The Environmental Extremism of Democrats

Living the Environmentally Friendly Life

Moonbattery has a profile of an environmental extremist named Bill McKibben.  McKibben is credited with stopping the Keystone Pipeline that would have brought oil from Canada to the United States, but which will now be going to China instead.

McKibben is doing everything he can to stop the use of fossil fuels for energy and is typical of the extremists who comprise the Democratic Party.  This is why gasoline prices are through the roof, and why they will go higher.  It is not an exaggeration to say that the Democratic Party wants you to suffer.  The reason is that they have an extreme view on the environment and want to force Americans to use far less energy.  In  order to do this we must car pool more, ride trains or buses or use bicycles for transportation (or walk).  We must live in smaller houses.  We must consume less, i.e. to live at a lower standard of living than we do now.  We must produce fewer children and dramatically shrink the population (hence the fanatical support of any and all abortion).

The Democrats' anti-energy policies are designed to force you into a simpler lifestyle that they have selected for you, and even high unemployment helps to achieve their goals.  Economic activity consumes energy, enriches and empowers people to have families and to consume more, all of which runs counter to the goals of the environmental extremists in the Democratic Party.

The biggest problem with this agenda is that it is largely hidden.  The Democrats don't openly espouse these goals, lest the populace wake up and throw them out en mass.  This is unfortunate, since we cannot know what Dems are thinking and why, what data (if any) that they rely on, what future they envision, or what their arguments are.  Without debate on these extreme policies, we cannot refute them.

Welcome to the grim future, fellow peasants.

Paul Gilding is Full (of It): When Enviro Whack Jobs Attack

The enviro whack jobs are at it again.  Leading the charge this time is Paul Gilding, Australian Enviro-Alarmist who insists that "the earth is full," that over-population has reached a crisis point, and that we are all doomed by global warming, higher food prices, depleted resources, yada yada yada.  Gilding's ideas are described in the New York Times by Thomas L. Friedman in an article called "The Earth is Full."

The answer:  more draconian governmental controls over people and businesses, less economic activity, more poverty, less individual freedom, a reduced lifestyle.  Green is the new Red.  If you disagree, you are just in denial.  Gilding cites the work of the Global Footprint Network, which claims that humans are using the earth's resources at unsustainable rates.  How the GFN came up with this calculation is anyone's guess, but they are not the first environmental doom-sayers to come along in recent years.  Paul Ehrlich's book "The Population Bomb" came out in 1968 to announce that mass starvation would occur in the 1970's and 1980's due to overpopulation of the planet.  Ehrlich was wrong -- the disaster didn't happen.  As for overpopulation, demographic studies show that populations in the Europe, Russia, Japan and elsewhere are in decline -- their populations are shrinking and in some cases, being displaced by massive immigration from the Muslim world.

There is a pattern among the environmental alarmists:  they describe dooms-day scenarios for humankind, insist that we have already passed some critical point, making disaster unavoidable, and that mankind must immediately submit to a kind of fascism to curtail or at least lessen the unavoidable and looming catastrophe.  Needless to say, the solution seems to lie in a one-world government, presided over by a committee of environmentalists.  They will tell us, no doubt, who can produce what, when and where, and who may consume it.

Sounds like Marxism to me.

Update:  A related article shows the economic destruction wreaked by the Green Freaks:  California's Green Jihad.

Celebrate Earth Day: Kill Yourself

Brian Sussman, a conservative pundit on KSFO radio (560 AM) here in the San Francisco Bay Area, has a column in Human Events today.  It covers the history and teachings of Earth Day (April 22), and how it is really a leftist propaganda day.  Earth Day is a day for assaulting capitalism, free markets and mankind.

Sussman tells how Stanford Professor Paul Ehrlich was one of the three founders of Earth Day.  Sussman writes:

Rounding out the troika was Prof. Paul Ehrlich of Stanford. In 1968, Ehrlich authored the Malthusian missive, The Population Bomb, in which he infamously spouted wild allegations that included equating the Earth’s supposed surplus of people with a cancer that needs to be eradicated: “A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people. ... We must shift our efforts from treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions,” he wrote.

Ehrlich's hatred of humans seems to be the unspoken premise of all environmentalist thought:  human beings are evil and must be tightly controlled, their numbers reduced to a bare minimum through poverty.  No doubt the "brutal and heartless" decisions Airhead Ehrlich spoke of were to be similar to those of Chairman Mao:  mass starvation of millions.  If you want to make an omelet you have to break some eggs.  Fellow eggs, take heed.

The Green movement is roughly thousands of Ted Kaczynskis, radical Luddites who want human beings to just die, so Gaia the Earth Goddess can reign supreme, making the skies, the waterways and the forests pristine and safe for squirrels, snakes and slugs.  The enemy of environmental purity is economic prosperity and the answer is widespread human poverty.  Now you know why the Dems won't let us drill in Anwar.

Read Sussman's take here. 

The Uncappable Spewing Spigot: And No, I'm Not Referencing Obama's Big Mouth

Ann Althouse asks, "Are we keeping a constant eye on the BP Oil Leak?" She mentions that an HD TV screen in a restaurant showed a live feed of the spewing underwater oil leak, without cease. She wondered what's the point?

One of her readers, Pogo, hit a home run with this remark:

The Uncappable Spewing Spigot of Spending is the avatar for Obama and the New Deal Democrats.

My God, isn't that the truth?

Finally, a Carbon-Free Environment!

An old saying goes "Be careful what you wish for, you might just get it."

No Pasaran ran this cartoon to illustrate the stupidity of liberal meddling in the private sector; this one illustrates the move to ban smoking from bars and other establishments.

The same principle applies to "low carbon footprint" schemes to combat non-existent global warming. The thousands of business buildings now sitting dark and vacant, no doubt, have a very low carbon footprint.

I'm reading a book called "Green Hell" (by Steven Milloy -- see link at bottom of page) that describes the aims, goals and schemes of the luddite environmentalists ("the Greens"). Indeed, the Greens are almost as crazy and damaging to humanity as were "the Reds" whose shoes they seek to fill.

Milloy shows how the Greens not only oppose oil and gas energy, they also oppose natural gas, nuclear energy and even solar and windmill energy. They oppose energy, period. Their true goals are to reduce the population and roll back modernity. He writes:

...greens don't really want to increase our energy supply--whether with fossil fuels or renewable energy--because that would undermine virtually all of the greens' ultimate goals: zero population growth, limiting the development of physical infrastructure, impeding economic growth, and redistributing wealth.

The Greens are just another crazy totalitarian ideology that is ultimately anti-human; they should be fought vigorously. Milloy indicates that the so-called Sierra Club is one of the major enemies of low cost energy. It is they who most frequently file lawsuits to stop the building of new oil refineries, coal plants, offshore drilling, and nuclear power plants. The next time you fill up at $4 a gallon, thank the Sierra Club.

On the other hand, if you are a believer in manmade global warming and the benefits of living green, you may feel ecstatic when you find yourself sitting in the dark because you can no longer pay your electric bill. At least you can say, loudly and with enthusiasm: "It's working!"

Get the book:

Offshore Oil Rigs Good for the Environment

This morning on KSFO Radio, Brian Sussman interviewed Humberto Fontova, a Cuban emigre who now lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. Fontova is a fishing and skin diving enthusiast. According to Fontova, the oil platforms off Louisiana don't harm the environment, they actually have improved it.

The oil platforms serve as artificial reefs for marine life, and as a consequence fishing there has greatly improved as the fish have proliferated and their numbers grown.

Fontova says he regularly hitches his boat to oil platforms so he can fish near the rigs.

A Marine Biologist from California called into Sean Hannity's show today and said the same thing about the oil platforms off of Santa Barbara. The rock fish there have also greatly proliferated due to the presence of the platforms, and the rigs also help prevent natural oil seepage onto beaches by relieving pressure from the oil dome beneath the seabed.

Want to help the environment? Support offshore oil drilling!

Sky Falling Scientist Calls for Trial of Skeptics

From the U.K. Guardian:
James Hansen, one of the world's leading climate scientists, will today call for the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to be put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature, accusing them of actively spreading doubt about global warming in the same way that tobacco companies blurred the links between smoking and cancer.

Hansen will use the symbolically charged 20th anniversary of his groundbreaking speech (pdf) to the US Congress - in which he was among the first to sound the alarm over the reality of global warming - to argue that radical steps need to be taken immediately if the "perfect storm" of irreversible climate change is not to become inevitable.

Read it all.

Stogie's analysis:

Hansen is a fanatic and deserves our contempt. Like Chicken Little, he is screaming that the sky is falling. We are to believe him simply because he assures us that it is true. This modern Chicken Little, however, has a laptop with a computer modeling program. It says A+B = Global Warming. It is far from a true model of the climate and how it works; it can't even model past weather patterns based on known facts, let alone predict the weather of the future. But we are supposed to believe Hansen based on his minority, largely unsupported opinion, because if we don't, capitalism and prosperity won't be ended, socialism imposed and society heavily regimented, which is the real goal of the Global Scamming crowd.

A great many more climatologists are skeptics of global warming than are adherents. The latter are usually receiving lucrative research grants and have a vested interest in keeping the scam going.

Don't believe them.

Environmentalism: Socialism by Other Means

When I was in college during the 1970's, a member of my YAF group wrote a prescient article for our newsletter. It was about the new fad of environmentalism, then in its embyronic stages. He wrote that, just as the issue of Civil Rights had been used as a sledgehammer against capitalistic society, so would envirnomentalism. He saw environmentalism as an elaborate ruse by which the government would enact more stringent controls over our society and freedom.

I don't even remember the writer's name, but if I did I would call him up and praise him. He was absolutely right. Czech President Vaclav Klaus described it well when he said: "The largest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity is no longer socialism. It is, instead, the ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous ideology of environmentalism." Charles Krauthammer, writing in the Washinton Post, says:

Predictions of catastrophe depend on models. Models depend on assumptions
about complex planetary systems -- from ocean currents to cloud formation --
that no one fully understands. Which is why the models are inherently flawed
and forever changing. The doomsday scenarios posit a cascade of events, each
with a certain probability. The multiple improbability of their simultaneous
occurrence renders all such predictions entirely speculative.

Yet on the basis of this speculation, environmental activists, attended by
compliant scientists and opportunistic politicians, are advocating radical
economic and social regulation. "The largest threat to freedom, democracy, the
market economy and prosperity," warns Czech President Vaclav Klaus, "is no longer socialism. It is, instead, the ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous ideology of environmentalism." Read it all here.

Green is the new Red. Don't be deceived by it.

.......

Greenpeace: Putting Politics Over Science

Patrick Moore, a founder of Greenpeace, has an article in the Wall Street Journal called "Why I Left Greenpeace." Moore has a PhD in Ecology and is an accomplished scientist. He said he found that the leadership of Greenpeace was composed of politicos who were not scientists. They had a bad habit of opposing chemicals like chlorine in drinking water and other useful and harmless chemicals like phthalates, which are used to make plastics pliable.

He writes:

Sadly, Greenpeace has evolved into an organization of extremism and politically motivated agendas. Its antichlorination campaign failed, only to be followed by
a campaign against polyvinyl chloride.

Greenpeace now has a new target called phthalates (pronounced thal-ates). These are chemical compounds that make plastics flexible. They are found in everything from hospital equipment such as IV bags and tubes, to children's toys and shower curtains. They are among the most practical chemical compounds in existence.

Phthalates are the new bogeyman. These chemicals make easy targets since they are hard to understand and difficult to pronounce. Commonly used phthalates, such as diisononyl phthalate (DINP), have been used in everyday products for decades with no evidence of human harm. DINP is the primary plasticizer used in toys. It has been tested by multiple government and independent evaluators, and found to be safe.

What is it about liberals that they can refuse to acknowledge real threats (like Islamic terrorism) while creating fake ones like DDT, Chlorination and Global Warming?

Today is Earth Day: End Capitalism Now

Today is "Earth Day." It's all part of the liberal worship of the earth as the new God. Evil humans are savaging the environment through industrialization, meat-eating, capitalism and SUVs. Liberals know that, in order to stop this disaster and save the earth, we must take drastic measures.

If you read all of the liberal thought on the matter, you will find that in order to save the Earth and turn it into the City of Oz, we must do the following:

1. End capitalism. There is a well-established link between prosperity and pollution and the best way to end prosperity and industrial activity is to adopt socialism. That always stops prosperity dead in its tracks.

2. Ride bikes and get rid of cars. Think of Vietnamese peasants with straw hats in thonged sandals. We must become like them. Poor.

3. Smoke lots of pot. It's the only CO2 that doesn't harm the environment, and besides, it creates good karma.

4. Stop having babies. It is an indisputable fact that Earth would be better off without humans. Think of what a paradise the Earth would be then! For squirrels.

5. Become vegetarians. Eating meat causes global warming through cow flatulance. If hamburgers were banned, farmers wouldn't raise cows, thus lowering the flatulance level. Global warming would come to a screeching halt.

6. Celebrate diversity. This has nothing to do with saving the planet, but what the heck, it sounds good.

7. Get naked. This also has nothing to do with saving the planet, but it's a moonbat tradition and besides, we like seeing naked people, especially women. This step goes especially well with No. 3 above. Even fat hippie women with hairy armpits start to look good after awhile.

8. Support wildlife. Go whale watching. We like whales because they don't have flatulance and aren't capitalists. Also, they look really cool on sweatshirts and coffee cups. Go down to the beach and kiss a seal.

Well, that's about it. I have to go now, I have to work on enlarging my carbon footprint.