Environmentalism Hijacked  by Roger King  

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. History of the Environmental Movement
3. James Hansen
4. Extremists Goals
5. Creating a Consensus
6. Other Supposed Environment Crisis's
7. Costs of Environmentalism
8. Conclusion

Introduction

History of the Environmental Movement  

First, lets look at some background of the environmental movement that would be helpful to understand.  After the fall of the Soviet Union and Communism worldwide, many in the anti-capitalist movement needed a place to continue pursuing their anti-free enterprise goals.   They found the perfect place in the environmental movement . They realized that suggested global catastrophes could only be solved with massive amounts of money and very strong government control.  Today, many of the loudest proponents of man-made global warming today are confirmed anti-capitalists.   Now, this certainly doesn't mean we don't have environmental issues that we should work on but it should suggest a tempered approach to believing every catastrophic issue pushed by these groups without extensive research.

Just suppose for a moment that they are powerful environmental extremists who true goal is the destruction of capitalism and a return to socialism?  How would they accomplish this.  Just for an interesting exercise, what if I were to ask you to devise a plan to destroy the greatest economy, creator of wealth, center of innovation, and center of individual liberty that has ever existed in human history!!  How would you accomplish this?   I would suggest the best method would be to create the fear of a global disaster involving something which humans either never had any control over or at best  very little control.   To achieve this you begin with some truth and then extract a disastrous worse case scenario that appears the people emotions but can't be easily disproven.  Then convince the people that centralized power and billions of dollars is they only solution to save them, the worlds poor and our children.  Enough people would willing give billions of dollars and control of their lives to those very people that wish to destroy them.   I am not necessarily saying this is what's currently happening but it does give you food for thought.

In a speech on the Senate floor on September 25, 2006, Senator Inhofe pointed out the abject failure of past predictions of ecological disaster made by environmental alarmists.  “The history of the modern environmental movement is chock-full of predictions of doom that never came true. We have all heard the dire predictions about the threat of overpopulation, resource scarcity, mass starvation, and the projected death of our oceans. None of these predictions came true, yet it never stopped the doomsayers from continuing to predict a dire environmental future. The more the eco-doomsayers’ predictions fail, the more the eco-doomsayers predict,”    Link

The real cure for global warming  by Vin Suprynowicz  at the Reveiw Journal  July 1, 2007  By "the environment" we meant "mankind's environment" -- the fresh air and clean water and green trees that make our human lives healthier and more pleasant  ...   So now "the environment," as used by these zealots, no longer means "the environs of mankind, which make mankind's life healthier and more enjoyable" -- presumably including plenty of clean drinking water. Rather, the term has been skinned and cured, turned into sheep's clothing and draped over a lurking wolf. The term is now used to mean "pristine nature, a beautiful thing which is endangered by the ongoing prosperity and procreation of human beings, a foul invasive enemy whose numbers need to be reduced through thirst and other means to protect each weed and bug  

For example Last weekend, however, the Review-Journal ran an editorial ridiculing the radical greens for fighting a pipeline needed to transport drinking water to Las Vegas from east central Nevada by using their usual cat's paw -- insisting the plan would damage some obscure minnow in some pond in Utah.   

Why I Left Greenpeace   by Patrick Moore  April 22, 2008   At first, many of the causes we championed, such as opposition to nuclear testing and protection of whales, stemmed from our scientific knowledge of nuclear physics and marine biology. But after six years as one of five directors of Greenpeace International, I observed that none of my fellow directors had any formal science education. They were either political activists or environmental entrepreneurs. Ultimately, a trend toward abandoning scientific objectivity in favor of political agendas forced me to leave Greenpeace in 1986.   ...  Sadly, Greenpeace has evolved into an organization of extremism and politically motivated agendas.  

How the world was misled about global warming and now climate change  by Dr. Tim Ball    April 21, 2008  we touched on the political climate engendered by environmentalism and its exploitation by those who want a new world order and believe this is achieved by shutting down the industrialized nations. Chief among these is Maurice Strong who said in 1990 “What if a small group of these world leaders were to conclude the principal risk to the earth comes from the actions of the rich countries?...In order to save the planet, the group decides: Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring this about?” He told Maclean’s magazine in 1976 that he was “a socialist in ideology, a capitalist in methodology.”  

The problem was how to bring about the collapse of industry without causing a revolt.   Global Warming was the perfect solution with CO2 as the culprit.  Almost everything in our industrialized world puts out CO2.  Now you have the world fighting to stop the supposed destruction of the world but unknown to them, they are actually doing the work of crippling the economy and industry.  So how do you get all the governments of the world to go along with this.  First, the Kyoto protocol is the tool and the UN under the direction of the IPCC is the driver of the tool.

How the world was misled about global warming and now climate change  by Dr. Tim Ball    April 21, 2008  Elaine Dewar, wrote about Strong in her book “Cloak of Green” and concluded that he liked the UN because, “He could raise his own money from whomever he liked, appoint anyone he wanted, control the agenda.”    

James Hansen

1. The Soros Threat To Democracy by Investor's Business Daily   September 24, 2007  How many people, for instance, know that James Hansen, a man billed as a lonely "NASA whistleblower" standing up to the mighty U.S. government, was really funded by Soros' Open Society Institute , which gave him "legal and media advice"?  That's right, Hansen was packaged for the media by Soros' flagship "philanthropy," by as much as $720,000, most likely under the OSI's "politicization of science" program. That may have meant that Hansen had media flacks help him get on the evening news to push his agenda and lawyers pressuring officials to let him spout his supposedly "censored" spiel for weeks in the name of advancing the global warming agenda.  Hansen even succeeded, with public pressure from his nightly news performances, in forcing NASA to change its media policies to his advantage. Had Hansen's OSI-funding been known, the public might have viewed the whole production differently. The outcome could have been different.  
2. Renowned Scientist Defects From Belief in Global Warming – Caps Year of Vindication for Skeptics  by Marc Morano  October 17, 2006
   1. The increasingly alarmist Hansen is featured frequently in the media to bolster sky-is-falling climate scare reports. His recent claim that the Earth is nearing its hottest point in one million years has been challenged by many scientists.
   2. Hansen’s increasingly frightening climate predictions follow his 2003 concession that the use of “extreme scenarios” was an appropriate tactic to drive the public’s attention to the urgency of global warming.
   3. Hansen also received a $250,000 grant form Teresa Heinz’s Foundation and then subsequently endorsed her husband John Kerry for President and worked closely with Al Gore to promote his movie, “An Inconvenient Truth.”  
   4. The increasingly alarmist Hansen is featured frequently in the media to bolster sky-is-falling climate scare reports. His recent claim that the Earth is nearing its hottest point in one million years has been challenged by many scientists.
3. The 'Old' Consensus? by Invenstor's Business Daily   September 21, 2007  On July 9, 1971, the Post published a story headlined "U.S. Scientist Sees New Ice Age Coming." It told of a prediction by NASA and Columbia University scientist S.I. Rasool. The culprit: man's use of fossil fuels.  ...  Sustained emissions over five to 10 years, Rasool claimed, "could be sufficient to trigger an ice age."  Aiding Rasool's research, the Post reported, was a "computer program developed by Dr. James Hansen," who was, according to his resume, a Columbia University research associate at the time.  So what about those greenhouse gases that man pumps into the skies? Weren't they worried about them causing a greenhouse effect that would heat the planet, as Hansen, Al Gore and a host of others so fervently believe today?

   "They found no need to worry about the carbon dioxide fuel-burning puts in the atmosphere," the Post said in the story, which was spotted last week by Washington resident John Lockwood, who was doing research at the Library of Congress and alerted the Washington Times to his finding.   

4. Nasa is out of line on global warming   by Christopher Booker   July 27, 2008   McIntyre has now shown that Hansen had been adjusting almost all his pre-1970 global temperature figures downwards, by as much as 0.5 degrees, and his post-1970 figures upwards.  Although Hansen claimed that this only resulted from more careful calculations, McIntyre pointed out how odd it was that the adjustments all seemed to confirm his thesis. 
5. Green Comes Clean by Investor's Business Daily  Hansen suggests that the tax be levied "at the well-head or port of entry" from where it "will then appropriately affect all products and activities that use fossil fuels."

   This tax will have "near-term, mid-term, and long-term" effects on "lifestyle choices," Hansen acknowledges. But he seems unconcerned about how such coercion will rearrange the lives and manage the behavior of a people who should be free of state coercion.

   Acting either out of boldness or desperation, Hansen goes on to reveal the environmentalist left's deeper ambition: a collectivist redistribution of wealth. He recommends that the carbon tax be returned to the public in "equal shares on a per capita basis."  

6. Some News For Al Gore  by  Neal Boortz  January 29, 2009   Hansen's former boss, retired senior NASA atmospheric scientist, Dr. John S. Theon, has come forward with some news .. Theon is skeptic of man-made global warming and his former employee James Hansen is an embarrassment to NASA. Yep, Theon says, "I appreciate the opportunity to add my name to those who disagree that global warming is man made." He goes on to say, "Hansen was never muzzled even though he violated NASA's official agency position on climate forecasting (i.e., we did not know enough to forecast climate change or mankind's effect on it). Hansen thus embarrassed NASA by coming out with his claims of global warming in 1988 in his testimony before Congress." 

7. In an op-ed piece penned for the London Guardian, Hansen said he is asking world leaders to place moratoria on new coal-fired power plants to fight global warming and pollution.   ...  "The trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains," he wrote. "Coal-fired power plants are factories of death."    Link
8. Climatologist James Hansen was one of 30 people arrested Tuesday in West Virginia while protesting mountaintop coal removal.  ...

   Earlier this year, Hansen publicly supported civil disobedience because "the democratic process" for tackling global warming "doesn't quite seem to be working."

   He also thinks fossil fuel company executives should be "tried for high crimes against humanity and nature" for spreading misinformation about climate change and has contributed to the presidential campaigns of Democrats Bill Clinton and Al Gore — or maybe it was Sen. John Kerry, since Hansen himself says he can't recall.   Link

    

Goals for Environmental Extremists

Carl Amery  "We, in the green movement, aspire to a cultural model in which killing a forest will be considered more contemptible and more criminal than the sale of 6-year-old children to Asian brothels."   Link

Judi Barri  Earth First   “I think if we don’t overthrow capitalism, we don’t have a chance of saving the world ecologically. I think it is possible to have an ecological society under socialism. I don’t think it’s possible under capitalism.”

Richard Benedict  an employee for the State Department working on assignment for the Conservation Foundation  "A global climate treaty must be implemented even if there is no scientific evidence to back the greenhouse effect."    Link

David Brower  Friends of the Earth  "Childbearing [should be] a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license.... All potential parents [should be] required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing."   Link

John Davis  Editor of The Earth First! Journal, the 'voice of the radical environmental movement said  "Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs. "   Link

Paul Ehrlich, Professor of Population Studies  "A massive campaign must be launched to de-develop the United States. De-development means bringing our economic system into line with the realities of ecology and the world resource situation."   Link   ”We already have too much economic growth in the United States. Economic growth in rich countries like ours is the disease, not the cure"          

David Foreman, co-founder of Earth First!  "We must make this an insecure and inhospitable place for capitalists and their projects. We must reclaim the roads and plowed land, halt dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled rivers and return to wilderness millions of acres of presently settled land."   Link   “Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental.”

David Graber  biologist, National Park Service  "I know scientists who remind me that people are part of nature, but it isn't true. Somewhere along the line ... we quit the contract and became a cancer. We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth.... Until such time as Homo Sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along."     Link

Sir John Houghton, first chairman of IPCC   "Unless we announce disasters, no one will listen"    Link  

Professor Maurice King  "Global Sustainability requires the deliberate quest of poverty, reduced resource consumption and set levels of mortality control."   Link

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

Dr. Reed F. Noss  The Wildlands Project  "The collective needs of non-human species must take precedence over the needs and desires of humans."   Link

Michael Oppenheimer, Environmental Defense Fund  "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 US. We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are."   Link

Prince Philip, WWF   ”If I were reincarnated, I would wish to be returned to Earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels.”

Jeremy Rifkin, Greenhouse Crisis Foundation  "The prospect of cheap fusion energy is the worst thing that could happen to the planet."   Link

Christine Stewart, former Canadian Environment Minister "No matter if the science is all phony, there are collateral environmental benefits...climate change provides the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world"   Link   

Maurice Strong, founder of the UN Environment Programme Isn't the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn't it our responsibility to bring that about?"    Link

Lyall Watson  The Financial Times, 15 July 1995   Cannibalism is a "radical but realistic solution to the problem of overpopulation."   Link

The Cost and Futility of Trading Hot Air  by Christopher Monckton   09 May 09, 2008  Leftist commentator, Alexander Cockburn, put it this way:   This turn to climate catastrophism is tied into the decline of the left, and the decline of the left’s optimistic vision of altering the economic nature of things through a political programme. The left has bought into environmental catastrophism because it thinks that if it can persuade the world that there is indeed a catastrophe, then somehow the emergency response will lead to positive developments in terms of social and environmental justice [liberal fascism]. 

For decades environmental activists have insisted that capitalism is not a “sustainable” (sufficient to “save the planet”) economic system. We now hear brazen declarations that democracy is no longer a “sustainable” political process. Al Gore lends a popular, philosophical/theological underpinning to collectivist impulses by casting the root of all environmental evils – real and imagined – in the scientific and industrial/technological revolutions. Put differently, for Gore and the EDF, the planetary environment, not human life, appears the supreme standard of value. Therefore, everything, most importantly Science and Economics, must be pried away from the benefit of man and pressed into total service of the State.

Given just a decade or two of such “sustainable” policies, bolstered by Gore’s religion, the world will be well on its way to a new Dark Ages, and the human misery it breeds.

The American people who owe their long, comfortable and healthy lives to the accomplishments of modern industry, technology, medicine and affordable fossil energy ought to be outraged by activists’ claims and policies. They should come to grasp the terrible costs and futility of the left’s policies; they must understand that life lived as the left envision it for them and their children is baneful; life lived in submission to the hard natural forces of climate and disease, increasingly lived without labor-saving technology, without the fruits of sophisticated agricultural techniques, and without modern medicine, sanitation, electrification and transportation systems is, to borrow a phrase from Thomas Hobbes, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

Economic growth requires energy growth, and restricting energy growth through self-interested international agreements such as Kyoto or domestic policies such as carbon taxes or cap-and-trade schemes is a recipe for global poverty and human deaths.   

Free enterprise capitalism provides the economic lifeblood for many of the world's poor. The late senator Paul Tsongas said in his speech at the 1992 Democratic Convention, "You cannot redistribute wealth you never created. You can't be pro-jobs and anti-business at the same time. You cannot love employment and hate employers."   ...

For three-quarters of a century the Soviet Union was touted as the model of what a planned economy could do for its people. To the embarrassment of many economics professors, it imploded. It could never afford environmental protection or improvement.  

‘Medieval Environmentalists’ attack CO2 in their efforts to derail civilization by Dr. Tim Ball & Tom Harris   January 21, 2008   David Graber, a research biologist with the U.S. National Park Service, said:   “Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, are not as important as a wild and healthy planet. I know social scientists who remind me that people are part of nature, but it isn’t true. Somewhere along the line – at about a billion years ago – we quit the contract and became a cancer. We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth. It is cosmically unlikely that the developed world will choose to end its orgy of fossil energy consumption, and the Third World its suicidal consumption of landscape. Until such time as Homo Sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.” 

Greens Thwart Gasoline Production   by Steven Milloy  at Fox News 6/13/2008   The Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council, or NRDC, successfully pressured the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to block ConocoPhillips’ expansion of its Roxana, Ill., gasoline refinery, which processes heavy crude oil from Canada, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.

The project would have expanded the volume of Canadian crude processed from 60,000 barrels per day to more than 500,000 barrels a day by 2015.   ...   Apparently, the plant’s planned 95 percent reduction in sulfur dioxide emissions and 25 percent reduction in nitrogen oxides wasn’t green enough.     ... 

Meanwhile, in California, green groups are working through the state attorney general’s office to block the upgrade of the Chevron refinery in the city of Richmond. The $800 million upgrade essentially would expand the useable oil supply by permitting the refinery to process lower-quality, less-expensive crude oil.    

How to Reduce Carbon Dioxide, Create Fields of Green in the Desert and Solve Our Dependency on Foreign Oil    by Duane Lester, All American Blogger   July 30, 2008   There is a lot of buzz about a new technology being touted as a possible solution in the “climate change crisis.” It is called a CO₂ scrubber, and it removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Just one would take a ton of CO₂ out of the air every day.  ...  The environmentalists should applaud this technology and welcome it to the battle. Instead, it is dismissed and condemned because it allows us to maintain our current lifestyles:

“There’s no magic bullet to save us from the problem of global warming,” said Kert Davies, an energy expert for Greenpeace USA in Washington, D.C. Removing greenhouse gases so readily will not encourage people to develop alternate, renewable technologies, he said, and strive for energy efficiency.

Such techno-fixes also miss the point of the environmental degradation brought on by the use of fossil fuels, he said.

   ...   If some powerful environmentalists had their way, we would all be controlled by carbon. As I noted before, more than once politicians have suggested we become tethered to individual carbon limits, set by governments who have our best interests in mind, of course.   

Creating a Consensus

How to Create and Protect a Consensus    by Paul,   October 14, 2007   A book authored by Janis, I. L. & Mann, L. (1977) Decision-making: A psychological analysis of conflict, choice, and commitment (New York Free Press), explores the concept of ‘Group Think,’ which shows a remarkable parallel with the way the climate science consensus is operated and protected.  Eight symptoms of Group Think are listed below:

1. Illusion of Invulnerability: Members ignore obvious danger, take extreme risk, and are overly optimistic.
2. Collective Rationalization: Members discredit and explain away warning contrary to group thinking.
3. Illusion of Morality: Members believe their decisions are morally correct, ignoring the ethical consequences of their decisions.
4. Excessive Stereotyping: The group constructs negative stereotypes of rivals outside the group.
5. Pressure for Conformity: Members pressure any in the group who express arguments against the group's stereotypes, illusions, or commitments, viewing such opposition as disloyalty.
6. Self-Censorship: Members withhold their dissenting views and counter-arguments.
7. Illusion of Unanimity: Members perceive falsely that everyone agrees with the group's decision; silence is seen as consent.
8. Mind guards: Some members appoint themselves to the role of protecting the group from adverse information that might threaten group complacency.

Other Supposed Environmental Crisis's

What is the government had spent billions to solve these "supposed" environmental crisis?    Why should we now believe global warming isn't another "supposed" crisis?

1. Population Explosion  Paul Ehrlich’s book, “The Population Bomb” published in 1968.   Populations explosion would lead to mass starvation.    In 1968, professor Paul Ehrlich, former Vice President Al Gore's hero and mentor, predicted that there would be a major food shortage in the U.S. and "in the 1970s . . . hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death."  Ehrlich forecast that 65 million Americans would die of starvation between 1980 and 1989, and that by 1999 the U.S. population would have declined to 22.6 million.   Link
2. Ice Age  In 1969, environmentalist Nigel Calder warned, "The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind."   Link 
3. Running out of Resources 
   1. Gordon Taylor, in his 1970 book "The Doomsday Book," said Americans were using 50 percent of the world's resources and "by 2000 they [Americans] will, if permitted, be using all of them."   Link   Link2
   2. In 1972, a report for the Club of Rome warned the world would run out of gold by 1981, mercury and silver by 1985, tin by 1987 and petroleum, copper, lead and natural gas by 1992.     Link    Link2
4. World Ruined by 2000  In 1975, the Environmental Fund took out full-page ads warning, "The World as we know it will likely be ruined by the year 2000."   Link  Link 2
5. Harvard University biologist George Wald in 1970 warned, "civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind." That was the same year Sen. Gaylord Nelson warned, in Look Magazine, that by 1995 "somewhere between 75 and 85 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct."    Link     Link 2
6. Nuclear Winter  The liberal response to the cold war was to run around screaming for 30 years that the nuclear missiles were about to fall and wipe out the entire planet
7. DDT
8. Asbestos
9. Ozone
10. Energy
    1. In 1885, the U.S. Geological Survey announced that there was "little or no chance" of oil being discovered in California, and a few years later they said the same about Kansas and Texas.  Link
    2. In 1939, the U.S. Department of the Interior said American oil supplies would last only another 13 years.  Link
    3. In 1949, the secretary of the interior said the end of U.S. oil supplies was in sight.   Link
    4. in 1974 the U.S. Geological Survey advised us that the U.S. had only a 10-year supply of natural gas. The fact of the matter, according to the American Gas Association: There's a 1,000- to 2,500- year supply.  Link
11. Mass Extinction by 1995  Sen. Gaylord Nelson warned, in Look magazine, that by 1995 "somewhere between 75% and 85% of all the species of living animals will be extinct."     Link
12. Oxygen Concentrations Falling  little or no attention is being paid to the long-term fall in oxygen concentrations and its knock-on effects.   Compared to prehistoric times, the level of oxygen in the earth's atmosphere has declined by over a third and in polluted cities the decline may be more than 50%. This change in the makeup of the air we breathe has potentially serious implications for our health. Indeed, it could ultimately threaten the survival of human life on earth, according to Roddy Newman, who is drafting a new book, The Oxygen Crisis.   Link

Costs of Environmentalism

Why I Left Greenpeace   by Patrick Moore April 22, 2008   Science shows that adding chlorine to drinking water was the biggest advance in the history of public health, virtually eradicating water-borne diseases such as cholera. And the majority of our pharmaceuticals are based on chlorine chemistry. Simply put, chlorine is essential for our health. ...   Despite science concluding no known health risks – and ample benefits – from chlorine in drinking water, Greenpeace and other environmental groups have opposed its use for more than 20 years.

Greenpeace now has a new target called phthalates (pronounced thal-ates). These are chemical compounds that make plastics flexible. They are found in everything from hospital equipment such as IV bags and tubes, to children's toys and shower curtains. They are among the most practical chemical compounds in existence.

Phthalates are the new bogeyman. These chemicals make easy targets since they are hard to understand and difficult to pronounce. Commonly used phthalates, such as diisononyl phthalate (DINP), have been used in everyday products for decades with no evidence of human harm. DINP is the primary plasticizer used in toys. It has been tested by multiple government and independent evaluators, and found to be safe.    

Unintended Global Consequences   by Diane Katz  April 22, 2008     Millions of acres of rainforest are fast disappearing as farmers in South America, Asia and elsewhere rush to clear land for cultivation. Among the culprits is government subsidization of corn-based ethanol — a supposed antidote to climate change. U.S. subsidies are expected to top $5 billion this year, which is prompting American farmers to devote more land to corn in place of soybeans. Consequently, their counterparts around the globe are clearing acreage to capitalize on higher prices for the displaced crops.

A cholera outbreak in Latin America killed more than 10,000 people and infected up to a million more after the government of Peru limited chlorination of the public water supplies — as demanded by Greenpeace and other environmental activists. The war on chlorine was abetted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which erroneously associated chlorination of water with an increase in cancer risk.

Millions of pounds of apples were left to rot and family orchards were lost to foreclosure following reports that Alar, a common ripening agent, was the most potent cancer-causing compound in the food supply. The American Council on Science and Health later revealed that a child would have to drink 19,000 quarts of apple juice every day for the rest of their life to consume the same amount of Alar fed to mice during tests for cancer.  

Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate by  Fred Singer with the Heartland Institute in 2008   The rise in environmental consciousness since the 1970s has focused on a succession of ‘calamities’:  cancer epidemics from chemicals, extinction of birds and other species by pesticides, the depletion of the ozone layer by supersonic transports and later by freons, the death of forests (‘Waldsterben’) because of acid rain, and finally, global warming, the “mother of all environmental scares” (according to the late Aaron Wildavsky).  

Wetlands

1. The United States is gaining wetlands, not losing them.  According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, net wetland acreage grew at a rate of 26,000 acres per year between 1997 and 2001, and in 2002 and 2003, net wetland gains averaged 72,000 acres per year.
2. The rate of wetland loss began to decline before the federal government began intensively regulating wetlands under the Clean Water Act.  It is estimated that prior to World War II, net wetland losses totaled about 800,000 annually.  In the 1950s and 60s, net wetland losses declined to an estimated 458,000 acres per year.  In the 1970s, wetland losses plunged further to an estimated 290,000 acres per year.
3. Wetlands regulations are expansive and onerous.  111.5 million acres of land in the U.S is currently covered by federal wetland regulations.  This is equivalent to a landmass larger than the state of California.  Under current federal law, landowners are not compensated when they lose the right to use their property due to wetlands regulations.  According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, this has resulted in approximately $162.6 billion dollars in lost development rights.

1. Two decades of the world's most stringent environmental regulations have made Germany, Europe's largest economy, increasingly energy dependent on Russia, the world's largest exporter of natural gas.  ...
2. In the aftermath of the Soviet Union's collapse, Germany's electricity sector enjoyed energy independence, thanks to extensive coal reserves and a large nuclear industry.   ...
3. Coal has been targeted because its combustion releases the most greenhouse gas of any fossil fuel  ...
4. Nuclear power emits zero greenhouse gas, but most environmentalists oppose it because the waste it produces is difficult to store.  ...
5. Germany could have supplied much of its own natural gas needs with domestic reserves from the northwestern state of Niedersachsen, home to 9 trillion cubic feet of gas. However, this energy is off-limits because environmental regulations have curtailed the complete exploration and development of the area.  ...
6. Instead, Germany has met its growing demand with natural gas imports from Gazprom, a state-owned enterprise that has a legal  ...  monopoly on all natural gas exports from Russia. Imports have skyrocketed since the Cold War, and Russia now supplies more than 40 percent of German gas consumption.  ...
7. So it seems that German is still using the same amount of energy that it normally would but has given up its independence to the Russians as a result of Environmentalism.

Conclusion