Environmentalist insurance
policies
Intellectual
ammo for holiday party responses to claims that you need meteorite insurance
Paul Driessen
Many liberals went into denial, outrage and riot mode after
November 8. Now they’re having meltdown over President-Elect Donald Trump’s
cabinet nominees with climate and environmental responsibilities:
Former Texas Governor Rick Perry at Energy, Oklahoma AG
Scott Pruitt for EPA, Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions for Attorney General, ExxonMobil
CEO Rex Tillerson at State, Montana Congressman Ryan Zinke at Interior. As Department
of Agriculture secretary and multiple assistant, deputy assistant and other
senior level positions are filled, the meltdown will likely raise sea levels by
several feet.
It’s even worse than “white supremacists” and “Russian
hackers” rigging and stealing the election. Having these people at the helm
will be an “existential threat to the planet,” say meltdowners.
A typical over-the-top reaction came from an aptly named
spokesperson for radical pressure groups and five-alarm climate scientists that
feed at the trough of taxpayer and tax-exempt foundation funding “This is the
wealthiest, most corporate, most climate-denying cabinet in history,” snorted
Kiernan Suckling, director of the anti-development Center for Biological
Diversity.
After eight years of anti-fossil-fuel, anti-growth,
anti-job, anti-blue-collar policies – and the Left’s fervent wish for eight
more years under Hillary Clinton – any Trumpian shift is bound to look that way
to them.
So we’re likely to get a bellyful of bombast from
like-minded (or ill-informed) office and neighborhood partygoers, especially if
they’re too much imbued with holiday spirits. At the risk of offending those
who do not share an NRA perspective on gun control (stance, grip, sight
alignment, trigger control), here’s a little intellectual ammunition that conservatives
may find helpful during those “spirited” discussions.
The United States needs
to reduce taxes and regulations that have hobbled energy development and job
creation – threatening to put federal bureaucrats firmly in control of our
states, communities, livelihoods and living standards. However, as I noted
recently, these essential, long overdue changes will come with no reduction
in air, water or overall environmental quality standards that ensure our health
and welfare. They will address rogue agency actions that actually impair our living standards, health and
wellbeing.
Indeed, nearly all these autocratic government actions are
based on some variation of the infamous “precautionary principle.” This
infinitely malleable pseudo-guideline says chemicals and other technologies
should be restricted or banned if there is any possibility (or accusation by radical
activists) that they could be harmful, even if no cause-effect link can be
proven.
Even worse, the bogus principle looks only
at often-inflated risks from using
chemicals, energy systems or other technologies that activists or regulators dislike
– never at the risks of not using
them; never at risks that could be reduced
or eliminated by using them. Sustainability “guidelines” are
very similar.
Just as perversely, if the Powers that
Wannabe like a technology, they ignore or actively suppress any harmful
impacts. For instance, since wind turbines can supposedly replace fossil fuels,
they ignore bird and bat deaths, human health damage from infrasound, and the
fact that essential metals are mined and processed under horrendous
conditions
by men, women and children in African and Asian countries.
Those environmental, health, human rights,
and child labor violations are far away (literally not in their backyards), and
thus can be conveniently ignored.
So can the poverty, disease, malnutrition and early death
perpetrated and perpetuated by extremist groups that campaign tirelessly to shut
down industries in developed nation communities – and prevent the poorest
nations on Earth from gaining access to modern technologies that improve and
save lives.
Eco-extremists claim they can save lives by preventing higher
temperatures, rising seas, and more storms, droughts and crop failures due to “dangerous
manmade climate change” decades from now. So they block fossil fuel power
plants that provide reliable, affordable energy for modern homes, hospitals,
schools and factories that improve health and living standards – and end up killing
millions right now, year after year.
Climate change has been
real throughout history. Sometimes beneficial (moderately warm, with ample
rainfall), sometimes destructive (decades-long droughts or cold spells, glacial
epochs with mile-thick ice sheets crushing entire continents), it is driven by
solar, cosmic ray, oceanic and other powerful natural forces that humans cannot
control. Carbon dioxide may play a role, but only a minor one, and rising
atmospheric CO2 levels make crops, grasslands and forests grow faster and
better.
The “unprecedented” manmade
climate cataclysms that Al Gore and Barack Obama promised are not happening. For
example, we were supposed to get more frequent, powerful and destructive
storms; instead, a record 11 years have passed without one category 3-5 hurricane
making landfall in the USA.
To attack fracking and
natural gas use, bureaucrats claim methane is 86 times more potent than CO2 as
a greenhouse gas – but won’t admit that it is 1/235th as prevalent in Earth’s
atmosphere (0.00017%), and at least 1/600,000th as prevalent as water vapor
(1-4%), the most important GHG.
Their “social cost of
carbon” schemes assign ever-higher monetary impacts to every climate and
weather problem they can possibly attribute to using carbon-based fuels – but
totally ignore the enormous and undeniable benefits
of utilizing oil, natural gas and coal that still provide 82% of US and global energy.
They’re convinced their anti-energy diktats will “save the
planet,” by shutting down US power plants and factories, despite vastly greater
emissions from China, India and a hundred
other nations that are rapidly expanding their fossil fuel use, to lift
billions more people out of abject poverty, disease and malnutrition.
The same anti-technology
activists and bureaucrats also detest biotechnology and genetically modified
crops that require less water and can battle insect predators with a tiny
fraction of the insecticides required for conventional grains and vegetables. They
equally despise another GM marvel, Golden
Rice, which prevents Vitamin A
Deficiency that blinds and kills hundreds of thousands of children every year.
Instead of applauding the
reduced blindness, malnutrition, starvation and death these crops can bring,
precautionary and sustainability extremists obsess about imaginary risks of
eating them, allowing more millions to die unnecessarily, year after year. It’s
not their kids, after all. Why should they be concerned?
The same callous, phony
ethics prevail on the disease front. Eco-activists support bed nets – but not
insecticide spraying to kill malaria-carrying mosquitoes, and certainly not
DDT, the most powerful, longest-lasting mosquito repellant ever invented.
Sprayed once every six months on the walls of mud or cinderblock houses, DDT keeps
80% of mosquitoes from entering, irritates those that do come in, so they don’t
bite, and kills any that land.
But radical ideologues
focus on trivial, irrelevant side effects that “some researchers say could be
linked” to DDT use – and let 600,000 parents and children die excruciating
deaths every year from malaria.
Every one of these
anti-technology, “precautionary” attitudes is the environmentalist
equivalent of protecting American kids from powerful chemicals, fatigue,
nausea, hair loss, and increased risk of illness and infection – by banning
chemotherapy drugs, and just letting the little cancer patients die.
They are the equivalent of
requiring you to carry a $10,000-a-year insurance policy that covers you only
if you are killed by a meteorite – or by a raptor or tyrannosaur. At least
meteorite risks are real, if extremely remote.
Raptors and T rexes exist
only in our imaginations, special effects computers and movie theaters – much
like the manmade climate chaos and other precautionary extremism that come from
computer models and PR hype, and drive too many of our policies, laws and
regulations.
Have fun at your holiday parties.
This season promises to be even more animated than most.
Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the
Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org), and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death
and other books on the environment.
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