Earth Day is a holiday for liars. I have followed the apocalyptic claims and the legislated mandates of the environmental movement since the 1970s and their single unifying factor has been the lies told to achieve various elements the Green agenda.

Since 1970, April 22 has been celebrated as Earth Day. It is generally regarded as the date of the birth of the modern environmental movement.

There are several common attributes of environmentalism. High on the list is its barely hidden contempt for the human race, the view that the world’s population has to be drastically reduced and that our consumption of everything from energy resources to agricultural and livestock production threatens the planet.

The food riots occurring around the world are the direct result of environmental mandates for biofuels, based on claims of global warming, but the Earth is cooling, not warming.

Earth Day had its antecedents in the United Nations that has long maintained an international environmental program. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has generated the current climate alarmism whose “science”, based on flawed computer models, has been totally discredited as often as not by the scientists it pretends to represent.

The incessant Green protests of everything and anything that might advance the welfare of the human race, from nuclear power to the Green Revolution that has insured sufficient food for the current and future population of the Earth, is the third element. These protests, too, are based on deliberate distortions of science and fact.

Fear mongering has always been the movement’s instrument of choice to influence public opinion and policy. A simple case in point was the reversal of an extensive campaign in the 1970s warning of a coming Ice Age to one that began in the 1980s about “global warming.”

Early Greens spread lies across a vast spectrum of issues, invariably causing incalculable harm. An example was Rachel Carson’s claims about DDT that resulted in its ban. Millions have since died for lack of the protection it affords against malaria and other insect-borne diseases. A full-scale attack on all pesticides and herbicides, critical to disease control and the world’s food supply, continues.

In 1968 Paul Ehrlich’s book, “The Population Bomb”, included the claim that “the battle to feed all of humanity is over.” He later claimed the Green Revolution, based on the modification of crops to resist drought and predation, would fail. Wrong again. The linking of population and food consumption is a consistent environmental theme.

The claim that greenhouse gas emissions must be drastically reduced is an attack on all forms of industrialization, i.e., corporations and the globalization that require the use of energy resources such as coal, natural gas, and oil. Energy is the single reason for America’s and the world’s economic growth and the enhancement of life through all manner of technologies involving transportation, communication, and agricultural advances.

By blocking access to energy such as the ban on oil extraction in ANWR or off the coasts of the United States, by lobbying against the building of coal-fired and nuclear electricity generation plants, by arguing for inefficient, highly subsidized solar and wind alternatives, Greens are creating a national energy crisis. How insane is it to ban the purchase of incandescent light bulbs?

There is no scientific justification for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Carbon dioxide represents a miniscule 0.038% of the Earth’s atmosphere and increases in CO2 always follow climate change. It does not initiate it. The Greens are lying.

The increasing food riots occurring worldwide are a direct result of the way the price of corn and soy has been artificially driven upward by environmental demands for “biofuels.” When Congress set in motion the mandate that countless bushels of corn be diverted as a food source for humans and livestock to the production of ethanol, it started a cascade of food shortages worldwide that were further exacerbated by weather related crop failures. 

Environmentalists have spread lies about all manner of food consumption. Eating beef is high on their list of grievances. Not incidentally, corn is a major feedstock for beef and other animals that are part of our daily diet. The Associated Press recently reported that “Worldwide demand for corn to feed livestock and to make biofuel is putting enormous pressure on global supply.” From prehistoric times to the present, meat has been one of mankind’s most invaluable sources of our health.

Along with the nation’s politicians, the nation’s print and broadcast media and our educational system have accepted environmental claims without skepticism or review. Since its release, children have been required to watch Al Gore’s duplicitous documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth”, and today’s textbooks are replete with environmental falsehoods. On Earth Day, the media is flooded with Green propaganda.

Earth Day would be a good day to begin to take back the Earth from those who would deceive us and harm us.

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Alan Caruba writes a weekly column posted on the Internet site of The National Anxiety Center, www.anxietycenter.com. He blogs at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com.

© Alan Caruba, April 2008