Earth Day: How Environmentalists Hurt the Environment
"Earth Day" was first observed on April 22, 1970, signaling the birth of the modern environmental movement. According to the Earth Day Network, the original "Earth Day" brought to life by Gaylord Nelson, then a U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, caused 20 million Americans to come out across the nation and demonstrate for a sustainable, clean environment.
The so-called green movement has gathered ever increasing steam with each passing year, morphing from clean air and clean water to global warming to climate change described by one N.Y. Times reporter as "the most significant scientific and technological challenge of our time." (Eduardo Porter, "Liberal Biases, Too, May Block Promises on Climate Change," New York Times April 19, 2016).
Many advocates for drastic measures to combat climate change (i.e., global warming) assert that human caused global warming is now "settled science."
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And yet, recently published data from the Department of Energy reveals that the U.S. has reduced carbon emissions for the past fifteen years by more than 10%, more than almost the entire rest of the world combined. How did America accomplish such a feat? The answer is hydraulic fracturing or fracking, which involves releasing fossil fuel (oil and natural gas) trapped in rock formations by injecting millions of gallons of water and chemicals into the formations.
As a result of widespread usage of this controversial technology, the U.S. has become the world's No. 1 oil and natural gas producer. As a direct consequence of fracking, the price of natural gas is one-fourth what it was a decade ago, and since America has a virtually inexhaustible natural gas supplies, people keep using more and more of this environmentally clean and very inexpensive fossil fuel.
EPA studies declaring fracking can be done safely and cleanly moved U.S.A. Today to declare that "to help the environment and economy, keep on fracking" (4/19/16). U.S.A. Today also observed in the same article that fracking "has spurred a remarkable U.S. energy boom and . . . this boom has created jobs, boosted manufacturing and brought the USA closer to energy independence."
Still, environmental activists on the left continue to oppose fracking, as well as the only clean energy "technology with an established track record of generating electricity at scale while emitting virtually no greenhouse gases: nuclear power." In fact, in a "Pew poll of members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 65 percent of scientists want more nuclear power" (Eduardo Porter, NY Times 4/19/16).
As Mark Perry has reported in Investor's Business Daily, "Over the past 50 years nuclear plants — by off-setting fossil-fuel combustion — have avoided the emission of an estimated 60 billion tons of carbon dioxide" (IBD, 12/9/15). Additionally, nuclear power generation is far safer to produce than the extraction of fossil fuel. No one has died generating power in an American licensed, American designed, American built, and American run nuclear power plant in a half-century of nuclear power generation. Conversely, hundreds of people die every year in extracting fossil fuel from coal mines and in on-shore and off-shore oil drilling.
The new fracking technologies and nuclear power demonstrate how such innovative technologies can allow people to protect the environment and not hinder or cripple economic growth or existing living standards. And yet, the left-wing environmental movement vigorously opposes the use of such environmentally friendly technologies? They also refuse to acknowledge, and now are seeking to criminalize, any challenge to their mantra that human caused global warming threatens humanity's and the earth's future.
Why do they seek to stifle free speech, suppress evidence, and end all debate on these issues?
The supposedly "settled science" (an oxymoronic phrase for any true scientist) of global warming isn't settled. When temperature measurements of earth are tabulated going back to 1957, it becomes apparent that temperatures "fall from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s, then rise and fall through the next half-century" ("Warming Deception," IBD, 3/9/16). Real Science reports that "this pattern of NASA making the past cooler and the present warmer has recurred repeatedly since NASA became chartered with proving global warming. The past keeps getting colder" (IBD, 3/9/16).
Now, scientific evidence has emerged that "it's been warmer, and extreme weather has visited us before, all in a time long before men began to drive cars and operate power plants that helped move him from an almost primitive existence to a modern one" (IBD, 9/15/16).
At this point, one needs to legitimately ask oneself just exactly which group is more closed-minded and in denial of the evidence and which group is willing to let scientific examination and discovery go where the evidence leads it, the would be "climate cops" or those who question their anti-growth, elitist, green agenda that values earth itself more than its human stewards for whom when it was created (Gen. 2:8-15)?
