"You've got to keep fighting to make sure
ignorance doesn't continue to be the guiding
principle in our global climate and
environmental policy . . . oh, and to prevent
several hundred thousand more deaths due
to environmental irresponsibility."
It's A Wonderful Life...Environmentally Speaking
USA Greg Lewis, Featured Writer
May 2, 2008
I was despondent to the point where I was thinking about ending it all
because of the continuing terrible news about the environment and
global warming. As I stood there on the bridge like James Stewart's
character, George Bailey, in the classic movie "It's a Wonderful
Life," an elderly gentleman came up to me. He introduced himself as
Clarence and said he knew how I was feeling and that he'd be willing
to show me how things would have been without the environmentalist
movement.
He pulled out a copy of the day's New York Times, but it wasn't the
Times I'd read earlier that morning. It was the Times as if the
environmentalist movement hadn't happened. The headline read "Fighting
in Baghdad Continues."
"So what's new?" I asked. Then I read on. The fighting was between
Iraqi and Iranian troops. The smoldering conflict between those two
countries had been rekindled in the late 1990s, but neither had enough
military power to overwhelm the other, so they were permanently
occupied what amounted to a long, drawn-out internecine conflict.
"Where are our troops?" I asked. Clarence explained that without the
environmentalist movement, the United States had engaged in
responsibly exploiting the oil reserves in Anwar and the Bakken Field
in North Dakota and Montana, as well as tapping oil fields off of the
Florida coast. Since the United States had developed the cleanest,
least environmentally damaging drilling technologies in the world,
we'd avoided the terrible environmental destruction that would have
occurred had Russia and Venezuela done extensive exploitation of their
oil fields, since both of those countries were irresponsible at best
and criminally negligent at worst in their drilling practices.
Clarence added that six new nuclear power plants had come online in
the past decade in the United States, and the technology they used was
so advanced and so safe that we were gradually able to retire outdated
power plants and yet still increase our electricity production
capacity. Not having the environmentalists around to hold up im****tant
drilling and nuclear energy projects had made us virtually energy
independent, and so our troops were deployed strategically to make
sure that local conflicts between Muslim countries, which were the
only remaining warlike societies on the planet, were contained and
didn't spill over to neighboring countries.
His conclusion: Not having the environmentalists around to impede the
responsible progress of energy resource development had saved, by his
estimate, more than 250,000 lives over the past decade, much of it
because we were no longer dependent on Middle Eastern Oil. And with
oil at $50.00 a barrel and gasoline at $1.79 a gallon, we were
certainly saving our citizens money.
"That's amazing," I said. "What else has happened as a result of
environmentalists not being around?"
"Well," he went on, "130,000 people in the northwest United States who
work in the logging industry and who would have lost their jobs due to
the Spotted Owl legislation still have those jobs."
"But what about the Spotted Owl?" I asked, fearing the worst.
Clarence explained that it was never the logging industry that
threatened the Spotted Owl in the first place; it was another more
aggressive species of owl, the Barred Owl, that was causing the demise
of the Spotted Owl. The Spotted Owl has continued to lose population,
but that would have happened anyway, as we found out in the ten years
following passage of the original legislation. It was well-known among
responsible scientists that logging was not the real reason the
Spotted Owl population was declining, but New York Senator Chuck
Schumer had bowed to pressure from the environmentalists and squelched
the research that would have saved those 130,000 jobs and which would
have found other ways to try to preserve the Spotted Owl that would
not have caused such hard****p to so many American citizens.
"OK," I said, determined to seek vindication, "let's get to the big
one: Global Warming."
"Global warming?" he asked, clearly not understanding my reference.
"Yes, global warming. You know, Al Gore's pet project, the one he won
the Nobel Prize for?"
"Al Gore? Nobel Prize? Not sure I understand."
"Do you mean to tell me that without the environmentalists Al Gore
didn't mount his global warming initiative to stop carbon emissions
that are causing our planet to heat up uncontrollably?" I asked, by
now somewhat frustrated.
"Oh, you mean the guy that lost the 2000 presidential election to
George W. Bush," he said, finally getting it. He went on to explain
that, without the environmentalists pu****ng their global warming
agenda, responsible climate scientists had come together to examine
the verifiable data about climate fluctuations and had determined that
the primary driver of climate variation was change in sunspot
activity. They tracked the evidence of climate change for the past
century and determined that it correlated almost exactly with changes
in sunspot activity and not to increases in carbon dioxide emissions.
They're currently noting that the global temperature hasn't risen
noticeably in the past decade, but that it's actually gone down .7
degrees in just the last year, due to the fact that sunspot activity
is at a cyclical 11-year low.
Clarence went on to note that the incidence of forest fires had
dropped 70 percent over the past several decades after President
Reagan instituted responsible forest management practices modeled
after those native Americans had practiced for centuries before we
came to this country. That saved our country hundreds of billions of
dollars in property damage, not to mention the loss of human and
animal life, the damage to human health, and the loss of productivity
that the toxins and particulate matter spewed into the atmosphere by
forest fires cause.
"That would have been impossible with the environmentalists still in
the picture," he said. "For some reason they got the silly and often
disastrous notion that thinning underbrush and dead wood was
detrimental to forests and that we should let forest fires take their
course. Totally unenlightened, of course, but fortunately that's been
avoided, thanks to Reagan's sound forest management policy." And just
for good measure he added that since we've re-introduced DDT into
Africa =97 another thing that environmentalists had been trying to
prevent =97 malaria has been virtually wiped out on that continent.
"But how is this supposed to make me feel better?" I asked. "In 'It's
a Wonderful Life,' the world was much better because of George
Bailey's being there. You're telling me the world is much worse now
than it would have been without the environmental movement."
"Well, at least you've identified the enemy," he said, trying to lift
my spirits. "You can't jump off this bridge because there's still an
im****tant battle to be fought. We've got to bring sanity and reason
and science back into the debate, despite the fact that that's the
last thing Al Gore and the environmentalists want. Introducing science
into the climate change discussion is to the environmentalists like
holding up the Christian cross is to a vampire. Environmentalists
shrink from the truth; they don't have any answers when the facts are
brought out into the open. So you've got to keep fighting to make sure
ignorance doesn't continue to be the guiding principle in our global
climate and environmental policy . . . oh, and to prevent several
hundred thousand more deaths due to environmental irresponsibility."
~~~~~~~~~~
Writer Greg Lewis is a Featured Writer for The New Media Journal. He
is co-author, with Dr. Charles Gant, of the Warner Books hardcover
"End Your Addiction Now." Dr. Lewis is a frequent contributor of
political and cultural commentaries to several websites.
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