Earth is doing great, thank you Another Spring, another Earth Day to suck the joy out. When the trees blossom, the spring rains awaken the Truckee, and songbirds replace the honking geese, the doom and gloom greens appear wearing sack cloth and ashes, and bewailing the guilt and greed of mankind that will one day turn every by Brendan Trainor Spring silent. Only that day never comes. This ritual has gone on for decades. The Earth Day Cassandras still inspire devotion even when their prophesies never materialize. Troy still stands. The day after the first Earth Day, Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich predicted that 45 million Americans would perish between 1980 and 1989 in a “Great Die Off” caused by famine and pollution. A few months before that, Joe Namath predicted the Jets would win the Super Bowl. People still remember Broadway Joe. Paul Ehrlich, not so much. There have been no mass dieoffs, no deadly smog disasters, no worldwide famines. Farming has become so efficient and high
yield that fewer farmers produce he predicted that government would more food on fewer acres than ever chemically sterilize entire human before. populations, except for a few who Peak oil? Forget about it! There obtain a government license to is so much oil the markets are breed. Last October, even China flooded, and oil companies are going threw in the towel on overpopulation bankrupt. Ehrlich was lured into hysteria when it ended its “One a $10,000 bet by economist Julian child” policy. Simon that commodity prices would The green doom doctrine fails trend down, not up. To his credit, he because human beings are not paid up. just a part of nature, but actually Why are greens always wrong can transcend it. Our evolutionary when they predict the end of industrump card is our intelligence. trial civilization? We developed our brains while One could start by saying they other animals developed brawn. are followers of the Reverend Our greatest resource is not oil, Thomas Malthus. Malthus saw that steel or wheat, but our ability to 0516 1/5 page 810 world population was increasing understand nature and its laws, and faster than production andReno, was, well, NV manipulate nature, within newly unsustainable. What Malthus failed discovered natural limits, to serve Reno News & Review to see was what a French economist our needs and desires. Slash and Thursday, May 5, 2016gave way to the of his time saw clearly: Jeanburn agriculture Baptiste Say predicted that instead of plow then to selective breeding and limits to growth, production creates now, yes, to genetically modified demand, which in turn stimulates foods. Why should genetic modifiproduction. The cycle is positive, cation at the microscopic level of not negative. David Brower, the gene splicing be any more immoral first president of the Sierra Club, than simply grafting a new cutting revealed his Malthusian bias when to an old root? Environmental
romanticism sees every innovation as a new Frankenstein. The green mobs come with pitchforks and torches only to discover there is no creepy castle, but instead a shining new Emerald City built by human reason. Green alarmists blame property and greed for pollution, but the worst polluters are the states and their militaries. It is the lack of private property that results in pollution. Capitalist production tends toward efficiency, which requires using fewer resources and producing lighter, stronger, safer products which pollute less over time. Third World countries pollute heavily as they industrialize, but when they reach a basic level of production, they become more efficient and pollute less. Green alarmism, like all movements demanding government interventions, will always wind up hurting precisely what it claims to want to help. Ω
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