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Facts
No Fantasy
Earth Day and Environmental
Insanity
By
Alan Caruba
Anyone
who has been paying any attention to the environmental
movement has got to have concluded it is insane.
•
While the United States stands poised on defaulting on its
ever-growing debt—the highest in the nation’s history;
•
While wars and insurrections are waged in the Middle East,
across northern Africa, and in the Ivory Coast;
•
While Japan struggles to deal with a major earthquake and
nuclear plant meltdown;
•
While Islam wages terrorism worldwide, and
•
While European nations attempt to deal with their own financial
crisis, the environmentalists—Greens—engage in the most absurd frauds
and
nonsense since the Dark Ages.
In
news from the United Nations—a misnomer if ever there was
one—Bolivia is proposing a UN treaty that will give “Mother Earth” the
same
rights as accorded to human beings. It has just passed a domestic law
that
grants these rights to bugs, trees, and all other natural things in its
own
country.
According
to the Bolivian proposal, humans have sought to
“dominate and exploit” the Earth in ways that threaten the “well-being
and
existence of many beings” such as malaria-bearing mosquitoes, lice and
ticks
that spread disease, trees that provide timber for shelter and
countless other
uses, venomous snakes, and every other creature upon which we depend
for
food---beef, chickens, and fish, to name just three.
The
Bolivian law, if successful, will end the extraction of all
natural resources in that nation, thus effectively plunging it into
insolvency.
That is a definition of insanity. It is also a description of the
United States
of America where access to its vast reserves of coal, natural gas, and
oil is
being systematically denied by the government.
This
is occurring as the Environmental Protection Agency continues
its effort to declare carbon dioxide (CO2) a “pollutant” that must be
regulated, despite the fact that is vital to all life on Earth.
In
America, there has been a resurgence of bed bugs, formerly
controlled by DDT. The EPA recently awarded $550,000 in grants to the
University of Missouri, Texas A&M University, the Maryland
Department of
Health and Mental Hygiene, Rutgers University, and the Michigan
Department of
Community Health, for bed bug “education, outreach, and environmental
justice
departments.” So, instead of authorizing the use of a pesticide to rid
us all
of bed bugs, it wants to “educate” us to live with them. That’s insane.
The
U.S. Forest Service scientists will hire field crews “to
gather information on the conditions of forests from approximately
1,000 sites
in five western states, Alaska, California, Hawaii, Oregon, and
Washington,
“for a comprehensive study on the health of trees in urban areas.” No
mention of
the millions this will waste, but it is heralded as part of Obama’s
“America’s
Great Outdoors Initiative.”
At
the same time, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has just
announced that the department will spend $1 million in “cost-sharing
funding
for children’s programs in 18 States and Puerto Rico, furthering USDA’s
commitment to connect young people around the country with America’s
great
outdoors.” Why?
A
rational nation that’s $14 trillion in debt, borrowing 40 cents
of every dollar it spends, would not do such things, but the United
States does
while its President calls for higher taxes. And why not? The Obama
administration spent up to $200 million to promote Obamacare. While
that was
happening, 26 States joined in demanding its repeal and a U.S. federal
court
judge declared it unconstitutional…
Read
the rest of the article at Facts No
Fantasy
http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com/2011/04/earth-day-and-environmental-insanity.html
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