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Friday, 05 September 2008
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The Really Inconvenient Truths
Front Page Magazine, Janet Levy, August 08, 2008
(The Really Inconvenient Truths, Iain Murray, Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2008, 323 pp.)
In The Australian (July 18), scientist David Evans – a self-described, former global warming alarmist who previously developed Australia’s carbon accounting model – admitted that evidence is shaky on how carbon affects global warming. In fact, Evans wrote, the current global warming trend actually ended in 2001. He cited ice core data from six previous global warming cycles over the last 500,000 years.
The data revealed that temperatures rose 800 years before any significant increases occurred in atmospheric carbon levels. A former recipient of political support, generous funding and professional satisfaction for his advocacy of global-warming intervention, Evans essentially blew the whistle on what he now believes is a fraud perpetrated on the public by many of the world’s governments.
Similarly, in The Really Inconvenient Truths, author Iain Murray, a Competitive Enterprise Institute environmental analyst and senior fellow, critically examines many of the broad, environmental notions now accepted as fact. He explores how these false notions have led to questionable regulations and policies to “save” the environment which have actually endangered more species, caused more human fatalities and squandered more energy.
He reveals how environmentalism, used as an anti-capitalism tool, has employed faulty data and politically engineered studies to restrict personal freedom, increase government control and spending, reduce or limit economic growth and curtail free enterprise. The liberal, environmental movement is thus masquerading as a benevolent protector of natural resources, Murray writes, with a quasi-religious moral superiority toward environmental sacred cows and view of man as a guilty interloper who disrupts nature.
The book’s subtitle, Seven Environmental Catastrophes Liberals Don’t Want You to Know About Because They Helped Cause Them, provides a framework for a detailed examination of the effects of sacred-cow environmental projects such as the ban on DDT and the promotion of ethanol. He also explores the cover-up of the polluting effect of contraceptives and abortion drugs, the failure of ill-advised forestry management policies and the bankruptcy of the endangered species act.
Ethanol
According to Murray, environmentalists tout the benefits of bio-fuels, but in reality bio-fuel production pulls land out of food crop production, increases food prices, threatens wildlife and ultimately increases greenhouse gas emissions. Bio-fuels do not offer any of the purported benefits touted by environmentalists, he says, who, at bottom, have contempt for the internal combustion engine itself.
Because of substantial resources used in its manufacture and carbon dioxide produced during operation, environmentalists have unleashed their fury against the engine’s fuel source, oil. They link American bellicosity with the quest for energy resources and accuse Republicans of obscenely lining their pockets with oil revenues. Environmentalists, joining forces with anti-war activists to reduce oil consumption, now promote the reduced, carbon-emissions solution proffered by agribusiness lobbyists: corn ethanol.
But, in his book, Murray counters that ethanol provides only two-thirds the energy content of gasoline, is expensive to produce and releases more harmful emission amounts than gasoline. Its real costs are hidden by government support, including $5 billion in subsidies, a federal excise forgiveness tax of $.51 per gallon, and an ethanol tariff protection from imports of 2.5%, plus $.54 per gallon. The government requires gasoline producers to buy four billion gallons of ethanol yearly, purchasing support that will increase to 7.5 billion gallons by 2012. Further, ethanol emissions are actually double those of gasoline when its emissions are counted and combined with emissions arising from its transportation via truck rather than pipeline systems and its intensive production requirements – planting, growing, weeding, reaping, fermentation and distribution. Further, diverting corn production from food production increases the acreage devoted to corn; squeezes out cultivation of soybeans, cotton and barley; and causes upward price pressures on other grains, dairy products, poultry and meat.
Ethanol production incentives could also prompt farmers to clear forests which could eliminate animal habitats and lessen air quality with fewer trees to absorb carbon dioxide. The rush toward bio-fuels has also had global consequences, Murray writes. The European demand for palm oil which can be mixed with diesel to reduce greenhouse gas emissions has lead to land buys in Indonesia, threatening the habitats and survival of orangutans, Asian elephants and Sumatra tigers.
The Gaia Movement
Environmentalists have not limited themselves to energy and food issues. Murray also links the quasi-religious Gaia Movement to environmentalist tendencies to view the Earth animistically, imbue it with the spiritual status of a higher being and conceptualize it as a singular-organism, self-regulating life support system. Called “The Gaia Hypothesis,” it’s an anti-human ideology that views human interference in nature in catastrophic proportions. Strict regulations are required to rein in mankind’s destructive tendencies lest the Earth strike back with natural disasters such as hurricanes, floods, pestilence or other forms of punishment.
The Gaia Movement has proposed alterations to the King James Bible. In Genesis, where God’s commandments for man to utilize and benefit from the Earth’s resources exist, a Gaia-syntonic meaning has been sought that revokes man’s dominion over the Earth and diminishes his importance and stature relative to the other inhabitants of the planet. This has achieved currency in some Christian circles.
Some Gaia adherents have called into question the moral character of Christians who disagree with them. They deny the biblical recognition of the supreme worth of human beings in relation to all of creation, believe the Earth’s human population is double that of optimal levels and allude to corrective geo-engineering measures and government regulations that would enforce their views.
Continue reading at front page magazine
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