The Coming End of the Environmental Movement

My friend, Joseph A. Olson, PE, recently wrote of “Climate Science’s Worst Week in History” in which he noted a series of events such as the UK’s Royal Society’s step back from its former support of global warming, a Washington Post opinion editorial by one of its perpetrators, Michael Mann of Penn State University, pleading for a Democrat victory in the midterm elections to avoid a congressional investigation, and the resignation from the American Physical Society by a 67-year member and renowned physicist, Dr. Hal Lewis for having been subverted by the environmental movement.

Having observed the movement for decades, I think we are seeing a growing awareness that environmentalism is fear-driven, based on many false claims, and is a threat to the U.S. economy and fundamental freedoms.

The environmental movement has its roots in what was formerly called conservation. Its great champion was Teddy Roosevelt and it was led by men like John Muir (1838-1914), a naturalist who advocated setting aside places like the Yosemite Valley, Sequoia National Park and other wilderness areas.

The objective was not only to preserve such areas, but to permit future generations to visit, enjoy, and be inspired by them. In creating national forests, it was understood they were to be managed in a fashion that yielded timber while providing opportunity for hunting, fishing, hiking and camping.

Muir founded the Sierra Club, one of the nation’s largest environmental organizations. Today there are so many environmental organizations and groups that you need a directory to sort them out. These groups, however, are now far more political than their original intent.

They are ministries of misinformation, disinformation, and outright scare mongering.

The movement as we know it today got a boost with the publication in 1962 of Rachel Carson’s book, “Silent Spring.”  It was an anti-pesticide diatribe whose claims have long since been disproved, but it set in motion a tsunami of fears regarding all chemicals and, beyond that, concerns about all kinds of manufacturing and technology; indeed anything involving energy resources.

Within eight years of the book’s publication President Nixon initiated the Environmental Protection Agency that has since metatisized into a rogue government agency intent on controlling all aspects of life in America. The EPA invents most of the science it cites and has an authoritarian contempt for the fundamental principles of American freedom and the for the constitutional process of legislating.

The scope of environmentalism is manifest in the United Nations Environmental Program of which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the source of the global warming hoax, has been the most visible of late.

We are witnessing, if not the death of environmentalism, at least its growing marginalization. The early signs are there to be seen. It will take a lot of time because much of academia, the judiciary, the media, some churches, and our schools have been hijacked by the environmental movement.

Like socialism/communism, a political movement closely aligned with environmentalism, environmentalism not only does not work, but imposes restrictions that run contrary to economic growth, health, and fundamental freedoms. Its solutions are as often as not are the cause of mass death as in the case of the banning of DDT.

Ultimately, environmentalism is opposed to all the technologies that protect, enhance and extend life for everyone on planet Earth.

This is why we see, time and again, environmental opposition to anything that might ensure a steady, dependable source of electricity, the power that maintains everything a modern society depends upon.

This explains why, at the heart of the global warming fraud, is the false assertion that carbon dioxide, the result of “fossil fuels,” causes the Earth’s overall temperature to rise despite the fact that it plays virtually no role whatever as regards climate.

This explains why environmental organizations like Friends of the Earth are leading campaigns against the use of coal to generate electricity and other forms of power generation. 

Environmentalists oppose oil and its derivative, perhaps one of the greatest inventions of the modern era, plastic.

It is why they advocate turning food, corn primarily, into an inefficient fuel called ethanol that can damage car engines. The diversion of massive amounts of corn has only served to drive up food costs.

It is why they advocate mass transportation and do all they can to impose new costs on the manufacture and use of automobiles.

It is why they advocate wind and solar power as viable sources of energy when neither would even exist without huge government subsidies. They are touted as a source of mythical “green jobs”, but Americans want real jobs and wonder why so few factories have been built here since the 1970s.

It has been environmentalists that foisted mandatory recycling programs that have proven as great a waste in time, labor and energy as the savings they were purported to save.

Was it a worthy goal to clean the nation’s air and water? Yes, without question, but by almost any standard one can name, that goal has been achieved. When the EPA announced it was going to regulate dust, you had to know that it’s being run by crazies.

The death of environmentalism began with the greatest hoax ever perpetrated in the history of modern man, global warming. It has taken decades for it to be exposed and its demise, along with other environmental “solutions” put forth are reaching a point of widespread public rejection.

That is a very good thing because, at the very heart of environmentalism is the intent to reduce the human population of the Earth. It is human “consumption” that environmentalists hate whether it is the food you eat or the energy you use in your daily life.

It will take a generation or two or three to rid ourselves of the chains environmentalism has imposed on us and the economy, but it will happen. It took some seventy years for the former Soviet Union to ultimately implode.

Just as communism killed millions, so too has environmentalism. Both still exist in various places and various forms, but they, like former religions and empires, will fail. Perhaps not in my lifetime or yours, but if we remain vigilant, if we resist, they too will die a deserved death.