Earth Day Predictions of 1970.

I do not know the author who compiled these quotes, but they are a good reason why they were wrong in 1970 when Earth Day was established and continue to be wrong today, Earth Day 2011.

"For the next 24 hours, the media will assault us with tales of imminent disaster that always accompany the annual Earth Day Doom & Gloom Extravaganza.

Ignore them. They’ll be wrong. We’re confident in saying that because they’ve always been wrong. And always will be.

Need proof? Here are some of the hilarious, spectacularly wrong predictions made on the occasion of Earth Day 1970.

“We have about five more years at the outside to do something.”
• Kenneth Watt, ecologist

“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”
• George Wald, Harvard Biologist

“We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.”
• Barry Commoner, Washington University biologist

“Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”
• New York Times editorial, the day after the first Earth Day

“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation.”
• Denis Hayes, chief organizer for Earth Day

“Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”
• Peter Gunter, professor, North Texas State University

“Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”
• Life Magazine, January 1970

“At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

Stanford's Paul Ehrlich announces that the sky is falling.

“Air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“We are prospecting for the very last of our resources and using up the nonrenewable things many times faster than we are finding new ones.”
• Martin Litton, Sierra Club director

“By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

“Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”
• Sen. Gaylord Nelson

“The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

Keep these predictions in mind when you hear the same predictions made today. They’ve been making the same predictions for 39 years. And they’re going to continue making them until…well…forever.

Here we are, 39 years later and the economy sucks, but the ecology’s fine. In fact this planet is doing a lot better than the planet on which those green lunatics live."

http://www.ihatethemedia.com/earth-day-predictions-of-1970-the-reason-you-should-not-believe-earth-day-predictions-of-2009

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What Greens Really Believe

By Alan Caruba

Earth Day was established in 1970 and millions of Americans and others around the world have been steadily brainwashed to embrace the impression that environmentalism is about protecting the Earth, but when Greens talk among themselves, it is a very different story and a frightening one at that.

The massive propaganda program that supports the Green agenda is impressive in its scope. Its locus is the United Nations whose Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was revealed in 2009 to be a complete hoax based on the manipulation of computer models to predict a warming due to excess carbon dioxide. There never was any threat from CO2. It is a gas that is vital to the growth of all vegetation on Earth. It represents a very minor, even miniscule, part of the Earth’s atmosphere.

Nothing, however, deters the Green agenda and, since the first Earth Day, it has penetrated the nation’s schools and, of course, its politics, deliberately deterring and thwarting access to the nation’s vast reserves of oil, coal, and natural gas; the greatest such reserves in the world! It is a drag on business development. It is the ultimate nanny state seeking to alter people's lifestyles through coercion, legislation, and persuasion.

What most people are unaware of is the fascistic hatred of mankind that underlies the philosophic basis of environmentalism.

Kenneth Boulding, originator of the “Spaceship Earth” concept, was quoted by William Tuck in “Progress and Privilege”, 1982, as saying “The right to have children should be a marketable commodity, bought and traded by individuals, but absolutely limited by the state.” Lamont Cole, an ecologist, has said, “To feed a starving child is to exacerbate the world population problem."

Stewart Brand, writing in the Whole Earth Catalog, wrote, “We have wished, we ecofreaks, for a disaster or for a social change to come and bomb us into the Stone Age, where we might live like Indians in our valley, with our localism, our appropriate technology, our gardens, our homemade religion—guilt-free at last!”

I doubt most people are wishing for a disaster and, when they occur such as the earthquakes in Haiti and in Japan, the first instinct of decent people worldwide is to mobilize to help those affected. This is a very human reaction, but it is not a Green one.

Helen Caldicott, co-founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility, characterized capitalism, saying “Free enterprise really means rich people get richer. They have the freedom to exploit and psychologically rape their fellow human beings in the process…Capitalism is destroying the earth.”

It is no coincidence that Earth Day is also the birthday of Vladimir Illich Lenin, the founder of the former Soviet Union and devotee of Karl Marx, the creator of Communism. The Communist revolution worldwide led to the murder of an estimated one hundred million throughout the last century.

At the heart of environmentalism, aside from its wish for far fewer humans, is a hatred of capitalism. The failures of communism and socialism everywhere attest to the way state control of all aspects of life is ignored by Greens.

David Foreman, founder of Earth First!, said, “We must make this an insecure and inhospitable place for capitalists and their projects…We must reclaim the roads and plowed land, hold dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled rivers and return to wildness millions of tens of millions of acres of presently settle land.”

Thus, agriculture, the key to civilization, is decried as harming the Earth and all manner of business and industrial enterprises, dependent on the provision of energy, is regarded as evil.

Major environmental organizations, Friends of the Earth and the Sierra Club to name just two, oppose the use of coal, oil, and natural gas to provide energy.

So much of what environmentalism preaches and claims in its propaganda is utterly false, but telling lies is part and parcel of the Green message.

Timothy Wirth, a former U.S. Senator (D-CO) said, “What we’ve got to do in energy conservation is try to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, to have approached global warming as if it is real means energy conservation, so we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.”

Virtually everything being advocated by the Obama administration represents this willingness to take action and tell lies about the nation’s need for energy, with the exception of the worst ways of producing it, wind, solar, and biofuels. Even before gasoline prices climbed to new highs, negatively affecting all aspects of life in America, Dr. Steven Chu, the Secretary of Energy, was advocating higher prices.

The few quotes cited here do not begin to illuminate the horrors that environmentalism would visit on mankind or the nihilistic view it holds, but they represent a far greater body of Green writings and statements over the years that indicate the extent of the threat it poses to humanity.

A deluge of environmental propaganda will precede Earth Day, April 22, 2011. It should be seen as a warning to all who believe in the Creator and all who wish to advance a world at peace, one in which humanity benefits from trade, prosperity, and modern technology worldwide.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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Earth Day and Environmental Insanity

By Alan Caruba

Anyone who has been paying any attention to the environmental movement has got to have concluded it is insane.

• While the United States stands poised on defaulting on its ever-growing debt—the highest in the nation’s history;

• While wars and insurrections are waged in the Middle East, across northern Africa, and in the Ivory Coast;

• While Japan struggles to deal with a major earthquake and nuclear plant meltdown;

• While Islam wages terrorism worldwide, and

• While European nations attempt to deal with their own financial crisis, the environmentalists—Greens—engage in the most absurd frauds and nonsense since the Dark Ages.

In news from the United Nations—a misnomer if ever there was one—Bolivia is proposing a UN treaty that will give “Mother Earth” the same rights as accorded to human beings. It has just passed a domestic law that grants these rights to bugs, trees, and all other natural things in its own country.

According to the Bolivian proposal, humans have sought to “dominate and exploit” the Earth in ways that threaten the “well-being and existence of many beings” such as malaria-bearing mosquitoes, lice and ticks that spread disease, trees that provide timber for shelter and countless other uses, venomous snakes, and every other creature upon which we depend for food---beef, chickens, and fish, to name just three.

The Bolivian law, if successful, will end the extraction of all natural resources in that nation, thus effectively plunging it into insolvency. That is a definition of insanity. It is also a description of the United States of America where access to its vast reserves of coal, natural gas, and oil is being systematically denied by the government.

This is occurring as the Environmental Protection Agency continues its effort to declare carbon dioxide (CO2) a “pollutant” that must be regulated, despite the fact that is vital to all life on Earth.

In America, there has been a resurgence of bed bugs, formerly controlled by DDT. The EPA recently awarded $550,000 in grants to the University of Missouri, Texas A&M University, the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Rutgers University, and the Michigan Department of Community Health, for bed bug “education, outreach, and environmental justice departments.” So, instead of authorizing the use of a pesticide to rid us all of bed bugs, it wants to “educate” us to live with them. That’s insane.

The U.S. Forest Service scientists will hire field crews “to gather information on the conditions of forests from approximately 1,000 sites in five western states, Alaska, California, Hawaii, Oregon, and Washington, “for a comprehensive study on the health of trees in urban areas.” No mention of the millions this will waste, but it is heralded as part of Obama’s “America’s Great Outdoors Initiative.”

At the same time, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has just announced that the department will spend $1 million in “cost-sharing funding for children’s programs in 18 States and Puerto Rico, furthering USDA’s commitment to connect young people around the country with America’s great outdoors.” Why?

A rational nation that’s $14 trillion in debt, borrowing 40 cents of every dollar it spends, would not do such things, but the United States does while its President calls for higher taxes. And why not? The Obama administration spent up to $200 million to promote Obamacare. While that was happening, 26 States joined in demanding its repeal and a U.S. federal court judge declared it unconstitutional.

As the nation struggles to reverse an unsustainable trend toward financial doom, Greens are trumpeting an “Extended Producer Responsibility” program to achieve “waste reduction and increased recycling” that would make manufacturers “liable for the cost of recycling TVs and other electronics at the end of their useful lives” and alter the way they package goods. This is not the manufacturer’s responsibility and will increase the cost of everything everyone purchases.

On Earth Day, everyone will be exhorted to engage in “A billion acts of Green” and to purchase “Green” products, all of which cost more than everything else one purchases in the normal course of everyday life.

We are only now recovering from the greatest fraud of the modern era, “global warming.” The United States wasted an estimated $50 billion on so-called scientific research, all of which existed for the purpose of advancing this hoax. It is rarely mentioned any more except for its fraudulent new name, “climate change.”

As we approach April 22nd, designated “Earth Day”, it would be well to recall that it is the birthday of Vladimir Illich Lenin, a devotee of Karl Marx and a man who plunged Russia into more than seventy years of Communism until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

Environmentalism, worldwide and in the United States of America, is devoted to the collapse of every scientific and technological advance of the past century, along with the capitalist system that made them possible.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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The Winter Solstice

By Alan Caruba

On December 22, 1554 AD, someone took note of a celestial phenomenon during which a full lunar eclipse occurred. It will occur again on Tuesday, the day that marks the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. Today’s astronomers will tell you it is just a coincidence and, indeed, that is all it is.

1554 had not been a good year for Lady Jane Gray who was beheaded after having spent just nine days as queen of England. The Privy Council had someone else in mind for the job. There were the usual battles in England and France where such skirmishes were what passed for politics in that era, but it was not otherwise a particularly memorable year.

For centuries, however, men had been paying close attention to the skies. In Ireland, there is a huge circular stone structure estimated to be 5,000 years old. On solstice, a single shaft of sunlight reaches deep into its central chamber at dawn. It predates the pyramids and Stonehenge, the latter of which was constructed to mark the winter and summer solstices.

Solstice celebrations clearly go back thousands of years in mankind’s history. The Neolithic peoples around the world, from about 10,000 to 3,000 BC, were the first farmers and, as a result, knowledge of the seasons and the cycles of harvest was critical.

The Moon that appeared to diminish and disappear only to reappear was of great interest as it proved an excellent way of marking time. It was, however, the solstice that was regarded as the day on which the Sun was reborn. Rebirth is a common theme in myths dating far back in history.

An excellent telling of the solstice story can be found here. “Ironically, the Earth is actually nearer to the Sun in January than it is in June—by three million miles. The Earth leans slightly on its axis like a spinning top frozen in one off-kilter position. Astronomers have even pinpointed the price angle of the tilt. It is 23 degrees and 27 minutes off the perpendicular to the plane of orbit.”

Clearly, someone was paying attention in ancient times because hundreds of megalithic structures have been found throughout Europe, each oriented to the solstices and the equinoxes. Sacred sites have been found in the Americas, Asia, Indonesia, and the Middle East.

In time, both Christmas and Hanukkah would be incorporated into the winter solstice, but the event was widely celebrated well before these holidays even existed and it was regarded as a time of magic. For the ancient Romans, of course, it was a time of feasting and, reportedly, debauchery, but just about any time of the year seemed to signal “party!” for them.

What lesson can we draw from the solstice of 2010? It is, I think, that the Earth is very old, 4.5 billion years old in fact, and what passes for human civilization is rather new by comparison. For a very long time, men peered into the sky and marveled at the Sun, Moon and stars. In time they began to make some sense of the cyclical change of seasons and apply it to agriculture and other activities.

Now consider the timeline. In 1554 someone recorded the lunar eclipse that occurred on the winter solstice, but it was not until October 1608, over fifty years later, that a device called a telescope was unveiled in the Netherlands. It made Jacob Metius of Alkmaar a tidy sum of money, but it was the genius, Galileo, who would grasp the power of the telescope. He made his first one in June or July 1609.

As this winter solstice dawns, the United States of America, the greatest pioneer of outer space, no longer has a vehicle to continue manned exploration. The Russians, with whom we were locked in conflict throughout the Cold War, now provide our astronauts a ride to the Space Station. There is something profoundly wrong about that.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

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