Here’s a reprise of some articles I wrote on the net effects of Environmental Imperialism.
Environmental Imperialism
The environmentalists and anti-war activists in this country tend to be one and the same, and their mantra of the past few years has been “Bush Lied — People Died.”
Forget for a moment your normal reaction to their theory that Sadaam had zero weapons of mass destruction – yes, centrifuges for enrichment were found, over 500 sarin and mustard gas shells have been found, terrorist training camps were found, labs were found, more sarin was found, well, you get the idea. Just forget all that for a moment, and like the left pretend that it’s not real.
Instead, travel with me if you will for awhile: put yourself into their mindset, and know their reasoning and the genesis of it. To fully understand the moral inconsistency and logical contradictions of their positions on environment, energy development, and the war you must for short periods of time think as they do. Don’t worry — you can take a shower afterwards.
This is more important than you think — most folks think of leftists as daffy or nutty, I mean they just get silly and call people names. I used to think of them as not dangerous — how can you think of someone like Jeremy Rifkin as evil? An examination of facts and history reveals that their goofiness and good intent delivers unintended consequences that lead to death, destruction and misery however.
To do this right, you are going to have to suspend some of your critical thinking ability for some sentences and paragraphs below. The operative word for this excursion will be “doomed” as in “We’re doomed — We are all DOOMED!”
To help you achieve that please go to your kitchen cabinet now, get out he Reynold’s wrap and construct a tin-foil hat. This is a necessary implement to block out intrusive things such as critical thinking, reality, and reason; alternately if you are lazy and don’t want to construct a hat you can just take a lot of drugs instead like many in the left do when faced with reality.
Be creative with your hat, there will be a contest later! You can make it look like a crown, a pirate’s hat, a baseball cap, a viking’s helmet, a French beret, or you could shape it like a donkey’s head and spray-paint it grey. I’ll wait here until you are done.
Now that you are done making your doomhat, here’s how you use it to aid your understanding of our brothers and sisters from the left (see how I’m gently easing you into left-think here?):
When you see HATS ON! in the text, put on your “we’re all doomed” tinfoil hat.
When you see Hats off in the text, take your doom hat off (warning: Never wear your “we’re all doomed” tinfoil hat in the shower or to bed.)
The birth of the left’s positions on environment and energy were in the sixties, and the seminal works on the subject were these four publications:
- The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich,
- The Limits to Growth from the Club of Rome
- Small is Beautiful by E.F. Schumacher
- Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson
(Note: If you want those books to make sense or to match reality you must wear your tin-foil hat full-time as you read them, if you can manage that then you too can be an environmental imperialist!)
These books were the genesis of environmental crisis-mongering in the west, which in turn led to a halt of nuclear energy expansion, a halt of new energy infrastructure, a stop to logging in the west half of our country, a stop to oil and gas drilling, neo-luddism as manifested by the likes of the Unabomber and Earth Firsters, and finally Environmental Imperialism in the form of the Kyoto Treaty, and the current “Global Warming Crisis”.
The views and philosophies generated by these seminal works also indirectly caused wars, famine, disease, and deaths by the thousands.
Ok — so it’s not as humorous an article as you thought, bear with me and I will lighten things up again in a bit.
Ok here’s where we start: the first two books used faulty computer models and malthusian projections to declare that we were doomed because world population was going to outgrow energy and natural resource production, creating massive unfed demand, tyranny, mutation, and anarchy!
HATS ON!
Jeremy Rifkin:
What are the prospects for the future? We are facing within the next three decades, the disintegration of an unstable world of nation-states infected with growthmania….This is what underlies the sudden, seemingly mysterious shortages and the widespread inflation that have plagued the world.
In the early 1970s, the leading edge of the age of scarcity arrived. With it came a clearer look at the future, revealing more of the nature of the dark age to come.
If you face what’s coming squarely, you may be able to ride the crest of the tidal wave that will engulf society, rather than be crushed beneath it.
For instance, it is prudent, we suggest, to stash a few cases of tuna in your basement (if you’re lucky enough to have a basement and the money for the tuna) because periodic protein shortages (or at least sky-high prices) seem certain to occur within the ten-to-twenty-year shelf-life of the cans.
Hats off
These words were written by Jeremy Rifkin in the early 70’s springboarding from the infamous report, Limits to Growth by the Club of Rome. As you can see since then resources have grown at a greater pace than population, and prices in terms of real dollars for resources have dropped.
The elaborate computer models and doomsday, Malthusian theories failed to account for two driving, primal forces of modern times: Science and Capitalism. As one outcome Jeremy lost a famous wager with Julian Simon on prices for natural resources in ten years, however some of the other outcomes were worse.
During the period after his book, we had the creation of OPEC, stagflation, high unemployment, and a third world debt crisis. Survivalists were creating cabins and stashes in the woods, and foreign economic policies were driven largely by paranoia. Recycling anything and everything became paramount, and xenophobia set in as the liberals worried about those starving brown, yellow, and black people coming to take what we had. We gave up in one war, and when Iran was overun by madmen we did nothing.
Environmentalists convinced many that energy in general was bad, that we had to use less of it because the “world was too much with us”, or we were too many for the world. Searching for new energy was just harming the environment, and useless in the end anyway.
HATS ON!
Repeat after me:
We’re doomed! We are all Doomed!
Big Oil and Walmart will kill us all!
Capitalism is exploitive — it’s destroying the rainforests!
Birds and mice and rats and slime molds are more important than development!
Great horned owls need old growth timber to nest in!
Split Wood not Atoms!
Plutonium is the most poisonous substance on the planet!
The only physics I understand is ex-lax!
We’re Doomed! We are All doomed!
Hats off.
Sorry, I had to throw that in there so you can understand where the left was coming from during that time frame.
The result of this malthusian thinking was the environmental movement, a hoarding of of natural resources created by nations and industries trying to corner the last, remaing scraps of x before inevitable shortages set in. This created huge price spikes and actual shortages in places needing the energy and natural resources the most: developing nations.
Due to high energy prices and resource shortage spikes created by speculation and the false economics of scarcity in the seventies, many people in developing countries went without refrigeration, without air conditioning, without central heating, and without water treatment. Going without those things in large populations leads to thousands of deaths. Disease from bad food storage and poor sanitation is one of the leading killers in developing nations, along with deaths from weather extremes. These dooms affect mostly the very young and the aged.
Reflect a moment on the newscasts of death tolls associated with weather that you see here every winter when cold reaches extremes and every summer when heat reaches extremes. If people are dying in the energy-rich US due to extremes of temperature, what do you think is happening in lesser-developed nations where central heat and air is not the norm?
During the stagflation stall of the 70’s and early 80’s western investment offshore stalled as well, and environmental concerns over “saving the rainforest” protecting the environment, etc. got in the way of a lot of third world development. With development comes simple things like water purification and sewage treatment, after all those exploitive sweat shop owners have to drink water too you know. Here’s what comes of poor water purification and sewage treatment from Unesco:
Globally, diarrhoeal diseases and malaria accounted for, respectively, 4% and 3% of disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) lost, and 1.8 and 1.3 million deaths in 2002. This burden is almost entirely limited to the under-five age group.
Diarrhoeal diseases
– Every day, diarrhoeal diseases cause some 6,000 deaths, mostly among children under five.
– In 2001, 1.96 million people died from infectious diarrhoeas; 1.3 million were children under five.
– Between 1,085,000 and 2,187,000 deaths due to diarrhoeal diseases can be attributed to the ‘water, sanitation and hygiene’ risk factor, 90 percent of them among children under five.
– With simple hygiene measures such as washing hands after using the toilet or before preparing food, most of these deaths are preventable.
Malaria
– Over 1 million people die from malaria every year.
– About 90% of the annual global rate of deaths from malaria occur in Africa south of the Sahara.
– Malaria causes at least 300 million cases of acute illness each year.
– Mortality due to malaria increased by 27% between 1990 and 2002, going from 926,000 people to 1,272,000.
– The disease costs Africa more than US$12 million annually and slows economic growth in African countries by 1.3% a year.
– Sleeping under mosquito nets would be one simple but effective way to prevent many cases of malaria, especially for children under five.
Africa accounts for 97% of the world’s burden of onchorocerciasis (a parasitic infection), 88% of the world’s burden of malaria, 78% of its schistosomiasis burden, and 52% of its trachoma burden.
Schistosomiasis (bilharziasis)
– More than 200 million people worldwide are infected by schistosomiasis.
– 88 million children under fifteen years are infected each year with schistosomes.
– 80% of transmission takes place in Africa south of the Sahara.
South-East Asia accounts for 62% of the world’s burden of dengue, and 56% of its burden of lymphatic filariasis.
An estimated 119 million people are infected with lymphatic filariasis globally, 40 million of whom suffer from the chronic form of the disease.
Africa accounts for 97% of the world’s burden of onchorocerciasis (a parasitic infection), 88% of the world’s burden of malaria, 78% of its schistosomiasis burden, and 52% of of its trachoma burden.
So: environmentalists lied, children in third world countries died.
You will see more in later parts of this continuing series, stay tuned for more fun facts and figures about those daffy liberals. Right now it all appears to be a stretch, but if you stick with this series liberal intentions will knit themselves together through unintended consequences into an ugly, evil scarf like your grandma used to make.
For a complete and thorough fiskage of Jeremy’s works, please stop by Classical Values where I filched the quotes, or for the full Uber-Fisk treatment, as well as a good dose of optimism for our future, pick up Julian Simon’s book, The Ultimate Resource.
More to come in part II of this series, and in part II you will get the Tin-Foil hat contest rules. Right now I am preparing for my son’s wedding, and will be taking a break for a few days, see you all after Labor Day!
Portugeuse air-traffic controllers intercepted garbled short wave transmissions from Islamist Terrorists and interupted a plot to blow up the Eiffel Tower in Paris France Thursday.
The tribes of Araby and the tribes of Persia have fought since times ancient. When Alexander conquered Egypt the Arabs flung open town gates and flogged the Persians out as he passed for the Persians were more hated than the new conquerers.
