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Enviro-Lies Selwyn Duke British Prime Minister Gordon Brown wants to force supermarkets to charge for plastic bags to curtail their use. This is part of a larger movement to ban the bags over concern that they cause the deaths of vast numbers of marine animals. Now, however, scientists tell us that research has never asserted that they pose a danger to marine life; rather, the facts have been grossly misrepresented. Follow this link to the original source: "Series of blunders turned the plastic bag into global villain" Upon being asked what wisdom was, the ancient sage Confucius once replied, "Wisdom is, when you know something, knowing that you know it, and when you do not know something, knowing that you do not know it." If this definition is correct, I would say most politicians are sorely lacking in the quality. A great example comes out of England, where the nation’s illustrious leader, Gordon Brown, has decided that part of his mission is to slay the plastic bag, convinced as he is that it imperils the planet. Yet it eludes him that his concerns are based on an obvious falsehood. Writes the Times Online:
Lest I be misunderstood, I’ve always been a conservationist (that’s what such a person was called before the left invented 'environmentalists"). I was raised with the maxim "Waste not, want not," a prescription for personal frugality. Thus, I always tried to be a good shepherd of the Earth, turning off lights and air conditioners when not needed, trying not to waste food and actually using public garbage receptacles (I grew up in New York City, where it’s widely believed that refuse spontaneously generates from concrete pavement). And I’ll be the first to admit that people litter recklessly, which is why you can find all sorts of garbage in every corner of the world. But I have a problem with environmentalists. They lie. I also have a problem with most politicians: They’re ever ready to remove freedom based on lies. This is part of the problem with government intervention. Besides the fact that politicians are quite willing to subordinate truth to political expediency, they’re also not, as they pretend to be, experts in the area of everything. Yet they still feel qualified to legislate on everything. This is never more obvious than with global warming. Despite a multitude of reports from experts who question the thesis that it’s caused by man, and despite uncharacteristically frigid winters in many parts of the world, politicians persist in advocating policy based on a sky-is-falling mantra. Then, the recycling movement also played upon a falsehood. While it’s now old news, the effort gained tremendous steam after the much ballyhooed travails of a notorious garbage barge named the Mobro 4000. Looking for a place to dump its load in 1987, the barge took a 6000 mile trip from New York to Belize and back, and environmentalists claimed that it highlighted how the U.S. was running out of dump space. The truth was far more mundane. A rumor had developed that the craft was carrying medical waste, causing successive localities to turn it away. As for dump space, John Tierney of the New York Times tells us:
Yet many consider the barge propaganda
akin to a white lie. "Isn’t the fact that we’re now recycling
a good thing?" they may ask. Well, it depends.
As Tierney also points out, at the time of the garbage barge false alarm, American businesses were already recycling millions of tons of refuse a year, voluntarily and profitably. He says that government mandated recycling is a different matter, however, as it has transformed recycling into what "may be the most wasteful activity in modern America: a waste of time and money, a waste of human and natural resources." And our politicians are giving us other cures that may be worse than the disease. At least partially motivated by the global warming scam, our government has enacted legislation to ban incandescent light bulbs by 2014. This would leave us with nothing but compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs), which have been cited as posing a mercury hazard. It’s as if our elected puppeteers don’t investigate what they legislate. Does it elude them that a generation ago we were warned of the danger of global cooling? As for the bags, have they forgotten that we were told it was an obligation to switch to plastic ones to save trees? Of course, it’s hard to ferret out the truth in these matters. Some say that the mercury danger of CFLs is exaggerated; that cutting down trees is less harmful than using plastic; that the world isn’t really entering a cooling phase, as some assert; and that recycling really is cost and resources efficient. I cannot say I know for sure. This is why I don’t propose to ban CFLs, paper bags or recycling, or re-engineer our economy based on climate models as reliable as the weather. When I do not know something, I know it. I also know something else: lies shouldn’t be tolerated. If a cause really is just, if it has a basis in reality, it needs no more buttress than the truth can provide. And there is one more thing I know: the politicians know less than I do. If only they knew it.
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