Posted on 09/02/2008 7:15:19 AM PDT by vadum
Summary: The debate over energy and environmental policy has taken a surprising turn. With gasoline hovering around $4 a gallon, environmental groups are on the defensive. Americans want lower gas prices but environmentalists want to use high fuel prices to force dramatic changes on society. Many greens continue to oppose all new energy production, but the major environmental groups have a new strategy. They think their allies in Congress can convince the public that more oil won’t lower gas prices. ... Today’s green activists take their cues from professional pessimists like Paul Ehrlich. He’s the Stanford University professor who famously –and incorrectly— predicted in The Population Bomb (1968) that rising population levels would cause the collapse of civilization by 1990. The left’s environmental soothsayer argued in 1978 that increasing energy production would have catastrophic consequences for the planet. “Giving society cheap, abundant energy…would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun,” wrote the guru whom Al Gore has hailed as a visionary.
Ehrlich, like Gore, has long supported taxing energy to discourage its use, and his inheritors in today’s environmentalist community are optimistic that soaring oil and gasoline prices could help make their utopian vision of society a reality. “High prices have been the prod that the left has favored to persuade Americans to abandon their SUVs and minivans, use mass transit, turn the thermostat down, produce less consumer goods and services, and stop emitting those satanic greenhouse gases,” the Wall Street Journal opined in 2006.
Cheap fuel is “folly,” part of a “gusher mentality [that] deforms our society and economy,” according to Carl Pope, the longtime Sierra Club executive director. Inexpensive energy is positively un-American, Pope argues:
“It leads the United States to sabotage international efforts to combat global warming, tolerate a huge trade deficit that has destroyed millions of manufacturing jobs, and keep military bases in the Middle East, where they serve as rallying points for terrorists. And it’s why the U.S. auto industry continues to promote size and performance over safety and efficiency.”
Pope concludes Americans are “better off without cheap gas.” (Sierra Magazine, March/April 2006)
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Cheap fuel is “folly,” part of a “gusher mentality [that] deforms our society and economy,” according to Carl Pope, the longtime Sierra Club executive director. Inexpensive energy is positively un-American, Pope argues:
“It leads the United States to sabotage international efforts to combat global warming, tolerate a huge trade deficit that has destroyed millions of manufacturing jobs, and keep military bases in the Middle East, where they serve as rallying points for terrorists. And it’s why the U.S. auto industry continues to promote size and performance over safety and efficiency.”
Environmentalists have done this very thing by compelling us to buy fuel from overseas. They cause all the impacts they claim.
Consumers do not consume, tourism suffers, enjoying a ride in the country becomes an "extravagance".
People did cut down in their gas consumption....and guess what...the government says it needs more money because "fuel tax income" is down.
The solution IS more homegrown oil and gas...
Let the damned environmentalists pay our energy bills. They’re the ones who are anti-oil. In all seriousness, does anyone know how much their at-present theoretical switch to alternative energy is going to cost? How much is it going to cost to switch automobiles to natural gas, while we sit on known oil reserves?
Great but long article. If you want to debate your liberal friends or econuts, you have to know their arguments and be ready with the facts to refute them.
If the American people can be made to grasp all of this, the dems should never win another election.
His "overpopulation" hysteria in the late '60s-early '70s led to Roe v. Wade (overpopulation was used as a justification), an entire generation being convinced not to have children (thus leading to the "birth dearth" of the mid-70s); and ultimately, to the dramatic nation destroying mass immigration of the 80's and 90's, as Third World "immigrants" flooded in to take the place of the native born who never were. The economy still needed people to keep going; the Fed still prints money.
Ehrlich's simplistic Malthusian analysis was trumpeted by every newspaper in this country 40 years ago. Movies were made, demonstrations staged, politicians elected. The famous Rockefeller Commission in 1972 concluded "the nation has no need of further population".
And national suicide ensued.
The Ehrlich's are a laughable pair of misanthropes who, if put on national TV now, would immediately be the objects of ridicule, two solitary fools who would have starved to death if it weren't for tenure at Stanford.
But the effects of their stupidity, amplified through the media, are not laughable: the crippling, and perhaps end, of a great nation.
stupidity, amplified= cnn-msnbc-abc-cbs-nbc
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