The book, The Really Inconvenient Truths: Seven Environmental Catastrophes Liberals Don't Want You to Know About--Because They Helped Cause Them
, is described thusly on its inside flap:Al Gore is bad for the planet...
Talk about really inconvenient truths--that's one of the many you'll find in Iain Murray's rollicking exposé of environmental blowhards who waste more energy, endanger more species, and actually kill more people (yes, that's right) than the environmental villains they finger. Did you know that estrogen from birth control and "morning after" pills is causing male fish across America to develop female sex organs? Funny how "pro-choice" and "environmentalist" liberals never talk about that. Or how about this: the Live Earth concert to "save the planet" released more CO2 into the atmosphere than a fleet of 2,000 Humvees emit in a year? We hear a lot about AIDS in Africa, but the number one killer of children in much of Africa is malaria--and guess who was responsible for banning the pesticide that used to have malaria under control? Iain Murray, a sprightly conservative environmental analyst with a long record of skewering liberal hypocrisy, has dug up seven of the all-time great environmental catastrophes caused by the Left and exposed them in The Really Inconvenient Truths. Murray lays bare:
* How ethanol, the liberals' favorite fuel, is destroying the world's rainforests--and could cause global food shortages
* How Al Gore's hero Rachel Carson cost the lives of millions of Africans through her efforts to ban DDT
* How the environmentalists have covered up the polluting effects of contraceptive and chemical abortion drugs
* How the Endangered Species Act actually endangers species
* How Gore's vision of greater state control over the economy has already produced some of the greatest environmental disasters in history
All of us want a planet with clean air and clean water, vibrant forests, healthy animal populations, and glorious open space. But liberal environmentalists aren't the ones to deliver it. In fact, they've made the planet worse, while old-fashioned property rights, unpopular hunters, and the innovative engine of capitalism have made it better. The facts are all here, in a book that Al Gore would rather burn than read.
Today's column, "The Truths Shall Set You Free", condenses and summarizes the main premises of the book. Here's a pullquote:
About a year ago, I became convinced that the global warming debate was going the way of other environmental issues during the past 40 years. Dissenting voices were being silenced as America hurtled toward more laws, regulations, and bureaucratic control -- which, "informed" opinion makers insist, are the only solutions allowed to any problems global warming might bring.
Sadly, this pattern has repeated time and again on a wide array of environmental issues since the 1960s, when the lawyers of the nascent Environmental Defense Fund began lobbying for local, then national, and then international bans on the pesticide DDT. The results in virtually every case have been disastrous: significant losses of both liberty and prosperity and, in some cases, environmental and humanitarian catastrophe.
Murray duly notes the hypocrisy of the environmentalists when they remain silent in the face of massive pollution of our lakes and rivers by hormones – so severe in some cases that male fish are actually growing female sex organs.
And how did the hormones get into the water? Turns out the dirty little secret is that even the newest, most advanced sewage treatment plants don't remove the hormones excreted into the effluent stream by humans taking birth control and "morning after" pills. The discharge from the plant is bacteriologically clean enough to go into our rivers – but still contains the active hormones from the urine of everyone swallowing those pills.
So why don't the environmentalists raise a commotion about this intolerable situation? Could it be due to the fact that the loudest, most doctrinaire greenies are generally also the most militant proponents of sexual freedom and abortion on demand, so this particular brand of pollution is off-limits? Murray thinks that there may just be a connection.
UPDATE: National Review Online has just published another piece by Iain Murray, this one based on Chapter 3 of The Really Inconvenient Truths: Seven Environmental Catastrophes Liberals Don't Want You to Know About--Because They Helped Cause Them
. In "The Pill As Pollutant", he, in effect, charges the environmental movement with failing not only to act on this egregious pollutant, but also with deliberately sweeping it under the rug.Intersex is not some new perversion or a weird combination of science fiction and pornography. It is an unfortunate condition that is affecting freshwater fish all over the developed world. It occurs when fish of one sex also exhibit sexual characteristics of the other sex.
In 2004, for example, researchers on the Potomac River, downstream from Washington, D.C., found large-mouth bass that in most respects were males, but who had eggs in their sexual organs. Quite often when this happens to fish, they find themselves unable to reproduce. When it happens primarily to male fish, the fish population in general suffers.
The cause of intersexuality among fish, scientists speculate, is pollution in the water, particularly hormones. Why don’t we have more outcries about hormones, and campaigns to save the fish populations? Why aren’t environmentalists lobbying on Capitol Hill to keep these chemicals from being dumped into our rivers?
He points out that in the UK, at least the regulators recognize the problem, although they have so far failed to act upon it.
So government bureaucrats, the enforcement wing of liberal environmentalism, officially refuse to do anything about the contraceptive pollution issue in the United States. All this is in marked contrast to the United Kingdom’s Environment Agency, which at least has the decency to label the contraceptive pill a pollutant, even though it appears powerless or unwilling to do anything about it.
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