Another “Earth Day” has come and gone and to what end?
What's different this year is that the United States now has a President, Barack Obama, who is perpetually drunk on Al Gore's and Robert Kennedy's stash of green Kool Aid, and the concept of "carbon caps" are only the beginning of the insanity our hell-bent on socialism leader might consider.
For some, this year’s observance would be seen as the 39th anniversary, when Senator Gaylord Nelson conducted his first environmental teach-in on April 22, 1970. For those of us who can remember back to the 1960’s and earlier, we can remember what it was like driving through industrial areas like the New Jersey Turnpike approaching New York City, The Baltimore Harbor Tunnel Thruway, the expressways to the south of Chicago, and the expressways leading to Niagara Falls around Buffalo, New York and remember the stench of the refineries, the spewing chemicals from industrial smokestacks, and the soot in the air. It was sickening. Littered highways were a common sight. The sight and smell of major bodies of water in major cities, the Baltimore Harbor, the Delaware River, the Detroit River, and much of an entire Great Lake, Lake Erie were full of floating litter, dead fish, and waste. A trip through the mountains of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and West Virginia revealed unsightly strip mines with rivers and streams leading through them with discolored, fouled water.
Certainly, some of the most unsightly forms of pollution have been conquered. One can walk through downtown areas of Baltimore, Washington, and Philadelphia in most weather conditions and the air does not seem unpleasant.
Still, in the Mid-Atlantic area, we cannot ignore our greatest natural treasure, the Chesapeake Bay which has faced crisis after crisis through the decades while some problems appear solved; others continue, some worsen, and new ones develop. In the late 70’s and early 80’s, the striped bass or rock fish had all but vanished, now nice large ones can be caught in season. The bay might not have visible swill, scum, and algae to the extent once observed in the past, but the bay is not well. Twenty years ago, one could go crabbing, and catch a bountiful harvest of big delicious blue crabs in a morning’s or afternoon’s work, almost effortlessly catching enough crabs for quite a lavish crab feast. Crabs by the bushel were available all along the Chesapeake Bay communities quite affordable for working class people who’d chow down on them with some good old National Beer. Oysters were plentiful. The Crab and Oyster industries thrived along the Maryland and Virginia Chesapeake coasts.
While an afternoon boating on the Chesapeake Bay is still a magnificent experience with incredible sightlines showing Maryland as “America in Miniature” in its finest glory on a bright sunny day spring or fall a close inspection from the northern bay between the Bay Bridge and Aberdeen reveals some man made problems. Gaze to the west and see the ribbon of haze running southwest by northeast more or less paralleling Interstate 95 and know that haze doesn’t belong there. With the massive amounts of auto exhaust where the air masses of the cooler northern continental approach the subtropics of the coastal plain more or less following the fall line, signs of a polluted atmosphere cannot be ignored. The Baltimore-Washington area can experience a sinus, skin, and lung irritating smog when the right weather conditions create a nauseating smog. Summer ozone alerts are still frequent.
Much hard work remains to make man’s destruction of the environment insignificant. Every citizen needs to make some adjustments in his or her day to day living habits to help make this necessity reality. How shameful it is, for instance, living in an apartment, and having no means to practice the most basic forms of recycling short of having to drive to the landfills and recycling centers during one’s free time. Where returnable bottles were the norm when we were children, throwaway glass, plastic, and metal containers are almost all that’s available in Maryland. Pennsylvania still sells beer at local beer distributors where beer by the case is in returnable long neck bottles, the best way to enjoy beer. Up into the 1970’s, sodas were primarily sold in returnable bottles. Local gas stations often sold cases of coke in wooden containers with 10, 12, or 16 oz bottles. Almost all milk was sold in ½ gallon and quart returnable bottles. What could be tastier than grandma’s canned tomatoes, tomatoes from our vegetable garden “canned” in reusable jars? Even the most expensive organic tomatoes from gourmet grocers don’t come close.
While automobiles are far less polluting than cars built before pollution controls started being mandated in the late 60’s, rest assured if one leaves the motor running in the garage, he’ll die from carbon monoxide and other toxic emissions just about as quickly. In the 1960’s, it looked like the future of energy production belonged to nuclear plants, and since 1979, what happened to that?
While much work needs to be done, the focus of environmental improvement is way out of line. Much work needs to be done. We scratched the surface above, but sadly environmentalism has become a kind of green fascism led by some of the western world’s most rabid socialists and committed extreme leftists whose agenda seems to be more directed toward an anti free enterprise agenda and less by pragmatic air, water, solids, and land use management. Claims of impending doom as a call to action cloud the real issues and compromise the whole movement.
Looking back to claims made during the first Earth Day, it’s a miracle we’re even still alive to be having this discussion. Organizer, Dennis Hayes opined “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation. Senator Nelson spoke of the words of Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, then Secretary of the Smithsonian that within 25 years between 75 and 80 percent of all species of animals would be extinct. Popular environmentalist, Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, maintained that between 1980 and 1989, 4 billion humans including 65 million Americans would starve to death. (Gee, isn’t obesity the new threat to the environment according to a British study?) Life magazine published that by 1985, the amount of sunlight reaching the earth would be reduced by half.
How ironic it is then that the concern then was that the earth was getting COLDER. The earth’s mean temperature would be four degrees cooler by 1990 and eleven degrees by 2000 which they considered would be twice the extent required to bring about a massive ice age. Thinking back to the winters of 1976-77, 77-78, 78-79, that wouldn’t seem so far-fetched. They also predicted that oil consumption at the 1970 rate of consumption would result in complete depletion of all crude oil.
Who could forget the dire predictions of the April 28, 1975 cover of Newsweek about the impending ice age? From its stark cover to all kinds of maps, charts, and figures, the famous Peter Gwynne article created a real sense of climatological doom. In 1975, without the Internet, cable television, and the media explosion, the impending ice age, global cooling, did not rev up the kind of hysteria the global warming frenzy of the last decade has been able to gin up, but given how cold the next three winters were in the eastern United States, it sure seemed to have some plausibility.
Among the radical left, global warming is still the mad hysteria for which our economic systems and lifestyles need to be turned inside out to address. It’s noteworthy, that increasingly as the widespread doom seems to be not quite as forthcoming as were other predictions of environmental doom, the term, “climate change” has become more fashionable. Regardless, in recent years, the warming trend has subsided. Go figure!
So what does all this mean?
First, at least in the United States and Western Europe, it would be absurd to accuse almost anyone of being “anti-environment.” Surely, there is a very destructive movement of extreme fascism masquerading as environmentalism with former Vice President, Al Gore, being one of its most vocal leaders; however, as far out of bounds as many of his suggestions are along with figures like Robert Kennedy Jr., their voices are moderate compared to the most extreme.
The primary debate surrounds two different approaches. One approach is the free market approach where developing green technologies are rewarded and developing an incentive based system of improving the environment should be promoted. The other is through massive regulation, penalties, restrictions, and government implemented, managed, and enforced solutions such as the “carbon cap” nonsense proposed by the Obama administration. One outgrowth of this kind of thinking is the ridiculous concept of “carbon credits” where a company can trade its pollution control requirements in exchange for investing in offsetting pro-environmental activities elsewhere. When one examines what insane things count as carbon credits and how much of this program reduces to good old political wheeling and dealing is especially onerous.
Looking at the big picture, without going to all kinds of charts and diagrams, going statistic crazy to document what is happening to the environment and what future scenarios could involve, sound environmental policy should be designed to minimize human imposition on the environment as much as possible without imposing ridiculous consequences on individual freedom and economic sustainability. All societies should always be engaged in constant efforts to find better, less imposing methods of energy generation, land use, and all human activities which impact our planet.
Foreign policy is at the heart of sound environmental policy and the world’s major economic powers are failing miserably on this front. While international treaties like the Kyoto accords would have imposed substantial burdens on the United States, Japan, and Western Europe, other economies were left scot free.
As the United States and Europe outsources manufacturing more and more to countries with weak environmental enforcement, these manufacturing countries are causing horrible strain to the planet’s health. While the world is awash of cheap finished goods manufactured in China, Chinese power plants and industrial output contributes significantly to atmospheric sulfur causing damaging acid rain in Canada as one for instance.
China, Russia, and the Islamic world show little willingness to work constructively toward maintaining the planet’s well-being while the rest of the world comes racing to them for cheap manufactured goods and energy supplies.
Considering that industrial equipment, consumer goods, electronics products, and many more commodities are manufactured in China to be sold by major American, Japanese, and American corporations from virtually all home electronics manufacturers, major retailers, home appliance firms, and the fashion industry, should we not be using the power of our customer dollars on the world market to demand proper environmental considerations?
American, Japanese, and European manufacturers should insist that their manufacturing units in China and elsewhere adhere to the same environmental standards as they do in their home countries. Since the world manufacturing market does not control the means by which China generates electricity, our governments can impose severe tariffs specifically targeted toward the pollution its infrastructure adds to the world’s environment. These tariffs should be two-fold, one to help countries remedy the cost of damage caused by Chinese pollution and second to incentivize China to meet world standards in energy production and vehicular pollution. To the extent China fails to comply, the world economy should continue to ramp up tariffs on China while rewarding industrial economies that are responsible.
The world’s civilized nations must unite and end their hands-off policy toward dealing with equatorial nations that are destroying the world’s rainforests using political and economic pressure to end the destruction of a vital part of the world’s eco-system. Similar tactics should be employed where “scorched earth” type behavior creates other environmental catastrophes whether it involves purely environmental concerns or behavior that endangers the world’s food chain and wild life, examples being; over hunting or fishing, poaching endangered species, or engaging in farming practices which leaves the soil unsustainable.
Doing nothing or leaving it up to someone else solves nothing while environmentalist fascism cannot be tolerated either. Human creativity, the free enterprise system, and respect for God’s bountiful creation will yield a world where human progress can exist in harmony with the natural environment. Greed, politics, and blaming someone else while accepting no responsibility yields the status quo. We can do better. We must do better.
If folks think Al Gore is the answer, they’re not asking the right questions.
