Chic Enviromentalists

Greens aren’t always goodBy LORRIE GOLDSTEIN
Global warming and the Kyoto accord are the crack cocaine of trendy causes for opportunistic politicians and chic environmentalists.
Since fighting man-made global warming involves “saving the planet,” or so they tell us, it is the King Kong of all environmental crusades.
Of course, the fact we have been warned in the past by this crowd that life as we know it was about to end over everything from “the population bomb” to “global cooling,” and that we survived, is now ignored.
Too many environmentalists know only one way of talking about these issues — hysterically — which has led to disaster in the past.
In this context, the history of the pesticide DDT is instructive.
DDT was rightly banned in the developed world a generation ago, specifically because of its misuse by modern agri-business in order to increase crop yields.
But it was then wrongly denied to the third world, despite the fact that properly-used, DDT was a life-saver.
As a result, millions of innocent people died or suffered life-altering illnesses due to malaria and other insect-borne diseases.
For the chilling story of what really happened when DDT was banned, which environmentalists have always boasted about as a great victory, read James Lovelock’s latest book, The Revenge of Gaia. In it, this brilliant scientist who is also the grandfather of the modern “green” movement, condemns ignorant, urban environmentalists, whom, he says, hysterically campaigned to ban all DDT use, with catastrophic results.
Ironically, Lovelock invented the electron capture detector, which first enabled the measurement of pesticides and other man-made pollutants in the atmosphere and which led to the birth of modern environmentalism.
Lovelock’s discovery also resulted in the publication in 1962 of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, warning of the dangers of pesticide use — the holy bible of the greens.
But as Lovelock angrily recounts in his book, “the indiscriminate banning of DDT and other chlorinated insecticides was a selfish, ill-informed act driven by affluent radicals in the first world. The inhabitants of tropical countries have paid a high price in death and illness as a result ...”
Lovelock is also an expert on global warming who believes the world is facing imminent catastrophe.
Because of that, he has again broken ranks with the greens, whom he accuses of hysterically campaigning against nuclear power, which, he argues, is mankind’s last, best hope.
Unlike the burning of fossil fuels, nuclear power doesn’t emit greenhouse gases.
As for the wind, solar and tidal power so beloved by the greens, Lovelock says it’s hopelessly naïve to think they’ll be ready in time at the capacities we need.
He compares the greens to clueless passengers flying on an airplane over the Atlantic who, having discovered that it is pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, tell the pilot to turn the engines off, thinking that will solve the problem.
“We cannot turn off our energy-intensive, fossil-fuel-powered civilization without crashing,” Lovelock warns. “We need the soft landing of a powered descent.”
Such straight talk — coming from one of the world’s leading environmentalists and climate change experts — will of course be lost on the braying jackasses in our House of Commons — on all sides — who are playing silly, partisan games on this issue, urged on by naive environmentalists playing fast and loose with reality.
Inevitably, our politicians will screw up Canada’s response to global warming which should lie outside of Kyoto — a farcical, money-sucking disaster — in the strict conservation of fossil fuels here in Canada, burning them as cleanly as possible and looking at every alternative, including nuclear power.
But it will never happen.
Remember, these are the same folks who can’t fix the long and often deadly wait times in our medicare system, despite years of promising to do so.
Now they’re going to “fix” the climate? God help us.