Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
----“Fire and Ice” by Robert Frost
As I write this, the environmental conference in Copenhagen is beginning, and the cover-up of “Climategate” is continuing. The major networks are not covering it at all---not a word has been broadcast on the news shows at ABC, NBC and CBS. Elsewhere, on cable channels and in a few major newspapers (and at the White House), it is being given the “move-along-nothing-to-see-here” treatment.
I remain gleeful. I’m confident no amount of spin can succeed. This particular genie will never go back in the bottle, and most ordinary folks (the kind who don’t sell carbon credits for a living) were pretty skeptical about global warming even before this.
The emails are bad enough. They reveal the fanatic advocacy of supposedly objective scientists, efforts to silence their critics, discussions of how to massage data so the answer comes out the way they want it, and even criminal conspiracies to destroy documents. Ugly stuff. But the real problem is the computer code itself, which is now revealed to be so muddled from repeated manipulation that the results it generated, the “proof” of global warming, cannot be replicated through any rational process. At this moment, finally, there is nothing to back up their claims. Not that there ever was, of course, but now the world can at last see the truth.
I quit smoking about three years ago. It’s not really “difficult” or painful, but it does require you to invest some emotional energy in the process. It distracts you from your normal routine and you find you think about smoking (or not smoking) rather more than you want to. You even dream about smoking. I still have those dreams occasionally.
I quit because smoking is bad for you. It’s not nearly as bad as the zealots will tell you, of course, but there’s no question it’s an unhealthy practice. (I think the anti-smoking propaganda probably kept me smoking five years longer than I otherwise would have, just because it was so false and politically correct and infuriating, and I felt I would be goddamned if I was going to knuckle under to the smoking fascists. The “second-hand smoke” mania was especially grating since there has never been any real evidence that second-hand smoke does anything more deadly than annoy people who don’t like cigarette smoke.)
The result is that now, though I am an ex-smoker, I don’t disapprove of smoking. In fact, I like smoking. I like to be around it. Smoking is fun. Smoking is cool. On the rare occasions when I find a bar where smoking is permitted, I settle in for a long stay. Smoking, to me, says “party.” Bars where smoking is permitted are a lot more fun than bars where smoking is banned.
When smokers come to my house, I set out ashtrays for them. “No, I’ll go outside,” they say. “Seriously,” I say, “I don’t mind. I like it.” They go outside anyway.
The point I’m trying to make here is that I’m not one of those ex-smokers who HATES smoking and smokers, and also has to lecture you on the evils of the filthy practice and tell you stories about somebody I know who died young from smoking and show you pictures of diseased lungs. I’m not that kind of ex-smoker.
As an ex-environmentalist, however---well, that’s another matter.
I imagine a lot of people who know me would be surprised to learn I was once a liberal. Actually, that may be overstating it. I always understood the link between private property and liberty, for example, and how capitalism creates wealth, and the need to respect the Constitution and protect our freedom to speak and assemble and worship as we please, and---O.K., I was never a liberal. But I WAS an environmentalist.
I went to seminars and teach-ins and meetings about clean air and clean water and the rain forests, and I worried about all these things. I gave money to PIRGIM at a time when I really didn’t have any money.
I remember lying awake at night contemplating the coming ice age. In the 1970’s, all the books and articles and TV specials about Global Cooling scared the bejesus out of me. I believed every word of it. I thought it was “science.” I was convinced we were doomed.
Then came April 1972. I guess I have EPA Chief William Ruckleshaus to thank for opening my eyes to what “environmentalism” had become.
As a result of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and a decade’s worth of activism by those who believed her, the EPA held an administrative trial to determine what deleterious effects could be attributed to DDT use. Did it harm wildlife? Did it interfere with reproduction in birds by causing a thinning in eggshells? Was it a carcinogen for humans? For seven months, biologists testified about their studies; and all the available science on the effects of DDT was reviewed. Then, in April 1972, the administrative law judge delivered his verdict:
“DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man. ... The uses of DDT under the regulations involved here do not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds, or other wildlife. ... The evidence in this proceeding supports the conclusion that there is a present need for the essential uses of DDT.”
Two months later, Ruckleshaus overturned the judge’s decision, declared DDT a “potential human carcinogen,” and banned it for virtually all uses. He had never attended the administrative trial, and he admitted he had not read the transcript either. The effect of this unilateral declaration was that DDT disappeared not only in the US, but around the world.
Malaria has been a scourge of mankind throughout recorded history. In 1939, DDT was synthesized as a mosquito-killer by Swiss scientist Paul Muller, and was first put to widespread use in 1943. It was instantly successful, and Muller received a Nobel Prize for his work in 1948. In the US, malaria was endemic in southeastern states and the Mississippi Valley until the CDC launched a DDT spraying program (in 1947) that eradicated malaria by 1951. By 1967, malaria had been effectively beaten in every developed nation, all of South America and large swatches of Southeast Asia. It remained a problem in Africa, though significant progress had been made. In 1972, that progress abruptly ceased.
Since 1972, there have been more than 100 million (mostly avoidable) deaths from malaria, almost all of them in impoverished developing countries that are least able to defend themselves. According to the World Health Organization, 90% of the deaths are of pregnant women or children under five years old.
The DDT fiasco was the end of my career as an environmentalist. There was probably a time when “environmental science” was primarily a matter of learning about nature and using that knowledge to find ways in which human society could live in harmony with it, but at sometime in the 1960’s or 1970’s, that changed. I doubt that the banning of DDT by the EPA was the moment it changed---it had happened before that---but the DDT ban made it clear that science was not very important to those who ran the EPA or who identified themselves as environmentalists.
There is a tendency to dismiss the sillier aspects of environmental activism as harmless excesses of those who only want to do good, to help out. All of us have walked through a forest and felt renewed thereby. The chatter of birds, the sound of icy clear water rushing over rocks, the unexpected sight of a deer in a clearing, the feel of fresh air in the lungs---all these things return us to some primal memory. At the right place, in the right moment, all of us are tree-huggers. It’s easy to understand the impulse, and a love of nature and its glory is not a bad thing, but a fundamental human response to the world.
But as the banning of DDT teaches us, “environmentalism” is something else. It’s a hundred million dead mothers and children without a peep out of those who were responsible for it. The pursuit of these feel-good ideals while ignoring the truth---well, it’s lethal. If you’re “saving the planet,” or if you can persuade yourself that is your goal, the consequences don’t seem to matter very much. But they should. If they don’t, you’re a moral idiot.
Of course, not every campaign of environmentalists is deadly. Some are just extremely expensive and wasteful. The modern recycling binge began with a single article by a man named J. Winston Porter in 1988. Mr. Porter, of the EPA, captured the public imagination with his claim, which is demonstrably false, that the United States was in danger of running out of landfill space. Now, twenty years later, most of us are subject to draconian recycling regulations and the nation spends hundreds of billions a year more than it needs to on waste disposal, for no discernable benefit other than the “feeling” some folks have that it’s the right thing to do. It certainly cannot be defended on economic grounds, though its acolytes try to, since any economically viable recycling would (and does) occur on its own in response to market forces. It’s only the useless and wasteful kind of recycling that gets mandated by governments since otherwise, no one with any sense would do it. Still, I don’t suppose it has killed anyone.
Remember alar on apples? Acid rain? Electro-magnetic fields from power lines? Cancer clusters? Brain cancer from cell phones? Radon? All of them have spawned minor industries and made a few people rich. Some of them are still around. As far as I know, these mini-manias haven’t killed anyone either. They just waste our time and the resources of our society which are, after all, not infinite. In addition, they degrade our culture by fostering an insidious deconstructionist ethic---that reality doesn’t matter; what matters is how we feel.
But there are plenty of environmental ideas that DO kill, though not always so directly and coldly as the ban on DDT. Generally, these are the movements that reduce the supply of commodities essential for human survival, like food and energy.
At any given moment on earth, there are a billion people who, while they may not be starving, are not entirely certain where their next meal is coming from. Until the rise of the democracy movement and capitalist institutions in the 18th Century, this was the lot of almost everyone on the planet---long hours of physical labor every day to secure the means by which one might survive to do it all over again the next day. While the developed and semi-developed world is now spared this life of unrelenting toil, it still exists in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. The weakest and poorest of these human beings are the ones who die when the price of survival rises.
They are easy to ignore. We don’t know their names and we never will. They are simply anonymous wogs and colored peoples, the sort that get slaughtered en masse from time to time in local genocides that we don’t pay any attention to either. Still, they die, and it’s the fault of our fashionable environmental ideas. It’s cause and effect.
When Western elites in Europe and the United States decide (without any scientific justification whatsoever) that GMO foods are suspect or somehow spooky, those GMO plants are no longer grown, and an acre that could have produced forty tons of food now produces only twenty. Who do you think this hurts? Not me, or anyone I know. If a bag of flour or corn meal costs half a buck more, I don’t even notice it. But other people do. Halfway around the world, there are people for whom that half dollar is the difference between living and dying.
For sixty years, organic food enthusiasts have been trying to persuade us that organic food is better for you, healthier, more nutritious. There is not a scintilla of evidence this is true despite billions spent on research, but their belief is unshaken. What we DO know is that most of the food-contamination scares (the e. coli and salmonella outbreaks) are attributable to organic farming practices, but somehow this never makes the front page. And of course, organic farming also makes less efficient use of agricultural land, driving up the price of food in ways that elites don’t care much about but starving people do.
Then there is the mandated production of ethanol, which illustrates what happens when you take one-fourth of a basic subsistence food and turn it into bio-fuel. Two years ago, food riots broke out (in Mexico, Haiti, Cameroon, Egypt, Pakistan, China, and other nations) as the soaring price of corn forced all basic food prices higher. All of this was driven not by market forces but by tax subsidies in the EU and the United States ($8 billion in 2007).
There are plenty of complaints about ethanol, among them that it uses more energy to create than it yields in the gas tank. In addition, it is far from certain that burning ethanol produces cleaner air pollution than gasoline does. Add in the food riots, and one might well ask, “What the hell was Congress thinking?”
And the answer is: what they always think. There is nothing particularly unusual about environmental initiatives having disastrous unintended consequences. After all, it’s not like our legislators actually KNOW anything about food or energy or the environment. (Two years ago, Nancy Pelosi casually remarked that natural gas is not a fossil fuel, but a renewable energy source, like wind.) All Congress is equipped to do is respond to groups like the Sierra Club, which hates gasoline, and Archer-Daniels-Midland, which grows and processes corn. Groups like this have a loud voice in Washington and are able to direct large contributions to politicians, so there is nothing at all surprising or unusual about our ethanol policy. In fact, if you are one of those people who thinks the US government should have an “energy policy,” ethanol subsidies are exactly the sort of thing you’re going to get. It’s the lesson of DDT repeated in a different guise. Neither scientific considerations nor concern for the environment have anything to do with the process. The words “science” and “the environment” are just key elements in the public relations template used to sell the idea. The real agenda is always something else.
And what is the agenda? Well, it varies, of course. It varies from issue to issue and from person to person. Sometimes, the motivation is simply greed. Al Gore is reputedly the world’s first green billionaire, for example. There may also be a larger political agenda such as the desire (evident on the streets of Copenhagen), to resurrect international communism as a world government.
Then there are the genuine tree-huggers, who are also in Copenhagen. These are simple-minded folks who feel strongly that every fence, every plowed field, every building and every oil well is an assault upon the good green earth. Similar are the Luddites, who arrive at the same conclusions though they do not so much love nature as hate the modern world. Luddites want to destroy all the machines and return to a simpler age. No one is stopping them from putting their beliefs into action by building themselves a hut in the woods, of course, but somehow they never quite do.
Even more disquieting is the small but noticeable segment of the political left for whom the deaths of poor and vulnerable third-worlders is not a bug, but a feature. They’re convinced the world just has too many of these sorts of people, and if some should drop into the void because of environmental programs, it’s something of a bonus. Back in the 1920’s, when Margaret Sanger founded Planned Parenthood, she did so to further the cause of eugenics by discouraging undesirable people (like Negroes) from reproducing. Nowadays, reducing the population of black and brown peoples is put in terms of the “population explosion” (another myth) rather than more overtly racist reasons. Back in the 1960’s, one argument made for banning DDT was to ensure that children in poor nations would die of malaria. As an official of the US Agency for International Development stated, “Rather dead than alive and riotously reproducing.” And today, you never hear feminists object to coercive contraceptive programs involving sterilization, or China’s forced abortions and one-child policy. The ghost of eugenics survives on the left, hidden under environmental and other fashionable facades.
Even though there are many agendas in the global warming movement, I suspect the primary motivation is as primal and human and ancient as it gets---the seductive allure of doom. Purveyors of the end-times have always found a ready audience because there is something in all of us that longs for oblivion, that makes us stare, fascinated, into the abyss.
As we face swelling prostates, aching knees, failing eyesight and dimming intellects, it’s the uncertainties around our deterioration that drive us mad. It’s one reason we worry, because worry is comforting. It allows us to narrow the focus of our existential despair. Am I eating too much cholesterol? Am I getting enough exercise? What if my heart stops? Silly, of course. Pointless. (It’s always something else that gets you.) But we all do it. Recently, on a radio show, I heard a woman tell the story of a horrible accident she had had several years before. She was hit by a truck, and as she was laying broken on the ground, in tremendous pain, her last thought before she passed out was this: “If I don’t survive this, I sure wasted a lot of time worrying about breast cancer.”
If global warming were real, and the oceans were to rise, and we all fried---well, there would be no escape, would there? We would all be toast, literally. And compared to the myriad of unknown minor and major woes we all must endure, the certainty of a specific and universal doom can be almost irresistible. The doom-sayers are never correct, but they don’t seem to have any trouble attracting a flock. And it doesn’t matter whether a particular pastor actually believes his revelation or is merely in the game to fleece the suckers. Not all of us will fall for it, of course, but enough will.
Al Gore is every preacher who ever picked a date for the end of the world and gathered his acolytes on a mountaintop to await the apocalypse. Is he sincere? Does he, in his heart, think he is speaking the truth? Well, considering his conduct, I find that difficult to believe, but ultimately it makes no difference. What matters is that others believed him, and that we were on the brink of shutting down much of the machinery that keeps me warm and well-fed and keeps untold millions of others, less fortunate, alive.
I thank God he has failed, and that the Copenhagen conference will be a fiasco. The exposure of global warming as a fraud has been an unexpected and wonderful development. It came out of nowhere, like the news that the Soviet Union had fallen. And for those of us who have had little to celebrate the past year, the news was every bit as welcome.
Copyright2009MichaelKubacki
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