HARKONNENDOG

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Saturday, March 12, 2005

Simianbrain links to a GREAT post about the death of enviromnetalism.

Here at the NYTimes. An excerpt:

In the 1970's, the environmental movement was convinced that the Alaska oil pipeline would devastate the Central Arctic caribou herd. Since then, it has quintupled.

When I first began to worry about climate change, global cooling and nuclear winter seemed the main risks. As Newsweek said in 1975: "Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the cooling trend ... but they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century."

This record should teach environmentalists some humility. The problems are real, but so is the uncertainty. Environmentalists were right about DDT's threat to bald eagles, for example, but blocking all spraying in the third world has led to hundreds of thousands of malaria deaths.

Likewise, environmentalists were right to warn about population pressures, but they overestimated wildly. Paul Ehrlich warned in "The Population Bomb" that "the battle to feed humanity is over. ... Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death." On my bookshelf is an even earlier book, "Too Many Asians," with a photo of a mass of Indians on the cover. The book warns that the threat from relentlessly multiplying Asians is "even more grave than that of nuclear warfare."

Kudos to the NYTimes for publishing this editorial, and to the liberals who grasp its truth. The exerpt above is why I laugh when people say Bush in harming the environment. Why would I trust these people. If it wasn't for their irrationality much of the country would be powered by nuclear energy, which is nearly perfect. It if wasn't for their ignorance much of the old growth forest that burned recently would still be pristeen. If it wasn't for... well, anyway, you get the point.

The environmental movement is like the ACLU. If they really did what they profess to do I would love these people, but in the end they hurt the causes they pretend to champion.

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