Where were Al Gore and Greta Thurnberg?
Along with everyone else, I looked on in horror as parts of Los Angeles burned to the ground; it was a real tragedy and one that absolutely could have been avoided.
Of course, many people saw the fire damage and their reaction was, “Those homes belong to rich celebrities who own multiple million-dollar properties, they can afford to rebuild.”
That, technically, is true. But what about the people who work as support staff for those celebrities? What about the gardeners, housekeepers, chefs, yoga instructors and on-call mechanics? Those people do not live in mansions.
Lest we also forget about the wanna-be actors working menial jobs in Los Angeles, hoping to one day be able to live in Palisades or the small business owners that saw their life’s work and savings reduced to heaps of ashes.
That said, I also noticed that the climate change crowd was noticeably quiet about the wildfires. The billions of dollars in damage and loss of life obviously was not severe enough for Greta Thunberg to hop on her sailboat and cross the pond to organize a protest.
I must have missed the Al Gore speech where he wagged his finger at the crowd and proclaimed, “I told you so!”
In my opinion, the reason the climate change crowd went mute was because the cause of the devastation was as obvious as the nose on my face: it was caused, in part, by the overzealous environmentalist movement and the ridiculous influence they have on public policy.
Forest management is a top priority for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the private logging companies that own huge swaths of land right outside our back doors.
While we all may complain about the lake levels at Clarkes Hill, one excuse never offered up is, ‘we have to protect the Steelhead trout.’ Likewise, when the Corps conducts a control burn, no one is forced to conduct a survey of how many endangered Quadrate pebblesnails may be impacted.
Controlled burns are necessary for a healthy forest ecosystem and if humans do not conduct them from time to time, Mother Nature will send along a few lightning bolts and do the job for us; however, where human-instigated prescribed burns are tightly controlled, Mother Nature is indiscriminate when it comes to burning off leaf litter, underbrush and houses that get in her way.
I have followed this overpopulation/global cooling/global warming/climate change conversation from the threat of impending ice ages to global deserts and it is clear to me that most of the end-of-the-world scenarios are less about saving the planet and more about selling books, garnering massive speaking fees, obtaining federal grants, winning massive lawsuit settlements and making superhero celebrities out of autistic high school dropouts.
Like the “rapture” prophets who claim to have nailed down the return of Christ down to the exact minute, when the date of the climate apocalypse comes and goes without the sun exploding or the seas flooding the plains, the climate change cult simply changes the date and passes the offering plate.
When I was a boy, my dad attempted to read the book, “The Population Bomb” by Paul R. Ehrlich. I say he tried, he read most of it and then threw it into the trash. Now, my dad was no scientist, he was a car mechanic by day and a country preacher on Wednesday nights and weekends, but he was astute enough to label the book and its thesis “junk science.”
It has been 50 years since that book’s publication and humanity has not bred itself to extinction yet. We do, however, destroy what could be valuable farmland through endless warfare; there are thousands upon thousands of acres of potentially arable land that remain “no-mans-land” due to shelling and chemical attacks that occurred in World War I.
Dad explained to me as a young lad that there was enough arable land on the planet to feed everyone two times over and we didn’t need to clear cut the Amazon rainforest to achieve that goal. That is the same reasoning I use whenever considering the impact humans may have on the earth and its sustainability.
Not that there haven’t been some real human-instigated climate emergencies, the first clue that humans and technological progress could have a negative impact was in the late 19th Century, when entire rivers in the industrial North caught fire and burned for months. Naturally, those same chemicals made it into the atmosphere and the result was acid raid.
When aerosol cans came along, no one thought much about the longevity of fluorocarbons until a massive hole was discovered in the ozone layer. Thankfully, those human instigated emergencies listed have been brought under control due to prompt action. According to the UN Environment Programme, the ozone layer is on track to have fully mended itself within the next four decades. All humans had to do was stop spraying the ozone killing poisons to achieve those mile-high 1980s hairstyles.
Bye bye Aquanet!
All of those things could be witnessed and measured. There was no need to trot out some bow-tie wearing ‘expert,’ who could have survived the Titanic sinking if he would have just gotten onto the wooden plank with his girlfriend Rose, to warn us that our daily commute was causing volcanoes to erupt and tectonic plates to grind against one another.
I come from a long line of outdoor conservationists. My grandfather was the “warden” for Billy Morris’ Wade Plantation and a good chunk of my youth was spent roaming the great outdoors.
Therefore, it pains me greatly that the fish caught in the lower Savannah is not fit to eat even decades after Olin and other companies were forced to stop dumping mercury and other toxins from the water. We are also now discovering that microplastics, a byproduct of the manufacturing process, are a part of the reason younger and younger people are being diagnosed with cancer.
However, just like we do not need to clear cut the Amazon so everyone can eat, there are sensible measures that can be taken to lessen humanity’s impact on the earth without taxing everyone’s “carbon footprint.”
It is not necessary to strip mine huge swaths of land to obtain the rare-earth minerals needed to make electric-vehicle batteries when the average combustion vehicle emits barely a tenth of the pollutants of a Model T Ford. We stopped manufacturing leaded gasoline decades ago and emission-controlling devices on cars have been mandatory since the 1970s.
It is time for countries such as China and India to conform to the pollution standards that America adopted long ago and time for their sycophant spokespeople like Al and Greta to retire.
I believe that comedian George Carlin had it right on the issue of climate change when he joked that one day, if humans get to the point where they can seriously have an impact on the planet’s health, the earth will get tired of us and shake us off like a bad case of fleas.
Scott Hudson is the Senior Investigative Reporter and Editorial Page Editor for The Augusta Press. Reach him at scott@theaugustapress.com
