2001's green lies

By Alan Caruba
web posted December 24, 2001

One of the great benefits of a free press is that it affords
everyone an opportunity to access the news about the events of
our times, but one of its great drawbacks is that it permits groups
with hidden agendas to mask their goals by manipulating public
opinion and policy. With freedom comes the responsibility to be
not merely informed, but to be able to discern truth from
propaganda.

It strikes at our security and our future when an entire nation is
distracted daily by non-existent "threats" to the environment or
health or the animal population. It gets everybody -- and
particularly the media -- looking in the wrong direction and
ignoring the likes of Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaida network
still active around the world.

In 1990, after a long career as a business and science writer, I
founded The National Anxiety Center as a clearinghouse for
information about "scare campaigns", those deliberate programs
of misinformation and dis-information that find their way, not only
into the news and entertainment media, but into the schoolrooms
of America.

Every year since then, I have issued an annual review of "The
Most Dubious News Stories of the Year". Prior to September
11th, Americans were being assailed by every kind of scare
campaign routinely generated by environmental groups. For
example, the effort to impose environmental thinking throughout
the US military resulted in the disruption of infantry and tank
training exercises whenever a so-called "endangered species"
was found at various bases. Environmentalists used the same
ploy to disrupt the training of pilots on bombing ranges in the US.
This has served to put our fighting forces at risk.

Environmentalism has even more dire impact on America's
needs. Given the upheaval in the Middle East and our
dependence on oil from their area of the world, one would think
that gaining access to the estimated 16 billion barrels of oil in a
remote region of Alaska would have a priority, but the
Democratic Party, allied closely with all environmental
objectives, has refused to even consider this necessary option.
Ignoring the obvious threat to our nation, some Greens even
assert that the war the US has conducted against al Qaeda exists
solely to protect the interests of oil companies.

Environmentalism, particularly when based on insane and
patently false standards of caution, can prove very costly. When
the Bush administration rescinded the reduction in the amount of
arsenic allowable in drinking water from 50 parts per billion to
10 parts per billion, environmentalists claimed Americans were
being poisoned, ignoring the fact that we drink 110 million
gallons of water daily with no ill effects whatever. One part per
billion is the equivalent of one inch to 16,000 miles. The hue and
cry that ensured from the Greens resulted in a reversal that will
impose huge costs on the nation's water systems, estimated to be
as high as $605 billion. No threat to health exists. Guess who will
pick up the tab?

This is how scare campaigns work. Environmentalists are expert
at finding non-existent threats and turning them into multi-billion-
dollar programs that do nothing more than drain the nation's
economic resources or restrict access to our natural resources,
from timber to coal to oil and natural gas, along with many vital
minerals.

While Americans were being deliberately frightened in 2001
about the water they drink, the American Academy of Pediatrics
was recommending that children should not drink fruit juices,
claiming it might cause malnutrition and a variety of other scary
illnesses. Meanwhile The Physicians Committee for Responsible
Medicine, a consort of the animal rights fanatics, People for the
Ethical Treatment of Animals, was warning against letting
children drink milk.

Not to be outdone, the US Food and Drug Administration put
into effect regulations that would outlaw various ways of
preparing eggs, from sunny-side-up to their use in Caesar salads.
The regulations are estimated to add more than $66 million to the
cost of preparing eggs by the thousands of fast food and other
restaurants throughout the nation. If you like your eggs served as
hard as hockey pucks, you will love these new regulations.

Two world-class perpetrators of scare campaigns, the US Public
Interest Research Group and the Consumer Federation of
America, announced in August that playgrounds were too
dangerous for children, claiming that playground equipment is the
leading cause of injuries to children, citing hundreds of thousands
of injuries. As any emergency room doctor will tell you, every
year children routinely manage to injure themselves riding
bicycles and generally enjoying themselves despite the fear-
mongers who would ban everything from skate boards to tinker
toys.

If these scare campaigns about everything we eat and drink were
not enough, Americans and others around the world were
treated to news that a "super volcano" could erupt somewhere
and endanger all life as we know it. These events occur, British
geologists noted, every 100,000 years. Those on the East Coast
of American were encouraged to worry about giant waves called
tsunamis.

Meanwhile, a scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center in
California had hatched a plan to prevent global warming by
moving the earth further away from the Sun by deliberating
deflecting the path of a passing comet or asteroid to alter the
orbit of the Earth. The fact that the Earth has not warmed even a
single degree in the passed half century continues to be ignored
by environmentalists and the mainstream press, for whom this lie
has become standard issue.

The bogeyman of Global Warming got a boost in 2001, a
uniquely warm one. Climate, though, is not measured by a single
year, but in terms of centuries. Not content with attributing
warming to human activity, a study conducted by the National
Center for Atmospheric Research and funded by the National
Science Foundation and the US Environmental Protection
Agency, declared that "volatile organic compounds" were
emitted by autumn leaves! We were informed that they "combine
with certain types of industrial emissions to create smog, and, in
some cases, they play a role in global warming." The earth has
been gradually warming for tens of thousands of years since the
last Ice Age. If this natural process were not occurring, you
would not be reading this.

Not to be outdone in the endless cycle of idiotic research,
scientists at the University of Oregon found that the pitcher-plant
mosquito can sense global warming. They warned that genetic
adaptation could "dominate a mosquito population in as little as
five years", this time ignoring that insects, among the oldest living
creatures on Earth, routinely adapt to various threats to their
survival. Meanwhile, the Green objective of banning every
pesticide continues, leaving everyone on Earth vulnerable to the
diseases spread by insect and rodent pests.

A rash of shark attacks off the Florida coast in 2001 generated a
lot of headlines during the summer and, of course, PeTa
announced it was putting up a billboard with the message
"Would You Give Your Right Arm to Know Why Sharks
Attack, Could it be Revenge? Go Vegetarian." Earlier an eight-
year-old had had his arm ripped off by a shark and a ten-year-
old had been killed.

According to PeTa, "Our message is that humans kill billions of
fish, including sharks, each year, in the most hideous ways, and
sharks aren't really to blame for doing what comes naturally." It
was subsequently revealed that an animal rights-inspired National
Marine Fisheries Service program to protect sharks had
contributed to the rise in shark attacks on humans in recent
years.

Amidst the endless and relentless scare campaigns, in October,
the National Center for Health Statistics announced that
American's average life expectancy is now a record 76.9 years,
the highest ever, and infant mortality rates had dropped to the
lowest level in the nation's history. Earlier, in June, the American
Cancer Society, National Cancer Institute and the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention came together to announce that
new cases and deaths from the biggest cancer killers were
declining, pointing to early detection and reduced smoking as
indicators for the trend. The rates had declined 1.1 per cent each
year from 1992 to 1998.

Other statistics offered more good news. Teen pregnancy rates
had plummeted to new lows and there was a record drop in
violent crime in 2000. Home ownership rates had increased in
nearly every state for the past decade.

2001 will be remembered for the way the United States and
other nations were confronted with the harsh reality of the global
Islamic radicalism supported by millions of Muslims. This is the
preeminent threat facing Western civilization. You can forget
about all of the bogus environmental claims. On close
examination, it quickly becomes obvious they are not based in
science, but rather exist to advance a harsh, leftist agenda of
global governance by a Green Taliban.

Alan Caruba is the founder of The National Anxiety Center, a
clearinghouse for information about media-driven scare
campaigns. The Center maintains an Internet site at
www.anxietycenter.com.

Enter Stage Right - http://www.enterstageright.com