Thursday, March 17, 2005

Why Oil in ANWR us probably a good idea...

When liberal columnists in the New York Times are writing like this, you know environmentalism has a bad name: The New York Times (free sign up required):

"In the 1970's, the environmental movement was convinced that the Alaska oil pipeline would devastate the Central Arctic caribou herd. Since then, it has quintupled.

When I first began to worry about climate change, global cooling and nuclear winter seemed the main risks. As Newsweek said in 1975: 'Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the cooling trend ... but they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century.'

This record should teach environmentalists some humility. The problems are real, but so is the uncertainty. Environmentalists were right about DDT's threat to bald eagles, for example, but blocking all spraying in the third world has led to hundreds of thousands of malaria deaths.

Likewise, environmentalists were right to warn about population pressures, but they overestimated wildly. Paul Ehrlich warned in 'The Population Bomb' that 'the battle to feed humanity is over. ... Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.' On my bookshelf is an even earlier book, 'Too Many Asians,' with a photo of a mass of Indians on the cover. The book warns that the threat from relentlessly multiplying Asians is 'even more grave than that of nuclear warfare.'"

Actually the UN has been convening to figure out how to solve the problem of underpopulation.

Back in 1991 I heard some guy on the radio doing a bit he called an "Environmentalist Wacko Update". I was stunned because I had never heard anyone desecrate the holy name of environmentalism. He went on about how most of what Environmentalism claims is exaggerated or outright, politically motivated lies.

He later published a book called See I told you so.

I wonder why?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

There is an interesting alliance between conservative defense-minded types, and environmental types (some of which are conservative, but many of whom are quite liberal).

consider this

Those guys, from both ends of the spectrum, think the ANWR thing is a sideshow, and does nothing to address our real problems.

I agree.

Interesting Stuff