Forget Homeland Security, Now It's About "Environmental Justice"

By Alan Caruba

It is the nature of any government to seek to expand its authority. The Founding Fathers knew this and gifted Americans with a Constitution that limits authority devolving it to the states and to “the people.” Read the Tenth Amendment. It isn’t working.

The freedoms they sought to establish and preserve for future generations are being eaten away and we tend only to hear about in individual cases when, in fact, it is so widespread we accept the injustices, the inefficiencies, and the enslavement in increments.

After 9/11 it was clear that some reorganization was needed to ensure that various enforcement and other agencies could communicate and coordinate more effectively in order to wage “a war on terror.” The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was created. The sheer size of it should have been a warning.

One of its siblings was the Transportation Security Administration that currently makes taking a flight anywhere a nightmare of intrusive groping and, because one failed bomber used explosive in his shoes, everyone now must remove theirs to get on a flight.

Fifty-seven years ago, the State of New Jersey issued me my first driver’s license. For years all one needed to do was renew by mail, but after 9/11, it was decided that every license had to include a photo. A very high tech license resulted, but it also means that, if you live in New Jersey, every four years you are going to spend a minimum of two hours in your nearest motor vehicle agency standing in line and sitting around for your number to be called in order to renew.

You need bring several documents with you such as a passport, birth certificate, and Medicare card. Just one won’t do. Even though I already have a license with a photo (it was on record at the agency so there was no need for a new photo), I still had to personally prove I am who I am to receive a renewed license. In an age of computerized records of birth and residence, the whole process struck me as overkill.

After December 1, 2012, New Jersey will join eight other States to issue a driver’s license with a gold star in the upper right corner. Without it, I will not be allowed to board a domestic flight or visit a federal building. Do I feel any more secure? Not really. In fact, what I really feel is the tightening grip of the federal and state government on my freedom to drive my car, get on an airplane, or legitimately enter a building in which the work of the federal government is being conducted. This is less about security and far more about authoritarian control.

Environmental Justice

I tell you this because I doubt you are aware that the Department of Homeland Security has added a whole new layer of authority to its portfolio. You thought it was about protecting the nation against acts of terrorism. Now it is about enforcing “environmental justice.”

The DHS has added Green Police to its concerns and, if you think this has nothing whatever to do with some jihadists trying to kill a lot of people as was the case on 9/11, you would be right.

According to a DHS report entitled “Environmental Justice Strategy”, issued February 2012, it is a “commitment of the Federal Government, through its policies, programs, and activities, to avoid placing disproportionately high and adverse effects on the human health and environment of minority or low-income populations.”

This has NOTHING to do with homeland security by the wildest stretch of the imagination and yet it is, according to DHS, federal policy. It gets its authority from Executive Order 12898 and this is the way government expands and expands and expands beyond what citizens expect or request.

The results are always predictable. Ordinary people who just want to be left alone discover that the government has defined the ownership of their land and property as a criminal act.

When Chantell and Mike Sackett found themselves locked into battle with the Environmental Protection Agency that had decided their land was a wetland, they battled the EPA all the way to the Supreme Court which granted them a unanimous decision in their favor on March 12th of this year. This kind of “law enforcement” by the EPA has been common over the years, but Congress has done little to rein in its typical bullying tactics.

Now add to the EPA, the Homeland Security Department with its own Green Police empowered to protect “minority and low-income populations.” This is a deliberate effort to divide Americans from one another, inspiring racial and class warfare. It is a vast reinterpretation of its responsibilities and authority.

Welcome to the Soviet Union of America or the National Socialist States of America.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Genocidal Green Quotes

By Alan Caruba

As Earth Day 2012 occurs on Sunday,  April 22, I offer a selection of quotes from leading figures in the environmental movement that are worth reading so that you can draw your own conclusions.

In 1970, the first Earth Day generated the following quotes:

“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” - George Wald, Harvard Biologist

“We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.” - Barry Commoner, Washington University biologist

“Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.” - New York Times editorial, the day after the first Earth Day

“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” - Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation.” - Denis Hayes, chief organizer for Earth Day in 1970.

Truth meant (and means) little to environmentalists.

“What we’ve got to do in energy conservation is try to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, to have approached global warming as if it is real means energy conservation, so we will be doing the right thing anyway in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.” – Timothy Wirth, former U.S. Senator (D-CO)

“It doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true.” – Paul Watson, co-founder of Greenpeace.

Many of the environmental movement’s leaders harbored genocidal dreams as the best way to “save the Earth.”

“We have wished, we eco-freaks, for a disaster or for a social change to come and bomb us into Stone Age, where we might live like Indians in our valley, with our localism, our appropriate technology, our gardens, our homemade religion—guilt-free at last!” – Steward Brand, writing in the Earth Catalog.

“Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental.” - Dave Forman, founder of Earth First

“I suspect that eradicating smallpox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems.” - John Davis, editor of the Earth First Journal

“The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable but a good thing….This is not to say that the rise of human civilization is insignificant, but there is no way of showing that it will be much help to the world in the long run.” - An editorial in The Economist.

Al Gore

One could devote an entire column to quotes by former Vice President, Al Gore, but one of my favorites is from his 1993 book, Earth in the Balance. “It ought to be possible to establish a coordinated global program to accomplish the strategic goal of completely eliminating the internal combustion engine over, say, a twenty-five year period.”

He was talking about the engine in every car, every truck, every tractor, every motorcycle, and every airplane, among other uses. Gore won a Nobel Peace Prize, shared with the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and an Oscar for his apocalyptic documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.”

There are, of course, voices of reason who have sought to warn us against the true agenda of environmentalism.

“The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false.” --Paul Johnson, historian

And, finally, this warning from the President of the Czech Republic, Vaclac Klaus: “They hate us, the humans, they consider us selfish and sinful creatures who must be controlled by them. I used to live in a similar world—called communism—and I know that it led to the worst environmental damage the world has ever experienced.”

Sources:
1970 Earth Day Quotes:  http://www.ihatethemedia.com/earth-day-predictions-of-1970-the-reason-you-should-not-believe-earth-day-predictions-of-2009

Green Quotes:
http://pushback.com/issues/environment/ecofreak-quotes/

More Green Quotes:
http://redneckusa.wordpress.com/2012/04/16/in-their-own-words-the-truth-about-their-real-motivations/

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Eco-Communism Celebrated Annually on Earth Day

By Alan Caruba


Sen. Joe McCarthy

I came of age in the 1950s during a period when Joe McCarthy was raising hell about communists in the federal government. He was spectacularly inept, often made intemperate and inaccurate charges, but for the most part he was right. He managed to alienate his fellow Republicans and earn a slap-down from then President Eisenhower. By around 1953 his fifteen minutes of fame were up. His bombastic personality undermined the seriousness of the issue.

McCarthy was all bluster, but the publication of “The Venona Papers: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America’s Traitors” in 2001 revealed that his charges of widespread infiltration of the State Department and even the White House during the Roosevelt and Truman years were true. Venona was the U.S. code name given secret Soviet spy communications that had been recorded during and after World War II. In 1995, the National Security Agency began releasing the documents.

In 2000 Reed Irvine and Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media wrote about a conference, “Rethinking McCarthy” devoted to the myths surrounding McCarthy that were disputed by journalist M. Stanton Evans, a director of the National Journalism Center. Chief among them was that McCarthy never named any names of suspected communists in government, but Evans revealed a file of material showing that he had. The other myth was that those named had been cleared by congressional committees or were just mildly leftist. They were not.

It is not surprising that Rep. Allan West who recently said that there are some eighty communists in Congress today, members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, drew the same response that McCarthy did in his era. Rep. West characterized the response as “A lot of buzz and inaccurate reporting.” Politico.com called him a McCarthyite.

In the run-up to Earth Day on April 22nd—the birthday of Vladimir Lenin, the Soviet Union’s first dictator—Brian Sussman, author of the bestselling “Climategate”, has a new book, “Eco-Tyranny: How the Left’s Green Agenda Will Dismantle America” ($25.95, WND Books). If you read no other book about the relationship between environmentalism and communism this year, you must read this one.

Sussman has brought together all the relevant facts. “Karl Marx founded a philosophy that inspires dictators and demagogues,” writes Sussman. “Commencing with the Russian Revolution in 1917 to the present, Marx’s tyrannical ideology has been responsible for the documented deaths of more than 110 million individuals around the world.”

“Pollution,” writes Sussman, “never has been Earth’s most troubling foe—Marxism had. And Marxists have always seized upon pollution, both real and imagined, as an effective weapon in their unrelenting war on freedom.”

Americans are the victims of blunders by a succession of presidents, but it was Richard Nixon who kicked off the plundering of the nation by the environmental movement when, in 1970, he quietly signed into law the National Environmental Policy Act, followed by the Clean Air Act. “Nixon’s Clean Air Act expanded the ’67 law to autocratically allow the federal government to limit both industrial and mobile sources of air pollution. It set up the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Today, the EPA has become a rogue agency, barely controlled by Congress. “Today the EPA is eighteen thousand full-time employees strong, with an annual budget of $10 billion”, notes Sussman.

“From a legal perspective,” writes Sussman, “what Nixon did in signing the Clean Air Act was flatly unconstitutional. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution limits the power of the federal government to the basics, none of which includes regulating the atmosphere.” The EPA engages in the most bogus scientific “research” seen since the days of the Soviet Union

The locus of the environmental movement is the United Nations whose Intergovernmental Panel on Climatic Change (IPCC) has been issuing reports that were used to support the global warming hoax and, when it was exposed as a massive fraud, has since changed its message to “sustainability” whose purpose remains the establishment of a global government run out of the UN. It advances every element of the communist movement in its attack on capitalism and the foundation of the freedom enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.

We have seen the systematic dismantling of the U.S. Constitution and our economy by our elected representatives, the latest being Obamacare’s effort to takeover one sixth of the nation’s economy while twisting the Commerce Clause to impose a mandate on everyone to purchase health insurance whether they want or need it.

Sussman’s book provides a time-line for the eco-tyranny at work in the nation today. The threat to our freedom and to the position of America as the protector of freedom worldwide is real.

Think about that when you find yourself drowning in the propaganda that will surround and augment the message of Earth Day and the forthcoming UN conference, Rio+20.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

The Great "Sustainability" Lie

By Alan Caruba

Americans are paying the hangman for the rope.

It is estimated that since the origin of the global warming hoax in the late 1980s, Americans have seen $50 billion of their dollars thrown down the climate change rat hole.

In a January CNSnews commentary, Elizabeth Harrington noted that “A study by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) determined that the United States (has been) funding the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations’ authority on alleged man-made global warming, with $31.1 million since 2001, nearly half of the panel’s annual budget.”

“In a Nov. 17, 2011 report, ‘International Climate Change Assessments: Federal Agencies Should Improve Reporting and Oversight of U.S. Funding’, the GAO found that the State Department provided $19 million for administrative and other expenses, while the United States Global Change Research Program provided $12.1 million in technical support through the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSP), averaging an annual $3.1 million to the IPCC over 10 years--$31.1 million so far.”

The forthcoming UN Rio+20 IPCC international conference in June will switch course from the discredited global warming hoax in favor if its fundamental agenda, the imposition of a global government that reflects the UN’s goal of a worldwide socialist economy. The sovereignty of individual nations will be subject to the dictates of a small group of UN bureaucrats.

The theme will be “sustainability.”

There is a reason that Earth Day, April 22nd, falls on the birthday of Vladimir Lenin, the former Soviet Union’s first dictator. Everything associated with the environmental movement has communism as its basis.

In February, KPMG, a Swiss entity and “a global network of professional firms providing audit, tax and advisory services” operating in 152 countries, held a conference that attracted “more than 600 top CEOs and senior business leaders from many of the world’s major corporations.” It was held in cooperation with the United Nations Global Compact, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, and the United Nationals Environmental Programme. Among those attending were former President Bill Clinton and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

It issued a report, “Business Perspective on Sustainable Growth: Preparing for Rio+20 and offered recommendations “to scale-up investment in sustainable development, provide strong price signals on resource scarcity and environmental impacts” and “deliver new platforms for public-private collaboration at the international and national levels.”

In other words, the UN is laying the groundwork to ensure that its bogus sustainability agenda will offer enough inducements to the global business community to ensnare them in its control.

In an article by Terence Corcoran in the Financial Post, he characterized Rio+20 saying, “It’s as if the high priests of Occupy the Planet and the Green Apocalypse—having run their old socialist and environmental engines into the ground—have stumbled across a new set of rationalizations and slogans.”

As if the Obama administration hasn’t wasted billions on its green energy agenda, funding one failed renewable energy company after another, the White House Council on Environmental Quality announced in March that it will sponsor its third annual “GreenGov” Symposium September 24-26 in Washington, D.C.

“The Symposium will bring together leaders from government, the private sector, non-profits and academia to identify opportunities to create jobs, grow clean energy industries, and curb pollution by incorporating sustainable practices into the Federal Government’s operations.” If this wasn't so ludicrous, I'd laugh, but these are the lies the Obama administration wants you to believe.

And people wonder why President Obama killed the Keystone XL pipeline, imposed an illegal moratorium on oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, and his administration has issued fewer leases for the exploration and extraction of oil on federal lands than any other.

Throw in the Environmental Protection Agency’s war on the coal industry, and the Interior Department’s limits on access to federal land known to contain uranium deposits for the nuclear energy industry, and you begin to see how our own government is conspiring to leave the United States of America bereft of the energy reserves that we have in abundance!

The nation’s energy needs and its dollar are being weakened in order to eliminate it as the only real deterrent to the United Nation’s, Russia’s and China’s global ambitions.

The Earth has not warmed in fourteen years and it is not running out of energy reserves of oil, coal, and natural gas.

As the global warming hoax is shelved, the sustainability hoax is being rolled out and will be on full display June 20-22 in Rio de Janeiro conference when the usual suspects and charlatans gather to plot the continuation of their socialist revolution.

There is not one single reason why the U.S. taxpayer should be contributing to this communist cabal and conference.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Overthrowing Environmentalism

 

By Alan Caruba

In 1517 Martin Luther set off the Protestant revolution against the Catholic Church that led to the spread of the then-new movement as a response to the corruption of the Church. It took time for it to establish itself as an alternative and was greatly aided by the invention of printing and spread of literacy, but mostly because ordinary people had grown weary of the Church’s extravagance, poor governance, and resistance to change.

The selling of worthless “indulgences” as a means to wipe one’s sins clean was the final straw.

Environmentalism has become a modern religion and its “cap and trade” scheme to sell worthless permission slips for the emission of so-called “greenhouse gases”—based on United Nations Kyoto Protocol calling for a reduction of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the Earth’s atmosphere—is being rejected by many nations .

As it has become common knowledge that CO2 is vital to all life on Earth and plays no role in affecting the climate, ordinary people have concluded that global warming in particular and environmentalism in general is a giant fraud.

No one argues that nations should not attend to the basic maintenance of clean air and water. That view predates the environmental movement, but the stranglehold on nation’s economies and the ability to engage in any form of commerce has reached a breaking point. The fact is, the U.S. has made great strides over the years and there are limits to how “clean” the air and water can or even should be. The EPA wanted to regulate “dust” at one point until Congress put an end to that insanity.

The lies required to maintain environmentalism and its vast matrix of laws and regulations are being publicly rejected and a recent example is a letter sent to NASA administrator by fifty present and former astronauts, scientists, and engineers who work for NASA is a seminal moment, not unlike Martin Luther’s 95 theses nailed to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg.

The NASA employee’s letter demanded that its Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) “refrain from including unproven remarks in public releases and websites. We believe that the claims of NASA and GISS, that man-made carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on global change are not substantiated, especially when considering thousands of years of empirical data.”

It should be noted that the global warming hoax can be dated to testimony by James Hansen before Congress in 1988 and he is still the GISS administrator! His apocalyptic predictions helped launch a U.S. response currently seen in the Environmental Protection Agency power-grab, based on the false CO2 claims, that will eliminate one fifth of the coal-fired plants providing electricity to a large swath of the nation and likely end the building of new comparable facilities.

On April 9th, Rasmussen Reports, a polling organization, release the results of a poll that found that 52% of likely voters “think there’s a conflict between economic growth and environmental protection, thoough 31% disagreed." Rasmussen stated that “support for investing in fossil fuels like oil and gas is also at a new high amidst near-record gas prices and the on-going development of the Keystone XL pipeline which President Obama blocked for environmental reasons.”

The following day, April 10th, Rasmussen released results of another poll that found that 44% of likely voters “believe, generally speaking, that the EPA’s regulations and actions hurt the economy. Just 17% disagree.”

On February 21st, Steve Milloy of JunkScience.com, was published in The Washington Times in an opinion about EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson’s testimony before Congress writing that “Over the past three years, the Obama EPA has conducted a scorched earth campaign against fossil fuel producers and users, especially the coal-fired power industry, with multibillion-dollar rules that provide no meaningful environmental or public health benefits.”

The environmental revolution—a Communist agenda—is being resisted piece by piece by scientists and others who no longer will submit to its utterly false “science” and its UN-inspired Agenda 21 plans to impose control over all aspects of life on planet Earth. A June Rio conference will largely abandon the fear-mongering of global warming in favor of “sustainability”, a matrix of controls that will enslave the world’s population with the worst totalitarian precepts since the rise of Communism and Nazism in the last century.

Agenda 21 has been at work in America for decades at this point and few have any idea what it represents. It is destroying property rights in America and that’s just for starters.

On Earth Day—April 22nd—the birthday of Vladimir Lenin, the dictator who imposed Communism on Russia in 1917, the various elements of the environmental movement will flood the world with propaganda. The connection between these two events should not be ignored.

Environmentalism should be soundly rejected and the emerging movement to overthrow it should redouble its efforts.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Obama's Eco-Lies

By Alan Caruba

As the nation and the world closes in on Earth Day, April 22nd, a tsunami of Green propaganda will overwhelm us with all the usual lies about global warming—now called climate change—and calls to reduce the use of all fossil fuels in order to reduce “greenhouse gas” emissions.

This Big Lie ignores the fact that there is no relationship between carbon dioxide (CO2) and the climate. CO2 reacts to climate change. It does not drive it. The Big Lie ignores the fact that the Earth has been cooling for fourteen years.

The past three and a half years of the having Barack Obama as President have been filled with constant crisis, not the least of which was the nation’s financial crisis which he constantly reminds us he “inherited.” He has not, however, solved it with proven ways to put millions back to work and turn around a stagnant economy.

Instead he devoted his best efforts to a takeover of one-sixth of the nation’s economy, the healthcare industry. His administration has waged a steady war on access to energy reserves vital to the nation’s economy. The result of these policies are being felt at the gas pump as prices rise to historic highs while billions of barrels of oil in the U.S. remain underground.

His devotion to all the eco-lies was seen in the millions wasted on “green jobs” with his failed “stimulus” and loans to “green industries”, primarily wind and solar power. Other schemes included high-speed trains where none are needed or wanted. To this day Amtrak has never made a profit. And electric cars remain impractical and unaffordable.

His environmental commitment was perhaps best seen and heard when Obama attended a United Nations Conference of Parties in Copenhagen in March 2010. His speech to the delegates and world press contained all the lies associated with “climate change” and the failed policies he was pursuing two years ago and earlier.

“We come together here in Copenhagen because climate change poses a grave and growing danger to our people. You would not be here unless you—like me—were convinced that this danger is real. This is not fiction, this is science," said Obama.

Aside from the fact that the climate has always been in a state of change for Earth’s 4.5 billion years, the science employed to frighten people about such change does not bear any resemblance to real science which is an impartial blend of data based on replicable experiments.

Real science does not have a political agenda. The bogus science of global warming was revealed in November 2009 when the world learned that a handful of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) “scientists” had systematically distorted the scientific process, conjuring up false computer models that ignored significant elements of climate history. The revelations would be dubbed “Climategate.”

Never one to not criticize America, Obama reminded the delegates that America was “the world’s second largest emitter” of greenhouse gases even though such gases do not function as a greenhouse, trapping and holding heat. If they did, how would one explain the fact that the Earth has been in a natural cooling cycle since around 1998?

What is the mark of a developing or successful economy? It is the use of energy!

Obama promised that the U.S. would work “to phase out fossil fuel subsidies” and promised “historic investments in renewable energy” and his intention to put Americans “to work increasing efficiency in our homes and buildings; and by pursuing comprehensive legislation to transform to a clean energy economy.”

Such a transformation is ludicrous. America runs on oil, on coal, on natural gas, on hydroelectric and nuclear power. The investments in wind and, in particular, solar power, have wasted millions of taxpayer dollars. Combined, wind and solar provide less than two percent of the nation’s electrical power while coal provides nearly half. It has been the use of coal that the Obama administration’s Environmental Protection Agency has been determined to reduce or end, falsely claiming CO2 is a "pollutant."

Typically, Obama said “There is no time to waste.” In reality the Obama administration has wasted every opportunity to increase access to America’s vast energy reserves. Even when bragging about oil production, Obama never admits that it is occurring on private land. His administration has virtually shut down access to exploration and extraction on federally owned and managed land.

Environmentalism is the mask of communism, concentrating ownership of all property and productivity in the hands of the government. Even when addressing the need to ensure clean air and water, it has been used as a blunt instrument of power to limit economic development.

These are well established environmental lies and they are Obama’s environmental lies.

The Copenhagen conference came to a hasty end as the world’s leaders fled the city to avoid being trapped there by a massive blizzard. The global warming they all warned against in 2010 was not occurring and is not occurring.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

A Teachable Moment about Chemophobia

By Alan Caruba

Having written a series, “The BPA File”, in which I detailed the vast efforts made worldwide to ban bisphenol-A, a chemical in use for the last sixty years to protect food containers against spoilage and to strengthen plastic bottles against breakage, I naturally welcomed news that the Food and Drug Administration has recently concluded the claims made against it lacked “scientific information” to justify the claims that have been made against it.

In fact, it was news enough to merit an article in The Wall Street Journal.

Ask any physician about the role of chemicals in the lives of humans and you will learn that we are walking chemical machines that not only ingest the chemicals we need to live—food and liquids—but we manufacture them in our bodies to maintain our health and, at the same time, eliminate harmful chemicals on a daily basis. This is necessary because we live in a world composed of chemicals, from ordinary water to the vitamin and nutrient content of what we eat.

Ask any chemophobe—a person subject to fears about any and all chemicals—and they will begin to reel off the names of various compounds they are convinced will kill you. What they never seem to understand is that it is the dose—the amount of the chemical—that can constitute harm. In the case of the foods we eat, their processing and packaging, the dose is so small as to represent no harm whatever. Even ordinary potatoes contain arsenic!

That’s why another story caught my eye. It was from Environment Canada and said, “The government of Canada has decided that Siloxane D5 is not harmful to the environment.” This was a welcomed reversal of a 2009 assessment that questioned D5’s environmental safety. One can only hope that the U.S. government’s massive regulatory machine, in this case the EPA, gets the message that good science is essential to good decisions.

Environment Canada described D5, a material found in many consumer products, saying, “Decamethylcyclopentasiloxane (D5) is an odorless, colorless liquid found in a number of personal care products, including deodorants, antiperspirants, cosmetics, shampoos, and body lotions. It is used in the production of silicone polymers and may also be used as a dry-cleaning solvent and in industrial cleaning.”

One can only imagine how many chemophobes have decided not to wash themselves, use cosmetics or antiperspirants because they are convinced they will die if they do.

I picked up the phone to Karluss Thomas, the Executive Director of the Silicone Environmental health & Safety Council of North America (SEHSC) to inquire whether D5 was on some watch list in the U.S. and he noted it is on a list of some 80 compounds scheduled for review by the EPA.

Mr. Thomas noted that his trade association had filed an objection with Environment Canada regarding earlier concerns about D5 and was pleased that a first-even Board of Review had been convened by the Canadian Environment Minister. The Board, after a rigorous review of the data, completely cleared D5 of any claims regarding its safe use. Three top, independent toxicologists gave it a thorough review. The findings, he said, had “broader implications” for any comparable review here in the U.S.

The Canadian action was a teachable moment for everyone who reads or hears similar claims about any chemical or product. Just as the PR campaign against Alar proved to be false and just as the latest claims against lean meat—labeled pink slime by its opponents—are equally bogus, real science inevitably disproves the claims.

Reliance on sound science leads to sound policy and spares society the harm that junk science causes to the economy, consumers, and to science itself.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

The Environmental Terrorizing of Children

By Alan Caruba

In many ways, the worst aspect of environmentalism is why Greens not only feel free to terrorize children with doomsday scenarios, but feel compelled to do so.

I have been reviewing books for some fifty years and with the publication of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” in 1962 and books such as Paul Ehrlich’s “Population Bomb” have been offering scenarios intended to move people and governments to take action that, in retrospect, were based on bad “science” and absurd doomsday predictions.

If you were fooled by global warming, they are counting on you to be fooled again by "sustainability", their reworking of Marx’s communism in the form of a grandiose scheme to control all of the Earth’s bounty. In June the United Nations will hold a Rio+20 conference that will declare that governments exist to ensure "sustainable well-being and happiness." The Declaration of Independence offers the opportunity to pursue happiness. It does not guarantee it, nor does it suggest that it is government's job to provide it.

A key element of the Green’s endless indoctrination schemes has been to reach children, the most vulnerable among us and for this reason our schools have been turned into Green prisons where their version of the Earth is pumped into the minds of children here and around the world.

Their primary teaching tool is fear. Fear that the oceans will rise and wipe out entire cities. Fear that the rainforests are disappearing. Fear that entire species are being destroyed by the hand of man. Fear that the use of any kind of fuel, coal, natural gas, and oil is despoiling the planet.

I have reviewed books for some fifty years at this point and I could not put a number on the books for children that hammer home these and other terrifying themes. One crossed my desk the other day, “Our House is Round: A Kid’s Book About Why Protecting Our Earth Matters” by Yolanda Kondonassis and illustrated by Joan Brush. It has been called “the perfect children’s introduction to environmental issues” by Fred Krupp, the president of the Environmental Defense Fund.

The author is not a biologist, a geologist, a meteorologist, or any other kind of scientist. She is a Grammy-nominated classical harpist. A harpist!

“Our Earth has gotten messy. What should we do?” she asks her young reader. What does she mean by “messy”? Her answer is that “cars, trucks, and factories make pollution, a kind of dirty gas or liquid that goes out into the air and into our rivers, lakes, and oceans.” This book is written for children age five to nine!

Imagine now what it must be like to be that age and be told that the air is polluted and the water is as well. This verges on child abuse.

“Pollution goes up into the sky and forms a blanket of gas that holds heat within Earth’s atmosphere. That makes our whole Earth warmer and leads to unclean air for breathing, melting polar ice caps, rising sea levels, and extreme weather patterns. Scientists call this warming of our Earth’s temperature CLIMATE CHANGE.”

It is a LIE. The Earth has been cooling for fifteen years.

Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. It is a gas as vital to all life on Earth as oxygen is to the life of living creatures. Without it, not a single blade of grass or tree or the vegetation we call “crops” would not grow. Livestock and wildlife depend on that vegetation. If you are age five to nine, you likely are unaware of this.

This book and all the others that incorporate these lies are a form of psychological terror.

The same week I received “Our House is Round”, I also received “The Big Green Book of the Big Blue Sea” and “Earth-Friendly Buildings, Bridges, and More.” You could stack all the environmentally-themed children’s books I’ve seen and it would reach up several stories.

They are a corruption of geophysical and biological science. They have nothing to do with “saving the planet” and everything to do with distorting children’s understanding of the real world.

It does not matter that the Ms. Kondonassis thinks she is serving humanity. The great lie of communism is that it will create a collectivist utopia. In reality it has always depended on terror to maintain itself and it has failed wherever it has been tried. Environmentalism is its latest permutation.

It is the same reason that communism derides religion for its emphasis on life and morality.

It is the same reason Americans are being subjected to government imposed limitations on energy and transportation, and coerced social change, altering and secularizing our society.

I have devoted my life to freedom of the press, freedom to publish, freedom to speak out, and to urge participation in the life of the greatest nation on Earth, but some books like “Our House Is Round” are the worst kind of mental pollution.

Environmentalism, like all tyrannies, begins by indoctrinating children.

Editor's Note: In 1974 Alan Caruba was a founding member of the National Book Critics Circle.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Fakegate: The War on Science

By Alan Caruba

Generations of Americans have been raised to venerate science and those who have enhanced and extended our lives through its application. The rise of environmentalism, however, has generated a war on science, first by distorting it, and then by propagandizing the “findings”, “studies” and resulting claims based on them.

Science hoaxes have been around a long time, most famously, the “Piltdown Man”, a paleontological fraud that began in 1912, claiming to be the “missing link” between man and ape when a fake skill was discovered in a gravel pit in England. In 1869, a fake “giant petrified human body” of a ten foot tall man. Carved out of gypsum, it was quickly debunked, but the public loved the story.

In more recent times, in the 1970s, there was the claim of a discovery of a Stone Age tribe in the Philippines. This was followed by “crop circles” and, in 1999, the Archaeorapter, an archaeological fake claimed to be the link between birds and dinosaurs, debunked by 2002.

The rise of the environmental movement began in the 1970s, but really took off in the 1980s with the greatest hoax of the modern era, the claim based entirely on corrupt computer models and astonishingly stupid “science”, that the Earth was within a decade, then twenty, then fifty years, of being destroyed by the rise of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere.

So many billions were lavished on this claim, initiated by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that it became a gravy train of government and foundation funding that included international treaties like the 1997 Kyoto Accords which nations agreed to reduce CO2 emissions, even if that meant—as is the present case of a new Environmental Protection Agency rule—that would shut down coal-fired plants that produce more than half of the nation’s electricity.

One think tank, The Heartland Institute, led the effort to debunk the hoax, sponsoring six international conferences featuring scientists and others who presented papers that demonstrated that 0.038 percent of CO2 in the atmosphere had little or no “greenhouse” effect on the Earth’s climate or weather events. It will hold its seventh conference, May 21-23, in Chicago.

Along the way, it acquired a lot of enemies, not the least were the mainstream media that have thrived on the endless scare campaigns generated by environmental groups. Countless articles assured us that the seas were rising and would swamp major coastal cities, that all the polar bears were drowning, and that every natural climate event from hurricanes to tornadoes was caused by global warming.



Dr. Peter H. Gleick

One leading voice among the global warming advocates was Dr. Peter H. Gleick whose work in the field of hydroclimatology catapulted him into the top ranks of the scientific community. In 2003 he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship and in 2006 he was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. In 2011 he led a new task force on “scientific ethics and integrity” for the American Geophysical Union.

On February 16, 2012 he resigned from the task force citing “personal, private reasons” but the reasons would become very public. On February 20, 2012, Dr. Gleick admitted to having fraudulently obtained documents of a board meeting of The Heartland Institute “under someone else’s name” for the purpose of making known its donors.

Dr. Gleick had also allegedly forged a two-page “strategy memo” purporting that the Institute was engaged in a variety of efforts to fraudulently undermine the claims of global warming scientists. The Institute did not have to, nor ever did engage, in any such efforts. The truth about the global warming claims was sufficient to undermine them.

This writer recently inquired of the National Academy of Science whether they had or intended to issue a statement regarding Dr. Gleick. Its executive director of news and public information replied, “No, NAS has issued no statement regarding this.” Otherwise known in the trade as "No comment."

In November 2009, in a massive data leak that was instantly dubbed “Climategate”, the world learned that IPCC scientists responsible for its reports claiming massive climate change due to global warming had been producing some widely disputed science to support the claim. By 1998, their emails revealed their growing panic over a perfectly natural new climate cycle of cooling.

Dr. Gleick’s scheme became known as “Fakegate” after his confession appeared in The Huffington Post. Legal action is being pursued against him because of the deception involved and because of the impact it has had on Heartland’s reputation. In the wake of Fakegate, General Motors, a donor for some twenty years, announced it would no longer support Heartland.

General Motors was no doubt influenced by the vigorous defense of Dr. Gleick waged via posts about Heartland on blogs like DeSmogBlog, on ThinkProgress.com, and Greg Laden’s blog, and by publications the include the Huffington Post and Politico. The defamation of Heartland included the Pacific Institute, co-founded by Dr. Gleick in 1987, along with the National Center for Science Education, and by Greenpeace.

Despite Dr. Gleick’s apology his apologists are doing their best to spin what he did when he impersonated a member of Heartland’s board and created the alleged false "strategy" memo.

Dr. Gleick and his apologists are a classic example of the lengths to which the global warming—now called climate change—conspirators have been willing to go to maintain the hoax. Since the 1980s they have influenced governments to spend billions in public funds and subsidies to advance its corrupt science, along with subsidizing a massive building program of solar panels and wind turbines providing so little electricity it actually has endangered lives in Europe and threatens the integrity of the U.S. electrical grid.

A documentary by the same company that produced Al Gore’s insipid stew of global warming lies, “An Inconvenient Truth” is now releasing a new documentary, “Last Call at the Oasis”, in which Dr. Gleick is featured. It has already been shown at the Smithsonian Institute! It is doubtful that his participation will be edited from the film given the revelations of Fakegate.

Fakegate was just one part of a full-scale war on those scientists—called deniers and climate skeptics—who had the courage to oppose the global warming hoax and it continues to this day. Dr. Gleick apparently decided that the Heartland Institute’s reputation had to be severely damaged for its courage. He will have his day in court.

A generation of Americans and others around the world have been brainwashed and continue to be brainwashed by a cabal of elites, often with very deep pockets, who have sought to advance the hoax to enrich themselves or to impose an unconscionable level of control over the world’s population through various UN programs and treaties, entrapping whole nations in their efforts. They have infiltrated the nation’s schools, its colleges, the news media, and run rampant in Hollywood.

In the meantime, the mainstream media has swept Fakegate under the rug, says little of the vast implications of Climategate, and continues to pander to the EPA and other elements of the Obama administration despite the obvious fraud, waste and failure of its “Green” programs.

The Heartland Institute has already paid a big price for its efforts and needs donors to replace General Motors’ support. It needs your support.

And science continues to be debased by men with PhDs and lofty academic connections and financial support. It has been said that truth is the first casualty of war and the war on science continues.

Editor’s note: To forestall the likely warmist response to this commentary, Mr. Caruba is not in the employ, nor receiving any funding from The Heartland Institute.

© Alan Caruba