“Environmental groups, which are as quick to fang each other as they are dirty polluters, are lining up in opposition to the lines and to wind farms in general. In fact, they’re lining up against most current sources of renewable power: the Audubon Society hates wind farms because the blades kill birds and bats; hydroelectric covers up large swaths of land and releases “greenhouse gasses” when decaying material is exposed to the air; the Sierra Club has opposed solar plants in the Mohave. Apparently, even geothermal creates toxic waste no one wants. So what’s the solution?”

Mr. Richardson goes on to say:

“There isn’t one. The power companies involved in the Kansas program are still trying to get the approval they need. Lawsuits have already been filed to stop the construction. The lesser prairie chicken is still doing its mating dance, and environmental groups still continue to oppose all types of power generation.”

We see the general attitude of the green movement here against human life; the lesser prairie chicken has a right to its habitat but humans–who must reshape nature for their survival–do not have a right to theirs.

For more on the green anti-human attitude, check out these quotes from the horses’ mouths.

Warming the earth will also reduce the frequency and intensity of violent storms by shrinking the difference between the coldest temperatures at the poles and the warmest at the equator. What this does is narrow the extremes between which weather patterns oscillate.

I will say a thank you to all the explorers and pioneers who discovered the earth’s richness, and to the scientists who discovered the laws of nature which, once understood, allowed man to rearrange nature to serve his survival, and to the inventors who discovered ways to harness the forces of nature vastly raising man’s standard of living. One more salute will go to the businessmen and entrepreneurs who marketed their discoveries thus making them available to the rest of mankind.

Finally, a toast to the political system that made it all possible–capitalism, the social system where people are completely free to to make a buck by serving their own self-interest through voluntary trade to mutual benefit with everyone else. In fact,it’s the only system where one’s interests cannot be served by the forced privations of others. It is a just system. Just wish we were not losing it.

I’ll make a vow also: that any advertisements by merchants boasting how their products are green or eco-friendly will go straight into the trash.

(for more on Exploit the Earth Day see this essay at The Objective Standard)

I believe that Audi intended it as a caricature: the only difference is that there is not yet an actual police force dedicated to environmental law enforcement at such a visible level. The absurd, petty laws from the commercial actually exist and the intrusiveness of the movement is incredible. (Looks like I’m not the only one that’s noticed the parallels.)

The pretext of global warming catastrophe is becoming increasingly flimsy as time passes. Each day finds new doubts coming to light—the jig is almost up. At some point, the justification for government expansion to prevent a cataclysmic future will evaporate entirely. The time is ripe for the left to make its move. With the health care legislation stalled for the time being, the Senate might take up Waxman-Markey or perhaps something even more meddlesome.

I think a lot of the opposition to socialized medicine by the public stemmed from picturing their health care being run by the post office or the DMV. This mental image crystallized the end towards which the reform was heading and galvanized them into action. In much the same way, I hope that the Audi commercial brought the slippery slope of the environmentalist movement into focus so that the average Super Bowl watcher could see what his view of “going green” would lead to when it became compulsory.

People don’t seem to mind statism when it’s affecting other people, but they draw a line when the hectoring and meddling becomes pervasive. This is the last remnant of the vaunted American sense of life. It is unprincipled, pragmatic, and tenuous to be sure:

A dictatorship cannot take hold in America today. This country, as yet, cannot be ruled—but it can explode. It can blow up into the helpless rage and blind violence of a civil war. It cannot be cowed into submission, passivity, malevolence, resignation. It cannot be “pushed around.” Defiance, not obedience, is the American’s answer to overbearing authority. The nation that ran an underground railroad to help human beings escape from slavery, or began drinking on principle in the face of Prohibition, will not say “Yes, sir,” to the enforcers of ration coupons and cereal prices. Not yet.
— Ayn Rand, “Don’t Let It Go,” Philosophy: Who Needs It, 213.

The dystopic future envisioned by Audi and its ad agency is chilling and repugnant, which is exactly the point of the ad no matter how inadvertent. Americans will meet the “overbearing authority” it represents with defiance and the left knows this.

But the emails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in England have cast unavoidable doubts as to the legitimacy of the long-heralded consensus that had found the science to be “settled.” World leaders, when they weren’t feigning ignorance of the controversy, began to backpedal from commitments due to the groundswell of grassroots outrage.

Efforts by the willfully-blind politicians and apologists who saw AGW as the sin for which the West could finally be reigned in and yoked fell on incredulous ears. This blatant stonewalling and sleight-of-hand further emboldened he opposition, for rarely are he leftists so brazen.

The politicians tried to downplay the motley CRU’s chicanery as unrepresentative of the majority of climate scientists. Carol Browner, Obama’s global warming czar, after first trying to dismiss the emails as trivial then stated baldly that she is “sticking with the 2,500 scientists. These people have been studying this issue for a very long time and agree this problem is real.” The reporter conducting the interview failed to follow-up on the obvious question begging: how many of those scientists were involved in the conspiracy to quash dissent and how many of those who weren’t would now still consider the conclusion unimpeachable?

Skeptics, naturally, failed to argue against science as a numbers game, which would’ve decimated this consensus. Instead they chose to trot out their own quantified contrapuntal consensus. The disinterested onlookers, however, can’t help but shake their heads at the one-upmanship and politicking. For the layman, science is collecting data, making theories, and verifying other scientists’ theories. This window into the sausage factory has exposed climate science as the scientific equivalent of cooking the books.

Climate scientists and the leftists who love them invoked the talisman of “peer review” in a vain effort to intimidate the public. Trading on the public’s superficial understanding of the peer review process, they tut-tutted the skeptics’ claims because they generally didn’t publish their works in peer-reviewed journals. They cited study after study in prestigious journals that supported their view that man-made carbon dioxide emissions were amplifying the greenhouse effect and causing catastrophe. When the peer-review process is open, anonymous, and intellectually honest, it is a decent way to gradually move science in the direction of truth and to maintain its focus on reality.

But the researchers in this instance did everything in their power to subvert the peer-review process. In email after email, they spoke of ousting journal editors who may have wavered in their commitment to the cause, of thwarting requests for their raw data or methodologies, and of coordinating with their fellow travelers to present a united front when conducting peer review. Any legitimate scientist should be disgusted at their behavior—and many are.

But peer review is not in itself a validation of the conclusions of any particular study. As Climategate has demonstrated, it is subject to manipulation and fallibility. The peers that review a paper ostensibly examine the author’s methodology, but unusual or controversial conclusions may appear invalid and so the review can lead to a creeping orthodoxy as these papers never see the printed page. So the rejection of skepticism by dint of a lack of publication is disingenuous when the rejectors are also the publishing gatekeepers. In the end, the only way to validate a finding is through reference to reality: does the conclusion follow logically from the empirical data? Is the empirical data collected in an objective, verifiable manner? Reality is the arbiter here, not men.

Worse yet are those who would sweep aside the scandal, ignore the lack of foundation for the AGW position, and fail to amend their support for far-reaching, global economic changes because of the researchers’ good intentions. You see this viewpoint appear in nearly any comment thread on any blog entry and it commonly takes the form “sure they were out of line but shouldn’t we be moving towards cleaner energy, less oil dependence, and renewable fuels?” The “trick” here is “we.” The “we” in question is not the gradual process of technological replacement that takes place when millions of individuals in the market act to buy cheaper, safer technologies; they’re invariably talking about the government enacting mandates on individuals and companies. The latter, because it is achieved through force, is not something we should be undertaking. If renewable energy is desirable, then it will be taken up by industries when it becomes profitable to do so.

The AGW crowd has not earned the benefit of the doubt. The mainstream media so far have turned a blind eye, but world leaders attending Copenhagen must not be allowed to pretend like Climategate never occurred. It is a sad day when the voices of reason are the Danes and the Saudis.

That’s right, producing consumer goods uses too much water. If that’s not bad enough, man is depleting the oxygen in our atmosphere. If we don’t assign some noble bureaucrats to regulate these horrors caused by capitalist greed, then we will all end up dehydrated and suffocating.

UPDATE: (HT: William Teach)

I know this is a few days old but I think it’s noteworthy anyway. The newest burden you will be asked to carry is provided by the Sec. of Commerce Gary Locke who says that Americans must be made to pay for some of the carbon emissions of–the Chinese! Read the WSJ blog article here. You see, the Chinese factories are making lots of inexpensive products that make our lives better, so we are the cause of their CO2 emissions.
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An alert relative sent to me a link to this story. Evidently, Nashville Tenn. is experiencing new record lows for July. They didn’t mention his name but Al Gore lives in the Nashville area. Love it.

A polar bear expert was told that he wasn’t welcome at a meeting of the Polar Bear Specialist Group because he has argued repeatedly that polar bear populations are actually increasing. The chairman of the group explicitly stated that his views “counter to human-induced climate change are extremely unhelpful.” He had obtained funds to travel to the meeting but the members of the group voted down his attendance in spite of his unassailable expertise.

These two recent episodes are but the latest in a long series of denying dissent by the proponents of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). Spend any time online researching global warming and you’ll quickly discover countless more examples of earnest dissenters citing a laundry list of reasons to doubt only to be derided as “deniers” and shouted down until they leave. The pattern plays out time and again. What the EPA scientist, the polar bear researcher, and these online denizens fail to realize is that the truth is utterly irrelevant to AGW advocates.

(For the record, I am on the fence about the validity of the science of the AGW debate. Warming may or may not be happening and it may or may not be a consequence of mankind’s industrialization—I’ve seen convincing support for each. I am quite unqualified to pass judgement on the scientific merits of either side’s position or to dispute the findings of actual researchers. I read widely on the matter and have been following it since James Hansen’s Congressional testimony in 1988, but neither fact counts for much as far as science goes. However, I can opine on the political implications of the conclusions and the culture of AGW as a lay observer and I will strive to confine myself to that perspective.)

The rational person spends a tremendous amount of time and effort looking at reality, evaluating hypotheses, and considering alternative explanations when he tries to come to know something. After the effort is expended and the conclusions are arrived at, he can legitimately claim the mantle of “certainty” about the item before him. But his certainty is not inviolable: if new data or new facts come to light that he hadn’t considered, he will evaluate his certainty and amend his conclusions to reflect them. He understands that knowledge is not a static destination, but an ongoing process with milestones representing the intermediate points. This view is not skepticism—where knowledge and certainty are impossible—but an openness to re-consider one’s premises.

When a rational person sees someone come to the wrong conclusion, he assumes that that person is much like him. So he will point out the pertinent facts and try to help that person come to see the wider context that negates or modifies the earlier conclusion. If he’s right, he just might persuade the other person to change his mind.

Scientists generally operate like the rational person described above. They work according to the scientific method, which enshrines the inductive approach. Publishing their findings in a scientific journal is supposed to be the beginning of the journey to knowledge as other scientists test the results and publish their own findings. This emerging consensus is then grist for causal explanation, which is then itself tested in new scenarios and experiments. This process is more rigorous and formal than the rational person’s due to its inherently social nature: the rational person really only needs to understand an issue in his own mind whereas a scientist must cast his understanding in precise, objective terms that are available to others.

At odds with both the rational person and the scientist is the man of faith. For him, knowledge once obtained is sacrosanct; his certainty is absolute and unshakeable. In contrast, the process by which he acquires such certainty is relatively effortless: he is told what to believe and he accepts it wholesale. His mind is literally closed off to contradictory information as he resolutely refuses to consider it.

The source of his knowledge and certainty is other people so the pedigree is of vital importance to him. If he is a Christian, the opinions of his fellow worshippers might carry some weight but pale next to his priest or the Pope. If he is a Marxist, then an economics professor’s ideas trump a graduate student’s but lose out to a consensus of five economics professors. When knowledge is severed from its ties to an objective reality, the need for a standard does not vanish so it morphs into an authority accounting game.

Dissent—or even worse, apostasy—cannot be tolerated in the realm of faith. Doubt is an injection of reason that undermines the received knowledge. So men of faith gather with other men of faith, trusting that none of whom will raise uncomfortable doubts or ask serious questions of each other’s certainties. They take solace in the mutual affirmations of rightness and correctness. When they come across dissent, their defense mechanisms react automatically to neutralize the doubt and quash the questions that percolate to the surface of their faith. The faithful swarm to prevent a mental foothold and seize on their numbers for reassurance that they can’t all be wrong.

By now, you can probably already guess which side I think the AGW group falls into. For the most strident of AGW advocates, the ones who loudly proclaim that the debate is over, AGW has become an article of faith—a religion with all the dogma, rituals, and trappings of any traditional one. For them, AGW must never be questioned and they are prepared to do whatever it takes to accomplish that. If doubt does come up, they ratchet up the rhetoric to cow the less-fanatical proponents through a variant of Pascal’s Wager.

The rank and file listen to what the leaders tell them and the clustering with those of like “mind” prevents them from having to question their beliefs. Their lack of doubt is more a happenstance of laziness or ignorance or intellectual sloth than a conscious use of mental blinders. They are the ones most open to suasion: the prolonged cold snap is distinctly at odds with alarmism and the hyperbole of the leaders is so over the top that even the dimmest must recoil.

On that front, there is reason for hope. Australia recently rejected a climate change bill. 40% of Americans think that global warming is not caused by man. There was even some spirited opposition on the House floor last week.

But it may prove to be a false hope. Those unwilling to do the intellectual legwork necessary to come to a firm conclusion about AGW (or any issue, for that matter) are easily recalled to the fold should things get warmer or dissent be silenced. While rejoicing in the momentary victories of rejection of this or that anti-man piece of legislation, we cannot let up on the culture war. Victory there is the only longstanding one. To achieve that, we need a resurgence of reason and rational people. Luckily, there’s some positive signs on that front as well.

Notice that Derbyshire characterizes these four “notions of liberty” originally described by David Hackett Fischer, as being “subtly different”.  Let us examine these differences, to see how “subtle” these differences are.

1.  “Publick” liberty.  This is the so-called “collective” liberty of democracy.  This is the “liberty” of communism, socialism and fascism, where the individual moves only by permission of the collective — which, of course, means the State.  The freedom to obey, in other words.

1A.  “Soul” liberty.  Originating with the Puritans, as above, this is essentially the freedom to do what God — in the person of the rulers — tells you to do.

2.  “Hegemonic” liberty.  This, in short, is the “liberty” of the feudal aristocracy — which Derbyshire tells us with a straight face, “cohabited quite comfortably with race slavery”).

3.  “Reciprocal” liberty.  This is what we know now as freedom of thought — though Fischer and Derbyshire construe it primarily as being the individual’s prerogative to follow God *instead* of man.  This is “soul liberty” with the State middleman removed; here each individual is (in principle) free to determine for himself what God is really saying.

4.  “Natural” liberty.  From the description, this is the only one of these which emphasizes freedom of action, and by implication, of private property.  It is the only one that sets the individual against an imposed “order”.  Of course, the quotes chosen by Fischer and Derbyshire characterize it as anarchic.

It should be clear that 1, 1A and 2 are instances of tyranny, not “liberty”.  Since when is the difference between liberty and tyranny “subtle”?!?!   If all of these were liberty, what is the “tyranny” against which all of these stand opposed?  What is the principle common to all of these that makes them all instances of “liberty”?

Derbyshire is giving us a snapshot of the pre-American conceptions of liberty, in particular how fragmented and confused it was, as compared to the unitary principle of individual rights of 1776.  This is valuable in and of itself.

But consider the implications!  The historical facts that Derbyshire has given us, refute two key conservative falsehoods.

First is the idea that America was the culmination of a gradual process built upon a long tradition (going back to Christ).  Observe the sharp discontinuity between these “four notions” and the American principle.  While Americanism does indeed draw upon existing ideas that go way back in history, it does so in the way that Isaac Newteon or Albert Einstein did in physics — by introducing  a radical new integration that jettisons long-established errors and resolves ancient contradictions. In this case, the errors being eliminated are Derbyshire’s #1 (democracy) and #2 (aristocracy), while secularizing #3 (freedom of ALL thought) and integrating it with #4 (individual  moral sovereignty).

Second, is the idea that *current* conservatives understand what liberty is.  John Derbyshire has just confessed, on the open Internet, that his view of liberty is pre-American — conceptually fragmented, confused, contradictory, primitive, and hopelessly blind.

Whither the Left in all this?  Again, Derbyshire enlightens, in a manner he likely did not intend:

“Very approximately speaking, modern liberalism descends from the first and third of Fischer’s styles, modern conservatism from the second and fourth.”

“Very approximately” notwithstanding (more on that below), this is indeed an accurate summation of our predicament: modern “liberalism” (the Left) embraces one part tyranny (#1) and one part liberty (#3, and not much of it anymore), while conservatives are the complete opposite: they embrace one part tyranny (#2) and one part liberty (#4).

If I were to rewrite political terms of thought with the intention of confusing people about liberty, I could not have done better.

But consider this:  Derbyshire’s description, together with his connection of these fragments to the modern political “alternative” — is just as accurate a description *of our modern day* as it is of the pre-American milieu.  These aren’t just echoes; we apparently have completely regressed to a pre-American concept of liberty.

Oviously, somebody DID rewrite political terms of thought here.  How else could we have ended up here, in this 17th century intellectual cesspit again, *after* the concept of liberty had been integrated into a single whole by the Founders?  How did we reach such a pass that such anachronism could be introduced as seriously relevant to modern political discourse (as Derbyshire implies in posting this in response to Iain Murray’s implicit, yet correct assumption that liberty is unitary) without so much as a guffaw from the audience?

As far as the conservatives are concerned, they remain active and knowing participants in the crime, even if they weren’t the ones to blow the first hole in liberty’s defenses.  Errors of this size are not made innocently.  The history is too well established, and the Declaration of Independence is available for all to read — so there’s no “we didn’t know” excuse.  Rather, when we examine the peculiar version of “history” that conservatives have written for themselves — one where the first true expression of Leftism/the political Enlightenment (treated as identical) was 1793, while 1776 was actually “a conservative reaction, in the English political tradition, against royal innovation”(1) — removes any doubt about what those people are doing; this intellectual retrogression is something they wish to exploit.

So who did crack liberty open once more?  Conservatives historically have not had the intellectual capacity or the position to engage in the deep-level corruption we are dealing with here.  Here, as elsewhere, they are not the vanguard, but are instead pilot fish following the sharks.  As the ideological history reveals, the sharks turn out to be — wait for it — Marx and Engels, two of the first full-blown Leftists.

While liberty was implicitly seen as indivisible in early 19th century America, the glue that holds that integration together –  the principle of individual moral sovereignty, deriving from Derbyshire’s #4 — never really “took” in continental Europe, where self-determination was seen as belonging to nations, not individuals.  Against that backdrop, it was easy for Marx and Engels to break liberty apart again.  What had previously been implicitly understood as simply “the system of natural liberty” was renamed capitalism, a term which substitutes a mere economic characteristic — the ownership of capital — for liberty, in a classic definition-by-nonessentials subversion.

By intellectually excluding the right of property from the rest of liberty, the Left could attack and destroy this most poorly-defended aspect of liberty while still passing themselves off as friends of what would henceforth be seen as political liberty.  The ploy worked; by the time the Russian Revolution blew the lid off that lie, the Left was firmly in charge intellectually, the intellectual Enlightenment was gone, and the economic/political dichotomy was solidly entrenched (and still is to this day).

The religious conservatives in America did not really notice the opportunity opened up for them by the Left until after World War II, but once they had, they got busy.  They can brazenly characterize the difference between instances of  liberty and tyranny as “subtle”, with straight faces, expecting that there no longer exist in the mainstream those minds who can call them on it.

I hold both conservatives and the Left as responsible for the results:  modern-day Americans willingly trade away liberty for trinkets (only to lose those too — h/t Billy) while those few who properly sense that something is going wrong, find a rat’s nest of conceptual confusion designed to mislead, frustrate, and thereby neutralize them.   Compare the confusion that paralyzes mainstream thought about liberty and politics, to the radiant blast of clarity and insight that comes from minds that operate on the premise that “freedom is of a piece”.

There is no aspect of the American concept of liberty which says or implies that individual rights cease to apply in those chosen acivities deemed  “economic” (or otherwise).  Liberty does not have “disposable” parts.  The idea that liberty can be safely fragmented is the lie relied upon by those who insist that capitalism is “just an economic system” and that government involvement in the economy is compatible with liberty.

In fact, only under conditions of liberty can there be a true separation between systems of economic organization and systems of governance; this separation is one of liberty’s necessary consequences, and can only exist within the understanding that liberty is indivisible.

To compromise one aspect of liberty is to compromise (i.e. surrender) it all.

I will not surrender it.

(1) Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind,  seventh revised edition, p6

For the uninformed (like me) Mr. Winter writes:

“The Tata Nano, a tiny car with average fuel economy of 55 mpg (4.3 L/100 km).
Priced at $2,500, it is the world’s cheapest car and designed specifically to give South Asia’s low-income families a safer, all-weather alternative to a motorcycle or scooter, currently the only “family car” millions can afford.”

Evidently, most Indians ride motorcycles or scooters which results in over 100,000 deaths and 2 million injuries per year. This car might alleviate that. But who is attacking the development of this car? Some fringe eco-activists? Nope. One of the enviro leaders at the UN.

“And yet, many environmentalists who profess to be on a mission to save mankind are condemning this new device as an “environmental disaster” they would like to wish out of existence. Chief U.N. climate scientist Rajendra Pachauri has said “I am having nightmares” about it. Many other green groups also lament its debut.”

Mr. Pachauri is also the lead scientist at the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) which has been, since 1990, selling the notion that global warming will lead to disaster for life on Earth and is all man’s fault which my own two US Senators Debbi Stabenow and Carl Levin bought.

Mr. Winter reports that demand for the Nano is expected to exceed supply and this means:

“It is exactly this popularity that critics from green groups — 100% of whom we can assume do not have to drive their children to school on a scooter — fear. They are afraid the Nano will become so popular it will spark an industrial revolution, such as Henry Ford’s Model T did in the U.S.
In other words, demand for the Nano will soar; leading to more factories being built, creating more jobs, which in turn will create more demand for cars, accelerating India’s production of greenhouse gases. The Nano will create progress. And gosh, that will be terrible.”

He properly condemns this enviro attitude:

“Unfortunately, this contemptible viewpoint, spewed from comfortable middle-class lodgings in the U.S. and Western Europe, has not received the heaping dose of ridicule it deserves. In the worst kind of cultural elitism imaginable, environmentalists argue that in their noble war on global warming, tens of thousands of traffic deaths annually in the developing world are acceptable casualties.

This is an utterly unacceptable position to take, no matter what. The birth of the Nano is an historic event that needs to be celebrated, and environmentalists need to reevaluate their rhetoric and game plan.”

There is of course, no chance they will reevaluate their game plan. Although I won’t be buying a Nano in the forseable future (I prefer something of substance between me and whatever is going to run into me), I’m happy to see such an objective, rational argument in a trade journal.

“An expedition team which set sail from Plymouth on a 5,000-mile carbon emission-free trip to Greenland have been rescued by an oil tanker.”

They just don’t get it.

Update; corrected typo

Junkfood Science has a remarkable post by the name ‘Rejection of science squared’. What’s amazing is that any paper or journal would be willing to publish such a speculative, assumptive, wishful thinking article. Or that somebody was willing to finance a study like this. I don’t think palm readers and clairvoyants use that many weasel words.
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Watts Up With That? (WUWT) has a guest post by Steven Goddard on the contradictory reports of the climate change alarmists which says in part:

Last weeks’ top Antarctic AGW story was :

Antarctic ice melting faster than expected

due to CO2, of course.

This week the #1 story is :

Antarctic ice spreading

but the increase in size is due to “stratospheric ozone depletion” which is of course also caused by man-made gases.

Except that’s not quite true as Mr. Goddard explains.

“Oh, and one minor problem with the ozone hole theory ”The ozone hole occurs during the Antarctic spring, from September to early December” – but the positive ice anomaly occurred during the autumn and winter (March through July) as represented by the red line below.”

The enviros will always find some reason to blame man for every problem real and imagined. How can it be otherwise since man is so evil and depraved by nature? Sigh. It shouldn’t be lost on anyone that Earth Day is also the birthday of communist leader Vladimir Lenin. In fact, the first earth Day was picked to be on his 100th birthday. Not much love for mankind there.

At the website Environmentalism.com are these three quotes, (with a link to even more):

Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs.

—John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal

Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental.

—Dave Forman, Founder of Earth First!

I know scientists who remind me that people are part of nature, but it isn’t true. Somewhere along the line … we quit the contract and 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. (source: “Mother Nature as a hothouse flower,” Los Angeles Times Book Review, October 22, 1989, p. 10.)

—David Graber, biologist, National Park Service

The above quotes show that the leaders of environmentalism place little or no value on human life and do not regard man as part of nature. But this is not just a small insignificant sample. There are many more at for example the conservative site Free Republic. Such as this quote which reveals the real inner motive of those who hate man:

“We have wished, we ecofreaks, for a disaster or for a social change to come and bomb us into Stone Age, where we might live like Indians in our valley, with our localism, our appropriate technology, our gardens, our homemade religion — guilt-free at last! — Stewart Brand (writing in the Whole Earth Catalogue”

Such is the power of guilt. It turns men against their own species, against themselves.

And how do you get men to accept an unearned guilt? By referring to nature not as nature but as ‘the environment.’ Get them to think they are responsible not only for their own environment but for everyone else’s as well. Don’t talk about the fact that environments are regional and local. Get them to accept the idea that their environment is global and therefore a man in Michigan is responsible for environmental damage in Peru. Make him feel guilty for that damage and he will not resist your demand that he atone for his guilt by handing over his money and freedom, or to support government policies that accomplish the same thing.

Earth Day (and the movement that goes with it) isn’t so much about bringing humanity up to the level of the Jetsons or Star Trek as it is of reducing our presence back to the Flintstones.

Notice how any suggestion that modern technology be used to save nature is met with indignant hostility. Observe that the peasants of Africa are not required to make sacrifices. They are already right where the enviros want them, close to nature–starving–and are already sacrificing the only thing they have to sacrifice, their future.

Environmentalists hold that all living organisms have an absolute, unconditional right to exist, except one–man. It is only man that must sacrifice his nature, his way of life, his happiness, his survival to all the plants, bugs and creatures of the planet. Man has no right to survive according to his own unique nature–which is by means of his reasoning mind. Make no mistake about it, the assault on man is an assault on reason. The protection of nature is only the excuse, the rationalization they use to attack man’s mind.

Earth Day should be renamed ‘Man Day’ to celebrate man’s mastery and therefore control over his environment. If the enviros really were concerned about nature they would champion laissez-faire capitalism, the only system that can provide for the survival of both man and nature.

But was Toyota’s success because they produced small cars and hybrids like the Prius, or was it in spite of that fact?

A caller to the, increasingly interesting, Rush Limbaugh Show points out the inconvenient truth:

[bold mine]

So Toyota actually loses money on each hybrid they sell, which they only make up for by selling their trucks and SUV’s. Those very same trucks and SUV’s which were supposedly the cause of Detroit’s failure.

The standard line we’re fed is that the Japanese are forward-thinkers for making hybrids while Detroit is going under for their mistake of making large and “gas guzzling” vehicles. This is completely false. As far as profits are concerned, hybrids are boat anchors driving their otherwise successful manufacturers down. Toyota lost money on them, even despite the fact that the government subsidized their sales. (Consider that for a moment: if the government weren’t grabbing our money to fund this boondoggle, the results would have been even worse) If Detroit had caved into political pressure to build these rolling mistakes, they would have ended up even worse off than today.

Congress, the Media, and the Left are demanding (and now mandating by law) that American auto manufacturers imitate Toyota’s failures. And they’re doing it by means of the popular mythology that they created in which hybrids are a business success.

This is, of course, one of many such myths that the Left has created in order to impoverish us and control our lives. In the past, I’d found it difficult to criticize hybrids on the fact of their money-loss because people who even partially bought into other such Leftist myths weren’t always willing to consider unprofitability a deal-breaker if the car served a “green” agenda. (“Well, that loss does worry me… but they’re saving the planet!”)

But in this economic climate where people are starting to appreciate the value of a profit (or at least, the problems of a lack thereof), and with the twist of Detroit’s business failure being blamed on their non-pursuit of hybrids, I think there is an opportunity here to cut into this lie.

So I recommend calling shenanigans on this one where you can.

-Inspector

(PS, if you’re interested in reading more on this subject, check out my November, 2008 post.)

JONATHON PORRITT, one of Gordon Brown’s leading green advisers, is to warn that Britain must drastically reduce its population if it is to build a sustainable society.

Porritt’s call will come at this week’s annual conference of the Optimum Population Trust (OPT), of which he is patron.

The trust will release research suggesting UK population must be cut to 30m if the country wants to feed itself sustainably.

Porritt said: “Population growth, plus economic growth, is putting the world under terrible pressure.

They do continue to use the tired old lie that they are doing this “for man.”  Orwellian double-speak has never been done better.  In order to make the world a better place for mankind, we must eliminate half of mankind.  And the sooner, the better.

In honor of Edison Hour, which was coincidentally established by the University of Michigan Students of Objectivism and myself, and also in tribute to Human Achievement Hour, households and businesses across the nation will be keeping their lights and other electrical devices on, and refusing to concede the unearned guilt that environmentalists want to establish in our culture.

We live in the most innovative, life-sustaining and “money-making” country in mankind’s history, and we should never apologize for human happiness and success. So please remember to keep your lights on this coming Saturday. You may want to spend the hour by sitting down by the bright light of your lamp reading Ayn Rand’s Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal or revisiting her uplifting novella, Anthem, from which I’ve selected a quote from its main character who rediscovered electricity and the light bulb:

I have learned that my power of the sky was known to men long ago; they called it Electricity. It was the power that moved their greatest inventions. It lit this house with light which came from those globes of glass on the walls.

Let’s make sure that the precious inventions that freed the world from darkness are never taken for granted, and especially not destroyed by the anti-man philosophy of environmentalism and “Earth Hour.” Let’s change the tide of the culture by celebrating human achievement and literally fending off the darkness.

“According to a series of recent surveys among the general population, most US citizens seem to be unable to pass even the most basic science literacy test, a trend that has got experts very concerned. Because individuals lack this ability, they may find it very difficult to interpret scientific articles, and some may even misconstrue presented pieces of evidence and turn them into something they are not, like in the case of global warming. As people miss even the most basic background in science, they cannot actually emit an informed opinion, and the trend is growing with each passing year, experts note.”

I would blame a lot of this on the anti-conceptual philosophy of education that has gripped American schools for about 50 years I would estimate.Some of these earlier students are now in the media which aids and abets the general ignorance.

A case in point is two articles that appeared in the Detroit News on Mar 13th 09. One was titled “Pollution not only fouls air, it dims skies.” There should have been some mention that the pollution of the 1950s has been reduced by about 90% today. In a 2000 edition of Reason Magazine editor Ronald Bailey writes

“In the U.S., air quality has been improving rapidly since before the first Earth Day–and before the federal Clean Air Act of 1970. In fact, ambient levels of particulates and sulfur dioxide have been declining ever since accurate records have been kept. Between 1960 and 1970, for instance, particulates declined by 25 percent; sulfur dioxide decreased by 35 percent between 1962 and 1970. More concretely, it takes 20 new cars to produce the same emissions that one car produced in the 1960s.”

According to this our skies should be getting brighter not dimmer. The threat of dimming of course is just another attempt at scarring people into sacrificing more of their money and freedom to those who are collecting such sacrifices–politicians and enviros.

The second article is a new report from WAPO “Trace carcinogen amounts found in baby care products.” It states that:

“More than half of the baby shampoo, lotions and other infant care products analyzed by a health advocacy group were found to contain trace amounts of two chemicals that are believed to cause cancer, the organization said Thursday.

Some of the biggest names on the market, including Johnson & Johnson Baby Shampoo and Baby Magic baby lotion, tested positive for 1,4-dioxane, or formaldehyde, or both, the nonprofit Campaign for Safe Cosmetics reported.”

The report did carry contrary statements by Johnson and Johnson to the effect that the EPA has found these products to be safe. But considering today’s anti-business climate, many readers will just dismiss the statements as routine business denials. Over at the website STATS, a division of George Mason University, Trevor Butterworth reveals that:

“First, the CSC is driven by a group of environmental activist groups with a long history of hyperbole. The study was self-published, it wasn’t peer- reviewed; in fact, it wasn’t even scientific – if one takes science to be formulating a hypothesis and testing it against the full range of data.”

He goes on to discuss both formaldehyde and 1,4-dioxane, said to be found in the health products and concludes:

“But here we come to the fundamental methodological flaw in report – one that underscores the need for real, peer-reviewed scientific analysis of chemical exposures and health and not activist reports designed to maximize media attention through sensationalism:

The Campaign measured how much formaldehyde was in the product, but not how much a child would actually be exposed to or absorb in the course of using that product.”

On 1,4-dioxane Mr. Butterworth writes:

“The other confounding problem with 1,4-dioxane is that we are exposed to it routinely in tap water, either by drinking or when we shower (as a volatilized compound), and in seafood, cooked meat, fried chicken, deep fry oil, ripe tomatoes, tomato paste, peppers, coffee, herbs and spices (within the range of 2-15ppm). In fact, given that 1,4-dioxane is more easily absorbed by ingestion and inhalation rather than absorption (due to its propensity to evaporate), the route of exposure is much more likely from the water we wash and shower in than through skin absorption from a cosmetic lotion.”

What makes the CSC report dishonest is the fact that it presents out of context assertions. It claims that all amounts of a carcinogen are dangerous and government force should be employed to ban them. The context being ignored by such activist groups is the toxicology principle that ‘the poison is in the dose.’ The human body has been evolving on this planet for thousands of years and has developed methods for dealing with trace amounts of toxic elements. Most people today have trace amounts of lead, mercury, dioxin, arsnic, asbestos, 1,4-dioxane and probably many others. Why aren’t we all dead? “The poison is in the dose” is why.

Activist groups like the CSC deliberately use out of context assertions knowing that many people, out of fear, will jump to the wrong conclusions. This fear is how they get donations which they use to lobby for governmental control over you and I.

He showed how bad coal is in comparison to nuclear, not because he was against coal, but simply to show that nuclear is a better, cleaner, and safer source of energy.   Also, he bases his arguments on the sensible idea that American nuclear plants would reprocess spent fuel, which would reduce the amount of nuclear waste – something which is not being done, again, for political reasons.

At any rate, I bring this issue up because President Obama has apparently decided that nuclear waste could never be safe in Yucca Mountain, and he won’t allow it to be stored there.   This simply isn’t a rational conclusion, as Beckmann demonstrates in his pamphlet.  I advise anyone with an interest in the so-called problem of nuclear waste disposal to read Beckmann’s pamphlet. 

On a related note, a promising new nuclear energy technology is written up in Technology Review, something called a Traveling-Wave Reactor.  It would reduce the already minute amount of waste produced by the nuclear industry.