I looked up Lowell Ponte, author of The Cooling, because I heard that years after writing that book he came to his senses and denounced all forms of environmental hysteria. Apparently he had this to say:
"But the Leftist press continues to quote bug and flower scientists about global warming - including doomsayers who three decades ago were predicting a fast-approaching, planet-freezing ice age. (I should know, being author of the 1976 Prentice-Hall bestselling climate book The Cooling.)
As you probably recognized, all such Leftist doomsaying - hothouse or ice age, wet or dry, population explosion or drastic decline - calls for the same remedy. We must have bigger government, more political regulation and control, higher taxes, and permit less individual and private sector liberty if we are to survive whatever is this year's fashionable danger."
Anyway, I stumbled across an objectivist wikipedia! The websites opening paragraph on environmentalism just hit the nail on head so hard I couldn't believe it:
"The basic principle driving the environmentalist movement is the belief that "nature" has inherent moral value, and therefore the influence of man, and especially that of industrial civilization, is evil. Politically, this means the advocacy of various limits on industrial civilization, since all productive human activity has some kind of byproduct. While few (but alarmingly many) advocates of environmentalism recognize it as such, the ultimate goal of the environmentalist movement is the total destruction of industrial civilization, and the vast majority of the human race whose existence is made possible by it."
Reminds me of a shirt I saw the other day that said something like, "the Earth does not belong to mankind, mankind belongs to the Earth." How can any serious person actually believe that? The Earth is an inanimate object. No person or thing has EVER belonged to an inanimate object and never will. Value comes from us. We decide what is valuable and what is not. Without life, the Earth is literally worthless. I love nature too, but only because of the value that it brings to me, not because of some mystical, moral value that it contains. Anyway the objectist wiki thread on environmentalism has a lot of good info.
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In "The Conservationist", The DEC's magazine Eliot Spitzer says, "Sustainable Development and environmental protection go hand-in-hand.That's why I recently set aside $2 million...to promote smart growth planning in NYS. Smart growth is sensible, planned growth...blah, blah, blah."
The Commissioner of the DEC says, "The governor recently signed a groundbreaking new law that requires automobile manufacturers to affix a "global warming index" sticker to new cars and trucks..." It goes on.
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