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Cultural Amnesia and Losing Earth



On August 1st, The New York Times published a thirty-one-thousand-word propaganda piece called “Losing Earth,” which in thirty-one-thousand words — almost the length of my latest book — did not manage to mention nuclear energy except once in passing. They also somehow managed to ignore the sheer amount of fossil fuels and rare-earth minerals — in short, industry — required to create and maintain “renewables.” They did, however, unwittingly “deal a horrible blow to the fringe activists” (unquote) who don’t understand production or even the most basic economics, and this blow has left activists everywhere scurrying to their soapboxes.

“The idea that energy companies ‘knew everything there was to know about climate change,’ as Bill McKibben likes to say, and that the rest of us didn’t know about it until James Hansen testified before Congress in 1988, ‘is one of the worst examples we have of the cultural amnesia of this country and especially around this issue,’ Nathaniel Rich [the author of the New York Times article] told NewsHour.”

Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, who (like me) long ago left the movement because of an utter and absolute disenchantment with its innumerable, unignorable lies — i.e. Noble Cause Corruption — as well as its patently propagandistic and unscientific methodology, recently wrote a must-read article titled Twelve Invisible Eco-Catastrophes and Threats of Doom That are Actually Fake. Among them:

Coral reefs around the world are dying and Ocean “Acidification” will kill all the coral reefs and shellfish in the world, and, of course, here is a “sea of plastic” the size of Texas in the North Pacific Gyre north of Hawaii.

For this last one, he posted this proven fake photo — laughably fake — which, however, eco-warriors and social justice warriors the wide world over are still posting to weariness, without, of course, daring to think for themselves:





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Single-Use Plastic And Why Nine Out of Ten Statistics are Wrong

[UPDATED] I was just sent this: SHOCKER:RECYCLING PLASTIC IS MAKING OCEAN LITTER WORSE

This one is surging — or, I should say, re-surging, since it’s not at all new — and you will watch it go stratospheric.

You will also watch the Texas-sized exaggerations and outright prevarications spread across the globe with pretty much the exact same speed as legal bans on single-use plastic.

Here Dr. Tom Hartsfield, physicist and associate Editor at RealClearScience, mathematically debunks the often-repeated claim about Texas-sized islands of garbage in the Pacific:

First, we can do a quick feasibility calculation. The mass of polyethylene terephthalate (PET), the plastic from which most water bottles are made, required to create a two-Texas-sized island just one foot thick is 9 trillion pounds. That’s 15 times more than the world’s annual production of plastic. Even if a year’s worth of the world’s spent plastic bottles could be airlifted out over the ocean and directly dropped in one spot, this island could not be made.

So, here are the facts. Much of the ocean contains little to no plastic at all. In the smaller ocean gyres, there is roughly one bottle cap of plastic per 50 Olympic swimming pools’ worth of water. In the worst spot on earth, there is about two plastic caps’ worth of plastic per swimming pool of ocean. The majority of the plastic is ground into tiny grains or small thin films, interspersed with occasional fishing debris such as monofilament line or netting. Nothing remotely like a large island exists. Clearly, the scale and magnitude of this problem is vastly exaggerated by environmental groups and media reports [source].)

You may or may not know, as well, that the debate-driving statistic that Americans use “500 million plastic straws a day” was the product of a nine-year-old’s guesstimations, and the truth behind this “wild lie” is morbidly fascinating.

Reason Magazine has listed several major media outlets explicitly perpetuating this particular lie:

CNN

The Washington Post

Reuters

People

Time

Al Jazeera

National Geographic

The Guardian

The Independent (UK)

Seattle Weekly

San Francisco Chronicle

The Sacramento Bee

The Los Angeles Times

Saveur

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

And activist groups also promoting the claim:

The Lonely Whale Foundation

The Plastic Pollution Coalition

The Sierra Club

The National Park Service has also touted it.

So has California Assemblyman Ian Calderon.

It’s also in the text of a Hawaii bill that would ban the distribution of plastic straws in the state.

If you’ve ever wondered how a propaganda campaign begins and then surges across the world, you’re watching it in real-time with single-use plastic.

Keep watching.

It is instructive.

Watch how people, whether in real life or on social media or both, who didn’t really think about the issue one way or another before, are suddenly perfervid — though they know little of the actual data but a lot of the major media talking-points.

As David M. Perry, whose son has Down syndrome and relies on straws, recently wrote for Pacific Standard Magazine:

The oddly singular focus on straws may date back to a a viral 2015 video of a sea turtle with a bloody plastic straw embedded in its nose. The video is horrific. But again, scholars have not identified straws as a particularly grave threat to marine wildlife.

(Michaela Hollywood, who has muscular dystrophy, also wrote an article for The Huffington Post titled “Straws Save Lives Like Mine — Don’t Ban Them!”)

None of which is to diminish the problem of pollution but only to present the actual facts and, most importantly, possible solutions.

Quoting microbial oceanographer Dr. Angelicque White, professor at Oregon State University, after a 2011 expedition to the mythical “Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” which lies between California and Japan:

You might see a piece of Styrofoam or a bit of fishing line float by at random intervals after hours or 20 minutes…. There are not floating towers of milk jugs, toilet seats and rubber duckies swirling in the middle of the ocean. The majority of plastic in the sea consists of confetti-like specks that are spread out widely and nearly impossible to see with the naked eye.

The nonprofit The Ocean Cleanup has taken perhaps the closest look at the problem and how to solve it.

Recently, they produced the most comprehensive assessment of the problem ever, which they detail in the 5 March 2018 issue of Scientific Reports — and here is where it gets very real and very interesting — and I ask you to ask yourself why this isn’t commonly reported:

The Ocean Cleanup study estimates that “up to 20 percent of ocean garbage mass resulted from the 2011 Tohoku tsunami,” which indeed pushed an enormous amount of trash out to sea.

Also, the primary items were not plastic straws, plastic cups, or plastic bags — not even close.

“In The Ocean Cleanup’s Pacific patch sample, 46 percent was fish nets. When combined with ropes and lines, it amounted to 52 percent of the trash. The rest included hard plastics ranging from large plastic crates and bottle caps to small fragments referred to as microplastics, which comprise 8 percent of the mass. Obviously, this is not simply a consumer waste issue…. Some of the waste, such as food packaging, included written material that indicated a significant portion came from Asia. Of these, 30 percent were written in Japanese and 30.8 percent were in Chinese.”

(Source)

I modestly suggest we ban fishnets and rope and bottlecaps, before we ban plastic straws and plastic bags.

Incidentally, I once briefly worked in recycling, and recycling, if you don’t know, is a thoroughly industrial process.

Other studies indeed confirm that Asia is a very substantial source of ocean pollution:

China and 11 other Asian nations are responsible for 77 percent to 83 percent of plastic waste entering the oceans because of their poor disposal practices. A 2017 Environmental Sciences & Technology study reported that up to 95 percent of plastic waste enters oceans from one of 10 rivers — eight in Asia and two in Africa….

Of course, other nations should do their best to reduce their contributions, no matter how small. The Science article placed the United States as 20th, but its contribution to ocean plastics was just about 1 percent, even though the United States is among the top plastic producers and consumers. Credit goes to modern waste management practices — landfilling, incineration or recycling — and litter control. (Ibid)

The Ocean Cleanup, which is a good organization founded in 2013, says it’s “developed and can deploy cleanup technologies which could remove more than 50 percent of the waste from the Pacific patch within five years.”

Technological problems require technological solutions.

Another nonprofit called Keep America Beautiful (the weeping Native American man from the old television ads was theirs) has in America been among the foremost fighters of litter since 1953. And they’ve done well: their reports show that U.S. litter has declined by over sixty percent since 1969.

Why do you not often hear that?

I don’t know. Perhaps because it’s not sensationalistic enough or scary enough to make the uncritical masses think we’re on the very brink of destruction.

Malia Blom Hill, a Hawaiian and policy director at the Grassroot Institute, recently wrote a decent article titled “State Legislatures Clutch at Plastic Straws” — which reads, in part:

In the last few weeks, the internet has enjoyed a hearty laugh at a California bill that would ban the use of plastic straws and throw violators in jail. Sneaking under the radar, however, is a similar proposal from Hawaii. The Hawaii version is slightly less draconian, in that it requires fugitive straw users to pay only up to a $500 fine and do community service.

It’s also closer to actual passage, having moved through the Senate Committee on Agriculture and Environment with three “aye” votes and none opposed.

The testimony in favor of the straw bill was focused primarily on the environmental impact of straws. People unfamiliar with Hawaii might be led to believe that the streets and beaches of our islands are littered with plastic straws. I assure you that is not the case….

Advocates for the disabled have commented that a plastic straw ban would be especially difficult for those with special needs. But why let a little practicality interfere with the warm glow that comes from legislating environmental morality?

The real problem here is not the straw bill. Every year, the Hawaii legislature has at least one proposal that is driven more by emotion and political trends than hard facts and research. The problem can be found in lawmakers who can’t pass a poster in the corner Starbucks without thinking, “There ought to be a law….”

(Source)

In a counterpoint to this article, one of the commenters, who, though I don’t actually know, did not strike me as particularly partisan either way, put it well:

Every article I read on this subject seems to leave out the actual problem to ocean pollution. It’s no[t] manufacturing less plastic and its not consumers using less plastic. It’s people (and businesses) who litter. Indeed, the vast majority of this littering comes from a few so-called ‘underdeveloped’ countries…. I grow weary of the constant barrage of blaming plastic manufacturers for this dilemma. Plastic applications continue to provide useful and economically beneficial products to citizens of all countries and employs millions worldwide. I do not wish to diminish the impact of any possible impact upon the environment, but keep in mind that there is a growing plastic recycling industry and it seems that there is a new innovation every day that will improve the sustainability of new polymers. Next time you contemplate plastic pollution in our oceans, remember how it got there.

(Source)

Reader, every single time you see a cause — whether right-wing or left — surging or re-surging, I implore you to ask yourself the following question first, last, and always:

What will the proposed solutions do?

Like smoking bans and CO2 bans and virtually all other legal prohibitions, banning single-use plastic and fining or jailing (!) people who use it will not address the problem — not remotely — and supporters and legislatures admit that openly. Until these groups and bureaus actually get serious about addressing problems — instead of all this feel-good talky-talky, which is ultimately meaningless but for all the gigantic and ever-growing bureaucracy it spawns — they cannot be taken seriously, nor should they be.

“Let’s say you recycle 100 percent in all of North America and Europe,” Ramani Narayan, a chemical engineer at Michigan State, tells National Geographic. “You still would not make a dent on the plastics released into the oceans.”

Why do it, then?

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The Unknown Rebel, Tiananmen Square, & the Twenty-Ninth Year Anniversary of a Socialist Massacre

Tank Man — or the “Unknown Rebel,” as he’s sometimes called: so small and yet so large.

That photo is of course from Tiananmen Square, twenty-nine years ago today, June 4th, when the entire world watched an anonymous Chinese man stand alone in front of advancing tanks, not backing down in the face of socialist totalitarianism.

Whether you associate more closely with the so-called leftwing or the so-called right, I urge you in all sincerity to please take a brief moment and ask yourself:

What would lead a person to such an incredible act — standing in front of a column of tanks knowing virtually for certain that you were going to die?

I write about Tiananmen Square every year on its anniversary because I think it’s vital that the world never fully forgets.

I ask you to think of the Unknown Rebel next time you see another enviro group lauding praise on the socialist Che Guerva, a proven child murderer (read some of it, please — please — I implore you to: “Murdered by Che: Che Guevara, Mass Murderer and Terrorist” and please take a moment and scroll through the documented victims here) — Che, a man who explicitly called for Russian nukes to wipe out New York City, which even the Huffington Post doesn’t ignore.

Here, incidentally, is some Che Guevara paraphernalia from an Occupy protest, all those years ago in 2011-2012: young women and men who are perfectly okay idolizing a mass murderer and socialist totalitarian, but who, at the same time, don’t at all like the people and the country who provide them with the wealth, health, cleanliness, and the pure freedom to protest these things which keep them alive. Let’s put it this way: women and men who wouldn’t be allowed to protest this way under the very man whom they praise — Che — but would have to do it like Tank Man (see above), in which case, also like Tank Man (it is believed, though no one really knows), they’d be rapidly executed.

Yes, America sucks — it’s so hip and cool to think so — except when it doesn’t:

Think of Tank Man next time you see a “Feel the Bern” bumper sticker — and they’re still everywhere — and think of Bernie himself in one of his three (American) mansions saying (and I quote from his own website): “These days, the American dream is more apt to be realized in South America, in places such as Ecuador, Venezuela and Argentina, where incomes are actually more equal today than they are in the land of Horatio Alger” and then in the very same paragraph asking, ostensibly in all seriousness, in reference to Venezuela-versus-the-United-States (where his mansions are all located): “Who’s the banana republic now?” as the Chavez regime tore through Venezuela leaving a vast swath of poverty.

Think of Tank Man next time you see Bill Ayers, and his book called Prairie Fires, which he dedicated to Chairman Mao Zedong, and think of all the other Obama progressives in positions of power praising the man himself: Chairman Mao Zedong, who is the one most responsible for creating the regime that (likely) killed Tank Man — and much, much more:

The regime that is undeniably 100 percent culpable for hundreds of millions of murders, forced famines, and wrongful imprisonments.

Because when people in some of the highest positions of power in this country overtly and explicitly praise someone like that and the majority of citizens see absolutely nothing wrong with it or, seeing something (they don’t quite know what), choose instead to look away, you can be sure there is a kind of mass lunacy and ignorance at work.

And then please, after that — please — tell me how none of this is true socialism, and that those of us who believe in the absolute sanctity and inviolability of individual person and property, tell me how we are the foolish radicals because we know that the moment you concede that principle — the principle of individual rights — you’re fucked, as history has proven, time and again and again and again and again and again and again….

And then tell me that behind every major victory for personal liberty — legalizing gay marriage, for instance, or pot legalization, justice for Native American children, or allowing insurance companies the freedom to trade across state lines, abolishing trade tariffs, et cetera — tell me what bedrock principles you find there undergirding such acts of true justice.

I’ll give you a hint: you won’t find collectivist principles.

This week, think of this and Tank Man for just a moment, before you go back to business-as-usual.

Surely, Tank Man is one of the defining photos of the 20th Century, but let us also never forget, as socialists already have — or, rather, never paid attention to to begin with because it’s not real socialism — Chengdu:

June 4th indeed marks the twenty-ninth year anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing, China — when the communist dictatorship of that country quashed a political reform movement, which was begun by Beijing students who sought to bring about more freedom.

At that time, other protests, in other Chinese cities, sprung up as well. Do you know about Chengdu?

Twenty-nine years ago, on April 15, 1989, Chinese students were mourning the death of a reformist leader. But what began as mourning evolved into mass protests demanding democracy. Demonstrators remained in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, day after day, until their protests were brutally suppressed by the Chinese army — on June 4. Hundreds died; to this day, no one knows how many.

The media captured some of the story of the massacre in Beijing. But Louisa Lim, NPR’s longtime China correspondent, says the country’s government has done all it can in the intervening 25 years to erase the memory of the uprising. Lim’s forthcoming book, The People’s Republic of Amnesia, relates how 1989 changed China and how China rewrote what happened in 1989 in its official version of events. Her story includes an investigation into a forgotten crackdown in the southwestern city of Chengdu — which, to this day, has never been reported.

It was in Chengdu, which is now a bustling mega-city with a population of 14 million, that Lim met Tang Deying (source).

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) ended these protests by force — which, really, is the only way governments can ever resolve disputes of this sort, since government by definition is an agency of force.

When it was all over, the People’s Republic of China began arresting its people on a widespread scale.

They also went to great lengths to suppress protesters and other people of China who were supportive of the protesters’ cause.

The People’s Republic of China banned the foreign press and controlled all later coverage of the event.

“Members of the Party who had publicly sympathized with the protesters were purged, with several high-ranking members placed under house arrest, such as General Secretary Zhao Ziyang. The violent suppression of the Tiananmen Square protest caused widespread international condemnation of the PRC government” (Andrew Nathan, The Tiananmen Papers).

The protesters — among whom were advocates of laissez-faire as well as disillusioned communists and Trotskyites and many other groups besides — were united only in their hatred of that oppressive regime. The Tiananmen Square protest was a protest against authoritarianism.

It actually began some seven weeks before, on April 15th, 1989, after the death of a largely pro-free-market, anti-corruption government official named Hu Yaobang. Many Chinese people wanted to mourn his death because they regarded him as something of a hero. By the eve of Hu’s funeral, a million people had gathered in Tiananmen Square.

In fact, many large-scale protests sprung up all throughout China, including Shanghai. These others remained relatively peaceful, however — except the now virtually forgotten Chengu:

Protests in Chengdu mirrored those in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, with students mourning the sudden death from a heart attack of reformist party leader Hu Yaobang on April 15, 1989. This soon morphed into mass protests, followed by a hunger strike beginning in mid-May.

Students occupied Chengdu’s Tianfu Square, camping at the base of its 100-foot-tall Chairman Mao statue and proudly proclaiming it to be a “Little Tiananmen.” The initial move by police to clear protesters from Tianfu Square on the morning of June 4 went ahead relatively peacefully.

But on hearing the news that troops had opened fire on unarmed civilians in Beijing, the citizens of Chengdu took to the streets once more. This time they knew the risk; they carried banners denouncing the “June 4th massacre” and mourning wreaths with the message: “We Are Not Afraid To Die.”

Soon the police moved in with tear gas. Pitched battles broke out in Tianfu Square. Protesters threw paving stones at the police; the police retaliated by beating protesters with batons.

At a nearby medical clinic, the bloodied victims of police brutality lay in rows on the floor. Kim Nygaard, an American resident of Chengdu, recalled that they begged her: “Tell the world! Tell the world!”

A row of patients sat on a bench, their cracked skulls swathed in bandages, their shirts stained scarlet near the collar, visceral evidence of the police strategy of targeting protesters’ heads.

But the violence went both ways: Dennis Rea, an American then teaching at a local university, watched, horrified, as the crowd viciously attacked a man they believed to be a policeman. The crowd pulled at his arms and legs, then dropped him on the ground and began stomping on his body and face, crushing it.

Eight people were killed that day, including two students, according to the local government’s official account. It said the fighting left 1,800 people injured — of them, it said, 1,100 were policemen — though it described most of the injuries as light.

But U.S. diplomats at the time told The New York Times they believed as many as 100 seriously wounded people had been carried from the square that day.

Protests continued into the next evening, and as June 5 turned into June 6, a crowd broke into one of the city’s smartest hotels, the Jinjiang. It was there, under the gaze of foreign guests, that one of the most brutal — and largely forgotten — episodes of the Chengdu crackdown played out after a crowd attacked the hotel (source).

It isn’t known exactly how many people died altogether in these Chinese protests, although at one time the Chinese Red Cross gave a figure of 2,600 for Tiananmen Square alone, a number which they later denied.

During those seven weeks, many of these protesters were openly discussing a principle that we almost never hear discussed even in this country — though it was this country’s foundational principle — a principle that is so profound and so complex that only a small minority of people today grasp its awesome logic. That principle is the principle of individual rights.

It was, incidentally, this same communistic Chinese government that American pseudo-intellectuals, like Norman Mailer, Howard Zinn, and Noam Chomsky, have described as (quoting Chomsky’s own words) “a relatively livable and just society,” about which “one finds many things that are really quite admirable.” Furthermore says Chomsky:

China is an important example of a new society in which very interesting and positive things happened at the local level, in which a good deal of the collectivization and communization was really based on mass participation and took place after a level of understanding had been reached in the peasantry that led to this next step.

The word Tiananmen literally translates to “Gate of Heavenly Peace.”

From the previously quoted article entitled “After 25 Years Of Amnesia, Remembering A Forgotten Tiananmen“:

“What happened in Chengdu 25 years ago matters enough that the local government continues to devote financial and human resources to muzzling Tang. Her treatment shows how scared the Chinese authorities are of their own recent history.

“A quarter-century ago, the government used guns and batons to suppress its own people. Now it is deploying more sophisticated tools of control — censorship of the media and the falsification of its own history — to build patriotism and create a national identity.

“Though China’s citizens have become undeniably richer and freer in the post-Tiananmen era, Tang Deying’s experience shows the limits to that freedom. Simply by keeping alive a memory that others have suppressed or simply forgotten, Tang has become seen as a threat to social stability.

“What happened in Chengdu matters because it shows the success of the Chinese government in not just controlling its people, but also in controlling their memories. In the China of today, that most personal space of all — memory — has become a political tool.”

Because the only true rebel — like Tank Man — is the person who follows not the crowd or the group, but reason and the independent mind.







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Angry Dirty Water: The Uncompahgre River

Along the western edge of Ouray, Colorado, and sourced some 12,000 feet above at a lake called Lake Como, there flows a greenish-yellowish-reddish river named the Uncompahgre River.

The word is pronounced un-COME-pah-GRAY.

It’s a Ute Indian word that means “dirty water” or “angry water” or “red lake,” because mountain minerals color the water, as they always have.

Long before the mines existed, the Utes observed this.

This is Red Mountain, near the river’s source:

Red Mountain is very beautiful, and it’s naturally this color.

It is not this color because of mining or pollution.

Ouray, however, which is where I grew up, is a mining town.

In the early nineties, when the environmental movement began to really take hold, we natives (and by “natives” I mean Ouray locals) rather suddenly began hearing that the reason the Uncompahgre River is colored this way is that the mines had polluted the river water.

In fact, this rapidly became a common environmentalist talking-point, repeated and passed along without any critical questioning.

And yet it’s totally, provably, patently false, and I, who was all for environmentalism at this time, I knew for a fact that this talking-point was a total fabrication.

It was pure propaganda made up out of whole cloth, and I, along with many others, watched this fabrication materialize and grow into a monster that, to this day, certain true-believers will fight you to the death over.

Other outright lies cropped up: lies about the mines being “mined out” (they’ve barely been tapped, in fact); lies about pollution and environmental degradation; lies about what the miners did to the environment. Some contained kernels of truth but were wildly exaggerated.

The question for me became: why?

The answer: Noble Cause Corruption.

At the time, being a kid, I didn’t of course know about this. But watching outright lies materialize before your eyes will certainly make you start looking far more critically at subsequent claims — or, at least, it should.

It turns out that the lies and exaggerations are part-and-parcel to the cause. They’re commonplace, as a matter of fact, and the leaders of the environmental movement make no real secret of this.

Most environmentalists I know are genuinely good people.

Most of my hippy-dippy friends are excellent sweet people, with excellent sweet intentions, and that’s why we’re friends.

But I can say also, without any hesitation or doubt, that most don’t have any idea about the philosophical-political-economic underpinnings of the movement they espouse, which is pure Neo-Marxism.

The truth is that I know no serious person who doesn’t care about the state of the planet.

The only real question is, how best to deal with environmental and societal issues?

And I can absolutely promise you this much:

It’s not through an elite bureau of centralized planners.

It’s not through subsidizing “renewables” and making them mandatory — and then claiming that renewables are “sustainable” because they’re more efficient, and look: they are everywhere now.

It’s not through majority rule, and it’s not through the majority having power to vote away the rights of any individual — which is to say, through vox-populi-democracy.

It’s not through subordinating individuals and their property to a collective — of any kind — and when you hear that proposed, every single time, no matter what, you can be 100 percent sure that it is a false and dangerous doctrine.

It’s not through wealth destruction and “bringing down all industrial society,” as environmental leader Maurice Strong put it, and it’s not through retrogressing back to that point in human history, not so long ago, when over ninety percent of populations were necessarily devoted to farming — when sickness and disease were rampant and unchecked and lifespans were dismally short, water and food dirty, and medicine was still in the dark ages, and even short-distance travel sheer drudgery and danger.

The solution is through human progress and innovation, which comes through fully and legally recognizing each individual’s unalienable right to person and property, allowing people to flourish and prosper and create new wealth, and also in holding people fully accountable for breaching either, whether through pollution, expropriation, eminent domain, extortion, murder, fraud, rape, or any other form of violence, direct or indirect: because human progress comes about through conditions of freedom.


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This Earth Day, May I Suggest …

May I suggest this Earth Day you peruse Steven Pinker’s new book Enlightenment Now?

Steven Pinker is by no stretch of the imagination a conservative, right-wing, Republican blah-blah-blah-blah — if, that is, you’re still into all that nonsensical partisan meaninglessness, which I am not. (Meaningless, I say, because the left and the right are two sides of an identical penny, as I’ve stated so many times, and I am quite prepared to prove that to you.)

Pinker “identifies” as a “left-wing libertarian” — a little like his teacher Noam Chomsky, with whom, however, he deviates significantly and is far less Marxist — which, incidentally, is one of the primary reasons I don’t think the word “libertarian” has much value or explanatory power:

It’s a rubber word that can be stretched to fit almost anything and anyone. If it’s to mean anything at all, it must be qualified out of all sensible proportion: civil libertarian, leftwing libertarian, anarchist-libertarian, anarcho-capitalist libertarian, Austrian libertarian, Rothbardian libertarian, Ron Paul libertarian …

Steven Pinker, in any case, is rational inquirer enough to have seen the clear and obvious and irrefutable:

Science, technology, progress, reason — all outgrowths of the ideas behind the Enlightenment — have made the world far cleaner, healthier, and better, even as world populations have grown.

He is, unfortunately, still far too equivocal in certain of his views, unable to break out of all the frozen dogma that’s been inculcated into his head — though I have followed his writing over the years and he’s come a long way — and so if you really wanted to know for Earth Day the actual facts about planet earth, I recommend Julian Simon’s book, which remains as sound and as brilliant today as it was the day it was written, the logical power of which has persuaded many, many, many people who honestly care about the truth, Steven Pinker included.

Be forewarned, however: Julian Simon’s book is fact-filled and not for the dogmatist.

It is the book that quondam Greenpeacer Bjorn Lomborg and his students tried to refute — and ended up being persuaded by because the data is so strong, and speaks for itself.

In fact, a beautiful book was born out of Bjorn Lomborg’s attempt to refute Julian Simon — who was a true hero and genius and lover of the earth, in my opinion, and who endured and tirelessly refuted staggering amounts of hostility, harassment, hate, ridicule, and lies almost exclusively from the tolerant left, who in my personal experience are the most intolerant of any religion or group, and never lost an argument because he had facts on his side — and that book by Bjorn Lomborg is an excellent book called The Skeptical Environmentalist.

Julian Simon’s book is also the book that Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore often cites as a seminal influence in why he, like me, left the environmental movement long, long ago:




Happy Earth Day!

Here is Steven Pinker’s recent interview with the excellent Nick Gillespie of the excellent Reason Magazine:

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Plastic Strawmen and Noble Cause Corruption



As a bartender, the latest wave of environmental misinformation and exaggeration struck particularly close to home. I’m referring, of course, to the environmental push to outlaw plastic straws in bars, with, additionally, the threat of steep fines.

Have you ever heard of “noble cause corruption”?

It’s when you’re so convinced that your argument is on the side of right and good and just and true that you believe there’s nothing wrong with lying or exaggerating in order to prove your case:

The ends justify the means, in other words.

The term “noble cause corruption” was originally coined by the American police force. It referred to those cops who “know” that a suspect is guilty and so feel totally justified in breaking the rules by, for instance, planting evidence or forcing confessions.

Of course, if you had to force a confession or plant evidence, how then did you “know” guilt in the first place?

The “noble-cause-corruption” principle is illustrated perfectly, over and over again, and is perfectly analogous with any number of environmental claims — and when people ask me, as they often do, why I’m critical of environmentalism as a worldview and (Neo-Marxist) philosophy, this is among the first reasons I give:

Because if you must lie to the public about the urgent problem of climate, or deforestation, or plastic waste, or acid rain, or rising oceans, or the ozone layer, or pollution, or species extinction, or CO2, or recycling, et cetera ad infinitum, then how do you know you’re not also lying to yourself about how big the problem is and how certain you are about it?

Have you heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, for instance?

Did you know that it doesn’t actually exist?

Quoting Tom Hartsfield at RealClearScience:

Have you heard of the giant plastic island in the Pacific Ocean? Several times in casual conversation, I’ve been told that mankind is ruining the oceans to such an extent that there are now entire islands of plastic waste. Daily Kos tells us that this “island” is twice the size of Texas!

First, we can do a quick feasibility calculation. The mass of polyethylene terephthalate (PET), the plastic from which most water bottles are made, required to create a two-Texas-sized island just one foot thick is 9 trillion pounds. That’s 15 times more than the world’s annual production of plastic. Even if a year’s worth of the world’s spent plastic bottles could be airlifted out over the ocean and directly dropped in one spot, this island could not be made.

So, here are the facts. Much of the ocean contains little to no plastic at all. In the smaller ocean gyres, there is roughly one bottle cap of plastic per 50 Olympic swimming pools’ worth of water. In the worst spot on earth, there is about two plastic caps’ worth of plastic per swimming pool of ocean. The majority of the plastic is ground into tiny grains or small thin films, interspersed with occasional fishing debris such as monofilament line or netting. Nothing remotely like a large island exists. Clearly, the scale and magnitude of this problem is vastly exaggerated by environmental groups and media reports.

(I recommend you read the full article — especially if you belong to the Party of Science.)

And from the left-leaning US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA):

“While ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch’ is a term often used by the media, it does not paint an accurate picture of the marine debris problem in the North Pacific Ocean. The name ‘Pacific Garbage Patch’ has led many to believe that this area is a large and continuous patch of easily visible marine debris items such as bottles and other litter — akin to a literal island of trash that should be visible with satellite or aerial photographs. This is not the case.”

— Ocean Facts, National Ocean Service

The following, from Slate Magazine, was written Daniel Engber — a journalist and environmentalist who, in a rare moment of candor wrote:

“There Is No Island of Trash in the Pacific. But the cause of clean oceans needed a good story. Our warming planet could use another one.”

The actual Pacific-Garbage-Patch story couldn’t haven been scripted any better.

It begins with an oil-heir on his way back from a yacht race(!) This oil-heir, in the picture at the top of my article here, is the poster child of the so-called limousine liberal: the person seeking to atone for his father’s money (while not actually having to part with it) by creating a cause and rallying cry for the environmentalist philosophy.

Daniel Engber, of Slate, makes explicit that the garbage patch was indeed just a rallying cry — and declares furthermore that this is completely acceptable [emphasis mine] because the cause is so very necessary that truth is irrelevant.

“In early August 1997, Charles Moore found himself floating through the North Pacific in his Tasmanian-built catamaran. Moore, an oil heir, activist, and yachting captain, had just finished up a two-week race and was heading back from Honolulu to Santa Barbara, California, through what’s called a “gyre”—an area of the ocean like the Sargasso Sea, wrapped inside a giant weather spiral, that serves as a reservoir for flotsam. As he described it in a 2003 article for Natural History, the thousand-mile journey took him through an endless field of plastic—3 million tons of it in all, he guessed, in an area about the size of Texas. Everywhere he looked he saw debris: bottles, bottle caps, wrappers, fragments. And when he returned to this “Garbage Patch” a year later, he found a vast “plastic-plankton soup” and a litany of bigger objects: a volleyball, a cathode-ray tube for a 19-inch TV, a truck tire mounted on a steel rim, and a gallon bleach bottle so brittle that it crumbled in his hands. Moore’s Garbage Patch would grow in size and fame in the years that followed.

“It was this false appraisal—this projection of collective guilt as a trash archipelago—that brought the problem of marine debris back into the public eye. It gave us all a way to comprehend, or at least hallucinate, what was otherwise a widespread, microscopic devastation.”

(Link)

Comprehension, hallucination … it’s all the same.

None of this is to say that we shouldn’t be concerned about litter and pollution. It is, however, to say that lying is always unacceptable — no matter the “cause” — and that if at this point you still put wholesale trust in the environmental movement, you’re putting your trust in dangerous hands: the hands of proven prevaricators, with a specific agenda that is not as benign as you’ve been led to believe.

Here’s climatologist Stephen Schneider admitting in no uncertain terms that it’s okay to lie to the public:

“On the one hand, as scientists, we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but — which means we must include all the doubts, caveats, and ifs, ands and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. To do that we need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to off up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This ‘double ethical blind’ we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide the right balance between being effective and being honest.”

– Stephen Schneider, quoted in Jonathan Schell, “Our Fragile Earth,” Discover Magazine.

And the man who kicked it all off, James Hansen of NASA, apparently feeling some compunction:

“Emphasis on extreme scenarios may have been appropriate at one time, when the public and decision-makers were relatively unaware of the global warming issue…. Now, however, the need is for demonstrably objective climate forcing scenarios consistent with what is realistic under current conditions.”

– James Hansen, “Can We Defuse the Global Warming Time Bomb?”

Yet here he was before:

“We have at most ten years—not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions.”

– Jim Hansen, “The Threat to the Planet,” The New York Review of Books, July 13, 2006, 12–16, at 16.

“In the United States of America, unfortunately we still live in a bubble of unreality. And the Category 5 denial is an enormous obstacle to any discussion of solutions. Nobody is interested in solutions if they don’t think there’s a problem. Given that starting point, I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are” — Albert Gore, Grist Magazine.

These quotes go on and on and on (and on).

Here’s the real point:

Waste is an inescapable by-product of all sentient things — humans included.

Externalities and pollution are inescapable.

The actual question, then, is this:

What’s the most efficient way to clean-up and to solve waste and pollution problems?

More and ever-more laws, regulations, red-tape, bureaus, bureaucrats, blind dogma, and the crony capitalists that this system fosters in full — cronies who often are not held accountable for polluting?

Or human progress and technology, which has done more for the environment in a shorter span of time than 50,000 pages of legislation, over the span of 40 years, in the Federal Register?

Private property and holding people fully accountable, via tort laws, for polluting?

Or crony capitalism and lobbyists and so-called public property for which no one is fully accountable?

The shocking, propagandistic photos the enviros never tire of showing us — whether of garbage, glaciers, drowning islands or anything else — are EXACTLY the left-wing equivalent of religious right-to-lifers showing us on the street corner gruesome abortion photos as if it’s some kind of argument.

It’s a non-argument.

A picture is not an argument.

On top of it all, there’s nothing that will make a person want to get behind a cause more than being lectured about one’s use of petroleum and plastic by an oil-heir in his plastic sunglasses and plastic bike helmet on a bike or boat or scooter made largely of plastic and petroleum.

Now leave me and my fucking straws alone.





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Obama Administration to Ban Asthma Inhalers Over Environmental Concerns

As you may recall, the White House recently waived EPA ozone regulation because those regulations proved too costly (this despite the fact that you can’t put a price tag on mother earth), but now the Obama administration is looking to make asthmatics pay a steep price — a measure, let it be noted, which will have absolutely no effect on the ozone or the environment:

Asthma patients who rely on over-the-counter inhalers will need to switch to prescription-only alternatives as part of the federal government’s latest attempt to protect the Earth’s atmosphere.

The Food and Drug Administration said Thursday patients who use the epinephrine inhalers to treat mild asthma will need to switch by Dec. 31 to other types that do not contain chlorofluorocarbons, an aerosol substance once found in a variety of spray products.

The action is part of an agreement signed by the U.S. and other nations to stop using substances that deplete the ozone layer, a region in the atmosphere that helps block harmful ultraviolet rays from the Sun.

But the switch to a greener inhaler will cost consumers more. Epinephrine inhalers are available via online retailers for around $20, whereas the alternatives, which contain the drug albuterol, range from $30 to $60.

Unlike these fatuous environmental regulations, asthma is no joke. Thus even left-wingers like the Atlantic’s Megan McArdle (an asthma sufferer herself) are campaigning against them. As McArdle correctly notes: “when consumers are forced to use environmentally friendly products they’re are almost always worse:

Er, industry also knew how to make low-flow toilets, which is why every toilet in my recently renovated rental house clogs at least once a week. They knew how to make more energy efficient dryers, which is why even on high, I have to run every load through the dryer in said house twice. And they knew how to make inexpensive compact flourescent bulbs, which is why my head hurts from the glare emitting from my bedroom lamp. They also knew how to make asthma inhalers without CFCs, which is why I am hoarding old albuterol inhalers that, unlike the new ones, a) significantly improve my breathing and b) do not make me gag. Etc.

(Link)

Cough it up, asthmatics, cough it up.


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Obama And the White House Reject Costly Ozone Regulations

But what about “the environment”? Economics are meaningless compared to Mother Earth, aren’t they? And anyway, there’s no connection between wealth and clean, healthy environments.

Well, the enviro-friendly White House seems to be rethinking that edict, as is usually the case whenever the rubber meets the road:

White House Rejects Controversial Ozone Regs

President Barack Obama on Friday asked the Environmental Protection Agency to withdraw a proposed regulation for ozone air quality standards, citing the nation’s wobbly economy.

President Obama, in a statement, said that by requesting withdrawal of the ozone regulations “I have continued to underscore the importance of reducing regulatory burdens and regulatory uncertainty, particularly as our economy continues to recover.”

A passenger enters a Kansas City Metro bus that warns of an Ozone Alert in Kansas City, Missouri, last month.

The EPA’s ozone rule has been among the more controversial regulations proposed by the environmental agency. Republicans and industry groups say the rule would be too costly to implement and lead to a slowdown in economic growth. Earlier this week, House Republicans said they would hold a vote this winter on a bill to prevent its implementation.

(Link)



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Make Every Day Earth Day — But Do It The Right Way

Earth Day is upon us again. It all began on April 22, 1970, when a United States Senator named Gaylord Nelson founded “an environmental teach-in” which he called, somewhat inauspiciously, Earth Day.

The first Earth Day was confined to the United States, but the first Earth Day national coordinator, one Denis Hayes, soon made it international, organizing events in approximately 140 nations.

This year rather than celebrating Earth Day by advocating still more government bureaus, which will then determine for the rest of us what we can do with our property, I suggest we instead celebrate the only real way to clean up and beautify the planet: private property rights and private stewardship.

The right to property is, as James Madison said, “the guardian” of every other right. Freedom and private property are inseparable. Property is freedom: you cannot be free if you are not free to produce, use, and dispose of those things necessary to your life.

“Control the property, control the person,” said Lenin, whose birthday, not quite coincidentally, is April 22nd.

Property, like every other right, is first and foremost the right to act: specifically, it is the right to produce, exchange, and use.

“Property is not only money and other tangible things of value, but also includes any intangible right considered as a source or element of income or wealth…. It is the right to enjoy and to dispose of certain things in the most absolute manner” (Electric Law Library).

Money is property.

The only alternative to private property is government or communal ownership of property, both of which amount to the same thing in the end: a bureau of centralized planners controlling the property.

“That alone is a just government which impartially secures to every man whatever is his own,” said James Madison.

If you desire to know precisely what someone’s political viewpoint is, all you need do is find out his or her stance on property; for it is through the stance on property that the entire political philosophy is disclosed. You needn’t listen to anything anyone says about “freedom” or “liberty” or any of these other easy platitudes: no one in her or his right mind will go against those things. Instead, simply check the stance on property. If someone doesn’t believe in full private property rights, that person is, to the exact extent he or she denies private property rights, a statist.

Property is the sine-qua-non of human freedom.

To defend freedom, therefore, you must start by defending the unalienable right to property.

The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government (James Madison, Federal Papers 10).

Government is instituted no less for protection of the PROPERTY, than of the persons (James Madison, Federalist Paper #54, emphasis in the original).

The true foundation of republican government is the equal right of every citizen in his person and property and in their management (Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval).

A right to property is founded in our natural wants, in the means with which we are endowed to satisfy these wants, and the right to what we acquire by those means without violating the similar rights of other sensible beings (Thomas Jefferson to Pierre Samuel Dupont de Nemours).

The political institutions of America, its various soils and climates, opened a certain resource to the unfortunate and to the enterprising of every country and insured to them the acquisition and free possession of property (Thomas Jefferson: Declaration on Taking Up Arms).

The moment the idea is admitted into society, that property is not as sacred as the laws of God and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence (John Adams).

Environmentalism has so thoroughly permeated world culture that the saving-the-planet rhetoric is accepted even by those who don’t really regard themselves as dyed-in-the-skein environmentalists. It is taught as holy writ in public schools, and it’s espoused by poets, priests, and politicians alike.

This monstrous ideology would, given the first opportunity, destroy humankind, a fact of which the leaders of this movement make no secret.

It is therefore of great importance to expose this ideology for what it actually is: a neo-Marxist philosophy that masquerades as something benevolent and life-affirming, but which in reality explicitly calls for humans to be subordinated to nature, via an elite bureau of centralized planners who, as you would suspect, are the ones that get to decide for the rest of us how we must live.

It was Jean-Jacques Rousseau who first began propounding the immanent-goodness-of-nature-untouched-by-man ideology. Rousseau also deplored “the corrupting influence of reason, culture, and civilization.” In fact, Rousseau, like many of our current politicians, also preached economic egalitarianism and tribal democracy, the “collective will,” and the primacy of the group over the individual. In a great many ways, Rousseau is the founder of present-day environmentalism.

His so-called Eden Premise was picked up by all the pantheists and transcendentalists, such as Henry David Thoreau, John Muir (founder of Sierra Club), Aldo Leopold (who helped found the Wilderness Society), and of course the propagandist Rachel Carson.

When, in 1860, Thoreau wrote that forests untouched by humans grow toward “the greatest regularity and harmony,” he inadvertently changed the life of a biologist named George Perkins Marsh, who in 1864 wrote a book called Man and Nature. In this extraordinarily influential book, George Marsh also tried to convince us that, absent humans, mother nature and her processes work in perfect harmony:

“Man” (said Marsh) “is everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discord…. [Humans] are brute destroyers … [Humans] destroy the balance which nature had established.”

“But” (he continued) “nature avenges herself upon the intruder, [bringing humans] deprivation, barbarism, and perhaps even extinction.”

Just as Thoreau influenced George Marsh, so George Marsh influenced a man named Gifford Pinchot, and also a man named John Muir.

Gifford Pinchot was a utilitarian who loathed private ownership of natural resources. He was also the first chief of the United States Forest Service under Republican President Theodore Roosevelt.

Gifford Pinchot was a collectivist who believed in sacrificing individuals and their property for the sake of “the greatest number.”

It was in large part because of Pinchot that the United States’ federal government increased its land holdings dramatically, so that today over one third of America is owned by the federal government — which holdings comprise over half of America’s known resources, including “a third of our oil, over 40 percent of salable timber and natural gas, and most of the nation’s coal, copper, silver, asbestos, lead, and other minerals.”

In his excellent account of American environmentalism, Philip Shabecoff says this:

“Pinchot wanted the forests managed for their usefulness, not for their beauty… He was not interested in preserving the natural landscape for its own sake.”

At the very least, Pinchot, a conservationist, was, however, still semi pro-human.

John Muir, on the other hand, Pinchot’s nemesis, was not pro-human. In fact, he was the diametric opposite.

It was John Muir, a Scottish immigrant, who introduced misanthropy into the environmental pseudo-philosophy, which misanthropy reigns supreme to this very day.

“How narrow we selfish, conceited creatures are in our sympathies!” said John Muir, also an unapologetic racist. “How blind to the rights of all the rest of creation! Well, I have precious little sympathy for the selfish propriety of civilized man, and if a war of races should occur between the wild beasts and Lord Man, I would be tempted to sympathize with the bears.”

From John Muir, it was only a short step to one Ernst Haeckel (1834 – 1919), a German zoologist, who told us that individuals don’t actually exist. Human individuals do not possess an individual consciousness, he said, because humans are only a part of a greater whole, and 1866 Haeckel coined that fated term “ecology,” which he defined as “the whole science of the relations of the organism to the environment.”

It was an Oxford botanist named A. G. Tansley who, in 1935, introduced the word “ecosystem.”

According to this same Tansley, individual entities don’t exist but are merely part of “the basic units of nature on the face of the earth.”

Aldo Leopold’s wildly popular Sand County Almanac was published in 1948. It preached “the pyramid of life,” and in order to preserve this pyramid, Leopold told us that federal governments must “enlarge the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals [which] changes the role of Homo Sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it.”

A Norwegian named Arne Naess (1913 – 2009) also believed that human individuals don’t actually exist. Only ecosystems do. It was Naess who first argued that the “shallow ecology,” as he called it, “of mainstream conservation groups” benefits humans too much. Thus, Naess began calling for “deep ecology” — i.e. “biospheric egalitarianism with the equal right [of all things] to live and blossom.”

These are just a small handful of the phrases and catchphrases that have now frozen into secular dogma, and which Rachel Carson, with her puerile pen, brought to the mewling masses. Her book Silent Spring opens like this:

There once was a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchard where, in spring, white clouds of bloom drifted above the fields. In autumn, oak and maple and birch set up a blaze of color that flamed and flickered across a backdrop of pines. Then foxes barked in the hills and deer silently crossed the fields, half hidden in the mists of the fall morning… The town is almost devoid of robins and starlings; chickadees have not been present for two years, and this year the cardinals are gone too… ‘Will they ever come back?’ the children ask, and I do not have the answer.

Most sane people see through this pablum like a fishnet. It’s the insane people who have swallowed it hook, line, and sinker.

The rest, of course, is history.

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UN Document Would Give ‘Mother Earth’ Same Rights As Humans

This is for all the folks out there — you know who you are — who over the years have told me that I caricaturize environmentalism and environmentalists; that I present the environmental position “unfairly,” as “too extreme” when I call it what it actually is: namely, neo-Marxism at its blackest, a quasi-secular religion that hates human beings and worships at the shrine of death — e.g.: “Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs” (John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal).

“In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself” (Al Gore, Club of Rome executive member).

“Mankind is a cancer; we’re the biggest blight on the face of the earth” (president of PETA and environmental activist Ingrid Newkirk).

“If you haven’t given voluntary human extinction much thought before, the idea of a world with no people in it may seem strange. But, if you give it a chance, I think you might agree that the extinction of Homo Sapiens would mean survival for millions, if not billions, of Earth-dwelling species…. Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental” (Ibid).

Quoting Richard Conniff, in the pages of Audubon magazine (September, 1990): “Among environmentalists sharing two or three beers, the notion is quite common that if only some calamity could wipe out the entire human race, other species might once again have a chance.”

Environmental theorist Christopher Manes (writing under the nom-de-guerre Miss Ann Thropy): “If radical environmentalists were to invent a disease to bring human population back to ecological sanity, it would probably be something like AIDS.”

Environmental guru “Reverend” Thomas Berry, proclaims that “humans are an affliction of the world, its demonic presence. We are the violators of Earth’s most sacred aspects.”

A speaker at one of Earth First!’s little cult gatherings: “Optimal human population: zero.”

“Ours is an ecological perspective that views Earth as a community and recognizes such apparent enemies as ‘disease’ (e.g., malaria) and ‘pests’ (e.g., mosquitoes) not as manifestations of evil to be overcome but rather as vital and necessary components of a complex and vibrant biosphere … [We have] an antipathy to ‘progress’ and ‘technology.’ We can accept the pejoratives of ‘Luddite’ and ‘Neanderthal’ with pride…. There is no hope for reform of industrial empire…. We humans have become a disease: the Humanpox” (Dave Foreman, past head of Earth First!)

“Human happiness [is] not as important as a wild and healthy planet. I know social scientists who remind me that people are part of nature, but it isn’t true. Somewhere along the line we … became a cancer. We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth…. Until such time as Homo Sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.” (Biologist David Graber, “Mother Nature as a Hothouse Flower” Los Angles Times Book Review).

“The ending of the human epoch on Earth would most likely be greeted with a hearty ‘Good riddance!’”(Paul Taylor, “Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics”).

“If we don’t overthrow capitalism, we don’t have a chance of saving the world ecologically. I think it is possible to have an ecologically sound society under socialism. I don’t think it is possible under capitalism” (Judi Bari, of Earth First!).

“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” (Maurice Strong, Earth Summit 91).

David Brower, former head of the Sierra Club and founder of Friends of the Earth, calls for developers to be “shot with tranquilizer guns.”

Why?

“Human suffering is much less important than the suffering of the planet,” he explains.

Also from David Brower, Executive Director of the socialist Sierra Club: “The goal now is a socialist, redistributionist society, which is nature’s proper steward and society’s only hope.”

Quoting the Green Party’s first Presidential candidate Barry Commoner:

“Nothing less than a change in the political and social system, including revision of the Constitution, is necessary to save the country from destroying the natural environment…. Capitalism is the earth’s number one enemy.”

From Barry Commoner again:

“Environmental pollution is a sign of major incompatibility between our system of production and the environmental system that supports it. [The socialist way is better because] the theory of socialist economics does not appear to require that growth should continue indefinitely.”

So much for your unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Indeed:

“Individual rights will have to take a back seat to the collective” (Harvey Ruvin, International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, Dade County Florida).

Sierra Club cofounder David Brower, pushing for his own brand of eugenics:

“Childbearing [should be] a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license. All potential parents [should be] required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing.”

That, if you don’t know, is limited government environmentalist style.

“There’s nothing wrong with being a terrorist, as long as you win. Then you write history” (Sierra Club board member Paul Watson).

Again from Paul Watson, writing in that propaganda rag Earth First! Journal: “Right now we’re in the early stages of World War III…. It’s the war to save the planet. The environmental movement doesn’t have many deserters and has a high level of recruitment. Eventually there will be open war.”

And:

“By every means necessary we will bring this and every other empire down! Mutiny and sabotage in defense of Mother Earth!”

And so on.

But, Ray, this is just the extremist fringe; these folks do not represent the true spirit of the environmental movement, as a reader of this website once told me.

Uh-huh. I suggest you keep telling yourself that so that you don’t have to confront the totality of the philosophy you’ve accepted.

And now there’s this:

UN document would give ‘Mother Earth’ same rights as humans:

UNITED NATIONS — Bolivia will this month table a draft United Nations treaty giving “Mother Earth” the same rights as humans — having just passed a domestic law that does the same for bugs, trees and all other natural things in the South American country.

The bid aims to have the UN recognize the Earth as a living entity that humans have sought to “dominate and exploit” — to the point that the “well-being and existence of many beings” is now threatened.

The wording may yet evolve, but the general structure is meant to mirror Bolivia’s Law of the Rights of Mother Earth, which Bolivian President Evo Morales enacted in January.

That document speaks of the country’s natural resources as “blessings,” and grants the Earth a series of specific rights that include rights to life, water and clean air; the right to repair livelihoods affected by human activities; and the right to be free from pollution.

It also establishes a Ministry of Mother Earth, and provides the planet with an ombudsman whose job is to hear nature’s complaints as voiced by activist and other groups, including the state.

“If you want to have balance, and you think that the only (entities) who have rights are humans or companies, then how can you reach balance?” Pablo Salon, Bolivia’s ambassador to the UN, told Postmedia News. “But if you recognize that nature too has rights, and (if you provide) legal forms to protect and preserve those rights, then you can achieve balance.”

The application of the law appears destined to pose new challenges for companies operating in the country, which is rich in natural resources, including natural gas and lithium, but remains one of the poorest in Latin America.

Read the full article here.

This, what you just read above, is merely the logical elaboration of the mainstream environmental philosophy, and, among many, many other things, it demonstrates a profound and fatal misunderstanding of the concept of rights, which by definition are compossible.

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Al Gore And The Snow-Job Of Kilimanjaro

In 2006, a movie director named Davis Guggenheim made a documentary about former Vice President Albert Gore and his global warming propaganda campaign. That movie is entitled An Inconvenient Truth, and since its release, the term “global warming” has, as you may have heard, fallen completely out of fashion — ostensibly because the earth has not warmed as predicted. “Climate change” and “climate chaos” have thus become the preferred nomenclature.

In An Inconvenient Truth, Gore — who, incidentally, told Grist Magazine that “Nobody is interested in solutions if they don’t think there’s a problem. Given that starting point, I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are” — spat out a pile of doomsday scenarios, which his millions of minions indiscriminately swallowed hook, line, and sinker.

Among those scenarios, none, perhaps, was more frequently regurgitated than Gore’s claim that “Within a decade, there will be no more snows of Kilimanjaro.”

Of course, the (inconvenient) truth about Kilimanjaro has been known for some time: as George Kaser (et al) published in the International Journal of Climatology, the snows of Kilimanjaro began receding around 1890 — which is to say, long before the advent of mass CO2 output. But we’ve written about that before, as have many others, like Dutch scientist Jaap Sinninghe Damste, winner of the prestigious Spinoza Prize, and please see also the following recent article in New Scientist: Kilimanjaro’s Vanishing Ice Due To Tree-Felling.

Now, however, there’s this:

And this:

If there is a poster child for global warming, it may be the vanishing snows of Kilimanjaro, which were predicted to disappear as early as 2015 in a widely-publicized report a decade ago.

However, the famed snowcap is stubbornly persisting on the African peak and may not fully vanish for another 50 years, according to a University of Massachusetts scientist who had a hand in the prediction.

The 2001 forecast was indirectly part of key evidence for global warming offered during the 2006 documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” which warned of the threats of rising global temperatures. In it, former vice president Al Gore stated, “Within a decade, there will be no more snows of Kilimanjaro” due to warming temperatures.

“Unfortunately, we made the prediction. I wish we hadn’t,” says Douglas R. Hardy, a UMass geoscientist who was among 11 co-authors of the paper in the journal Science that sparked the pessimistic Kilimanjaro forecast. “None of us had much history working on that mountain, and we didn’t understand a lot of the complicated processes on the peak like we do now” (source).

And this:

Physicist loses civility over Gore’s Kilimanjaro claims: ‘That dishonest a##hole can no longer surprise anyone’

Al Gore and his representatives have declined to comment.

(Hat tip Climate Depot)

About a decade ago, Doctor R.J. Braithwaite wrote an article that appeared in Progress in Physical Geography.

In that article, which was peer-reviewed, Doctor Braithwaite tells us how he analyzed 246 glaciers, sampled from both hemispheres and latitudes, between the years 1946 and 1995. This “mass balance analysis” he conducted found that “some glaciers were melting, while a nearly equal number were growing in size, and still others remained stable.” Doctor Braithwaite’s unequivocal conclusion:

“There is no obvious common or global trend of increasing glacier melt in recent years.”

“By some estimates, 160,000 glaciers exist on Earth. Only 63,000 have been inventoried, and only a few hundred have been studied in the detail described by Braithwaite” (“It Would Be Nice to Know More about Ice,” Jay Lehr).

On the basis of that logical fallacy known as the fallacy of insufficient evidence, all glacier fears are stopped cold right there.

But in fact that’s only the tip of the iceberg.

Keith Echelmeyer, a glaciologist at the University of Alaska’s Geophysical Institute, says this:

“To make a case that glaciers are retreating, and that the problem is global warming, is very hard to do… The physics are very complex. There is much more involved than just the climate response.”

Mr. Echelmeyer goes on to tell us that in Alaska there are large glaciers advancing in the very same areas where others are retreating.

Quoting Doctor Martin Beniston of the Institute of Geography at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland:

Numerous climatological details of mountains are overlooked by the climate models, which thus makes it difficult to estimate the exact response of glaciers to global warming, because glacier dynamics are influenced by numerous factors other than climate, even though temperature and cloudiness may be the dominant controlling factors. According to the size, exposure and altitude of glaciers, different response times can be expected for the same climatic forcing.

Of course, as Doctor Beniston intimates, the paramount thing to consider in any discussion of glacial melt is the sheer size of these suckers, which because of their size do not respond to heat and cold like the snow in your backyard. According to the excellent glacier program at Rice University, those response times run something like this:

Ice sheet: 100,000 to 10,000 years

Large valley glacier: 10,000 to 1,000 years

Small valley glacier: 1,000 to 100 years

Glaciers are influenced by a variety of local and regional natural phenomena that scientists do not fully comprehend. Besides temperature changes, glaciers also respond to changes in the amount and type of precipitation, changes in sea level and changes in ocean circulation patterns. As a result, glaciers do not necessarily advance during colder weather and retreat during warmer weather (John Carlisle, National Center for Public Policy).

Glaciers Are In World-Wide Retreat — read one New York Times headline recently.

Well, they were anyway, starting decades before industrialization (i.e. increased CO2 output). As IPCC AR4 reports:

Most mountain glaciers and ice caps have been shrinking, with the retreat probably having started about 1850 [NB: the end of the ‘little ice age’]. Although many Northern Hemisphere glaciers had a few years of near balance around 1970, this was followed by increased shrinkage.

Research published by the National Academy of Sciences indicates that the much-touted Peruvian glacier (on p. 53-53) disappeared a few thousand years ago.

There are, moreover, glaciers forming across the globe, in both hemispheres. Here’s a very partial list:

In Norway: Alfotbreen Glacier, Briksdalsbreen Glacier, Nigardsbreen Glacier, Hardangerjøkulen Glacier, Hansebreen Glacier, Jostefonn Glacier, Engabreen Glacier, Helm Glacier, Place Glacier. Indeed, a great number of Scandinavia’s glaciers are exploding.

In France, the Mount Blanc Glacier.

In Ecuador, Antizana 15 Alpha Glacier.

In Argentine, Perito Moreno Glacier, the largest in all of Patagonia, was recently observed to be advancing at about 6 feet per day.

Chile’s Pio XI Glacier, the largest in the southern hemisphere, is also growing.

In Switzerland, Silvretta Glacier.

In Kirghiztan, Abramov Glacier.

In Russian, Malli Glacier is growing and surging.

In New Zealand, as of 2003, all 48 glaciers in the Southern Alps were observed to have grown.

In the United States: Mount St. Helens, Mount Rainier, Mount Shuksan, Mount Shasta, Mount McKinley, Mount Hubbard, and Rocky Mountain National Park have all shown recent glacier growth.

“There is evidence that the McGinnis Glacier, a little-known tongue of ice in the central Alaska Range, has surged,” said assistant Professor of Physics Martin Truffer. He recently noticed the lower portion of the glacier was covered in cracks, crevasses, and pinnacles of ice – all telltale signs that the glacier has recently slid forward at higher than normal rates.

There’s also this article from the Associated Press, which I quote only in part:

Geologists exploring Colorado’s Rocky Mountain Park say that they discovered more than 100 additional glaciers here in a single summer, said Mark Verrengia.

Officials previously believed the park, which is 60 miles northwest of Denver, included 20 permanent ice and snow features, including six named glaciers. The new survey, conducted by geologist Jonathan Achuff, shows there are as many as 120 features.

“Comparisons with historical photos suggest that at least some of the glaciers are expanding,” say park officials. “Subtle climate changes may be helping the formation of glaciers or at least reducing their retreat.”

“We’re not running quite in sync with global warming here,” park spokeswoman Judy Visty said.

Not, of course, that it really matters much either way, since the entire climate change issue is predicated upon a stupendously fraudulent premise: a corrupt epistemology.

To say nothing of the fact that, as has been demonstrated repeatedly, the free market is far better equipped to deal with environmental issues than proposed socialist policies — for the simple reason that free markets generate astronomically more capital with which to deal with such issues.

The wealthier the country, the healthier the country.

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A Complete List Of Things Caused By Global Warming

The following site is called the Warmlist, and it has rather painstakingly tracked all the effects actually attributed to global warming climate change “climate chaos.” It will either make you laugh or cry, one or the other:

Click-Click

For all you folks still on the climate chaos bandwagon, please tell us what you’re thinking, and why you’re thinking it.

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Environmental Propaganda And The 10:10 No Pressure Campaign

As I’ve often said, environmentalism as a political philosophy is a cult of death, the highroad to hell, truly neo-Marxism at its blackest. For all those who have so stridently claimed that my criticisms are unjust, that they are divorced from reality and wildly exaggerated, I offer you this latest inanity from the 10:10 propaganda machine:


And here’s another one from the World Wildlife Fund.

More on the matter from Ed Driscoll’s James Delingpole and also this thorough article.

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More Recycling Myths Exposed

The church of recycling and the cult of organic composting was dealt another hard blow recently, when the Toronto Star conducted the following in-depth investigation, which was sent to me by my indefatigable friend Redmond. (Vote Redmond on October 25th, 2010!)

Green bins: A wasted effort?
Deep flaws mar recycling program as tons of organics end up in landfills or are turned into compost so toxic it kills plants

The City of Toronto boasts that its green bin program diverts a third of our garbage and turns it into “black gold” compost. But a Star investigation shows that the program – although nobly conceived – is a sham.

There are two problems. First, the city’s claim of how much waste the program diverts from landfill is inflated. Second, some of the compost that is being produced will kill your plants because of its high salt content, according to laboratory tests.

The Star found that, over the past two years, thousands of tons of organics in various stages of the composting process have been dumped into a gravel pit, tossed into landfills or stockpiled on city property. What’s more, some of the material residents are told to place in green bins – plastic bags and diapers – has wound up in the belly of a Michigan incinerator, despite Mayor David Miller’s vow Toronto will never burn garbage.

City residents deserve better, say compost experts. At least $15 million of taxpayers’ money goes to truck and treat the organic waste.

“Toronto homeowners put a lot of time and energy into separating their kitchen organics,” says Jim Graham, chair of the Ontario Waste Management Association.

“Residents have the right to expect the processors to do their job – and to create high-quality compost of consumer grade that they can use on their gardens.”

Toronto Mayor David Miller was too busy with the strike to comment, a spokesman told the Star on Thursday.

Geoff Rathbone, the city official in charge of the organic program, told the Star what happens to the organic matter “is not of concern to us” because it’s the provincial Ministry of the Environment’s job to enforce standards on processors.

The green bin program began in 2002, and today 510,000 Toronto homeowners dutifully separate garbage and put the organic waste into green bins for curbside pickup.

Compared to the pure organic programs in Durham and Peel regions, Toronto’s was flawed from the start. After public consultations, the city chose the simplest system for homeowners, encouraging plastic bag liners and the inclusion of diapers, neither of which can be composted.

The city proudly states that the compost it produces is “safe to use in gardens and lawns.”

Tests conducted for the Star by A&L Canada, a leading agricultural laboratory, found serious problems with compost produced by two separate companies contracted by the city to process the organic waste.

In one case, the lab found the compost was unfinished, meaning it was rushed through the process, in which micro-organisms break the waste down into a high-nutrient soil conditioner.

In the second case, the sodium content of compost given out at Toronto’s Environment Days was so high that it would kill plants. (More curing time would have removed naturally occurring sodium in vegetables and the salt we add to food.)

The Star also looked at the city’s so-called “diversion rate,” the markers by which recycling programs are judged. Critics say Toronto’s one-third rate is inflated.

Miller’s re-election promise in 2006 vowed to ramp up diversion rates to 70 per cent by 2010, so there’s pressure on the city to claim the highest possible rate.

Toronto’s annual output of 120,000 tons of organics has created a mad scramble for processors. In each of 2007 and 2008, the city shipped 1,000 truckloads to Quebec. By the time the green bin waste arrived, locked inside plastic bags the city wants residents to use, it was sometimes so rotten it went straight to landfill, says Quebec’s environment ministry. Some processors can’t handle liquefied rotten material.

That burns Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong, who has spent years trying to track the organic waste. “We have an unwritten rule with the public that the green bin system will have integrity, and the materials they put in the bins will be reused in a meaningful way,” Minnan-Wong says.

“When the food ends up landfilled, or when the compost is toxic, then you are betraying the principles and the reasons why we have this program to begin with.”

Two major compost processors hired by the city to handle the waste – such as leftover steak, banana peels and all those diapers – have been hit with provincial restrictions due to neighbourhood odour complaints.

Within the past two months, before the municipal garbage strike began, Orgaworld Canada in London was severely limited in the amount of organics it could process while Universal Resource Recovery in Welland was shut down entirely. Follow the trail of Toronto’s organics, and the flaws in the system emerge.

The Star found that Orgaworld, which processes about 40 per cent of Toronto’s organic waste, has been sending thousands of tons of “residual” plastics to be burned in Detroit. It turns out about one-fifth of Toronto’s organic output is being burned or buried in landfills.

The city tells residents to put diapers into their green bins.

Graham of the Ontario Waste Management Association also owns Try-Recycling in London. He said the diapers are considered diverted when placed in the compost stream, but are immediately screened out. “Makes for good diversion numbers, but they end up in the landfill anyway,” he said.

Add to that the plastic Toronto wants homeowners to line their bins with. In Durham and Peel, residents are told to buy compostable bags.

Toronto has built a multi-million-dollar system that is sup posed to separate organic waste from non-compostable plastic bags. (It is also planning two new local processing facilities, at a cost of roughly $65 million, using the same technology.) But plastics make the food rot quickly, causing odour problems for processors, and large shreds of plastic end up in the compost.

Nobody wants to see the green bin program scrapped, just made better. Susan Antler, executive director of the Composting Council of Canada, says some municipalities, such as Durham, are “shining stars.” They impose strict limits – no plastic bags, no diapers, and no dog feces and kitty litter. (The latter two are both allowed in Toronto, with feces contributing to odour issues and kitty litter putting clay into the compost.)

“Garbage in means garbage out,” Antler says.

Orgaworld founder Henk Kaskens, who is based in the Netherlands, came to London, Ont., last month to deal with “the fuss” created when the environment ministry ordered Orgaworld to limit its daily intake of green bin material to five trucks, or about 150 tons. Before that it was taking about 1,000 tons a day. (The order was lifted recently, but a new investigation is underway.)

The environment ministry says it has logged 170 odour complaints against Orgaworld since January.

At the same time the ministry hit Orgaworld with the limits, it closed down the second largest processor of Toronto’s organic waste, Welland’s Universal. The ministry told Universal it had logged 120 complaints of odours such as smells akin to “vomit” or “dead animals” since the facility opened last fall.

Toronto was caught in a vice, with nowhere to turn, because all but one of its other processors were facing ministry limitations or Environment Act charges.

Universal general manager Gerald Pratt said his company is taking the odour issues very seriously and is working very hard to fix the problems at the plant.

The problem caused Toronto to stockpile 3,000 tons of organics in city transfer stations – long before the strike began.

Orgaworld’s Kaskens, who said he makes “the best compost in Ontario,” invited the Star for a tour of his plant. He said the odour problems resulted from ducts that crashed from the walls to the floor because a subcontractor had not properly fastened them. He complained the environment ministry is too enforcement-focused and scares away future investments.

Inside the cavernous plant are huge piles of food waste, plastic bags ripped open. Kaskens said his technology turns organics into compost in just 12 to 14 days. The ministry requires it be held another 21 days, but “it is not necessary.”

The Composting Council’s Antler and numerous other industry leaders said they have never heard of compost that can be finished in 12 days. It takes up to six months to cure compost, Antler said. Kaskens pointed out the piles of residual waste, the plastics, in his plant. He said they are trucked to Detroit for incineration.

Neither the city nor compost companies could put a firm figure on the amount of non-organic residuals that are burned or landfilled, giving figures that vary from 15 to 22 per cent and higher.

Welland’s Universal general manager Gerald Pratt put it at 26 per cent, primarily plastic shopping bags. Toronto’s organic waste has a “great deal of contaminants in it,” Pratt wrote in a June letter to a Michigan landfill he hoped would help him after his plant closed.

The Michigan landfill’s manager, Dan Gudgel, said in an interview he could not compost Universal’s organics because the contamination meant it would take too long to get Michigan government approvals.

“I hear you have a state of emergency up there,” he said.

Article by Moira Welsh

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The Great Outdoors Initiative

Not quite ten years ago, in May of 2001, Robert Tracinski wrote the following:

Past regulations have been imposed in the same manner that the new, less-restrictive process is being adopted: by executive-branch decree. The result of those decrees over the past three decades has been a vast environmentalist land grab, with millions of acres of land sealed off from logging, mining, grazing and even recreation. This is a basic technique used by the Left to achieve through the regulatory agencies what they could not achieve in an open vote. The technique is to introduce legislation to achieve some vague, positive-sounding generality, such as “worker safety” or “environmental protection” – things no politician will want to go on record voting against….

Consider that federal regulatory agencies make thousands of rulings each year, adding about 80,000 pages annually to the Federal Register. Do you think Congress can exercise “oversight” by debating all 80,000 pages of these regulations? Do you think the president, his advisors and his cabinet officers can consider and personally approve all of these decrees?

Of course not.

And the very process which Robert Tracinski describes above, far from diminishing, has suddenly accelerated. To wit:

On April 16th, 2010, Barack Obama released a so-called Presidential Memorandum, which he and his clownish administration termed “A 21st Century Strategy for America’s Great Outdoors.” Did you hear about it? You’re not alone. In fact, that’s part of the point: legislation by stealth.

Quoting Michelle Malkin:

Across the country, White House officials have been meeting quietly with environmental groups to map out government plans for acquiring untold millions of acres of both public and private land. It’s another stealthy power grab through executive order that promises to radically transform the American way of life….

Take my home state of Colorado. The Obama administration is considering locking up some 380,000 acres of Bureau of Land Management land and private land in Colorado under the 1906 Antiquities Act. The Vermillion Basin and the Alpine Triangle would be shut off to mining, hunting, grazing, oil and gas development and recreational activities. Alan Foutz, president of the Colorado Farm Bureau, blasted the administration’s meddling: “Deer and elk populations are thriving, and we in Colorado don’t need help from the federal government in order to manage them effectively.”

The bureaucrats behind Obama’s “Great Outdoors Initiative” plan on wrapping up their public comment solicitation by November 15. The initiative’s taxpayer-funded website has been dominated by left-wing environmental activists proposing human population reduction, private property confiscation, and gun bans, hunting bans and vehicle bans in national parks.

Make no mistake: this issue is entirely about private property, which is the crux of freedom, and which the religion of environmentalism explicitly seeks to do away with.