Paul Driessen
Third Reich Forest Minister Hermann Goering was an avid
hiker and ecologist who once sent a man to a concentration camp for cutting up
a frog for fish bait. In 1933 he and other Nazi Party leaders enacted
anti-vivisection laws to stop what he called “unbearable torture and suffering
in animal experiments.”
Intensely hostile to capitalism, the Nazis controlled all industries and
envisioned large-scale wind turbine projects that would generate “huge amounts of
cheap energy” and create millions of German jobs.
But as Luftwaffe commander, Goering planned and directed
the 1939 terror bombing of Warsaw and the final obliteration of the city’s Jewish ghetto. Thousands were slaughtered, and survivors were
sent to the Treblinka concentration camp, under “the final solution” that he
helped mastermind – to send millions of Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, “mentally
deficient burdens” and other “sub-humans” to ovens and mass graves.
About the most charitable thing one can say about Nazi
ethics is that they were perversely conflicted and schizophrenic. People
clearly occupied a lower niche than animals on their “moral and ethical”
hierarchy.
Sadly, the same observations apply to the more rabid
elements of modern environmentalism. Ironically, in the name of “keeping fossil
fuels in the ground” to “save the planet” from “dangerous manmade climate
change” and other imagined calamities, radical greens also demand actions that
would ultimately destroy the very habitats and wildlife they claim to love. Their own words
underscore their attitudes.
“If we don’t overthrow capitalism, we don’t have a chance
of saving the world ecologically.” (Earth First! activist Judy Bari) “Loggers
losing their jobs because of spotted owl legislation is no different than
people being out of work after the furnaces of Dachau shut down.” (Friends of
the Earth founder David Brower)
People have become “a cancer … a plague upon ourselves
and upon the Earth. Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin
nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.” (National
Park Service scientist David Graber) “In the event that I am reincarnated, I
would like to return as a deadly virus, to contribute something to solving
overpopulation.” (Prince Philip of England)
“Even if animal research produced a cure for AIDS, we’d
be against it.” (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals president Ingrid
Newkirk) “Six million people died in concentration camps, but six billion
broiler chickens will die this year in slaughterhouses.” (Newkirk again)
Banning DDT in Sri Lanka might well unleash a malaria
epidemic, but “so what? People are the cause of all the problems. We have too
many of them. We need to get rid of some of them, and this is as good a way as
any.” Besides, in the United States, DDT substitutes “only kill farm workers,
and most of them are Mexicans and Negroes.” (Environmental Defense Fund
scientist Charles Wurster)
“Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the
equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.” (Paul Ehrlich, who in 1968
predicted mass starvation and a collapse of civilization by the 1980s)
“It’s much cheaper for everybody in Africa to have
electricity where they need it,” from little solar panels “on their huts.”
(Actor Ed Begley, Jr.) People in developing countries “simply cannot expect to
have the material lifestyle of the average American.” (Friends of the Earth
president Brent Blackwelder)
These attitudes, policies and demands prevail today.
Radical greens still advance the same irrational, intolerant views about
pesticides to control insect-borne diseases; genetically modified crops to feed
more people from less acreage with less water; and access to abundant,
reliable, affordable energy required to power modern industrialized societies
in Africa, Asia and other less developed regions.
The world’s poorest families still live unnecessarily
squalid, miserable, diseased, malnourished, short lives. Billions still don’t
even have electricity, clean water, light bulbs or a tiny refrigerator.
It’s awful enough that they were born into these places
and conditions, and must endure corrupt, kleptocratic dictators. It is
intolerable that their hopes and dreams are also stymied by unelected,
unaccountable eco-imperialist activists and bureaucrats, who prance, preen
and profess their commitment to “marginalized” people – but care about them
only if they are “threatened” by capitalism or climate change. Not
surprisingly, they brazenly ignore their own callous roles in this injustice.
The world’s dark-skinned people remain at the bottom of the environmentalist ethical hierarchy
– with millions dying every year from preventable diseases of poverty,
perpetuated by callous environmentalists. Developed country loggers, miners,
factory workers, ranchers, pensioners and poor minorities are not much higher up; farmers
also get short shrift, unless they grow corn, soybeans or canola for biofuels.
The battle over fossil fuels has recently entered other
dangerous territory, as “protesters” launch campaigns reminiscent of radicals
putting spikes in trees so that sawmill blades would explode and injure workers
– while comrades bombed GMO and animal testing labs, meat packing plants and even houses.
Their targets now are oil and natural gas transport
systems – as a prelude to more rampant destruction – as Putin aides and cronies assist and finance other groups that
are trying to block US energy production.
A new cadre of Earth Liberation Front anarchists has
taken to closing the valves on pipelines – sabotage that could result
in pipeline ruptures, oil spills, explosions, injuries and deaths. In one case,
the “valve turners” called the Keystone pipeline operations center just minutes
before closing the valve, causing the valve wheel and ground below the
saboteurs’ feet to shake. They could have caused a disaster.
If caught, arrested and prosecuted, these extremists
invoke the “necessity defense” – asserting that they were compelled to break
the law, in order to prevent a greater harm: manmade climate cataclysms.
The eco-terror groups have issued a “Decisive Ecological Warfare” manifesto, urging like-minded
criminal elements to commit sabotage against pipelines, transmission lines, oil
tankers and refineries. As in the past, the militants want “more moderate”
environmental groups to support the “necessity” defense, acts of sabotage, and
the use of eco-terrorism to “disrupt and dismantle industrial civilization” and
“remove the ability of the powerful to exploit the marginalized and destroy the
planet.”
They want more “mainstream” pressure groups to promote
the notion that sabotage is acceptable and normal where Earth’s future is at
stake. Environmentalists have already persuaded Western institutions not to
support pesticide use, fossil fuel power plant construction and other modern
technologies in poor, disease-ridden, energy-deprived countries – so maybe this
lunacy no longer so farfetched.
Several states have passed “critical infrastructure
protection” bills, assessing criminal penalties on terrorists and organizations
that conspire to trespass on or damage essential infrastructure sites. The
bills also hold parties responsible for any resultant damages to property or
persons; they should also penalize foundations and other financiers of
eco-terror. All 50 states and Congress should enact similar bills.
The asserted justifications that drive perverse,
conflicted environmentalist ethics are based on ideologies, assertions and
computer models that label humans, capitalism and modern technologies as
existential threats to our planet. They have given rise to a $1.5-trillion-per-year Climate Industrial Complex that is
determined to expand its revenues and control people’s lives, livelihoods and
living standards – while redistributing wealth mostly to those who would be in
power and those who would keep them in power, while sending just enough to the
world’s poorest families to improve their lives slightly at the margins.
Ironically, in the process, eco-activists will inflict
far more damage on environmental values than do the technologies they despise.
Their “solutions” to alleged ecological “problems” will turn billions of acres
into wind and solar farms, biofuel plantations, hydroelectric projects, and mines for materials needed for
wind turbines, solar panels, batteries and other “clean, green, renewable”
energy alternatives.
The twentieth century revealed how thin the veneer of
humanity, civilization and ethics can be, when propaganda, fear-mongering,
hatred and emotions take over. We need to muster enough science, intellectual
rigor and freedom of speech to prevent more deaths in the name of
“environmental justice.”
Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee
For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org)
and author of books and articles on energy and environmental policy.
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