Have you noticed recently that every single initiative and statement mad by the environmental movement has an underlying theme that remains constant, no matter what the complained about crime against Mother Earth? These stories or proclamations always go something like this, “the upcoming environmental disaster is a threat to all life on the planet, and the only way to put a stop to that threat, thereby saving humanity and all living creatures is to adopt Marxism as a socioeconomic system.” I think, that just about covers it all. To prove my point, the U.N. grand poobahs on all things climate related released their third report this week, and if you had guessed that man kind is doomed and adopting a world wide Marxist government is the only possible way to save us all, then you would have won the office pool this year. I know that I’m shocked, how about you? Of course, there is a reason why, since 1991, Socialism and loss of freedom have been the only possible cures for our environmental sins, and I think I’ll let one of the very first environmentalists to grace our Earth Mother tell us what that reason is.
Patrick Moore, founder of Green Peace, on why he left his own creation:
Basically they are using sensation, misinformation, and scare tactics. The environmental movement was basically hijacked by political and social activists who came in and very cleverly learned how to use green rhetoric or green language to cloak agendas that had more to do with anti corporatism, anti globalization, anti business, and very little to do with science or ecology, and that’s when I left. I realized that the movement I had started was being taken over by politicos basically, and that they were using it for fundraising purposes. Nobody is going to listen to you if you say the world is not coming to an end, but if you say the world is going to end, you get headlines. And so sensationalism, especially when it’s combined with misinformation leads to a situation where people send gobs of money to these groups for campaigns that are actually totally misguided.
Now we can go on and on about whether such calamities are actually headed our way. I notice that Chicken Little wastes no time with apologizing for screeching about dangers that weren’t there to begin with, Ozone, Global Cooling, Godzilla, what have you. I also notice that Chicken Little and his merry crew are already on to some new issues with which to convince us to voluntarily give up our basic freedoms and economic prosperity and finally allow for the top down central planners to show us all a better way. But before anyone buys the premise that complete government control of our lives by some super world wide ruling elite party of genius bureaucrats would somehow be better for the environment, have a peek at the environmental track record of the Marxists the last time they were put in charge of things.
When the Berlin Wall came down and the Iron Curtain was finally lifted to expose the inner workings of communism to Western eyes, one of the more shocking discoveries was the nightmarish scale of environmental destruction. The statistics for East Germany alone tell a horrific tale: at the time of its reunification with West Germany an estimated 42 percent of moving water and 24 percent of still waters were so polluted that they could not be used to process drinking water, almost half of the country’s lakes were considered dead or dying and unable to sustain fish or other forms of life, and only one-third of industrial sewage along with half of domestic sewage received treatment.
An estimated 44 percent of East German forests were damaged by acid rain — little surprise given that the country produced proportionally more sulphur dioxide, carbon dioxide, and coal dust than any other in the world. In some areas of East Germany the level of air pollution was between eight and twelve times greater than that found in West Germany, and 40 percent of East Germany’s population lived in conditions that would have justified a smog warning across the border. Only one power station in East Germany had the necessary equipment to clean sulphur from emissions.
snip:
The environmental destruction associated with communism is no coincidence or accident of history, but rather a perfectly logical outcome for at least three reasons. Perhaps most obviously, communism invariably means authoritarianism (how else would a New Soviet Man emerge to work towards the bright, shiny future prophesied by Marx and Engels without re-education camps and control over the levers of societal machinery?), with little tolerance for dissent or concerns about hazardous waste in the worker’s paradise. To voice the opinion that perhaps not quite all was well, or that the air smelled funny, was to invite suspicions being a saboteur, kulak or harboring bourgeois tendencies.
Second, communism means an absence of property rights, having all been surrendered to “the people,” which is to say the state. As that which belongs to everyone in fact belongs to no one, who is to be confronted over the factory sending toxic plumes into the sky which then descends on the cornfield, or the dumping of waste into the river plied by tourists on cruise boats? And who really owns the cornfield or the boats?
Lastly, communism also simply cannot compete with capitalism in the production of wealth and technology, both of which greatly assist in addressing environmental problems. Why should anyone be surprised that only one East German power station had the necessary equipment to scrub sulphur from its emissions? This, after all, was a country whose answer to Western automobiles — the Trabant launched in the late 1950s — did not even include a fuel gauge in its early versions, something first introduced decades prior (unsurprisingly the Trabant was also bad for the environment, emitting nine times the hydrocarbons and five times the carbon monoxide emissions of the average European car of 2007).
Do you want to know what else causes a terrible ecological impact? If you guessed green technology or green energy does, you’ve won the prize. As it turns out, those Solar Energy Farms that our government has been pouring untold Billions into are responsible for a larger amount of deaths to birdies than pheasant season and duck season combined. Those Solar farms are basically the equivalent of the birdie killing fields.
The three main causes of death were:
1. Solar flux: Exposure to temperatures over 800 degrees F.2. Impact (or blunt force) trauma: The birds’ wings are rendered inoperable while flying, causing them to crash into the ground. Birds that do not die are often injured badly enough to make them vulnerable to predators.
3. Predators: When a bird’s wings are singed and it can not fly, it loses its primary means of defense against animals like foxes and coyotes.
Hummingbirds, swifts, swallows, doves, hawks, finches, warblers and owls were just some dead birds found at the solar facilities’ “equal opportunity” mortality hazards.
In one instance, lab staff observed a “falcon-type bird with a plume of smoke arising from the tail as it passed through [a] flux field.”The study found that besides the intense heat, birds may be mistaking large solar panels for bodies of water. The injured birds then attract insects and other predators to the area. They, too, are then vulnerable to injury or death.
In one instance, researchers found “hundreds upon hundreds” of butterfly carcasses (including Monarchs). The insects were attracted to the light from the solar farms, which in turn attracted birds and perpetuated a cycle of death and injury.
As for me, were it not for the very real danger of these people getting their way, and fulfilling their dream of wrecking the economic prosperity for all of us, (which by the way has a very real and terrifying human cost, such as famine in the third world among other things,) I would be laughing my touchas off at watching them run around from scary story to scary story bleating on about impending doom. I’m still cackling about that beyond stupid movie in which Man Made Global Warming literally chased Dennis Quaid down a corridor and had him slam a door shut to protect himself from it, (The Day After Tomorrow.)
One of the reasons environmental fear works so well on the easily duped is that you truly can not immediately see via empirical evidence the truth of falsity of the claim being made. The Earth is warming crapola has been shoveled at us since Ronald Reagan was President, and it wasn’t until this year that the American Physical Society has finally pushed back.
Perhaps no bleating from Chicken Little rewards the fear mongers as well as that warning associated with Nuclear Power. I watched with some amusement as the dolts in California flocked to pharmacy shelves and emptied the stores there of iodine due to the Earth Quake experienced in Fukishima. Never mind that the exposure to radiation felt by the California population was 2000 times greater due to the bananas found in the grocery stores there, or the granite on their kitchen counter tops, or in the phosphorous found in their laundry detergent, than any possible exposure caused by the Fukishima Plant, their fear came from that place that dared to use Nuclear Power in order to create cheap electricity for the citizens of Japan. This is because in the world of the Marxists, it is not the actual danger that is important, but that anyone outside of their socioeconomic system would successfully produce energy in order to create prosperity.
Just in case you’re predisposed to be afraid of Nuclear Power, perhaps you should read this article from the Wall Street Journal.
Besides the U.N.’s Chernobyl report, the most extensive data on human exposure to radiation is the American-Japanese joint study of hibakusha—”explosion-affected persons”—the 200,000 survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The expectations at the start of that study (which has taken over 60 years and continues to this day) were that survivorswould be overrun with tumors and leukemia and that a percentage of their descendants would be genetically deformed. Instead, researcher Evan Douple concluded, “The risk of cancer is quite low, lower than what the public might expect.”
Radiologist John Moulder analyzed the results of one group of 50,000 survivors, about 5,000 of whom had developed cancer: “Based on what we know of the rest of the Japanese population, you would have expected about 4,500 of them. So we have 5,000 cancers over 50 years where we would expect 4,500.” Assuming that the 500 additional cases are all due to radiation, that means a rate of 1%. And there was no increase in inherited mutations. Remember: These aren’t victims of a power plant breakdown; they are survivors of a nuclear attack.
For the Fukushima disaster of 2011, the consensus estimate is a 1% increase in cancer for employees who worked at the site and an undetectable increase for the plant’s neighbors. Just think of the difference between the overwhelming nuclear fears and nightmares we’ve all suffered from since 1945 and that range of increased risk: 0% to 1%. And if that’s not enough to question everything you thought you knew about radiation, consider that, even after the catastrophe in Japan, the likelihood of work-related death and injury for nuclear plant workers is lower than for real estate agents … and for stockbrokers.
That’s right, despite all of the Mother Jones and Huffington Post pictures and pontifications showing how Fukishima has doomed all of man kind, the truth is that there is a small chance that two, count them two, more people who worked at that plant on that day might, not definitely but might, develop health problems later in life due to exposure from that particular day. The resulting health impact on the neighboring community will be zero, and certainly Californians went a little overboard with their iodine buying spree.
By the way, if you guessed that Hydraulic Fracturing was going to cause Earth Quakes as the next Chicken Little table pounding warning, then you win the prize. What that prize is of course is another matter. Your prize is a spiffy multi year vacation at one of the reeducation camps coming soon to the People’s Republic Of Amerika, I’ll see you there.
COLUMBUS, Ohio — State regulators for the first time have linked earthquake activity in eastern Ohio to hydraulic fracturing, confirming the suspicions of activists pushing unsuccessfully for a drilling ban.
State Oil & Gas Chief Rick Simmers told The Associated Press on Friday that the state has halted drilling indefinitely at the site near Youngstown where five minor tremors occurred in March following investigative findings of a probable link to fracking.
A deep-injection well for fracking wastewater was tied to earthquakes in the region in 2012.
Simmers says Ohio will require sensitive seismic monitoring as a condition of all new drilling permits within three miles of a known fault or existing seismic activity of 2.0 or greater. Drilling will pause for evaluation with any tremor of 1.0 magnitude and will be halted if a link is found.
