met and discretionary income rises, people are
willing and able to spend money on both pollution remediation and
pollution prevention. Consequently, affluent (developed) societies are
less polluted than developing societies.
Contemporary green paganism is an atavistic, anti-life fetish.
Cloaked in mystical ignorance and wildly misanthropic, contemporary
green pagans are as much of a threat to their fellow humans as their
primitive forbears ever were.
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.
Many zealous greens are strongly imbued with pagan values.
Paganism is generally defined as polytheism mixed in with nature
worship. Primitive pagans frequently cowered before the forces of
nature, fatalistically resigned to being at nature’s mercy, believing
that progress was not only impossible, but a criminal offense against
nature. So complete was their submission to nature, and so foreign to
them was the idea that individual lives have value, that pagan societies
often practiced human sacrifice to appease the gods of nature,
particularly the sun god (e.g., the Aztecs).
Let’s forget about polytheism for now. What’s more important are the
attitudes toward nature and human life. In the modern scientific era,
many people – whether prompted by theistic or humanistic beliefs and
values – reject the pagan beliefs that humankind should submit to nature
and that individual human lives deserves protection. However, many
other people, particularly hardcore greens, reject those principles and
replicate primitive paganism by exalting nature and devaluing human
life.
Pagan greens insist that we cling to dependence on natural, “clean,
renewable” sources of energy, namely, from the wind and sun. Try as they
might, though, they can’t coax consistency and reliability out of those
fickle natural sources. Nor are wind and solar energy really clean or
renewable, since they depend on massive consumption of many
“nonrenewable” resources, some of them highly polluting. (They also kill
more wildlife than fossil fuels do, but that’s another story.)
Of particular concern are the sometimes rabidly anti-human beliefs of
green pagans. They have variously labelled the human race “a virus,” “a
disease” “vermin,” “a cancer.” The hatred for humanity is palpable.
Here is more: “The extinction of the human species may not only be
inevitable but a good thing”; “Human beings, as a species, have no more
value than slugs”; “Man is no more important than any other species.”
Like some primitive pagan societies, groveling in fear before the
forces of nature, pagan greens believe that some individuals need to be
sacrificed for life to go on. Thus, the founder of the Environmental
Defense Fund, favored banning DDT because the ban would, “get rid of
some of them” (in Ebenezer Scrooge’s words, “decrease the surplus
population”) via insect-borne malaria and insect-caused crop
destruction. Indeed, the human death toll from banning rather than
moderating the use of DDT has exceeded the death toll from communism,
making environmentalism the most lethal leftist ideology in history.
That shouldn’t be surprising, for communists at least paid lip service
(however dishonestly) to “the good of the people,” while pagan greens
regard human life as no better than a pestilential germ.
The anti-human animus of pagan greens even gave rise to a pejorative
term: “speciesism” – i.e., the belief that humans are superior to other
species. Well, in pagan green cosmology, humans may not be superior to
other species, but in the real world, we are. Forget about us being at
the top of the food chain. Think moon-landings, movie magic, Mozart and
McCartney. Humans are unique. Every other species pursues its
self-interest without a thought for the long-term survival of other
species. Only humans have enough foresight to take deliberate steps to
try to conserve other species. Only humans could feel regret and grieve
if a beloved species goes extinct. Only humans are clever enough to
discover or invent 57 different genders. Sorry, animal kingdom, but it’s
no contest – humans are superior.
The contrary belief to speciesism is that all species are equal. That
belief can be harmful to humans. About 30 years ago, the Environmental
Protection Agency blocked the cleanup of sewage in the Tijuana River
Basin on the grounds that the cleanup would endanger the survival of the
life forms that dwelled in that toxic (to humans) brew. Yes, federal
bureaucrats placed the survival of various bacteria above the health of
human beings. That’s pagan!
Another manifestation of anti-human green paganism is their
preference for anti-growth agendas. The deadliest environment for a
human being is poverty, yet greens work to thwart economic development
in developing countries by trying to deny them access to the very fossil
fuels that enabled the people in developed countries to climb out of
poverty and live thriving, healthy lives. You can read details of these
tragic and genocidal policies in Paul Driessen’s superb book, Eco-Imperialism.
We need an environmentalism as if people mattered. (As a counterpoise
to Friends of the Earth, we could use an environmental advocacy group
called “Friends of people who live on Earth.)
Green icon Paul Ehrlich once asserted, “Economic growth is not the
solution it’s the problem.” He is 180 degrees off-target. Growth is the solution. If it
were true that the more economic development there is, the more
polluted our environment would be, then our goose would be cooked. We
could conceivably get so prosperous that we’d pollute ourselves to
death. But the world doesn’t work that way.
Instead, there is a well-known pattern known as the Kuznets curve
(named after the late economist Simon Kuznets who explained the
pattern). What happens is that when societies begin to develop and climb
out of poverty, pollution rises. But once development gets to the point
where basic needs are met and discretionary income rises, people are
willing and able to spend money on both pollution remediation and
pollution prevention. Consequently, affluent (developed) societies are
less polluted than developing societies.
Contemporary green paganism is an atavistic, anti-life fetish.
Cloaked in mystical ignorance and wildly misanthropic, contemporary
green pagans are as much of a threat to their fellow humans as their
primitive forbears ever were.
It is a phenomenon of modern life that as membership in the old established religions wane, cults continue to sprout up like toadstools. Most of them have a very limited number of adherents and unless 75 people are killed at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, or 900 are killed or commit suicide at Jonestown, Guyana, we don’t hear about cult leaders like David Koresh or Jim Jones.
Occasionally, a smaller cult manages to make the news when they commit mass suicide in order to board a spaceship that will take them to Cloud Cuckooland.
But when it comes to sheer numbers and influence, there’s nothing to match the doomsday cult that has sprung up in the wake of Al Gore’s warning us about the imminent threat of global extinction. What makes the longevity of this cult so remarkable is that Gore’s “imminent” has turned into “eventual” and none of the true believers is questioning the ever-changing timetable. The cause of addressing climate change has become the modern world’s version of a secular religion.
There has long been a church of environmentalism having many of the characteristics of its ecclesiastical forerunners. One of course is the apocalypse that will consume us all if we do not follow the rules. The rules involve making penance for our original sin of unleashing the earth’s carbon dioxide emitting fuels from the Earth’s crust, and more recent transgressions involving plastic straws and cross country airline flights. But repentance is near. Salvation lies in eliminating our “carbon footprint”, using reusable shopping bags, and supporting MacDonald’ new meatless hamburgers.
The folks who espouse the climate change gospel know little more about the science of climatology and the greenhouse effect, than the average medieval villager knew why crops may fail or the sun and moon become eclipsed. And in complete symmetry of past religions, children are being used as effective role models in propagating faith. Millions left school to urge adults to battle this modern scourge, or perhaps they just enjoyed a day off school to speak the lines they were taught.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal on September 21, 2019.Gerald Baker wrote”the testimony of a guileless child is a powerful weapon against skepticism.” Sixteen year old Greta Thunberg has become the poster child for the religious fervor among climate change activists growing fanaticism.
Recently, A O-C and a few of the dimwits running for the Democratic nomination warned us that 2030 is absolutely the last day that this planet will be able to sustain human life. Webet confidently that by 2025, they’ll move the deadline to 2040.
Even Gore was something of a late bloomer. Starting around 1974, all the experts at the U.N., NASA, the New York Times, the AP, Time and Newsweek, were warning us of a coming Ice Age or fretting about a disappearing ozone layer or something really scary-sounding they called acid rain.
But, then, almost overnight, they regrouped and started keeping us up nights by screaming that the planet was in immediate danger of being incinerated.
When neither of those calamitous changes in the weather took place, the same folks decided to settle for a changing climate. The fact that they never explained what would be so terrible about things cooling down a little in the San Fernando Valley in California in July or warming up a bit in Fargo North Dakota in December should tell people all they really need to know about these cheap hustlers, who are in it for money, power and attention
Gore warned of melting icebergs and rising ocean levels, which simply proved that he didn’t even remember his high school science. If you fill a glass with water and ice to the very top, when the ice melts, not a drop of water will rise above the rim.
It’s now twenty years later, the ice at the North Pole and South Poles haven’t vanished. If anything, they have expanded. As has Al Gore, if you’ve seen him lately.
Gaianism is alive and well in what we call Western civilization. In advance of the United Nations Climate Action Summit on Sept. 23, leftists are actively practicing their faith. Man has despoiled the Earth and now must ... confess to the Earth.
Think we're exaggerating?
On Sept. 17, New York's Union Theological Seminary, a progressive Christian adjunct to Columbia University, put out a tweet that many people must have assumed was a satire from the religion pranksters at The Babylon Bee. "Today in chapel, we confessed to plants," it began. "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." Then they asked for an Amen: "What do you confess to the plants in your life?".........To Read More....
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....
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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Some years back Burt Prelutsky wrote an article entitled “Those poor, poor perverts”. The basis of the article was a discussion as to how ridiculous are the arguments surrounding pedophiles and how they are to be treated by society.
He uses the old story of how “intellectuals” (Editor's Note: He used the word “nuts”, but they were the intellectuals of the day. Nothing has changed!) would sit around for hours and discuss how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.
See, television did cure one thing.
The only problem is that so many of those who are in decision making positions apparently don’t waste their time on television, mores’ the pity, because they now sit around and decide how many feet away from a school a convicted pedophile may live who has been released from prison.
Prelutsky makes a point that should be obvious to the most casual observer:
“For what reason would any sane society ever release such a person from jail? The notion that kids are safe if the creep lives 2,000 feet away from where they play is perfectly loony. What about the kids walking to and from those parks and playgrounds? “
He points out that it is like releasing all the bank robbers from the prisons and telling them they can’t live any closer that two blocks away from a bank and expecting this to be the solution to their wanting to rob banks. He goes on to say, “judges and lawmakers seem happy to ignore the rates of recidivism among rapists and pedophiles. Is there anyone else, aside from defense attorneys, who would argue that a man who’s raped a six year old child deserves a second chance?”
We have ceded our own common sense to the “experts”! Are they really all that credible? So credible that we willingly abandon traditional values, common sense and moral balance?
Where is our moral compass?
As unpleasant an issue as this is, I use it to show a peculiar mindset that has permeated society that really is nuts. Concern about pedophiles, bank robbers and other assorted villains of society is the common concern that we all must share. We also have the added concern of those who are destructive to society in a much larger and more insidious way. The green movement! The group industry and society as a whole must have concerns about. That's the environmental movement, and those who promote it inside and outside industry.
They promote junk science and outright fraudulent science as fact, and those who should be at the fore front standing against this nonsense turn into cheerleaders, and everyone laps it up like ice cream.
We are willing to accept nonsense from these people because the media is on their side. The EPA is clearly complicit as they continue spewing out a lava flow of scientifically dubious regulations. They support junk science through grant money. Integrated Pest Management and Green Pest Control are these kinds of endeavors.
The green movement even has legislators held hostage to them via their monetary support.
Some years back a California congressman wanted to make changes to the Endangered Species Act…not repeal it as is really needed…..just add some sanity to it; and the Sierra Club spent a ton of money to defeat him and they did. They stated that “this was a lesson” to other legislators. This makes them more deadly to more people over a broader scope of humanity than bank robbers or even pedophiles.
Do we as an industry really believe all the nonsense they spew out? Do we really believe that we can really come to some sort of mutually acceptable final agreement with them? No matter what many of the prominent people in our industry say publicly; when I talk to them personally and off the record, they all acknowledge that it is all claptrap.
A lobbyist I have known for years makes the point that in any negotiations there must be some compromise, and I agree. The problem we seem to have is being able to understand the difference between compromise and capitulation. If during these discussions we give up something, I would like to know what the other side is giving up.
I am not talking about just being quiet for a while either. Or being quiet while their brethren from some other greenie group attacks us, which is what usually happens. There is no command and control system within the green movement. They will not only continue attacking industry they will attack their green brethren as sell outs for not being green enough.
If you give up 25% of something and they go away until next year, but they will be back the very next year demanding that you give up another 25%, And this will go on, and on, and on until you no longer have anything to give up.
When you dance with the Devil you don't call the tune, you can't name the dance, you don't lead and you may not be able to leave the dance floor. Why don't we get it?
If you think this is an extreme and unreasonable view; ask Kentucky Fried Chicken. They backed down on point after point and the animal rights people said that this was a “good start”. There will be no end to their demands because the Neville Chamberlain “Policy of Appeasement” philosophy will not work on people with an agenda?
They are the anointed! They know best about all things. They truly believe their individual and collective intellect is far greater than all of the practical experience accumulated by mankind over the centuries. Their's is the “vision of the anointed”, and must not be ignored, no matter the consequences.
As a result of the policies they have promoted they clearly have become the 20th century’s greatest mass murders, and are working just as hard in the 21st century to maintain that status.
Ford Motor Company found out the hard way. In a Fox News article Steve Milloy points out:
“After Ford caved into pressure from left-wing activist investors and issued a report stating that it “views stabilization of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and energy security as critical and related business issues that warrant precautionary, prudent and early action,” the enviros thanked Ford in return by accusing his company of putting “more heat-trapping pollution into our skies each year than the entire country of Mexico”; continuing to “produce more global warming pollution on average than any other automaker”; continuing to make SUVs; and fighting a California law that would require a 30 percent reduction in automobile carbon dioxide emissions by 2016.”
So, what do they want from us in pest control? Well, I am sure that if we would offer to kill ourselves that they would agree that this would be a nice "start"!
I am the last one to decry their desire for a simple life without all the modern conveniences; if that is what someone wants, then I say…enjoy! However, if all of these people think their ideas are so great, why are all the greenies and their supporters living in the developed world and not in the third world where their policies hold sway? If they really believe all of the stuff they spew out, they need to take a personal stand and move there.
They could really make an impact on everyone’s mind by taking their children with them also.
Certainly that must make sense to everyone! After all, why would a greenie want to expose themselves and their children to all of these terrible chemicals and advanced technology of an advanced nation? Right?
They need to move to one of the many areas of the world where there are no roads, few cars and no running water contaminated with any chlorine or fluoride. No electricity, no vaccinations, no genetically modified foods, no fungicides, no anti-bacterial cleaners, all organic food, no pesticides, no air conditioning.
Will there be many takers? I have no doubt there would be few, if any! You can be sure that the greenies will be as close to the modern conveniences and the society they claim to despise as surely as bank robbers will rob banks and pedophiles will hang around children.
To paraphrase the earlier question asked by Burt Prelutsky:
“For what reason would any sane society ever believe anything these people say?"
The notion that society would be better off adopting the ideas and philosophies of the green movement is perfectly loony.” And yes! We really have lost our minds!
Let's try and get this once and for all. The left is irrational, misanthropic and morally defective, that's history and that history is incontestable. Dystopia follows the left like Sancho Panza followed Don Quixote. A madman!
Apparently, the inmates have taken over the asylum, led by the former barmaid Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, now a member of Congress. The Green New Deal is a bizarre plan to create a cultural revolution in the United States. The role of Mao’s little red book is replaced by the musings of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). After the green revolution, happiness will reign throughout the land.
Ms. Ocasio can’t even make a credible threat to our economic well-being. According to the Green New Deal, if we don’t prevent global warming, we will lose $500 billion of annual economic output by 2100. The current GDP of the U.S. is $20 trillion. Assuming modest real growth of one percent per year, GDP will be $44 trillion (in current dollars) by 2100. Losing $500 billion or 1.1 percent of 2100 economic output is clearly minor and would be made up by 2101. The Green New Deal advocates instantly destroy their own argument with their own numbers. ...........The reports of the IPCC and of the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) are political documents masquerading as scientific studies...............The Green New Deal mostly has nothing to do with climate change. The program has a strong resemblance to the Fundamental Rights and Duties of Citizens found in the 1936 Constitution of the Soviet Union (the “Stalin” constitution)............
Although we live in a golden age of prosperity and opportunity, we also live in an age of ignorance. Ms. Ocasio has a college degree in economics but is apparently a sucker for socialistic ideas that were already thoroughly discredited by 1950. Think of George Orwell’s books 1984 and Animal Farm, and the seminal critique of socialism The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek. Somehow socialism always turns cruel and brutal. There is no better recounting than the Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. But facts and history are less important than the feeling of being ignored suffered by so many intellectuals and academics. Those intellectuals and academics fill the void in their lives with leftist religion.....................Read more
SPOTLIGHT: There’s no such thing as a ‘balance of nature.’ Nature is not static
BIG PICTURE: A prominent theme of ecologist Daniel Botkin’s latest book, 25 Myths That Are Destroying the Environment, is that the natural world is more sophisticated than we imagine.
Everything is fluid. Numerous interactions are taking place at any given time. On multiple levels and in multiple directions. Between species and within species. The belief that whales and other animals would be peachy keen if only humans weren’t around informs many conservation measures. We’re the skunk at the picnic. We disturb. We perturb. We upset a natural, intrinsic balance. The irony of such ‘environmental’ thinking, says Botkin, is that it ignores the environment:........To Read More...
It’s a good thing environmentalists have double standards – or they wouldn’t have any standards at all.
Empire State legislators worry that anything above the current 0.0001% methane in Earth’s atmosphere will cause catastrophic climate change, and that pipelines will disturb wildlife habitats. So they oppose fracking for natural gas in New York and pipelines that would import the clean fuel from Pennsylvania.
But then they bribe or force rural and vacation area communities to accept dozens of towering wind turbines that impact thousands of acres, destroy scenic views, kill thousands of birds and bats annually, and affect the sleep and health of local residents – to generate pricey intermittent electricity that is sent on high voltage transmission lines to Albany, Manhattan and other distant cities.
Meanwhile, developers are building a 600-mile pipeline to bring natural gas from West Virginia to North Carolina, to power generating plants that provide low-cost electricity almost 24/7/365. A portion of the 100-foot-wide pipeline right-of-way must go through forested areas, necessitating tree removal.
To protect migratory birds and endangered bats, state and federal officials generally require that tree cutting be prohibited between mid-March and mid-October. Because the Atlantic Coast Pipeline is behind schedule, the companies sought approval to continue felling trees until May 15, to avoid further delays that could increase costs by $150-350 million. The request was denied.
Not surprisingly, the pipeline, logging and request to cut during migratory and mating season have put the developers, regulators and environmentalists at loggerheads. A 16-mile long segment through Virginia’s George Washington National Forest garnered particular attention.
Although the short segment would affect just 200 of the GWNF’s 1.1 million acres, the Virginia Wilderness Committee claimed any tree cutting in the area would create an “industrial zone” and “severely degrade some of the best remaining natural landscapes” in the Eastern USA. The Southern Environmental Law Center called the entire project “risky” and “unnecessary.” The groups prefer to “keep fossil fuels in the ground” and force a rapid transition to solar and wind energy.
One has to wonder how they would react to the far greater environmental impacts their “green” energy future would bring. Will they be true to their convictions, or continue applying double standards?
For example, using sun power to replace just the electricity from Virginia’s nearly 24/7/365 Lake Anna Nuclear Generating Station would require nearly 20,000 acres of solar panels that would provide power just 20-30% of the time. The rest of the time, the commonwealth would need fossil fuel or battery backup power – or homes, businesses, hospitals, internet researchers and environmentalist offices would have to be happy with electricity when it’s available, instead of when they need it.
That’s 100 times more land than needed for the pipeline, which will be underground and mostly invisible, whereas the highly visible solar panels would blanket former crop and habitat land for decades.
Natural gas and coal generate about 55 million megawatt-hours of Virginia’s annual electricity. Replacing that with wind power would require thousands of gigantic turbines, sprawling across a half-million acres of forest, farm and other lands. Backup battery arrays and transmission lines from wind farms to distant urban areas would require thousands of additional acres.
(This rough calculation recognizes that many turbines would have to be located in poor wind areas and would thus generate electricity only 15-20% of the time. It also assumes that two-thirds of windy day generation would charge batteries for seven straight windless days, and that each turbine requires 15 acres for blade sweep, operational airspace and access roads.)
The turbines, transmission lines and batteries would require millions of tons of concrete, steel, copper, neodymium, lithium, cobalt, petroleum-based composites and other raw materials; removing billions of tons of earth and rock to mine the ores; and burning prodigious amounts of fossil fuels in enormous smelters and factories to turn ores into finished components.
Most of that work will take place in Africa, China and other distant locations – out of sight, and out of mind for most Virginians, Americans and environmentalists. But as we are often admonished, we should act locally, think globally, and consider the horrendous environmental and health and safety conditions under which all these activities take place in those faraway lands.
Many turbines will be located on mountain ridges, where the winds blow best and most often. Ridge tops will be deforested, scenic vistas will be ruined, and turbines will slice and dice migratory birds, raptors and bats by the tens of thousands every year. Those that aren’t yet threatened or endangered soon will be.
The wind industry and many regulators and environmentalists consider those death tolls “incidental takings,” “acceptable” losses of “expendable” wildlife, essential for achieving the “climate-protecting” elimination of fossil fuels. The deaths are certainly not deliberate – so the December 2018 Interior Department decision to end the possibility of criminal prosecutions for them, under the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act, makes sense.
However, when regulators allow industrial wind facilities in and near migratory routes, nesting areas and other places – where large numbers of eagles, hawks, falcons, geese, other birds and bats congregate – the number of deaths soars beyond “incidental” or “acceptable.” And as the number of US onshore wind turbines climbs from 40,000 a few years ago, to 52,000 today, to potentially millions under “keep oil, gas and coal in the ground” demands, the threat of decimation or extinction across wide areas skyrockets.
Some say we should install future turbines offshore, in our coastal areas. Truly monstrous 3.5-megawatt turbines would certainly reduce the total number needed to replace substantial quantities of fossil fuel electricity. However, they would destroy scenic ocean vistas, decimate sea and shore bird populations (with carcasses conveniently sinking from sight), impair porpoise and whale sonar, interfere with radar and air traffic control, and create significant hazards for submarines and surface ships.
Even worse, as wildlife biologist Jim Wiegand and other experts have noted, the wind industry has gone to great lengths to hide the actual death tolls. For example, they look only right under towers and blades (when carcasses and maimed birds can be catapulted hundreds of yards by blades that move at nearly 200 mph at their tips), canvass areas only once every few weeks (ensuring that scavengers eat the evidence), and make wind farms off limits to independent investigators.
The bird and bat killings may not be criminal, but the fraud and cover-ups certainly are.
The attitudes, regulations and penalties associated with wind turbines also stand in stark contrast to the inflexible, heavy-handed approach that environmentalists, regulators and courts typically apply to permit applications for drilling, pipelines, grazing and other activities where sage grouse and lesser prairie chickens are involved – or requests to cut trees until May 15, to finish a Virginia pipeline.
The Fish & Wildlife Service, Center for Biological Diversity and Audubon Society go apoplectic in those circumstances. (Audubon was outraged that Interior decriminalized accidental deaths of birds in oilfield waste pits.) But their silence over the growing bird and bat slaughter by wind turbines has been deafening.
These attitudes and policies scream “double standards!” Indeed, consistent bird and bat protection policies would fairly and logically mean banning turbines in and near habitats, refuges and flyways – or shutting them down during mating, nesting and migratory seasons.
It’s time to rethink all these policies. Abundant, reliable, affordable energy makes our jobs, health, living standards and civilization possible. The way we’re going, environmentalists, regulators and judges will block oil, gas and coal today … nuclear and hydroelectric tomorrow … and wind and solar facilities the following week – sending us backward a century or more. It’s time to say, Enough!
Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy and environmental policy.
Recent news that the German Green Party is willing to work with the extreme right “Alternative for Germany” (AfD) in order to secure a vote to ban glyphosate has shocked many political actors seeking a cordon sanitaire around the German fascist party. The Risk-Monger though is not surprised. He has often used words like “undemocratic”, “Machiavellian” and “fascist” to describe the self-righteous environmental activist campaign strategies.
The Greens are a party of inherent contradictions. They talk of democracy and the voice of the common person yet the consequences of their food and energy policies favour the elite and the privileged (at the expense of the poor).
Greens will lead transparency campaigns and moves to expose corporate lobbying, and yet they themselves, as transparocrites, often do not disclose from whom and how they use their (public) funds. They seek development and increased aid for emerging economies and yet they legislate to harm African agricultural and technological development. Environmentalists are quick to be righteous but unlike industry and government, do not adhere to ethical codes of conduct and even condone lying and breaking the law.......Green activists are essentially fascists who tolerate minorities! .......To Read More.....
