Editor's Note: Contributing Editor, Bill Zettler, has written one of the most in-depth and provocative looks at the social and scientific phenomenon surrounding the issue of global warming. Zettler ends the five-part series on what has become perhaps the most controversial issue of our time. It will always be a must read for those who want to have the facts about climate change and the motivations behind those who promote speculation over GLOBAL WARMING. -- Dan Zanoza
From the Desk of Bill Zettler
"Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change. ... The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality."
The above quote sounds like any number of recent AP reports on the Global Warming disaster looming before us. Actually, it is a quote from Newsweek magazine in their April 1975 issue. The “grim reality” they were writing about? Why GLOBAL COOLING, of course.
So, who are these people who currently predict that Global Warming spells the demise of the human race, even though many scientists suggest otherwise?
Some think it started with Al Gore who, in 1992, published a book titled, “The Earth In the Balance”. But crazy environmental predictions preceded Gore by at least 20 years. In 1968 Berkeley professor Paul Erlich wrote a book called, “The Population Bomb” wherein he predicted 100’s of millions of people would starve within decades because population growth would exceed natural resources and food production. Here are some of Erlich's more famous quotes are:
"Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun." (1976)
“We've already had too much economic growth in the United States. Economic growth in rich countries like ours is the disease, not the cure." (1990)
"The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970's, the world will undergo famines. Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death, in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. Population control is the only answer." (1968)
Erlich could be considered the intellectual godfather of the radical environmental disaster clique currently dominating media, politics and entertainment.
It is easy to imagine Al Gore saying the same things Erlich said--only in a more politically correct manner. But the gist of the environmentalists’ argument could be summarized from the above quotes:
* Cheap energy is a curse not a blessing.
* Economic growth is bad.
* Humans need to die or at least not be born.
In other words humans are bad, capitalist humans are worse and American capitalist humans are the worst of the worst. Lenin could not have said it better.
What we have in the environmentalist Left is a new age of collectivists whose major goal is to stop or at least limit capitalism and to make certain the elitist intelligentsia (meaning themselves of course) take control of human progress. Indeed their solution would not be progress, but retrogression and such a philosophy would not move human life forward, but backward.
Why are the collectivists of old now determined environmentalists? Because the 1980’s marked the end of socialism and there was nowhere else for them to go. The 20th Century had proved, via the largest human experiment in history, that socialism does not work.
The Berlin Wall fell and Soviet Communism fell shortly thereafter. From seven decades of Gulags and blood emerged raw, but successful, capitalist states--although some still struggle against tyrannical ex-communist politicians.
India went from a Democratic socialist nightmare to a thriving capitalist success story in less than two decades. China, also know as Mao Tse Dung’s Stalinist death-camp, emerged as a hybrid communist-capitalist success story. And England under Margaret Thatcher successfully privatized all the collapsing government-owned industries including oil, telephone, power, coal, steel, railways and airlines.
Therefore, what is a dedicated socialist to do, faced with the historical evidence that capitalism works and socialism doesn’t? What to do when the ignorant peasant proletariat, when given the chance, eagerly chooses capitalism over socialism?
All socialists were out of jobs, but not out of ideology. Where to go to continue the fight against the evil of capitalism? The universities and the environmental lobby were more than happy to hire them. That is because environmentalists and university collectivists know if you can restrict energy exploration and subsequent energy use, you can stop capitalism in its tracks or, at the very least, slow it down.
One of the most effective ways to do this is to use the legal system in the effort to stop fossil fuel exploration. For example, sue to protect Caribou migration and stop oil exploration in ANWR (Arctic National Wildlife Refuge); sue to put Polar Bears on the Endangered Species List and prevent exploring for oil in the Arctic oceans; and sue coal-fired power plants for emitting mercury, even though U.S. power plants produce less than 1% of worldwide mercury emissions. After you have done that, sue to prevent the building of any nuclear power plants.
That leaves only renewable fuels to fill an impossible energy gap left by restricting the expansion of the use of fossil fuels and nuclear power. This will retard capitalism, not only in the U.S., but worldwide. This is due to the fact energy use per capita is directly correlated to wealth. Less energy means less wealth means less development means less capitalism.
However, that also means more poverty, more misery and more death because of this unassailable fact: We cannot feed, medicate and educate the nine billion people demographers say will be on earth in 2050 without extensive expansion of coal and nuclear energy sources. To legislate restrictions on energy use will bring certain death to millions of innocent people worldwide. This would be an unprecedented human disaster, solely of the environmental collectivists making.
Paul Driessen, Author of "Green Power, Black Death" wrote: “My big concern with Global Warming, is that the policies being pushed to supposedly prevent Global Warming, are having a disastrous effect on the world's poorest people.”
James Shikwati, a Kenyan Economist and Author said in a 2006 interview: “No refrigeration or modern packaging means that food cannot be kept. The fire in the hut is too smoky and consumes too much wood to be used as heating. There is no hot water. Those in the West cannot begin to imagine how hard life is without electricity. The life expectancy of people who live like this is terrifyingly short, their existence impoverished in every way.
“A few miles away (UN Global Warming Conference, Nairobi, Kenya 2006), the UN is hosting its conference on Global Warming in its plush gated headquarters. The gift shop is selling souvenirs of peasant tribal life, while delegates discuss how to promote what are described as sustainable forms of electrical generation. Africa has coal, and Africa has oil. But environmental groups are campaigning against the use of these cheap sources of energy. Instead they say Africa and the rest of the Developing World should use Solar and Wind Power.
“I don't see how a solar panel is going to power a steel industry. How a solar panel, you know, is going to power some railway train network. It might work maybe to power a small transistor radio.”
So the battle is joined. Will the elitist environmentalists win with their “the end justifies the means” ideology and drive the world backward into another Dark Age? Or will common sense and historical precedent prevail. Lets hope and pray it is the latter.
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Part 1 Series Overview by Bill Zettler: http://rffm.typepad.com/republicans_for_fair_medi/2008/03/global-swarming.html
Part 2 If It's Not Carbon Dioxide, What Is It? by Bill Zettler: http://rffm.typepad.com/republicans_for_fair_medi/2008/03/global-swarmi-2.html
Part 3 The Facts, Ma'am, Just The Facts by Bill Zettler: http://rffm.typepad.com/republicans_for_fair_medi/2008/03/global-swarmi-3.html
Part 4 Global Warming's Conscientious Objectors by Bill Zettler: http://rffm.typepad.com/republicans_for_fair_medi/2008/03/global-swarmi-4.html
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