Radical
environmentalists put people last, and destroy habitats and wildlife to end
fossil fuels
Third
Reich Forest Minister Hermann Goering was an avid hiker and ecologist who once sent
a man to a concentration camp for cutting up a frog for fish bait. In 1933 he
and other Nazi Party leaders enacted anti-vivisection laws to stop what he
called “unbearable torture and suffering in animal experiments.”
Intensely hostile to capitalism, the Nazis controlled all industries
and envisioned large-scale wind turbine projects that would generate “huge amounts
of cheap energy” and create millions of German jobs.
But as
Luftwaffe commander, Goering planned and directed the 1939 terror bombing of
Warsaw and the final obliteration of the city’s Jewish ghetto. Thousands were slaughtered, and survivors
were sent to the Treblinka concentration camp, under “the final solution” that
he helped mastermind – to send millions of Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, “mentally
deficient burdens” and other “sub-humans” to ovens and mass graves.
About the
most charitable thing one can say about Nazi ethics is that they were perversely
conflicted and schizophrenic. People clearly occupied a lower niche than
animals on their “moral and ethical” hierarchy.
Sadly, the
same observations apply to the more rabid elements of modern environmentalism.
Ironically, in the name of “keeping fossil fuels in the ground” to “save the
planet” from “dangerous manmade climate change” and other imagined calamities,
radical greens also demand actions that would ultimately destroy the very
habitats and wildlife they claim to love. Their own words underscore their attitudes.
“If
we don’t overthrow capitalism, we don’t have a chance of saving the world
ecologically.” (Earth First! activist Judy Bari) “Loggers losing their jobs
because of spotted owl legislation is no different than people being out of
work after the furnaces of Dachau shut down.” (Friends of the Earth founder
David Brower)
People
have become “a cancer … 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.” (National Park Service scientist David
Graber) “In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly
virus, to contribute something to solving overpopulation.” (Prince Philip of
England)
“Even if
animal research produced a cure for AIDS, we’d be against it.” (People for the
Ethical Treatment of Animals president Ingrid Newkirk) “Six million people died
in concentration camps, but six billion broiler chickens will die this year in
slaughterhouses.” (Newkirk again)
Banning
DDT in Sri Lanka might well unleash a malaria epidemic, but “so what? People
are the cause of all the problems. We have too many of them. We need to get rid
of some of them, and this is as good a way as any.” Besides, in the United
States, DDT substitutes “only kill farm workers, and most of them are Mexicans
and Negroes.” (Environmental Defense Fund scientist Charles Wurster)
“Giving
society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child
a machine gun.” (Paul Ehrlich, who in 1968 predicted mass starvation and a
collapse of civilization by the 1980s)
“It’s much
cheaper for everybody in Africa to have electricity where they need it,” from
little solar panels “on their huts.” (Actor Ed Begley, Jr.) People in
developing countries “simply cannot expect to have the material lifestyle of
the average American.” (Friends of the Earth president Brent Blackwelder)
These
attitudes, policies and demands prevail today. Radical greens still advance
the same irrational, intolerant views about pesticides to control insect-borne
diseases; genetically modified crops to feed more people from less acreage with
less water; and access to abundant, reliable, affordable energy required to
power modern industrialized societies in Africa, Asia and other less developed
regions.
The world’s poorest families still live unnecessarily squalid,
miserable, diseased, malnourished, short lives. Billions still don’t even have
electricity, clean water, light bulbs or a tiny refrigerator.
It’s awful enough that they were born into these places and
conditions, and must endure corrupt, kleptocratic dictators. It is intolerable
that their hopes and dreams are also stymied by unelected, unaccountable eco-imperialist
activists and bureaucrats, who prance, preen and profess their commitment to
“marginalized” people – but care about them only if they are “threatened” by
capitalism or climate change. Not surprisingly, they brazenly ignore their own callous
roles in this injustice.
The
world’s dark-skinned people remain at the bottom of the environmentalist ethical hierarchy
– with millions dying every year from preventable diseases of poverty,
perpetuated by callous environmentalists. Developed country loggers, miners,
factory workers, ranchers, pensioners and poor minorities are not much
higher up; farmers also get short shrift, unless they grow corn, soybeans or
canola for biofuels.
The battle
over fossil fuels has recently entered other dangerous territory, as
“protesters” launch campaigns reminiscent of radicals putting spikes in trees
so that sawmill blades would explode and injure workers – while comrades bombed
GMO and animal testing labs, meat packing plants and even
houses.
Their
targets now are oil and natural gas transport systems – as a prelude to more
rampant destruction – as Putin aides and cronies assist and finance other groups
that are trying to block US energy production.
A new
cadre of Earth Liberation Front anarchists has taken to closing the valves on pipelines – sabotage that could
result in pipeline ruptures, oil spills, explosions, injuries and deaths. In
one case, the “valve turners” called the Keystone pipeline operations center just
minutes before closing the valve, causing the valve wheel and ground below the
saboteurs’ feet to shake. They could have caused a disaster.
If caught,
arrested and prosecuted, these extremists invoke the “necessity defense” –
asserting that they were compelled to break the law, in order to prevent a
greater harm: manmade climate cataclysms.
The
eco-terror groups have issued a “Decisive Ecological Warfare” manifesto, urging like-minded
criminal elements to commit sabotage against pipelines, transmission lines, oil
tankers and refineries. As in the past, the militants want “more moderate”
environmental groups to support the “necessity” defense, acts of sabotage, and the
use of eco-terrorism to “disrupt and dismantle industrial civilization” and “remove
the ability of the powerful to exploit the marginalized and destroy the
planet.”
They want
more “mainstream” pressure groups to promote the notion that sabotage is
acceptable and normal where Earth’s future is at stake. Environmentalists have
already persuaded Western institutions not to support pesticide use, fossil
fuel power plant construction and other modern technologies in poor,
disease-ridden, energy-deprived countries – so maybe this lunacy [is] no longer
so farfetched.
Several states have passed “critical infrastructure
protection” bills, assessing criminal penalties on terrorists and organizations
that conspire to trespass on or damage essential infrastructure sites. The
bills also hold parties responsible for any resultant damages to property or
persons; they should also penalize foundations and other financiers of
eco-terror. All 50 states and Congress should enact similar bills.
The asserted justifications that drive perverse, conflicted
environmentalist ethics are based on ideologies, assertions and computer models
that label humans, capitalism and modern technologies as existential threats to
our planet. They have given rise to a $1.5-trillion-per-year
Climate Industrial Complex that is determined to expand its
revenues and control people’s lives, livelihoods and living standards – while
redistributing wealth mostly to those who would be in power and those who would
keep them in power, while sending just enough to the world’s poorest families
to improve their lives slightly at the margins.
Ironically, in the process, eco-activists will inflict far
more damage on environmental values than do the technologies they despise. Their
“solutions” to alleged ecological “problems” will turn billions of acres into
wind and solar farms, biofuel plantations, hydroelectric
projects, and mines for materials needed for wind turbines, solar
panels, batteries and other “clean, green, renewable” energy alternatives.
The twentieth century revealed how thin the veneer of
humanity, civilization and ethics can be, when propaganda, fear-mongering,
hatred and emotions take over. We need to muster enough science, intellectual
rigor and freedom of speech to prevent more deaths in the name of
“environmental justice.”
Paul
Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow
(www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on
energy and environmental policy.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment