Earth Day Riots
by Alan Caruba
Issue 107 - May 7, 2008

Since 1970, April 22 has been celebrated as Earth Day. It is generally regarded as the date of the birth of the modern environmental movement.

This year it was greeted with something different—food riots. It was not a coincidence. The food riots occurring around the world are the consequence of the environmental movement’s insistence upon government mandates for biofuels, based on its claims that this would reduce global warming and save the planet.

Earth Day had its antecedents in the United Nations international environmental program. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been the leading proponent of the dangers of manmade global warming endangering the planet. But it is all based on computer models rather than actual empirical science. It was all so speculative that an extensive environmental campaign in the 1970s warning of a coming Ice Age was changed to one that began in the 1980s about “global warming.”

Consider the bad “science” in Rachel Carson’s claims about DDT that resulted in its ban. As a result, millions have since died for lack of the protection it affords against malaria and other insect-borne diseases. A full-scale attack on all pesticides and herbicides, critical to disease control and the world’s food supply, continues.

In 1968 Paul Ehrlich’s book, “The Population Bomb”, included the presumably scientific claim that “the battle to feed all of humanity is over.” He later claimed the Green Revolution, based on the modification of crops to resist drought and predation, would fail. Wrong again. The linking of population and food consumption is a consistent environmental theme.

The claim that greenhouse gas emissions must be drastically reduced is an attack on all forms of industrialization, i.e., corporations and the globalization that require the use of energy resources such as coal, natural gas, and oil. Energy is the single reason for America’s and the world’s economic growth and the enhancement of life through all manner of technologies involving transportation, communication, and agricultural advances.

By blocking access to energy such as the ban on oil extraction in ANWR or off the coasts of the United States, by lobbying against the building of coal-fired and nuclear electricity generation plants, by arguing for inefficient, highly subsidized solar and wind alternatives, Greens are creating a national energy crisis. How insane is it to ban the purchase of incandescent light bulbs?

There is no scientific justification for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Carbon dioxide represents a miniscule 0.038% of the Earth’s atmosphere and increases in CO2 always follow climate change. It does not initiate it.

Environmentalists have spread lies about all manner of food consumption. Eating beef is high on their list of grievances. Not incidentally, corn is a major feedstock for beef and other animals that are part of our daily diet. The Associated Press recently reported that “Worldwide demand for corn to feed livestock and to make biofuel is putting enormous pressure on global supply.” From prehistoric times to the present, meat has been one of mankind’s most invaluable sources of our health.

The result of all the misinformation and resulting bad policy has been less energy, poorer quality food and increasing costs for food, especially for the very poorest and most vulnerable in the less developed world. The increasing violent and widespread food riots occurring worldwide are a direct result of the way the price of corn and soy has been artificially driven upward by environmental demands for “biofuels.” When Congress set in motion the mandate that countless bushels of corn be diverted as a food source for humans and livestock to the production of ethanol, it started a cascade of food shortages worldwide that were further exacerbated by weather related crop failures.

Next year Earth Day would be a good day to begin to take back the Earth from those who would deceive us and harm us.

Alan Caruba writes a weekly column posted on the Internet site of The National Anxiety Center, www.anxietycenter.com. He blogs at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.