Next Page | Contents | Previous Page
YOUR LONG- RANGE PROSPERITY
Everything that the environmental movement has proclaimed since its coming of age in the 1960s and 1970s has turned out to be wrong. The air and water are getting cleaner, not dirtier. Nature kills more species than mankind. A mere three volcanos during the past one hundred years have spewed more pollutants into the air than all of mankind throughout history. Ultraviolet radiation reaching the earth's surface has decreased during the past 50 years. There are now nearly twice as many trees in the United States as there were in 1900. Pollution has not poisoned America, nor has it caused an ice age to occur as environmentalists predicted in the 1970s. Nor have the oceans been poisoned with mercury, lead, or any other substance; nor has a deadly overpopulation occurred. In contrast to all of the doomsday predictions asserted by environmentalists, overall pollution levels continue to decrease while the health and life span of humans continues to increase.
Environmentalism is merely the latest manipulation tool of that age-old mentality that attacks success and progress. In the late 1980s, as communism finally collapsed (communism had been the darling of anti-success, anti-achievement movements for the past one-hundred years), former socialists and communists flocked into the budding green movement. Environmentalism became the new vehicle to attack success and progress.
The anti-success, anti-progress philosophy underlying the environmental movement needs little elaboration. The constant quotes and statements made by its leaders make it abundantly clear that the environmental movement considers mankind a scar on nature, that man's progress must be stopped, even reversed, and that man's success and achievements act as a cancer upon the environment. In other words, stop progress, stop success, subordinate humans to owls, fish, plants. But this anti-success, anti-progress philosophy, just like all the previous anti-success, anti-progress philosophies throughout history, will lead straight to suffering and death.
Man is the only animal born without any natural survival tools. To survive, man must learn how to transform nature. Everything required for human survival must be acquired by using the mind to think and to devise tools for satisfying needs. To survive and prosper, man must follow a philosophy that holds his life and his welfare as the supreme value and guiding standard. Any standard that holds the welfare of plants or animals or the party ideology or any other cause above man can only lead to ruined potential, lost happiness, destruction, and eventually mass death. All the countless anti-success, anti-progress movements throughout history have demonstrated this.
No rational person today can argue about the benefits of technology. Before the industrial revolution, man's life was short, nasty, and brutish. The average life span was under 30 years. Humans spent their days performing back-breaking physical toil. They were constantly menaced by disease and painful ailments. Experiencing a happy, successful, and fulfilling life was out of the question for all but a handful of aristocrats. The average person was nothing more than a poor, ignorant, suffering serf.
But it was the industrial revolution, with its flowering of business and technology, that lifted the average man out of a miserable, suffering state and into today's world of abundant opportunity, health, and a decent standard of living. Yet, it is exactly that technological progress and development that the environmental movement attacks. In fact, leaders of the environmental movement openly advocate that mankind be forced to return to the anti-life state of the miserable pre-industrial days. Of course, to do this would mean mass death and destruction for everyone. That has always been the end result of movements that attack success and progress. Reason, compassion, common sense will not stop anti-success, anti-progress ideologues. If the result is mass unemployment, destroyed living standards, even death, "So be it!" is their response.
After all of the doomsday predictions proclaimed in the 1960s and 1970s by the environmental movement turned out to be false, the movement fell relatively dormant. Then, it was revived in the late 1980s primarily because environmentalists came up with two new doomsday scenarios: Global Warming and Ozone Depletion. But, as before, these doomsday scenarios prove false when looked at in an objective, in-context manner. This is because the environmental movement is concerned not with fact and science, but with stopping progress and development. Let's take a closer look at both the global warming assertion and the ozone depletion assertion.
Global Warming: In the late 1980s several heat waves and droughts hit America. Environmentalists jumped on this occurrence to scare the public with doomsday scenarios about global warming. Environmentalists asserted that the gasses emitted by our autos, power plants, and other activities were thickening the atmosphere, causing more solar heat to be absorbed by the atmosphere. But this is merely inner-logic speculation. No clear trend exists showing that temperature increases have occurred over the past 100 years. A few analyses of temperature data over the past century taken in major cities has shown, debatably, a fraction of a degree increase in average temperatures. But these measurements are from urban areas. Other studies done with temperatures measured on the ocean by sailing vessels show no increase in average temperatures over the past 100 years. Cities and large urban areas are naturally going to be hotter because they have less vegetation, which absorbs heat, and have more concrete, steel, and other finished surfaces which reflect heat. Everyone has experienced the difference in temperature on a hot summer day when walking onto a paved street versus a cool grassy lawn.
To demonstrate the ridiculousness of the global warming assertion, consider how in the late 1970s, when America experienced several years of record cold, environmentalists claimed that pollution in the air was reflecting sunlight back into space, causing temperatures to fall. They predicted a global ice age was about to result. Newspapers and magazines all over the world ran headlines proclaiming that earth was heading into a man-made ice age.
Now, let's look at the facts -- plant decay, volcanic seepage, and other natural processes release about 200 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year. Human activity, on the other hand, releases only an estimated 7 billion tons of carbon dioxide each year. Obviously, this is not a threat to the ecosystem. If it were, we would see undeniable proof that temperatures were rising, not inconclusive and contradictory data depending on where measurements were taken over a 100-year period.
The ultimate factor in exposing the irrationality behind the global warming doomsday scenario is the fact that the eruptions of a mere three volcanos during the past 100 years (Krakatoa in Java, Katmai in Alaska, and Hekla in Iceland) emitted more gasses into the air than the entire history of mankind combined. That's not even including the more recent eruptions of Mount St. Helens in Washington and Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines. These facts alone destroy the credibility of any global warming doomsday prediction. No permanent catastrophic changes occurred in the global atmosphere as a result of those volcanos. Yet, those volcanos released more pollution into the air than the entire history of mankind combined.
Ozone Depletion: Two university academes theorized that because CFCs, the main cooling ingredient in refrigerators, can mix with certain gasses in the atmosphere to produce chlorine gas, which does destroy ozone molecules, such chlorine gas may rise several miles into the atmosphere and destroy ozone in the ozone layer high above earth's surface. Yet, no direct evidence has ever been produced that shows the relatively minuscule amount of CFCs released at the earth's surface by human activities results in the ozone layer being destroyed.
The significance of the ozone layer is that it screens out harmful ultraviolet radiation from the sun and prevents it from reaching the earth's surface. For natural, yet currently unknown reasons, an ozone hole forms over the poles each year. This has been known by scientists for decades. When this naturally occurring ozone hole over the South Pole increased in the 1980s, environmentalists used this as a rallying cry to arbitrarily assert that the ozone layer was being eaten away by man-made CFCs. They then issued doomsday warnings that dramatic increases in skin cancer and birth defects would result. But, to link the naturally occurring ozone holes at the poles with man-made CFCs is a non sequitur.
First of all, if man-made CFCs were destroying the ozone layer, ozone holes would appear over populated areas, not at the poles where no humans live. More significant is the fact that chlorine, the by-product of CFCs that destroys ozone, is released in nature each year, especially from volcanic seepage, in quantities that far exceed human release. And finally, the ultimate factor exposing the irrationality behind the ozone doomsday scenario is the fact that the amount of ultraviolet radiation reaching the earth's surface each year has been measurably decreasing since the 1940s. That's right, ultraviolet radiation reaching the earth's surface has been decreasing since the 1940s, not increasing. Yet, it is cancer-causing ultraviolet radiation that is at the crux of the ozone doomsday scenario.
Despite these in-context facts, governments went ahead and banned CFC production after 1995. What are the implications of this? Well, CFC's main use is to cool refrigerators. Now, consider that a major cause of malnutrition in the underfed third world is food spoilage due to a lack of refrigeration. The reason why mass starvations are no longer common in the third world is because even the poorest countries now have an extensive, though far from sufficient, refrigeration chain. This refrigeration chain allows food to move from farms to urban areas and to be stored for future consumption. By banning CFCs, the price of refrigeration is going to increase dramatically, the efficiency of refrigeration is going to decrease, and refrigerators now in use will become obsolete. Industrialized nations can afford this. Poor, hand-to-mouth third-world nations cannot.
The end result of the unnecessary and irrational act of banning CFCs is going to translate into thousands of deaths in the third world as the already delicate refrigeration chain breaks down and becomes less efficient and more costly. Food spoilage is going to increase in the third world, deaths related to malnutrition and starvation are also going to increase.
Scientists and CFC manufacturers know this. They have issued warnings to environmental groups and the government. But, that didn't stop the environmentalists nor the politicians. The production of CFCs was banned anyway. Death and destruction have never stopped anti-success, anti-progress movements.
Out-of-context, false assertions of the environmental movement can and will kill. Consider the case of DDT: In 1874, German chemists developed a chemical compound called dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane, subsequently named DDT. DDT was found to be extremely effective at killing disease-carrying and crop-eating insects, while it was essentially harmless, even in concentrated doses, to humans and animals. Thus, it was considered as almost a "miracle" pesticide. DDT wiped out many deadly diseases in the third world, such as malaria, typhoid, sleeping sickness, and others. It also made famine due to plagues of crop-eating insects a thing of the past.
Unfortunately, in the late 1950s, Rachel Carson, a nature writer employed by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, jumped on environmental rumors that pesticides were supposed to be building up in livestock and humans and were leading to a mass poisoning of America. Of course, none of these unsubstantiated doomsday rumors ever proved to be true. But that didn't stop Ms. Carson. Instead of conducting objective, scientific studies to see if pesticides were indeed harming humans and animals, she promptly wrote a doomsday book called Silent Spring. In her book, she simply made up a story about a town in the heart of America. Ms. Carson described the residents of this fictional town as suffering from all kinds of maladies as a result of DDT being sprayed on the town's crops.
Upon publication of Silent Spring in 1962, it was immediately acclaimed by reviewers as a great work. Several reviewers stated that Silent Spring would be the salvation of mankind. The book was hailed in the media. It sold several million copies. Ms. Carson received numerous awards.
As a result of Silent Spring's unscientific, inner-logic attacks against pesticides, an enormous public clamor arose to ban DDT. DDT was subsequently banned in the United States and other western countries. Next, international pressure was put on third-world countries to discontinue the use of DDT as well. What were the results of this anti-pesticide movement founded on untrue assertions and an anti-technology, anti-progress ideology? Consider, as just one example, the third-world country of Ceylon (subsequently named Sri Lanka). In 1961, before the publication of Silent Spring, there were just 100 cases of malaria in Ceylon, and for the first time on record, no recorded deaths occurred from malaria in Ceylon. This was the result of mass insect eradication programs using DDT. But, after the publication of Silent Spring and the subsequent international outcry against DDT, Ceylon discontinued using DDT. By 1968, just seven years later, there were two and a half million cases of malaria in Ceylon and over 10,000 deaths. Ceylon officials attributed this directly to discontinuing the use of DDT. Ten thousand deaths in a single year occurred in just one third-world country because of the irrational, anti-technology assertions of the environmental movement.
Ms. Carson, who was proclaimed a hero and given the Albert Schweitzer award for her book, had issued a death warrant for tens of thousands of people. Ideas based on anti-technology, anti-progress platforms are deadly. Even when those ideas emanate from a small, soft-spoken woman.
Any movement that results in the deaths of thousands of people cannot be excused. That, in itself, warrants its immediate discrediting and the public's complete withdrawal of support. Whenever a movement is based on anti-success, anti-progress ideas, whenever a movement depends upon obscuring reality and deceiving people, whether that movement is called communism, fascism, fundamentalism, or environmentalism, the end result has to culminate in mass destruction and death. And don't count on the leaders of such movements to be compassionate or to act with common sense. They won't. They will simply ignore facts that contradict their ideology and will instead increasingly blame productive working people for the problems that their policies cause.
Let's now examine business and technology at a more basic, philosophic level. You see, business is the creation of values. To survive, business must produce tangible values for which others willingly pay for. Thus, by its nature, business must be a net producer of values to society. Otherwise, a business can not survive.
The production of values can sometimes have negative side effects. But those side effects, in turn, get solved by business itself if they are significant enough to pose a real problem. For, it then becomes a commercial value to society to solve such problems. Business will then rush in to provide that value.
For example, today there are almost twice as many trees growing in America as there were in 1900. This is because of the logging industry. The side effect of large-scale development in this country resulted in cutting down more and more trees. Thus, it became a significant value to the logging industry to counteract this side effect of development by planting enormous numbers of trees.
Consider how a century ago, when coal was the prime heating element, major cities became so polluted that the sun sometimes could not be seen for days. Thus, it became a major value to eliminate such pollution. As a result, smokeless coal was developed and eventually coal fireplaces were replaced with much cleaner gas furnaces and electric heaters. Today, major American cities are far less polluted than they were a century ago.
Consider the threatened extinction of elephants and other exotic animals in Africa. In every African country where wild elephants and other exotic animals live, their numbers continue to dwindle each year. The exception is in South Africa. There, the number of wild elephants and other exotic animals increases each year. This is because game reserves are run by private, for-profit companies. It has become a value for business to preserve and breed rare animals on those game reserves. And that is exactly what is being done.
The bottom line is that business is a gigantic net producer of values. Whenever and wherever pollution or other side effects truly become a problem, business will move in and solve it. This has been proven time and again throughout history.
This brings us to the following point: There is no need for environmental policy, environmental protection agencies, or environmental legislation. Whatever real pollution problems do exist, they can factually, objectively be resolved in a court of law. If somebody is emitting pollution that is harming another person, then the victim can go to court and, using objective law, have that polluter halt his activities and compensate victims for any provable damages inflicted upon them. Any other means of forcibly stopping pollution is immoral by its very nature. An objective court system is the only moral system for determining if one person is harming another and then enforcing an end to that harm plus reimbursement for damages.
In an objective court, only hard, provable evidence will do. Circumstantial evidence, arbitrary assertions, future predictability models will not do. For, in science, if a phenomenon really exists, an abundance of undeniable, hard evidence will also exist. If such evidence does not exist, an assertion is just so much home-spun inner logic.
This takes us to a major deception employed by environmentalists: asserting the arbitrary. The reason why environmentalism gets away with so many irrational actions is because it employs an age-old trick of asserting the arbitrary. For example, the environmental movement makes statements such as "continuing to emit gasses into the atmosphere could have drastic consequences 50 or 100 years from now." Or, "releasing CFCs into the atmosphere may have a drastic effect on the ozone layer in the next generation." Or, "allowing a plant or an owl to become extinct could drastically effect the ecosystem and even the food chain somewhere down the line." But all of that is merely asserting the arbitrary. Asserting the arbitrary cannot be accepted by any rational being, for then any fantasy goes. A person could just as legitimately assert that a hundred years from now we may discover that we should have stepped up the emission of gasses into the atmosphere several-fold because it would have prevented the next ice age or would have improved plant life by thickening the atmosphere. Likewise, one could assert that mankind should step up the extermination of a certain owl, or a certain plant, because we may discover that a heretofore undetected enzyme emitted by that owl or that plant into the food chain was responsible for triggering cancer in humans.
Asserting the arbitrary has no basis in reality. And, like any action that does not concur with reality, whether it is implementing communism to "help the poor" or draining blood to "help the sick", great net losses will inevitably result. Asserting the arbitrary must never be sanctioned by a rational person.
The environmental movement gets much of its support by proclaiming how delicately balanced the environment is and that mankind had better not upset nature's balance. Yet, Nature herself provides the ultimate refutation of the environmental movement. A quick examination of earth's history reveals that there is no such thing as a natural state of the environment. The natural environment is constantly changing and evolving. Originally earth had an atmosphere full of hot, toxic gasses and was completely uninhabitable by life forms. Since that time, dramatic changes in all parts of the environment have occurred. As a result, 90 percent of all life forms ever to evolve on earth have become extinct by nature's own doing. So much for the frantic cries that every plant and animal species must be preserved at all costs. Nature herself is the ultimate exterminator of plant and animal species.
In fact, what becomes clear over time is that eventually every species becomes extinct. At some point, a species simply becomes unable to cope with new changes in the environment -- that species then becomes an unadaptable "dinosaur." Only a species that can master and control nature herself can survive indefinitely -- i.e., only mankind. Nature herself will eventually wipe out all other species.
Environmentalists assert that it is heresy for mankind to attempt to alter or control nature. Catastrophe will result, they exclaim. But that is simply not rational, for that is exactly what man must do on a massive scale if he expects to survive. Instead of coiling away from any activity that may affect the climate, mankind must charge ahead full steam and learn how to master and control the global climate now, while he still has the chance. Why? Because over the past several hundred thousand years earth has been going through a cycle of vast ice ages interspersed with warmer periods. Scientists believe that earth is merely in between ice ages right now and that in another ten thousand years or so earth will probably be heading back into a major ice age.
Talk about climatic catastrophe! Countless species will become extinct then. And ten thousand years on the time line is not much time at all. Our direct ancestors were alive during the last ice age, and our future descendants will be alive during the next. They are not going to like the idea of an ice age setting in. It is doubtful they are going to stand idly by and watch nature do its thing.
Environmentalists virulently preach against man-made changes in the forests, in the oceans, in the arctic, and so on, as if the conditions on earth today are some kind of intrinsic Garden of Eden that have always existed and always will exist in their present form. In reality, almost every imaginable form of environment has existed during earth's five-billion-year history. And, at some point during earth's next five billion years of existence, the sun will begin to burn out. Earth's atmosphere will then burn as the sun swells, and then literally freeze and fall to the ground once the sun has extinguished itself. So much for the sanctity of nature and its atmosphere.
Earth has already existed for five billion years. Life has existed in primitive forms for three-fourth's of that time. Thus, there will most likely be life existing on earth when the sun does begin to burn out during the next five billion years. Any intelligent beings alive then are not going to like what nature has in store for them. If they are to survive, they will have to declare war on nature. In the meantime, mankind has got a lot of technology to devise and a lot of development to do if we hope to survive indefinitely.
Looking towards the more immediate future, consider the rest of the planets in our solar system. They all have barren, inhospitable, lifeless environments. Instead of fearing change, mankind has to exert integrated effort and forward movement to venture out beyond earth's comfortable boundaries. In complete contradiction to the whining, huffy, anti-technology, anti-progress environmentalists, mankind needs to learn how to control nature in order to bring the gift of life, with its abundance of warmth and fullness, to the now barren, inhospitable planets.
If we reject the environmentalists' age-old anti-progress, anti-success mentality and instead push forward full steam -- learning to master and control nature -- then mankind can bring the beautiful gift of life beyond earth to the surrounding planets. That is the pro-development, pro-technology, pro-human direction mankind needs to strive for -- not the direction of going backwards and living in small tribes in little huts as many leaders of the environmental movement openly state mankind should do. It is now time for the children of earth to grow into adults. We must embrace the challenges of the future if we are to survive. If we do, then a glorious universe of exciting achievement and growth awaits us.
Today's environmentalists are like the fundamentalists of past centuries who spurned man-made machines declaring that they were the work of Satan and would corrupt mankind. Today's environmentalists are like the religious fanatics who protested when doctors first started doing internal surgery, saying it was toying in God's domain and would bring the wrath of God upon us. Today's environmentalists are like the anti-change, anti-progress lobby that protested the opening up of railroads in America proclaiming that such freedom of travel would lead to a life of decadence. Today's environmental movement is the same anti-progress, anti-technology cynicism that has always declared man's success will result in some unforeseen calamity.
In reality, the opposite is true. A constant charging forward of technology and progress is what brings opportunity, health, increased living standards, and happiness to mankind. It is also what solves real problems that do exist. As demonstrated repeatedly throughout history, industry itself evolves towards ever-cleaner, less-polluting processes. Pollution represents waste and therefore inefficiency and lost money. Industry evolved from burning dirty wood and coal to burning much cleaner gas and electricity and then to nuclear power which emits no pollution at all. Only the interference of anti-technology, anti-progress environmentalists prevents this natural advancement to ever-cleaner, less-polluting industrial processes. Witness the environmentalists' complete hostility toward nuclear energy. This is because a clean environment is not what its leaders really want. That is only a mask. Environmentalists are anti-technology, anti-progress.
Observe how the industrialized, first-world countries are much less polluted and cleaner than the unindustrialized, third-world countries. Development, prosperity, technology inarguably lead to an increasingly cleaner, safer environment as well as a stable, even declining population.
Whenever a movement is driven by envy against success, against technology, against progress, its leaders will keep going until they destroy everything -- just like communism destroyed the lives of everyone under its domain, just like fundamentalists are willing to throttle the lives of everyone under their domain. That is why an anti-progress, anti-success movement such as environmentalism must be opposed with all one's might. But, just how does the man in the street, who is not a scientist and does not have all kinds of facts and figures at his disposal, handle the constant onslaught levied against technology and progress through out-of-context facts and figures? How is one suppose to know what is true or not. And what about the next anti-success, anti-progress movement that will evolve as soon as environmentalism begins to wane of its own bankruptcy in the distant future? That anti-progress, anti-success movement, too, whatever form it takes, whatever new cause it uses as its mask, will undoubtedly have all kinds of facts and figures to justify its case. How can the layman defend against that as well? How can one know when not to sanction movements that will, by their very nature, result in death and destruction to the human race and to each individual's personal opportunity and happiness? How does one know when sanctioning a movement will result in destroyed standards of living by blocking progress and technology?
The bottom line is to forget all the so-called facts, figures, arguments, and case examples. Those, as any lawyer or journalist can testify, can be used out of context to support any untrue assertion or claim. Instead, look at who is producing values -- businesses, developers, farmers, industry, and so on. Then, look at who is attacking the value producers -- whether those attackers are socialists, environmentalists, animal rights groups, egalitarians, or whatever movement they represent. The deciding factor is to identify who is producing values for society that others willing pay for versus who is attacking those values and their producers.
Whatever facts, figures or stories some value-attacking activist gives you, you can simply state that you do not accept the validity of those facts or figures or stories. You can rightfully assert that those facts and figures were compiled with political ends in mind and therefore you do not accept their validity and that you believe they are being used out of context. Then, simply identify who is producing objective values that others willingly pay for versus who is attacking those values. Then, announce that you are going to side with the value producers, not the value attackers.
The Neo-Tech Discovery, Frank R. Wallace, Neo-Tech Publishing Company, 1992. The Disaster Lobby, Grayson & Shepards, Fallett Publishing, 1973. Rational Readings on Environmental Concerns, Jay H. Lehr, Van Nostrand Reinhold Publishing, 1992. Eco-Scam: The False Prophets of Ecological Apocalypse, Ronald Baily, St. Martins Press, 1993. Everything You Know About the Environment Is Wrong, Gregg Easterbrock, The New Republic, April 30, 1990, P.14. Trashing the Planet, Roy & Guzzo, Regnery Gateway Publishing, 1990. The Heated Debate, Robert C. Malling, Jr., Pacific Research Institute, 1992. Environmentalism: Sacrificing Mankind to Nature, Peter Schwartz, Second Renaissance Books, 1991 (Audio). Protecting Mother Earth From the Environmentalists, Brett Peters, The Neo-Tech Report, July, 1991, P. 26. The Great Ozone-Hole Hoax, Brett Peters, The Neo-Tech Report, Volume 1, Number 4, 1990, P.l. Climate Convention Follies, James M. Sheehan, Competitive Enterprise Institute, May 1992, P. 1.
Next Page | Contents | Previous Page
Disclaimer - Copyright - Contact
Online: buildfreedom.org - terrorcrat.com - mind-trek.com