Greens Want Cake and to Eat it, Too

This article in the New York Times highlights several things wrong with the environmentalist movement, never denouncing it, rather embracing it:

The orators at the first Earth Day didn’t deliver speeches on global warming. That was partly because there weren’t yet good climate models predicting warming in the 21st century and partly because the orators weren’t sure civilization would survive that long anyway.

They figured that the “overpopulated” world was about to be decimated by famine, the exhaustion of fossil fuels, global shortages of vital minerals, pollution, pesticides, cancer epidemics, nuclear-reactor meltdowns, and assorted technological disasters. Who had time to worry about a distant danger from a natural substance like carbon dioxide?

Well, the expected apocalypses never occurred, and it’s the unexpected problem of greenhouse gases that concerns scientists today.

So the Greens were completely wrong about their apocalyptic visions back then, but they are spot on now? The true motivation of the Greens is to grind civilization to a halt. Whatever propaganda and lies they have to manufacture to get it done doesn't matter. Making the Earth "greener" is secondary to ridding the Earth of humans.Greens have created a religion, with the Earth as God, which requires human sacrifices. Science is their enemy; why do you think they have to manipulate data to get the results they want? Stewart Brand, who inspired Earth Day, has seen some of the errors of the details of his quest, but doesn't waver from his principles:

But resisting new technology produces its own unpleasant surprises. The “No Nukes” movement effectively led to more reliance on electricity generated by coal plants spewing carbon. The opposition to “industrial agriculture” led to the lower-yield farms that require more acreage, leaving less woodland to protect wildlife and absorb carbon.

Frankenfood, like Frankenstein, is fiction. The imagined horrors of “frankenfoods” have kept genetically engineered foods out of Europe and poor countries whose farmers want to export food to Europe. Americans, meanwhile, have been fearlessly growing and eating them for more than a decade — and the scare stories seem more unreal than ever.

Last week, the National Academy of Sciences reported that genetically engineered foods had helped consumers, farmers and the environment by lowering costs, reducing the use of pesticide and herbicide, and encouraging tillage techniques that reduce soil erosion and water pollution.

“I daresay the environmental movement has done more harm with its opposition to genetic engineering than with any other thing we’ve been wrong about,” Mr. Brand writes in “Whole Earth Discipline.” “We’ve starved people, hindered science, hurt the natural environment, and denied our own practitioners a crucial tool.”

He understands the consequences of his beliefs, yet is unwilling to alter them. The warm fuzzies he gets from his green antics let him off the hook. He wants to observe the facts of reality and then ignore them in order to pursue his destructive whims. Everything he announced as fact in the past has been refuted, so he just changes the angle of attack: from global cooling to global warming to climate change; from "no nukes" to "not enough nukes"; from mass starvation to opposing frankenfood and back again; from opposing DDT to calling for more to be done about malaria.

The author ends the article with this advice:

We are as gods and have to get good at it.

If by "gods" he means in the sense that humans have the ability to manipulate the environment to raise our quality of life, yes we are "gods". However, he means that we have to get good at it by polluting less, producing less, using nature less - which leads to lowering the quality of human life. We need to reject the environmentalist mantra. Humans exploit the Earth to survive, to thrive, to produce, to create an environment that best suits our lives. To stop exploiting the Earth would be suicide.