“So I think a true environmental concern – not a ‘ism’ because you have a problem right away with that, cause ‘environmentalism’ indicates that your whole world view and your values and your purposes ought to be organized around the centrality and superior value of the natural world. I believe the natural world has an incredible value but you don’t start off by removing humans from that.
“I think a real environmental concern would take first and foremost the prosperity, well-being and security of human beings, and then from there you want to do what you can do to minimize the destruction of nature where you can do that, and to protect and preserve things where it doesn’t present a deep conflicts with well-being of large numbers of people.
“Also, we should remember that technology, generally speaking, moves from less environmentally friendly to more environmentally friendly postures or configurations, so that if you take, let’s say, wood, coal, oil, natural gas, hydroelectric… nuclear – if you take that as a string of things, the least damaging is the most technologically sophisticated; and if we really wanted to do something about C02, although I don’t see the evidence that we need to be rushing into that at all, but if you wanted to do something about CO2 globally, why don’t we have a global forum where we examine how many people are on wood who could be moved coal? How many people are on dirty coal that we could get into clean coal? How many people on clean coal that we could get into oil and natural gas? Et cetera. Let’s have an examination of the world energy use and pollution, and then come up with a global strategy for energy modernization? The environmental movement has never wanted to come remotely close to such a practical orientation to even the issues that they’re bringing up. And the issues they bring up are always fraught with misleading comments and misuse of data and ignorance of data.
"The Global Warming argument or campaign is primarily intended for political purposes and the purpose is to strip away from the upper third of the country, or perhaps upper 20% - especially if that were to measured in terms of education – strip away the support of those people from a strong commitment to growing production and industry. Instead, what it redirects their attention to is finding ways of using less energy. There’s no endgame there. You can find ways to use less energy, but you still – if there are energy problems and they have to be solved through the creation of energy.
So if you really believe coal and wood cause CO2 in the atmosphere and it traps the sun’s heat in there, if you really believe that, how can you be so cavalierly, consistently anti-nuclear? I mean these people don’t even want an exploration of how the technology might even be better today than it was 30 years ago. Or what’s being done in Russia or France or China, South Africa or wherever.
[INSERT PICS AND STATS nuclear power use in France, India, Russia, France, China, South Africa, and India].
"Their opposition to nuclear power is so mindless that one has to wonder, what is their commitment to the general progress of people in the world?
The other thing is the use and misuse and sloppy use of evidence in this area. They just dismiss people who have counter theories and they portray them as all being corporate hacks, or whatever. That’s just not really true and that’s not addressing yourself either to the evidence and the arguments. [60 sec. insert of Professors Paul Reiter, Nir
Shaviv, Ian Clark, Tim Ball, John Christy & New Scientist editor Nigel Calder, from the documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle.]
"Everybody knows who’s interested in climate that the temperatures have risen and fallen historically and they rose and fell in periods earlier when humans had no effect [i.e., did not exist]. That’s an established fact, so we know there are other possible reasons for temperatures to rise and fall. Anybody looking at the recent record knows that the temperature went down in the 40s, 50s and 60s. And so this so-called heating trend was interrupted by a 30-year cooling trend.
"When the environmental movement first surfaced in the beginning of the 70s, the original argument was not we were in danger of global warming, the original argument was global freezing, and that’s because that was the 30-year trend at the time.
When you start to put these things together and then you start looking at statements that a lot of them make, like Al Gore saying – he’ll go on TV and say, ‘Every climatologist in the world agrees there’s global warming and CO2 causes it.’ [Insert Gore, Norwegian TV]. That is so, that is such an outrageous lie. There’s no truth to that. There’s immense disagreement, all over the scientific community, and a lot of the scientists don’t want to voice an opinion. They take the position that, you know, they stay out of the controversy – which I think you can’t do once the controversy is there. Yeah, maybe scientists shouldn’t run around starting them, but once it’s there you’ve got to stand up and say what you do know, or what you don’t know.
"I think this whole global warming thing ran out of gas to some extent on things like resource depletion [insert book cover, The Limits to Growth]. They issued the Limits to Growth study…over a hundred articles appeared in the world’s scientific journals, challenging one or another of the important aspects of ‘limits to growth’ arguments. Didn’t phase them. They went right on pushing it. They never mention the fact that their figures…have nothing to do with the availability of resources, they’re estimates of what’s been assayed or evaluated, and they took those figures to mean what’s in the whole earth, for example. That’s one thing they did in there. That argument [resource depletion] seems to have run out of some gas, and then the other argument is of course overpopulation.
[Insert Tim Magazine: The Population Explosion/cut to Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book, The Population Bomb]
"And while people are still interested in that – you can still throw it around as a slogan or a phrase like Paul Ehrlich’s followers, overpopulation argument is still occasionally referenced or thrown around, but probably the problem there is that population growth rates in most countries are already close to zero, even a lot of Third World countries, so how far can you take that?
[INSERT GORE: “Population is stabilizing of its own accord, but we are now in a very different relationship to the planet…”
"So what cause do you have left? Well, global warming."
END/PART ONE/ENVIRONMENTALISM: A CRITIQUE (Prof. Donald Gibson)
|
