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Oct. 30, 2004 So George W. Bush is poisoning the air? Hard to sell that premise to the rational and informed when the statistics indicate improving air and water quality. But some people buy it anyway. They tend to be Sierra Club humanity-hating wackos who go ballistic if they find a foot print in the woods. They also tend to be closet Marxists who hate eeeeevilllll corporations. The environmental movement goes way back, and the gods they worship are all doomsayers. There isn't a cheerful one in the pantheon. Rachel Carson published "Silent Spring" many moons ago and still my back yard is overrun with deer eating the azaleas and crickets are chirping and the raccoons forage for the gourmet treats my wife leaves out for them, and bald eagles are spotted flying overhead frequently. Seems she was merely taking the anti-humanity tack so beloved of liberals, predicting disaster. Disaster is all they see. Back in the late 1960s, Paul Ehrlich created his famous I=PAT equation, IMPACT=POPULATION times AFFLUENCE times TECHNOLOGY. He had it exactly backward, as any fool could see. It is the developed countries of the world, those with affluence and advanced technology, where the air and water are becoming constantly cleaner. And population is also contained by affluence and technology. It is the developed countries where birth control and small families are practiced. It is the third- world countries which create pollution and where population explodes. He was also a humanity-hating doom-and-gloomer. In 1968 he declared: "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines--hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death." And in 1975, he predicted that, by the mid-1980s, "mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity," in which "accessible supplies of many key minerals will be facing depletion." One only has to note that commodity prices have in the main declined markedly, for between 1975 and 2000 the World Bank's commodity price index for minerals and metals fell by nearly 50%, and consider the law of supply and demand to discover that there is no scarcity of minerals and metals. Clinton, favoring his Indonesian jillionaire supporter, Mr. Riyadi, who had control of certain high-grade coal supplies, created a national monument in Utah, just coincidentally where a large supply of this high-grade coal had been found and where it could easily have been mined without disturbing more than a few Gila monsters. Interestingly, besides helping pay off Mr. Riyadi, this increased our dependence on foreign sources of energy and makes us more vulnerable to pressure from Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries. Yet when Bush wishes to develop our own resources, relieving us of some of this dependence, he's bad-mouthed as favoring corporations. At least they are OUR corporations, not some sinister, shadowy Indonesian. By the way, just what's so bad about corporations? They create jobs and products, cranking the engine of the economy, which makes us more affluent and improves our technology, which helps us clean up the air. Remember, Paul Ehrlich had it backwards. Anyway, environmentalism is just a convenient camouflage for Marxists who wish to trash corporations and capitalism. You had noticed that, hadn't you? ------------ About the author Brooks A. Mick: 63-yr-old physician, still practicing medicine but retired from the US Army. Write just for the fun of it, but working on novel in the vein of Tom Clancy's politico-military genre. Email: brooks15@cox.net ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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