Daily Blurb #5

Is China Preparing For War With the United States?

Reports that China has developed the prototype of a stealth bomber is getting people in our Defense establishment hot under the collar – and for good reason.  While China has never approached anything near parity with the U.S. in military capacity, the fact that it is now developing its own military technology, sometimes well in advance of the United States, is certainly cause for concern.  There is of course an argument that the trade ties between the United States and the Republic of China and the mutually assured destruction of both economies should war erupt, would prevent a military confrontation.  But this is  no longer convincing.  One just has to read the the books of Niall Ferguson to understand how nations quickly abandon their own better economic instincts when it comes to wars of aggrandisement.

And China’s ambitions in the Western Pacific are very much about self-aggrandisment.  In August, in its annual report to Congress,  the U.S. Department of Defense claimed that China was ramping up investment in an array of areas including nuclear weapons, long-range missiles, submarines, aircraft carriers and cyber warfare. The military report said China was “already looking at contingencies beyond Taiwan” including through a longstanding project to build a far-reaching missile that could potentially strike US carriers deep in the Pacific.

It should come as little surprise.  The revitalization of the Middle Kingdom of the  Ming and Qing dynasties, wherein China reduced all the nations surrounding it to vassal states, is not merely a part of Chinese folklore, but a central tenet of  political discourse and national business strategy.  Is war likely tomorrow, or next year or even in ten years?  Perhaps not.  But we would be foolish to believe that it could never happen or that expenditures in military technology represent no threat to the global  supremacy of the U.S. military.

Obama’s Day of Reckoning Over Settlements

In a few days the Obama Administration will be tested on exactly how much of an obstacle it believes the 120 settlements in Samaria and Judea represent to the peace process.  This month, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is taking his campaign to the UN Security Council, where the Palestinians will introduce a draft resolution that would declare Israeli “settlements” in Jerusalem to be “illegal.” The draft demands a halt to all construction in the eastern half of Israel’s capital city.   The Palestinians understand exactly what this means:   “We drafted it using the same words that Secretary Clinton is using and so we don’t see why the U.S. would veto it,” Abbas said.

The Obama Administration, as of today, stands equivocal on how it intends to address this flagrant attack on the notion of a negotiated settlement. On December 29, Mark C. Toner, the State Department spokesman had this to say on the matter at a press conference in Foggy Bottom:

” QUESTION: Hi, Mark. I’m wondering about this report of the draft resolution that may go before the UN Security Council on – by supporters of Palestinians condemning the Israeli settlements. What would the U.S. response be to that?

MR. TONER: Well, every U.S. Administration has been for decades has been clear on this. We don’t accept the legitimacy of continued settlement activity, and in fact, we believe continued expansion is corrosive to peace efforts, as well as to Israel’s future. We believe, fundamentally, that direct negotiations are the only path through which the parties will ultimately reach the framework agreement that is our goal, our mutual goal. And final status issues can only be resolved through negotiations between the parties and not by recourse to the UN Security Council, so we’ve consistently opposed any attempt to take these kinds of issues to the Council, because we believe that these kinds of efforts don’t move us any closer to our goal, which is of two states living side by side in peace and security.

QUESTION: Would the U.S. go so far as to use its veto power?

MR. TONER: Again, it’s a hypothetical at this point, Cami, but I think I made our position pretty clear. Any more questions?

This has never been a “hypothetical” for any other U.S. Administration and the government’s position on the matter is far from clear.   One-sided U.N. resolutions against Israel have ALWAYS been vetoed by the U.S. at the United Nations.   The failure of the Obama Administration to signal its intentions regarding such a draft resolution is truly a first and a worrying development.

Pundits in Washington and New York are now speculating about what any abstention on the part of the United States could mean for  Israel and the Middle East.  Some have suggested that it will confirm what many for some time have considered the truth – that the Obama Administration’s intends to become  the first openly hostile Administration to the Jewish state.  I would go further.  It would open the gates to the next Middle East war, encouraging Israel’s enemies to believe that it has been abandoned by its main diplomatic champion and that open season has been declared.

The Administration’s insistence on settlement freezes as preconditions to negotiations has proven rash as the Palestinians and their Arab allies have used it to craftily drive a wedge between Israel and its American ally.  If Obama wants to prove he cares more about peace in the Middle East than he does about punishing Israel for its settlement policies, then he must immediately signal to the Arab world that his country will not stand idly by while Israel is made the fall guy for his Administration’s own diplomatic failures and mistakes.   That would be the mature and responsible approach.  But I wouldn’t count on it.

Meet Fred Singer

On Wednesday night , January 5 in Bel Air,  AFA presented  Fred Singer, the renown and ebullient climatologist who has spent the past 30 years debunking anthropogenic global warming and transforming skepticism on that subject into a high art.   Singer’s book Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Years and the unmatched research from his own organization, the Nongovernmental International  Panel on Climate Change ( NIPCC) which produced the 850 page study  Climate Change Reconsidered, form the basis of  the scientific response to the deeply flawed and highly politicized work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations agency whose four reports over the past 19 years have been used to sound the clarion call for cutting global carbon emissions.

Singer, an avuncular and engaging speaker with a stentorian voice, described how the global warming debate gained world wide traction as environmentalists came to dominate world forums on issues of economic development.   Whereas he believes there is abundant evidence for increases in world temperatures over the past 150 years,  he stated that the evidence that man has substantially contributed to that warming is still very much in contention and should be debated.  The more likely explanation, he said, is that we are now in the midst of a global warming cycle that repeats every 400 or so years and has much more to do with solar activity than with anything humans do or don’t do on Earth.

It was a powerful presentation, delivered  with a wry sense of humor and a warmth that belied  Dr. Singer’s reputation as a curmudgeon.  I highly recommend Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Years and hope to bring Dr. Singer back  to Los Angeles in June for our next summer conference Big Footprint: Is Green the New Tyranny?

New Environmental Video Hints at the Truth

Over the past few days a short environmental film/advertisement, presented as a comedy, has raged through the Internet, suggesting that anyone who opposes emission controls should be eliminated.

My first reaction to this footage was that it was a satire by a group that actually opposes green movement advocacy.

I was wrong.

The film was produced by the London based environmental group 10:10, whose mission is “to unite every sector of society behind one simple idea – cutting our carbon by 10% a year starting now”

After an enormous backlash, 10: 10 pulled the video and issued an apology to its membership.

Unfortunately, that was not very satisfying. For even if tongue-in-cheek, the very idea that those who oppose green policies should be eliminated, leaves echoes of a fascist predilection for quelling dissent- an impression green movement advocates should wish to avoid at all costs.

The ad is somewhat reminiscent of Audi ad broadcast during the Super Bowl in January. Back then I commented on the fact that while the ad might have also been tongue-in-cheek, there was a seriousness conveyed about the green movement’s determination to change the way we think, feel and relate to the environment – and it was not beyond possibility that one day draconian measures would be adopted to enforce compliance with green thinking.

There is a sense that all is not well within the environmental movement. Al Gore’s tone, following repeated resistance to his advocacy for Cap and Trade legislation, has become hectoring. James Hansen, the Director of NOAA, one of the prime proponents of anthropogenic global warming cause, has been reduced to a characature of a green movement advocate, so silly and shrill have become his pronouncements. Polls reveal that more and more Americans are turning their backs on the greens, whose agenda they have begun to realize may not be as much to protect the environment, as to shackle humanity.

So this new environmental video may be hinting at an increasing level of desperation.. And, of course, we all know where such desperation can lead.

In Defense of British Petroluem

Is it any wonder that the oil conglomerate British Petroleum is not winning any popularity contests lately?  After all, this is the moment that our chattering classes have been eagerly anticipating for decades  – the whale-like oil companies finally surfacing and exposing a vulnerable flank to a host of upraised harpoons.  So successful has the media mauling and demonization of the corporate giant been, that you would think the company is the very re-incarnation of the Creature from the Black Lagoon, determined to blacken our seas and stain our sands with its slimy, viscous poison.

So anyone trying to build a case for the London-based multinational during its agonizing and protracted auto de fé, does not have an enviable task.  After all, who really wants to speak a good word about a company that has facilitated the worst oil spill of the past 40 years –  an episode that may be on its way to becoming the most calamitous man made environmental disaster in history?

Well, frankly, I do.

Because British Petroleum, whether appreciated today or not, has been one of the singularly great success stories of the world’s entrepreneurial classes, building an almost unparalleled  record of success as a spearhead of Western civilization.  It has brought wealth and prosperity, not simply to the West, but to those countries where it has located its operations and created models for how corporations can overcome institutional obstacles.  It has shown how an indomitable spirit , accompanied by bold vision can achieve results that those who complain endlessly about corporate rapaciousness, only dream about.

From its founding in 1901 by William Knox D’Arcy, and then through the skilful leadership of Charles Greenway and his successor John Cadmon, the Anglo- Persian Oil Company, (renamed Anglo-Iranian Oil in 1935 and then again British Petroleum in 1953) has undertaken exploration of a vital world energy source in countries largely hostile to either exploration or development.

We shouldn’t forget that the discovery of oil in Persia in the early years of the 20^th Century did not occur after some Oriental counterpart of Jed Clampett, shooting buck skin on a desert sand dune, inexplicably struck it rich.  It took nearly a decade of painstaking and often fruitless exploration  before oil was discovered – and with those efforts  initially producing only pitiful returns.   That it eventually succeeded so well, is testament not just to the vision and acumen of corporate leaders, but the drive of the West to expand. For with that expansion was carried a value system that came to dominate the world and  spread the bounty and promise of Western civilization.

Of course even the mere mention of the name of “Anglo Persian Oil” can arouse the most acerbic vitriol from the left, who regard the fact that Europeans once sought to develop and exploit the Persian oil fields, as a badge of colonial shame.  Yet, whatever you want to say about the men who greedily eyed profits in the Persian Gulf, there can be no question that their undertakings had a transformative impact on the world, raising living standards wherever they went and making possible important advances in health, transportation and communications.

Oil’s less benevolent impact on our world  –  the mark of environmental degradation- might stand as its deepest indictment.  But the industry, it should be remembered, did not produce the demand itself; it simply responded to it.  As Western technology developed and prosperity accelerated, oil, replacing coal, became a vital piece in achieving progress in almost all fields of human endeavor.  That our society has now identified oil as a major pollutant and as a threat to our long term survival, should not be thrown in the faces of companies such as BP.  They are not responsible for inventing our luxuries.  They only help to make them move.

Does any of this excuse BP from its responsibilities to facilitate the containment and clean up of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico?.  Of course not.  But the company does not deserve to stand accused as a scourge of humanity, to be hounded out of business for the obscene presumption of seeking to take advantage of our desperate need for a reliable source of energy.

Perhaps President Obama, in his apparently insatiable need to lacerate and lecture BP, should then consider something pertinent about his own past:  Neither Kenya , Indonesia nor Hawaii, all places that figure prominently in his curriculum vitae, would have produced societies capable of giving either him or his father the education and opportunities they had, without the  participation and even leadership of companies such as BP.

Lets hope that the endless gushing in the Gulf ends soon.  But lets also hope that the same endless anti-corporate gushing in Washington, offering a different, but no less contaminating level of pollution, ends even sooner.

The British Election in Red, Blue, Green and Yellow

As the British  national election entered its final days, it was interesting to watch the three candidates fall over themselves to prove to the British constituency their multicultural credentials.   Prime Minster Gordon Brown,  Conservative Party leader  David Cameron and Liberal Democrat Nick Clegg consistently pounded home the message  on the hustings that only they are capable of leading the nation to a safer, more environmentally friendly , culturally open future.   Each one insisted that only they will provide  strong leadership and statesmanship, worthy of an occupant of 10 Downing Street.

The whole thing is a bit of a laugh.  Britain’s greatest problems have little to do with the  floundering economy, environmental degradation nor the absence of charismatic leadership.   They are almost exclusively tied to the collapse of British identity.  The flood of immigrants pouring  into the country over the past two decades, particularly after Britain’s became a signatory to the 1999 Treaty of Rome, has opened the doors  to hundreds of thousands of foreign laborers, who, unlike in the United States, are in the country legally.

The foreign workers – a large percentage from Eastern European countries alone, take low paying jobs that British citizens no longer want themselves. Many are quite open about the perquisites of working in the U.K. – particularly the availability of free health services.  Not many wish to remain permanently in the country and become English citizens.

And so it is that  one can walk into an English pub, as I did two summers ago, in the heart of the British countryside and discover the waitresses to be Polish, the cook  Iranian and the owner Pakistani.   If you spend some time listening to the conversation of the patrons you will hear a veritable patois of foreign languages spoken.

The governing elites do not see this  as any real problem.  They fail to appreciate the urgency of upholding British identity and protecting against its erosion by immigrants seeking the benefits of  the English welfare system, without any intention of  permanently remaining in the country.

There should be very little surprise then that prime minister Gordon Brown, in an unguarded moment, could reflexively label a 66 -year-old woman, questioning him about immigration, as ” a bigot.”    For Brown and others in his government, the ideal of England as a heterogeneous nation which subscribes to common values and ideals is now passe and irrelevant.   He, much like  his opponents Cameron and Clegg, have bought into the notion of England as a country which should willingly absorb foreign influences and ideas in order to strengthen its new multicultural order.

Of course Britain is in a bit of a fix about the whole issue.  The Schengen Plan of the European Union, to which England is an enthusiastic signatory, mandates that borders to be opened to  the workforces of other European nations.  This was the final nail in the coffin for the Commonwealth, which once extended the same privilege to the citizens of the former British Empire.   But it has also seen, over the past decade, a death blow to British cultural identity, as  European immigrants, seeking better paying jobs and working conditions, enroll their children in schools without an ability to even speak English and take up hospital beds that were once reserved for those actually born in the country.

Many British politicians, among them the three who fought the election, now seem to accept that the right to free movement is as much a humanizing force in the world as the right to free speech or the principle of free trade.  This is the new Europe – where such universal freedoms and privileges trump national identity and cohesion.   And so it is natural that  Brown could view Gillian Duffy’s words as bigoted.  The hush- hush nature of the discussion casts all who doubt the necessity of open borders as outside the pale of discussion.

And its not just the governing classes who are gung-ho about immigration. In 2006, the Trade Union Congress, concluded in a report:

“Host countries gain from migration. It is possible to debate the size of these gains, but the important point for British debates is that immigration does not have a negative impact: overall levels of employment and wages are slightly higher as a result of immigration, and migrant workers pay more in taxes than the value of the public services they receive. When studied at the level of the country as a whole, the old accusations of the extreme right, that immigrants take native workers’ jobs or are a drain on the welfare state, are as false as they have ever been.”

It is  also perplexing  is that one  couldn’t slide a piece of paper between the three candidates’ environmental policies.  So  committed are these parties to combating global warming and saving the planet from human degradation that you did not hear a word from anybody that the end -is-nigh warning from environmentalists might be somewhat inflated.  Subscription to doomsday scenarios remained strong, for much like the insistence upon open borders among the British elites, no one dared challenge this hallowed trope.

As of this writing it looks as though the Tories in Red  have defeated  Labor in Blue – even if  the resulting  hung parliament may soon  necessitate new elections.   But for a contest painted in multicultural hues, overlaid with a patina of green and with the respective candidates terrified of confronting the real issues,  the whole mess seems  to have taken on a disturbing  shade of yellow.

The World’s Raging Gushers

The new immigration law in Arizona, the Greek bail out plan and the attempt to control the Louisiana oil spill all seem to share at least one thing in common.  They are all desperate measures to plug raging gushers – human, financial and environmental – which threaten to swamp the lives and economies of millions of people in the West.

Lets examine each in turn.

Arizona

In Arizona, Governor Jan Brewer signed Senate Bill 1070 with the intent of addressing a problem that the Federal government has proved itself singularly incompetent to handle.   For 20 years the Arizona border has been a porous sieve, with tens of thousands of Hispanics finding a way to avoid border patrols and surveillance from federal authorities.  With the tightening of border controls in California and Texas, the illegal  immigration rush has been funneled into the two desert states of Arizona and New Mexico, which have traditionally proven much harder to police.  A Department of Homeland Security high tech fence has not worked out and is now in hiatus pending a review.   Washington D.C., meanwhile, has engaged in a heated debate over the way of dealing with the status of illegal immigrants already in the United States.  But it is doing nothing to address the means of circumventing their entry.

The furor that has greeted Senate Bill 1070 wasn’t hard to predict.  Multi-culturalists, amnesty devotees, civil rights advocates and those generally not so hot on the federal government’s exercise of sovereign rights, have described the legislation as akin to a Nuremberg law.  That idea, of course , is preposterous.   The Nuremberg Laws were Nazi racial edicts passed in 1935 against legitimate German citizens.  SB1070 only targets those who have already broken American law and are not citizens. Nor does it target race or ethnic groups.

The one thing that has so many people exercised is this amendment to the wording of  Sec. 2. Title 11, chapter 7 is:

” A LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICER, WITHOUT A WARRANT, MAY ARREST A PERSON IF THE OFFICER HAS PROBABLE CAUSE TO BELIEVE THAT THE PERSON HAS COMMITTED  ANY PUBLIC OFFENSE THAT MAKES THE PERSON REMOVABLE FROM THE UNITED STATES”

The apparent ability of Arizona’s police force to arrest anyone on a mere suspicion that they are illegal will transform Arizona, into, you guessed it, a police state.   But the law does not breach any of the 4^th Amendment prohibitions against illegal searches and seizures. Arizona police are prohibited from racially profiling or stopping anybody merely because of appearance or ethnicity.  They may only  stop someone whom they suspect of either having committed a crime or misdemeanor or of being in the process of doing so.   Lest we forget, being in the United States without proper authorization or identification such as a passport and visa  or a driver’s license, is such a federal misdemeanor.   In reality, SB1070 does nothing to the law but seek to enforce it,  a responsibility the federal government has abrogated.

Greece

The Greek bail out plan announced this week, in which the International Monetary Fund will join with many of the larger European countries in supporting the collapsing Greek economy, was also an attempt to stave off a disaster.    The Greeks have for months teetered on the edge of default on their foreign loans, the prospect of which I explored in the my piece A Greek Tragedy.

The bail out plan rocked markets in Spain and Portugal, threatening to lower their bond ratings.  The drop in investor confidence has rightfully been called a  contagion which  could well spread to many of the smaller and more vulnerable European  economies, such as Italy and Ireland (who, together with Spain, Portugal and Greece, make up the colorful European acronym ” PIIGS”).  The outcome for the Euro’s stability could be devastating as the larger countries are forced to contribute  substantial amounts of their  GDP to shore up  their less robust fellow EU’ers to the south.

Germany plays a pivotal role in all of this and in my previous article, I identified its growing resistance to be being drawn into the vortex of a general European collapse.

But there is an interesting flip side to these developments.  The weakening Euro has made German imports in the United States and Asia cheaper, which is becoming something of a boon to German industry.   One other development, not spoken about too openly these days, is the prospect of a renewed German domination of Europe.  With all the smaller countries of Europe helplessly dependent on German largess, the economic behemoth to the north will exert, by force if necessity, an increasingly controlling influence on monetary policy and financial regulation in those countries.

Although the Germany of 2010 is not the Germany of  1940 and no one is accusing the Germans of a potential political dictatorship, we cannot evade the truth that financial power is often the lever used to exert political power, and the prospects for one country coming to totally dominate that area of the world, cannot be discounted as a fantasy.

Louisiana

You would think poor old Louisiana had had enough trauma to last at least a century.   But then along comes the oil spill of the decade as a burning rig off  Venice, LA, leaves 11 men missing, (presumed dead) and threatens an environmental catastrophe not witnessed since the Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska in 1989.

The extraordinary irony of this occurrence is that it happened in the wake of the Obama administration’s decision ( see my piece Surprise! Off Shore Drilling May Not  Be Just a Conservative Passion)  to relax the moratorium on off- shore drilling in Virginia and in other select areas.  The decision came as increasing pressure had mounted on the administration to allow the United States to develop its own oil resources instead of being held at the mercy of the oil cartels in the Middle East and Latin America.

All of that will now be put on hold as environmentalists launch a vigorous “you see” campaign to demonstrate how foolish such an idea would be.   They will paint a bleak future in which no beach in the world will offer water pure enough to allow children to swim safely and drinking water would affected by  oil seepage into water tables.

But lets talk a little common sense, please.   The likelihood of a spill of this nature with any regularity, is highly remote.  The causes of the freak explosion on the Transocean rig are unknown and it is simply too early to suggest that the rig demonstrates the inherent  danger of oil rigs or that all rigs will result in absolute  environmental degradation.  The noise emerging from the environmentalists reminds me of the Three Mile Island fiasco in 1979, when our entire nuclear industry was stopped in its tracks without any evidence at all  that the partial  reactor meltdown in Pennsylvania had  had  any permanent affect on humans in the area.

Such intemperate environmentalist scare tactics neutered the nuclear industry and  set us on a course of energy dependence which, as we well know, has had far reaching consequences.

Conclusion

None of these problems are at all simple to resolve.   Gushers are never too amenable to easy fixes and plugs.   But lets not forget that these are human problems, to which humans will, in their ingenious way, apply human solutions.  The jury should therefore not be called and there should be no rush to judgment on SB1070 , the Euro meltdown  or the Louisiana oil spill, until all the evidence is actually in and we can subject it all to reasoned, discriminating analysis.

Earth Day as Global Guilt Fest

There are plenty of people around today who can tell you about the first Earth Day, held on April 22, 1970.   They are in their late 50s and early 60s  now, but back then they were students, part of the Woodstock Generation and eager to find a cause to which to attach themselves.   In the midst of the Vietnam War, in which defoliants such as Agent Orange were used to strip away forests concealing enemy combatants and a  massive oil spill had contaminated the Southern California coastline, the idea of celebrating the Earth and its natural bounty seemed a redeeming response to human despoliation.

But there was, surprisingly, already an  “Earth Day” in existence in 1970 that had been enthusiastically celebrated for close to 100 years.  Arbor Day had been instituted in 1872 in Nebraska by Julius Morton, a Michigan transplant, who felt that the planting of trees could bring life again to the Great Plains.  He believed that tree planting was “no more than a desire to pay a just debt to our forefathers who had cultivated trees before us.”  Tree husbandry was also an expression of the human impulse to increase the beauty of the land, “to endeavor to make the world lovely because he has been a dweller on it.” On the very first Arbor Day alone, one million trees were planted.

You would hardly know it, but National Arbor Day is still around and is organized and coordinated by the non-profit organization Arbor Day Foundation, whose sole mission is to support the planting and maintenance of trees.  It may seem decidedly uncool and retrograde to support such a moribund notion, but in fact today’s environmentalists could learn a great deal from the arborists.  They could learn that all global warming could be dealt with through a massive reafforestation program around the world.  They could be guided by the goodwill and genuine level of cooperation between arborists.   And they could absorb that love for nature, rather than contempt for humanity, should be the ultimate guiding principle of any environmental movement.

Because contempt for humanity and censure  for its transgressions are at the core of today’s environmental movement.  Global warming hysteria has clearly taken aim at human incompetence in managing the environment.  Animal rights organizations regularly decry the hubris of human beings who consider themselves as in some way superior to the animal kingdom;  And supporters of such outré international policy platforms as Agenda 21 regularly dismiss  inconvenient notions such as individual property rights, as an interference in their quest to save the planet.

In contrast, National Arbor Day is pro-human and focuses on human productivity and hope for the future.   ”The only stand we take,” says Mark Derowitsch of the Arbor Day Foundation, “is that it’s a great thing to plant trees.” Arbor Day does not require nor ask for government intervention, regulation, restriction or taxation.  All it calls for is publicly spirited individuals and organizations to plant trees. “Anyone can plant a tree,” says Derowitsch. “You get your hands dirty and make a huge difference in the world.”

Is it any wonder that many people who once called themselves environmentalists are now loathe to do so because of that term’s negative connotations?    In 1990, according to an ABC News/Gallup survey series, 75 percent of Americans surveyed  said they considered themselves to be environmentalists.    But those  numbers have been slowly reversing over the last decade.  As of 2008 (the most recent year the question was asked), only 41 percent of Americans identified themselves as environmentalists, with 58 percent now saying they do not.

And Gallup’s annual environmental survey also finds the public now favors economic growth over environmental protection by a 53-38 margin. For most of the last 25 years, even during previous recessions, the public favored the environment over the economy by as much as a two-to-one margin.  That trend is now reversing itself  as more and more citizens begin to understand that absurd environmental moratoria are making it impossible to compete with countries that are not so hindered.  Meanwhile, opinion in favor of increased oil and gas exploration is surging, just as is the demand for nuclear power as a safe, cheap and clean alternative to fossil fuels.

Perhaps this is all because the militancy of the environmental movement has turned people against it as they increasingly realize that such self aggrandizing organizations as  Sierra Club, World Wildlife Fund, National Defense Resources Council and Environmental Defense Fund have transformed  from grass roots advocacy institutions into multimillion dollar fund raising franchises, with radical political agendas which stray far from their original mission of environmental protection.

That is not to mention the widespread realization of the alarming religious overtones which have crept into environmental language.  In 1990, the Earth Day Foundation introduced The Equinoctial Earth Day, celebrated on the March equinox (around March 20) to mark the precise moment of astronomical mid-spring in the Northern Hemisphere, and of astronomical mid-autumn in the Southern Hemisphere.   Solstice festivals are pagan in origin, going back to the earliest days of civilization.   In 1992, Maurice Strong, the Secretary-General of the Earth Conference, hinted at the overtly religious agenda proposed for a future Earth Charter( 2000), when in his opening address to the Rio delegates he said, “It is the responsibility of each human being today to choose between the force of darkness and the force of light…….We must therefore transform our attitudes and adopt a renewed respect for the superior laws of Divine Nature.”  Strong finished with unanimous applause from the crowd.

In anticipation of the conference, his wife, Hanne Strong, held a three-week vigil with Wisdomkeepers, a group of “global transformationalists.” Through round-the-clock sacred fire, drumbeat, and meditation, the group helped hold the “energy pattern” for the duration of the summit.

As if to prove the wild eyed ambition of  this New Age millenarianism, authors of the Earth Charter, an environmental manifesto promulgated at a UNESCO meeting held in Paris in March, 2000 commissioned the building of The Ark of Hope , a latter day replica of the Ark of the Covenant as a place of refuge for the Earth Charter document.   The Ark was later brought on foot to New York City from Vermont (just as the Ancient Israelites had once carried their Ark) and exhibited at the United Nations.

Is it any wonder that Strong would therefore comment after the promulgation of the Earth Charter:  “The real goal of the Earth Charter is that it will in fact become like the Ten Commandments?”

Or that Mikhail Gorbachev, one of the  world’s leading proponents of sustainability could state: “ Do not do unto the environment of others what you do not want done to your own environment….My hope is that this Charter will be a kind of Ten Commandments, a ‘Sermon on the Mount’, that provides a guide for human behavior toward the environment in the next century?”

In preparation for AFA’s The Green Movement Seminar in February, 2010,  all of the speakers explained to me that they must regularly qualify themselves as sincere supporters of  clean air and pure water before launching into any jeremiad against the environmental movement.   This is largely a result of the guilt laid upon our society by environmentalists/ecologists over the past 40 years, who insist that mankind is preternaturally oriented towards environmental degradation.

With such a sad record of negativism, there should be little wonder that this year’s Earth Day, on the 40th  anniversary of that seminal event, has passed by with a whisper, not a bang.   Perhaps it is because Americans are beginning to understand that the world is not quite  as grim a place as the Earth Day promoters would have us believe.  Or that our future is indeed tethered to an environment that is put to humanity’s use and better purposes and not the other way around.

To Badger Hunters Everywhere: We Will Rock You

You can’t get a creature much cuter than a badger.  And an English badger is a cut above the rest.   Celebrated and anthropomorphized in the works of C.S. Lewis, Kenneth Grahame, Beatrix Potter and Roald Dahl, the badger is about as British an animal as you might want, even if every continent sports its own variety.

It shouldn’t be much of a surprise then, that a new movement has arisen in England and Wales to defend the badger from unwanted culling.   Led by Brian May,  guitarist of the legendary U.K. rock band Queen, this movement calls for an end to a government  mandated program of curtailing badger populations, which is now proposed for the highlands of Wales.  The reason?   Badgers, who carry tuberculosis without harm to themselves, urinate and salivate on cattle grazing fields causing Welsh cattle to ingest contaminated grass.  The contraction of bovine TB is fatal to the cattle, necessitating trips to the slaughterhouse.  In the past several years, thousands of heads of  Welsh cattle have been  put down once seized with the disease.

The solution would seem to be a no brainer, right?  Get rid of the badgers.  That might have been appropriate in the 1980s when a devastating source of trichinellosis affected Russian badgers and cattle and later bovine TB which affected English farms.  The answer of English authorities then was a program of gassing which effectively ended the plague.

But that was so 1980s.   Since then there has been a widespread growth of English acceptance of the value of the badger and over 60 associations have  sprung up around the country to lobby for their protection.  Spurred by these groups,  the 1992 Protection of Badgers Act made it an offense to kill, injure or take a badger, or to damage or interfere with its lair ( known as a sett) unless a license is obtained from a statutory authority.  An exemption that allowed fox hunters to loosely block setts to prevent chased foxes escaping into them, was brought to an end with the passage of the 2004 Hunting Act.

Desperate to save their farms from increasing danger, the Welsh farmers are urging  a new cull of 1,000 head of badgers to eliminate the threat.  Mr. May is having none of it.  An animal lover who maintains a menagerie for sick animals at his 19th Century mansion,  May insists that the animals be inoculated rather than killed.  The farmers argue the difficulties involved in such inoculation ( for instance, it is not as if the badgers will line up at the local veterinarian for their shot).

The dispute is emblematic of a struggle being waged across the Western world between animal liberationists and those whose livelihood is dependent on animal  husbandry.   As I wrote in last week’s piece,  How Would You Like Your Eggs?, people like the Welsh farmers win little sympathy from activists who believe that the world’s priorities rest with conserving the animal kingdom whatever the cost to human beings.    And so rich rock stars like May will pump hundreds of thousands of pounds of their own money into animal rights campaigns in an effort to harness support for  their pet projects, indifferent to how this might affect the livelihoods of thousands of farmers.

The outrage of  the farmers is palpable.    In a recent  Wall Street Journal article Brian Walters, the vice-president of the Farmer’s Union of Wales stated:

” It is completely galling for those who have to live with the misery and financial losses caused by TB to see a millionaire rock star dropping in to talk about the proposed cullwhen he has no idea of the desperate need to control this disease.”

Christianne Glossop, chief veterinary officer of Wales added before the hearings :

” By Day Two,  Brian May had gone back to wherever he lives in the English home counties and here we are in Wales, and we still have TB.”

May, himself, is unapologetic.  In the same Wall Street Journal article he is quoted as expressing astonishment at the furor:

” Why do we as a species think we have the right to exterminate another animal species?”

In those few words May encapsulates the nub of the dispute.   The rampant and growing belief that humans are like all other animals on earth, with no greater claim to use of the earth’s resources,  is in direct conflict with the notion of human exceptionalism – that human destiny is to control the planet and utilize its resources for the benefit of mankind.  The former kind of thinking can only lead to a further collapse in moral values, to an attack on the protection and valuation of human life and the diminution of the  willingness to make environmental compromises in the event of an environmental crisis which affects the health and welfare of human beings.

No one , of course, is talking about exterminating badgers.  But the animal liberationists among us know a crusade when they see one, and will stop at nothing, even the destruction of a local farm economy, to enforce their world view on their fellow countrymen. We will rock you, indeed.

How Would You Like Your Eggs?

A few months ago, during  heavy rains in Los Angeles, I was at my gym, where televisions had recently been installed for the entertainment of  the elliptical users.  On this particular morning, I looked around the gym and noticed that all motion had virtually ceased.  Everyone seemed to be consumed with a drama that was playing out on the screens.   A mottled German shepherd was swimming for his life in the swollen Los Angeles River.  For an hour and a half, while I was in the gym (and, apparently, for a long time beyond) , the drama played out, with a helicopter eventually lowering a fireman into the river,  who took hold of the dog and whisked him to safety.

Just another day on Los Angeles television, I thought, where  frivolity regularly intersects with irrelevance.  But as the day wore on and other tragedies, such as a tree which collapsed on a home in Kern County killing a young boy asleep in his bed, barely got any coverage, I became deeply concerned.  How is it that abused animals or those in distress receive so much more sympathetic attention from our media than humans in the same perilous condition?

Its a question that demands an answer and one made particularly relevant for me by  a piece in the Wall Street Journal on Thursday, April 8 in which egg farmers are seen to be striking back against those animal rights organizations seeking to significantly hinder their businesses.  Egg farming  and its impact on the lives of chickens, came into the spotlight in California in the lead up to the 2008  federal election when animal rights organizations, led by the Humane Society, successfully fought for the passage of Proposition 2.  The Proposition, then known as the California Prevention to Farm Animal Cruelty Act, mandated that calves raised for veal, egg-laying hens and pregnant pigs be confined only in ways that allow these animals to lie down, stand up, fully extend their limbs or turn around freely.  Misdemeanor charges  and fines of up to $1,000 would be leveled against violators.

What was astonishing about the Proposition’s success was the range of support it received from across the spectrum of California society – from environmentalists to religious groups to political organizations, who would usually have nothing to do with such a matter.  The overwhelming majority of Californians (63%), who eventually approved the proposition were no doubt moved and influenced by videos of chickens being trampled  in close quarters or sometimes pecked to death by rivals.  This was no way for a chicken to live a dignified life.

Most voters of course did not know that Proposition 2′s passage  would mean higher prices for eggs and veal, would  jeopardize food safety and public health, and wipe out Californians’ access to locally grown, fresh eggs.

What they also didn’t know is that the principal sponsor of Proposition 2, The Humane Society of the United States,( HSUS) is a cash rich organization pledged, not only to making life easier for farm animals, but to changing our whole relationship to the animal kingdom.  Their campaign is  not only  to transform us into vegetarians, but also prohibit all human domestication of animals and animal husbandry.  HSUS, along with such organizations as PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals)  and Farm Sanctuary have adopted a one- step -at- a-time strategy intended to undermine the economic and cultural foundations for the domestication and use of  animals for human purposes – in essence destroying any notion that there is a separation in moral stature between humans and animals and elevating animal rights to the level of human rights.

They are achieving their incremental strategy through the promotion of legislation, voter initiatives and intense lobbying.  They file law suits, many of them frivolous and vexatious.  And they publish video or photographic exposes -some real and some faked, that serve as the basis of  official investigations and PR campaigns.  The  commanding victory in California is the leading edge of this campaign and has become  a rallying cry for animal liberationists throughout the land.

All of it is designed, not to promote animal welfare – which is far from a principal concern – but rather to impede the functioning of the animal using industries, damaging their profitability and undermining their public legitimacy.

Flush with cash, these  liberationists have few fears about the mounting opposition to their tactics.  Said Wayne Pacelle, HSUS President at a press conference on Wednesday:  “People know what happened in California and they know it can happen again and again.  They know that no group has passed more ballot measures than we have.  They know we have a focused strategy.  They know we have a budget of $150 million a year.  And they know we’re ready for a fight.”

The Agribusiness Industry has seen what is happening and is fighting back.  Organizations in Kansas and Missouri have launched a full throttle campaign against the Humane Society.  On Thursday, April 8, Kansas Farm Bureau President Steve Baccus wrote in a letter to Bank of AmericaCorp., one of the Humane Society’s largest corporate sponsors, that “HSUS seeks to remove meat from our dinner tables,  leather goods from our closets, animals from zoos and circuses and eventually pets from our homes.”

The reach of the animal rights movement is deep and pervasive and should not be ignored.   Evidence of it was recently offered by Judge J. Thompson who presided over a Los Angeles District court case in which Glynn Johnson, a former Los Angeles County Assistant Fire Chief, was sentenced to 90 days in jail for beating a puppy with such violence that the dog need to be euthanized.   Judge Thompson stated that in his 22 years on the bench, not even the death of children had inflamed the level of rage and vitriol he had seen leveled at the accused.

Look soon for the Humane Society to take that one to the bank as well,  adding another trophy in its quest to transform our country from an animal loving one, into a society where people not only fear to touch animals, but are terrified of  any attempt to domesticate them.

Surprise! Drilling May Be More Than a Conservative Passion

Those who were around for the Republican Convention in September 2008  will recall some of  its more interesting highlights.  First there was the electrifying acceptance speech by the then politically unknown Sarah Palin.   Then there was the feisty, no holds barred address by Rudi Guiliani (remember  “Change is not a destination, just as hope is not a strategy?”)

But by far the most interesting attraction of that convention for me was the sound of the convention members themselves roaring, ” drill, baby, drill,”  grafting an awkward sexual  innuendo onto an otherwise staid policy platform.

It was of course believed back then that Democrats were perennially and viciously opposed to any off -shore drilling and that the efforts  for developing the vast stores of oil wealth lying beneath the continental shelfs  of California, Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico would be stymied by Democrats for years into the future.

Hence the rather suggestive Republican mantra.

So you can imagine the surprise of many Democrats when Barack Obama announced on March 31 that a 20 year old federal moratorium that has limited drilling along coastal areas other than the Gulf of Mexico would be lifted.  The new plan, announced by the Secretary of the Interior, allows new oil drilling off Virginia’s shoreline and considers it for a large chunk of the Atlantic seaboard as well.

In addition, the Interior Department will forge ahead with drilling  platforms in the eastern Gulf of Mexico if Congress allows that moratorium to expire.   It will also  allow exploration along the south Atlantic and mid- Atlantic Outer Continental Shelf “to support energy planning” — a step toward potential leasing.

Environmentalists, as you might expect, are writhing in apoplexy about this assault on a long held liberal orthodoxy.

David Helvrag, the President  of the environmental group Blue Marine Foundation opined in the Los Angeles Times on Thursday:

” Offshore drilling has done little to wean us from Middle Eastern oil. And with less than 5% of our domestic oil located offshore, more ocean drilling won’t help now either. The only real way to quit relying on foreign oil is to wean ourselves from oil, and that’s something our leaders are unlikely to fully embrace until we’ve tapped that last reserve of sweet crude.”

Ah, there it is -  the standard trope of the NOAAC ( No Oil At Any Cost) crowd – that only the elimination of fossil fuels as an energy source will relieve us of that triple headed monster -  our dependence on Middle East oil, the  pollution of our oceans and the perils of  global warming.

It is a neat cure all, but like many simple minded solutions,  almost totally falacious.

The United States is presently importing 70 percent of the oil we use at a cost of about $700 billion per year paid to foreign countries, some of which could be secretly pledged to our destruction .

To get an idea of what we are losing daily in not developing our own extraordinary off shore resources try and swallow these statistics:   We pay $50 million every day to Russia, $109 million to Saudi Arabia and $150 million to Venezuela.

At this rate, that kind of wealth transfer will  give our enemies the financial clout, in only five years, to finance the take over  of the combined $18 trillion worth of the Fortune 500.

This is when we possess an estimated worth of $60 trillion in off shore oil  and natural gas  deposits that our moratoria, until now at least, will not allow us to touch.

Would all  this be enough to wean us off our foreign oil dependency?  Not immediately perhaps.   But it might offer something even better – a level of domestic  competitiveness that will drive the OPEC controlled price of foreign oil down.

Also forgotten,  is that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge’s oil deposits contain one of the greatest areas for drilling in the world with an estimated 60 billion barrels of oil buried beneath its surface.  Those who think that oil production will ruin a pristine natural environment there simply don’t know the facts.  For the area sought to be drilled is only a 2,000 square area adjacent to the coast, which occupies just 2%  of the total area of the ANWR.   Nor is it a true wildlife habitat or a pristine forested areas at all, but barren, windswept tundra.

The argument that oil development will lead to the despoliation of the environment is also mostly nonsense.  Oil exploration and extraction has advanced to such a high level of sophistication in the past forty years that drilling can now be  conducted sideways without huge rigs blotting the  seascape.  Intensive safety procedures have ensured that there has not been even one serious incident of spillage from an oil well (even during the devastating impact of Hurricane Katrina) in the past forty years.

As for global warming,  we are still years away from the cost efficient development of bio-fuels that could replace fossil fuels.  This was implicitly recognized by the President when he suggested that the granting of leases for off shore oil exploration was a” temporary measure” to help the nation through a period where alternative sources of energy can be developed and be made more widely available.

The embrace of this reality, together with the administration’s advancement of nuclear power as a safe, clean and cheap source of energy for America’s needs, is a welcome sign of sanity among Democrats.

But that probably won’t prevent  the certain flood of  law suits soon coming the president’s way.    They will arrive because environmentalists still act as if the Santa Barbara oil spill, which catalyzed the movement for bans on off shore drilling,  occurred only last week.  In fact it occurred in January, 1969 and since then oil drilling has become inordinately safer, more exact and less expensive.

And while we have been twiddling our thumbs the rest of the world has shown no embarrassment whatsoever about developing newly discovered off shore oil deposits.  Brazil has displayed few qualms about seeking to develop recently discovered off shore oil fields near Rio De Janiero.   Russia and Britain have not been stymied by a litigious environmental movement in developing the North Sea.  Nor, for that matter, have China and Japan, who have recently entered into a joint project to develop vast natural gas deposits in the Sea of Japan.

With such facts populating our calculations of the American future, how can anyone sensibly argue that the movement to restore off shore drilling is just a Republican fillip to its oil industry paramours.

It all reminds me of a story told about the late Ted Kennedy who, in the early 90s, was photographed in a compromising position on a speedboat with a naked 22-year-old companion.  Widely distributed and reported on, an embarrassed Kennedy was approached by Alabama Democratic Senator Howell Heflin who chortled:  “Well I do believe the Senator from Massachusetts has changed his position on offshore drillin’!”

That is a joke, I suppose, that Democrats and Republicans can both now appreciate.

Giving Fish Their Human Rights

Otto was a pike who lived in Lake Neuchatel in Switzerland.  Life for a pike in Switzerland was pretty good.  Short working hours and long vacations;  a national health care service for which he paid nothing. And laws that protected abuses against his species. 

Everything was going swimmingly until the day Otto saw a red tail earthworm dangling just below the surface.  Not believing his luck at discovering such a rare delicacy, he quickly ascended only to discover that he had been fooled.  The worm was bait and Otto was about to become Erik Lafevre’s catch of the day. 

Poor Otto.  For the next ten minutes he conducted a life and death struggle against Erik’s rod but the exertion was finally too much for him.  Out of breath and out of energy, Otto took his last gulp of  freshwater and was hauled in, to finally expire on the wooden decking of  Erik’s skiff. 

Fortunately for Otto’s family though, a videographer was on hand to document the entire death struggle.  Within hours the encounter had been downloaded on YouTube and within days it had attracted 400,000 unique views.   

It did not escape the notice of the government.  Claiming that the amateur angler’s inexpert handling of his rod  had negatively impacted the fish’s dignity, Erik was sued in a Zurich district court by State attorneys on behalf of the fish.  Pretty soon everybody was getting into the act.  The worm’s family sued Erik for wrongful death.  The lake, incensed that its waters would be used for so nefarious an activity as fishing, launched its own suit;  and the vegetation at the edge of the lake sued for the fact that Erik had trampled some grass unique to the area as he maneuvered his skiff into the water.  

Sound like a nice modern fable?  Well it would be if there wasn’t so much truth to it.  For in Switzerland today animals, plants and water have individual rights enforceable in Swiss courts.  In fact, as the Wall Street Journal reports, over the weekend a referendum was offered to the Swiss, which, if passed would mandate that each canton in the country would be compelled to hire an animal rights attorney.   Today in Switzerland, an abuse of any animal, even a fish, can earn you a fine and  plant geneticists can be penalized for harvesting plants  in such a way that injures the plant’s dignity. 

One has to wonder about the way in which non-human life has been elevated  to the same level as human in countries as disparate as Switzerland, Spain and Ecuador.  In Spain, limited human rights have been given to apes, a result of extensive lobbying for 20 years by the Great Ape Project ( led by the philosopher Peter Singer and ape conservationist Jane Goodall); In Ecuador, plant life was accorded legal status under the new constitution, passed in July, 2008.

If you are thinking that the movement to elevate animal and plant life to the moral plain of humans is a simple expression of  deep empathy on the part of tree huggers and dog lovers, you  would be quite wrong.  Because the proponents of animal/ plant rights are decidedly anti-human in their perspective, viewing humanity as the true blight on earth and animals as its genuine custodians.

They have introduced into our lexicon a new term – speciesism.  Speciesism holds that assigning different values or rights to beings on the basis of their speicies is a prejudice that is not worthy of humanity.  Because man himself is an animal he is of no less or greater worth than the denizens of the animal kingdom with whom he shares the earth.

This, as Wesley Smith states in his extraordinary new book,  A Rat is a Pig Is a Dog is a Boy, results in the acceptance of the notion that logical distinctions that we all make without thinking betwen oursleves and the animal kingdom, are in fact akin to racism, anti-Semitism and every other bigotry by man against his brothers and sisters. 

But even more significant, says Smith, the removal of  any distinction between humans and non-humans, leads to the decimation of all moral values.  This is demonstrated by the insistence by some of these same ethicists, that sexual engagement between humans and non-humans should pose no serious issue since inter-species breeding has been part of the natural world since the beginning of time.  Infanticide, long condemned in most human societies, should be perfectly acceptable since infants are not cognate, sentient creatures. Vivisection experiments, long carried out on animals, is better reserved for those humans  in a catatonic or vegetative state rather than live animals since the former have, similarly, an absence of  all sentient, cognitive capacity.

It would be nice to think that such a philosophy is restricted to a few crackpot academics and animal rights advocates.  But it would  be a mistake to think this way.   With governments now picking up the cudgel, we increasingly face a world in which the entire concept of human exceptionalism is under assault. 

And so we have a scenario where one day, if our animal liberation friends have their way, there may be places on earth where to kill an animal of any species and under any circumstances, will be regarded as the equivalent of killing a man.  

Maybe Otto’s friends and supporters will then have their day in court after all.