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March 28th, 2024

Unconentional Wisdom

When Being Green Is Just Plain Yellow

Alicia Colon

By Alicia Colon

Published August 25, 2014

When Being Green Is Just Plain Yellow
There are three types of environmentalists: the good, the bad and the stupid. I've met the good and the very good. The bad can only be described as bordering on evil. As for the stupid, some of my critics would put me in that category whenever I voice my skepticism about global warming being due to mankind. I'll admit ignorance on the issue of climatology but I do know how to recognize truth versus deceit on the subject.

Speaking of the good environmentalist, I met the late great author Michael Crichton in 2005 when he was in New York to receive the Sound Science Award from the American Council on Science and Health. While his "State of Fear" is a work of fiction, it's exhaustingly researched and contains facts that belie the daily doom saying from agenda-driven eco-alarmists. Although many of Crichton's novels were made into successful feature films, e.g. "Jurassic Park" and "The Andromeda Strain," this particular novel could never be made in Hollywood. It debunks every cherished cause espoused by the hybrid car-, organic food loving, global warming-fearing celebrities of La-La Land.

At the Union League Club luncheon, Crichton said, "If you're going to be concerned about exposure to minute levels of pesticides, then you might want to start being concerned with the effects of excessive fear mongering." Note: The U.K. Observer reports that the "United Nations just issued a statement that the swine flu pandemic could kill millions and cause anarchy in the world's poorest nations unless £900m can be raised from rich countries to pay for vaccines and antiviral medicines." Remember SARS?

Eco-alarmists inspired by Rachel Carson's junk-science tome "Silent Spring" have blood on their hands. Crichton told us, "Banning DDT is one of the most disgraceful episodes in the 20th-century history of America. We knew better and we did it anyway, and we let people around the world die and didn't give a damn."

Giving a damn about people is what made the other very good environmentalist leave the organization he founded. Patrick Moore, Ph.D., co-founder of Greenpeace, served for 9 years as president of Greenpeace Canada and 7 years as a director of Greenpeace International. Of the five directors at G.I., he was the only one with a scientific background.

When I was asked to meet him in 2007, I assumed I'd be interviewing an environmental militant. Mr. Moore, however, turned out to be one of the sanest people on the issue of climate change and the environment that I've ever met. No wonder Greenpeace has removed any mention of him from its Web site.

Mr. Moore told me that many of his colleagues were not interested in cooperation and rejected consensus in favor of continued confrontation, ever-increasing extremism, and left-wing politics. "Environmentalism has become anti-globalization and anti-industry," Mr. Moore says. "Activists have abandoned science in favor of sensationalism."

Mr. Moore does not deny that the planet may be going through a warming trend, but he joins other reputable scientists who are becoming more and more skeptical about humans being the principal cause. He left Greenpeace because he saw his colleagues abandoning science and logic and adopting zero-tolerance policies that are environmentally negative.

What Mr. Moore also revealed was the mindset of the bad environmentalists. He is highly critical of Greenpeace's campaign against biotechnology in general and genetic engineering in particular, which, he says, "exposes their intellectual and moral bankruptcy."

"If adding a daffodil gene to rice in order to produce a modified strain of rice that can prevent half a million children from going blind each year, we should move carefully to develop it," Mr. Moore says.

It is becoming clearer, however, that the environmentalists are essentially anti-science, anti-technology, and anti-human. One group, Optimum Population Trust, advocates having fewer children to lessen the carbon dioxide output.

Environmentalists are halting mining projects in Romania, Madagascar, and

Chile that would provide jobs and better living conditions for impoverished people now living in substandard, unhealthy environments.

The Irish filmmaker Phelim McAleer made an excellent documentary, "Mine Your own Business," which chronicled the damage that the eco frauds do in the developing nations I just mentioned. He described their motives as wanting them to "stay as 'traditional peasants' forgetting all the while that the poor people desperately want progress and desperately want to enjoy the good, healthy and long life we in the West take for granted."

This leads us to the third type of environmentalist, but perhaps "stupid" is too strong a word. "Naïve" or "gullible" might be more apt if one tends to believe whatever Al Gore, Leonardo DiCaprio or any other Hollywood pseudo-climatologist says in those global warming ad spots. Hey, did you notice that they always show the same female polar bear in danger of extinction? Why do we never see videos where, due to their overpopulation, polar bears are running amok in Alaskan and Canadian towns? These global warming ads still air even though a leading global warming advocate, a professor for climate physics at Germany's Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences, Mojib Latif, now admits that the planet hasn't warmed in the last 10 years.

Dumb is no excuse for journalists being too cowardly to expose the eco terrorism that destroys legitimate construction projects. Are we too spineless to question who's behind the powerful environmental groups that are responsible for influencing government agencies to act against our interests? Why did the Federal Bureau of Reclamation cut off the irrigation pumping to Southern California farms to protect a tiny indigenous fish? Since July, the farmlands have dried up and unemployment in the area has reached 40 percent.

Journalists know that the United States has more oil than the entire Middle East, but we're not allowed to drill for it because of environmental activism. They've searched the news reports at www.usgs.gov for the latest oil discoveries. But do they ask who's funding these eco groups or are they too afraid to find out that it may be those who supply our current oil needs and don't want us to be independent?

So let's continue to pay twice for light bulbs made in China that contain toxic mercury because we've been told it will save the planet. Let's forget what it it will do to our landfills. Let's not question who's making money off our gullibility, and let's continue to be green until we get rid of that big yellow streak down our backs.

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