Happy? Earth Day

I remember the first Earth Day back in the 70s, when we worried about the imminent risk to the earth caused by pollution. Now, nearly four decades later, we are supposedly still worried about the imminent risk to the earth caused by pollution.

The pollution has changed; the worry has not, even though it's clear there are lessons to be learned from year after year of hysteria: The earth works on its own long cycles, not our headline-grabbing short cycles; the earth is a lot more resilient than Greenie fundraisers would like you to believe, and finally, Greenies have gotten more successful at promoting environmental hysteria.

The evidence for each of the three is self-evident and needs no further explanation here. Instead, I'd like to praise the Greenies for a moment.

Don't get me wrong; I'm no fan, primarily because from top to bottom, the movement knowingly sensationalizes and distorts for self-benefit, which appalls me since I believe public discourse requires the level playing field truth provides. Worse, their solution is always larger government. They are anti-capitalist, anti-corporate and completely untrusting in the character of man, trusting instead in the fumbling, power-corrupted auspices of government.

Yes, capitalism lead the world into the industrial revolution and pollution, but government went along with it and in time communism proved itself far more capable of blindly destroying natural resources than capitalism. The Greenies have forgiven government and big social programs, but have never forgiven capitalism, even though today it is the leading force that's creating the technologies that are taking us away from our polluting past.

But I still praise the Greenies because at their core they are conservationists, as am I. Conservationism is a biblical concept rooted in God's decree that we be stewards of his creation, and it holds as true today as it did with Adam and Eve. So while I make a living fighting environmentalists who try to stop new homes and infrastructure, and think their positions in these battles are untenable and do not represent stewardship, I look at the results of the fights and am not too upset at all.

My firm has been involved in programs that have set aside over 350 square miles of open space in return for development rights. That's more open space conservation than any environmental group has accomplished, as far as I know. Today, I'm working on one project that will preserve 1,600 of its 3,000 acres, another that will build on just under 12,000 acres and preserve just over 12,000, and a third that will permanently protect 21,000 acres, building on just 5,000 acres.

And the built environments within these projects are becoming quite green. Extra work is done to give more houses south-facing orientations for active and passive solar, and Energy Star appliances are required. Recycled water is used to irrigate lawns and parks, and low-flow fixtures are mandatory. Transit is given high priority, and walkability is incorporated in the design to reduce vehicle miles traveled and improve quality of life.

These are dramatic changes from the old model of subdivisions as far as the eye can see, and it's come about for two reasons: regulation and marketing.

The Greenies celebrate regulation on Earth Day and call for more, but there's more than enough, at least here in the USA. Land is preserved to protect endangered species, streams, oaks and rare plants. Carbon footprints are reduced to comply with new laws and regs.

But more important, consumers are starting to prefer green communities and are willing to pay a bit more to have open space nearby and energy efficiency everywhere they look.

So this Earth Day, my prayer is that we get down to earth and celebrate the fact that we're doing enough. There's no need for more political grandstanding on Greenie causes; the balance has been struck in America, and if anything, it favors the earth more than the people who live on it.

Now we are in a position where the free market can take over, working within the regulatory process, and create communities that take care of human needs while stewarding the resources God gave us.

Some related reading:

• For the whacked-out MSM view calling for a complete retooling of the economy a la WWII to tilt at windmills fight global warming, read this essay in Time.
  
  
• For a counterpoint, read this essay by Dennis Prager, who says, "It is much easier to fight global warming than to fight human evil."
  
  
• For a much more logical approach than Time's, in which we apply technology to conserve, rather than appease the hysterics, see this essay by Glenn Reynolds in the NY Post.
  

hat-tip for links to Real Clear Politics

Chop-Sticking It To The Greens

The grand chopstick protest is raging throughout China ... well, cropping up here and there in big cities like Beijing, where this protest apparently forced the fast-food noodle chain Noodles Loves Noodles (catchy, eh?) to switch to plastic chopsticks.

According to the WSJ, the Chinese use 63 billion pairs of snap-apart, throw-away wooden chopsticks a year. They're not made from virgin forest trees, but from birch, poplar and bamboo, which grow fast and are not endangered.

The enviros would have them replaced with plastic? Plastic? Made from oil, processed in effluent-leaking, fume-belching factories?

Well, yes. Or, of course, you could follow the approach used by China's BYOC (bring your own chopsticks) activists. Again, WSJ:

B.Y.O.C. is becoming a way of life for young Chinese activists like Margaret Yang, a 28-year-old market researcher for Intel in Beijing. On a recent lunchtime visit to a Beijing branch of the Chinese hot-pot chain Little Sheep, Ms. Yang put her ideals into action. When the waitress approached with a fistful of disposable chopsticks, Ms. Yang flashed her personal chopsticks, sending her scurrying away.

After a lunch of lamb strips, mushrooms and bok choy, Ms. Yang illustrated the cleanup protocol, requesting a cup of hot water from the waitress to rinse her chopsticks in, before slipping them into the organic cotton sack she uses to carry them.

Hat-tipper Jim notes with proper tone:

OK, let's see if I get this straight.

Instead of using some "...roughly 63 billion pairs each year" of disposable chopsticks that are "...typically made from fast-growing woods like birch, poplar and bamboo that are not endangered"..."and often uses leftover wood that is not suitable for other industries", we are going to request 63 billion cups (that's nearly four billion GALLONS, BTW) of HEATED water, instead.

And people wonder why I think that most environmentalists are just plain nuts! HA!

Jim, Jim, Jim. It's green image that matters. Please don't bother Greenies and Warmies with troublesome things like facts and logic.

Bludgeoning Big Oil With Katrina

It comes as a shock to no one that Greenies, Warmies and the hodge-podge of progress-haters like to tag humans with blame every time a natural disaster hits. I can see the headline:

Asteroid Rushes to Earth:
SUVs Blamed

Today there's a headline over an AP story that's not quite as extreme, but is definitely from the same school of attack journalism:

Did oil canals worsen
Katrina's effects?

It's a legitimate question to ask what the 10,000 miles of canals dug years ago through the Louisiana marshes have done to the area's environment. At a minimum, the canals have changed saltwater-freshwater dynamics and caused dredged materials to be piled as fill on surrounding marshland.

Sensible study of these matters could lead to a plan that would rectify past damages, prevent future damages, while still allowing the benefits of the oil canals to be realized.

Oops. Did I say "benefits?" Nowhere in the 48-paragraph story does the reporter, Cain Burdeau, detail why the canals were built, how they're used or what the Louisiana economy would be like without them. And nowhere does he contrast the regulatory environment today with what it was when the canals were dug, leaving the impression that nothing's changed.

Burdeau doesn't even allow the oil industry to open its mouth until paragraph 41, and then it's a couple quick paragraphs clipped onto the end of the story. According to the story, the oil industry doesn't provide anything useful anyway; rather, it is just "'sucking out of the ground so much oil and gas."

Burdeau says the oil industry is dodging criticism because of a big PR campaign -- not because they provide a lot of benefit and have changed due to intensive regulation -- so he and others are launching their own PR campaign, based on the premise "If what we've done hasn't driven them out, let's blame them for something much bigger."

Still, when politicians in Washington or Louisiana talk about Katrina guilt they blame the Corps of Engineers, global warming and the French for building a city in low-lying swamps nearly 300 years ago — but not the oil industry.

"It's the elephant at the dinner table and nobody wants to say there's an elephant there," said Luke Fontana, a New Orleans lawyer for Save Our Wetlands, one of the state's oldest grassroots environmental groups that has fought the draining of swamps and oil company activity since the 1970s.

And

[The canals] also connect an overlooked set of dots in the Hurricane Katrina aftermath: The role that some say the oil industry played in the $135 billion disaster, the nation's costliest.

The article presents not a single meteorologist to reinforce its premise -- probably because they all would have scoffed at the idea. Katrina was just too big and too nastily positioned to be bothered much by man-made affairs.

It's classic journo-crap. Find a problem no one's paying much attention to, bleed deeply over it personally, and trump up a bigger charge against it, in the hopes you've finally found the silver bullet that will kill the bad guy.

Budreau isn't a journalist; he's a pimp to the lawyers of Save Our Wetlands. Write it straight, write it honest, or get a job with the Greenies.