'Environmentalists' vs humans

January 4, 2005

"CO 2 trading targets too generous, say environmentalists" - "The European Union is at the centre of a new row between governments, industry and environmental campaigners over its ambitious new CO 2 emissions trading scheme, which came into effect on January 1. It is designed to help the 25 members meet their commitment to an 8% cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2012 under the Kyoto protocol." (The Guardian)

Environmentalists don't really have a problem with CO₂ (what tree hugger could object to plant food?) but rather with energy and humanity's use thereof. Misanthropist quotes are abundant in the movement, here's a few from The Environmentalists' Little Green Book, U.S. Chamber of Commerce (ISBN:0-615-11628-0):

• "Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun." -- Paul "Population Bomb" Ehrlich.

• "Complex technology of any sort is an assault on human dignity. It would be little short of disastrous for us to discover the source of clean, cheap, abundant energy, because of what we might do with it." -- Amory Lovins, Rocky Mountain Institute.

• "Isn't the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn't our responsibility to bring that about?" -- Maurice Strong, Secretary General of the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development (the so-called Earth Summit) held in Rio de Janeiro.

• "We've already had too much economic growth in the US. Economic growth in rich countries like ours is the disease, not the cure." -- Ehrlich again.

• "The planet is about to break out with fever, indeed it may already have, and we [human beings] are the disease. We should be at war with ourselves and our lifestyles." -- Thomas Lovejoy, assistant secretary to the Smithsonian Institution.

• "The only real good technology is no technology at all. Technology is taxation without representation, imposed by our elitist species (man) upon the rest of the natural world." -- John Shuttleworth, FoE manual writer.

• "The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States. We can't let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the U.S.. We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are." -- Michael Oppenheimer, senior scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund.

• "People are the cause of all the problems; we have too many of them; we need to get rid of some of them, and this (ban of DDT) is as good a way as any." Charles Wurster, Environmental Defense Fund.

• "Man is always and everywhere a blight on the landscape." -- John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club.

• "The world has a cancer, and the cancer is man." Alan Gregg, former longtime official of the Rockefeller Foundation.

They don't like people and they are quite prepared to use any excuse to inhibit enabling technology, chemicals and affordable energy. Why are we pursuing a course set by people haters?