Saving the Earth?By Alan Caruba
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Every time I hear someone say something about “saving the Earth” I want to say, “Are you out of your mind?”
The Earth is some 4.5 billion—that’s billion with a b—years old. How did it ever manage to exist without us? How did it survive ice ages, meteor impacts, and all the other stuff that went on before homo sapiens decided to climb down out of the trees and walk upright?
If human beings are responsible for “global warming” how did the Earth manage to get through various earlier stages such as the Permian, Triassic, Jurassic, Paleocene, Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene, Pleistocene, and our era, the Holocene which reaches back a mere 10,000 years; a period that matches up with the ending of the last major ice age.
One of the distinguishing features of these and other earlier periods of Earth’s history is the repeated evidence of mass extinctions. Since humans weren’t around to take the blame for them, what did cause them? There is evidence that it was the result of magnetic reversals.
For far too long I have been listening to people who are absolutely convinced that human beings are “destroying” the Earth. Three quarters of the Earth is under water. Oceans are the largest part of the Earth’s surface. Most of the land is uninhabitable or not arable. You can’t farm it and you probably wouldn’t want to live there.
The parts, mostly cities, where human beings congregate range from being vast slums to gleaming towers of commerce or condos. If you’re wealthy, living in such places can be very enjoyable. If you live in the slum, you hope you can find a tasty tidbit at the neighborhood garbage dump.
Virtually none of these people, rich or poor, spends a lot of time thinking about “saving the Earth” unless, of course, there’s a buck to be made while allegedly doing so.
There’s lots of money to be made these days in “saving the Earth.” If you’re the owner of a solar or wind farm, the government can’t wait to lavish millions of taxpayer’s—other people’s—dollars on your enterprise. Same holds true if you make moonshine…oops, I mean ethanol.
Then, if you’re Al Gore, Nobel Peace Prize winner, Oscar winner, Grammy winner, winner of the Nashville Bingo Night Jamboree, you are going to score millions by telling people that the Earth is coming to an end any day now and, to prevent this, you need to buy the lighter-than-air “carbon credits” he’s selling. The government wants to get in on this bonanza with a “cap-and-trade” program to limit greenhouse gas emissions in order to prevent a global warming that is not happening.
Meanwhile, other charlatans are busy selling an interest in their carbon sequestration scams or just selling you anything that comes packaged as “eco” anything. Paying more for something “Green” just marks you as a chump.
So who are these people kidding when they talk about saving the Earth? YOU!
And who do these people dislike for despoiling Gaia or Mother Earth? YOU!
None of us, individually or all six billion, can “save the Earth”, but there are a few things we can avoid doing. At the top of the list is littering. Did you see the photo of the Capitol Mall after everyone got through celebrating the inauguration of the Anointed One? Ugh.
In fact, that is pretty much the entire list as far as I am concerned. Don’t litter. Clean up after yourself.
And for those still preaching to other people about saving the Earth, just stop. It makes you look and sound like an idiot.
Alan Caruba writes a daily blog at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com/. Every week, he posts a column on the website of The National Anxiety Center, http://www.anxietycenter.com/.
© Alan Caruba, March 2009
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