While the risks of continuing to live our current lifestyle have been sung from the rooftops and beaten into the minds of citizens for years now, few have grasped the risks associated with the growing fervor of the green movement.
Steve Milloy, the author of a new book called Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop them, offers a comprehensive rebuttal to the green movement, seeking to expose the true motives of many environmental activists. As much as possible in the book, he quotes organizations and activists to show just how far overboard the movement has gone.
Scientific rebuttal is a hard sell, says Milloy. “It’s almost always easier to scare than to reassure voters,” he explained, pointing out the fact that the green movement has gained popularity through faulty science. “An Inconvenient Truth,” Al Gore’s award-winning documentary is a chief example, in which “nearly 100 percent of the film’s scientific material was questionable.” The shoddy research even caused a British judge to rule that teachers were required to give a disclaimer to students before showing the film because of the questionable “truth.”
Another example of the often irrational green fervor that has overtaken the country is a new “green laptop” from Asus. The laptop is meant to be environment-friendly because it sports a bamboo cover, rather than the usual plastic one. As Milloy explained, though, harvesting and growing bamboo emits greenhouse gases, and then transporting it to the United States emits even more. When the cover is eventually thrown away it biodegrades causing even more gas emissions. Not only is the new bamboo cover less than eco-friendly, it costs over $700 more than the original.
Milloy’s point is that “we need to come to the realization as individuals that this is not about the environment. This is about something else.” It is all politics, he explains, and activists use the green movement as a way to gain power and money. His mission is to inform the public about what radical environmentalists are doing to meddle with everyday life, and equip people with the knowledge to resist. It is not the American people who support the green movement, but the movement’s well-placed activists and radicals in government.
Milloy’s principal objection to the green movement is the evasive procedures that green activists are willing to employ to see their goals reached. “A simple concept of Green Hell is that there is no area of your life, not one tiny parcel of your day-to-day existence that the greens consider off-limits to intrusion. There is no personal behavior of yours that they consider too trivial or too sacrosanct to regulate.”
The greens are dead-set on controlling the way Americans live. “The greens aim to bring about their brave new world through federal law or local ordinance,” says Milloy. “But where that’s not practical, they’ll settle for inducing artificial shortages, pricing you out of your bad habits by hiking taxes and imposing surcharges, or simply by trying to condition you and those around you that you are engaging in an act of severe personal transgression.”
The average person can stand up to the greens’ campaign to control the way individuals express their freedoms by learning about the debate. Conservatives can do so by getting active in the debate. Conservatives are bolstered by prestigious, well-organized think tanks but they have few activists. Liberals, while lacking in think tank power, have an abundance of activists. This may explain the questionable science, together with the pop-culture advertising, that characterizes global warming alarmists.
Those who are concerned about the realistic threat imposed on the individuality and civil liberties of average Americans should take a stand, express their concern, and read Green Hell.
In the conclusion to Green Hell, Milloy asks: “Worried about federal spending and the deficit? How about the looming bankruptcy of Social Security and Medicare? What about spiraling health care and education costs? Perhaps you are worried about the economy? Green policies will not only add to the government’s already-onerous tax burdens but, more important, will raise prices, severely damage the economy, and destroy the tax base that feeds the government.” The consequences of the radical green movement are severe, but its opposition is strong and is just beginning to push back. Liberals like to quip that the “debate is over” on global warming, but they could not be more wrong.
Daniel Allen is an intern at the American Journalism Center, a training program run by Accuracy in Media and Accuracy in Academia.
