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Environmentalists’ policies kill real people

By Theresa Camoriano

Al Gore and his fellow alarmists love to frighten us with their computer projections of global warming and claims that many deaths will be caused someday in the future by our continued burning of fossil fuels.  Many people who consider themselves to be prudent go along with Al, saying we should heed his warnings if there is even a small chance they might come true, but these supposedly prudent people are ignoring the very real deaths Al’s policies are causing right now. 

Numerous policies promoted by the environmentalists (preventing drilling for oil, preventing the development of viable alternatives such as nuclear power, demanding a reduction in carbon emissions, etc.) have caused the price of fuel to go up, which pushes people to use more dangerous forms of transportation, such as lighter weight cars, motorcycles, and bicycles.  This, in turn, results in more traffic deaths.  Al and his wealthy environmentalist friends still can afford their safer forms of transportation, so they are not personally affected, but they are very happy to see the rest of us getting more miles per gallon (and more deaths per mile). 

Similarly, the biofuels mandates that have been used to buy votes in farm states and that are darlings of the environmental movement have driven up the price of food and caused starvation around the world as well as harming the environment.  But the facts are irrelevant to the environmental extremists, whose real goal is to feel good.

Of course, this is nothing new.  The banning of DDT, which launched the environmentalist movement based on the alarmist projections in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, has caused millions of very real deaths due to malaria.   Fortunately, African countries now are saving lives by returning to the use of DDT to kill the disease-carrying mosquitoes.   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT  The environmentalists now argue that the DDT ban was not responsible for the millions of malaria deaths or the tens of millions of people who have been debilitated by the disease during the ban.  They do not want to think their idealistic, well-meaning policy actually resulted in so many deaths, especially when they cannot point to any significant benefit from the ban, so they claim the DDT was not effective against malaria (although it appears to be very effective today) and say the claims of the millions of deaths due to malaria is a myth.

Environmentalist alarmists do not want to make a real cost-benefit analysis to see whether the expected benefits of their proposed policies outweigh the costs.  They prefer to promote a policy as being worthwhile “if it might save just one life”, while ignoring the many lives the policy may cost.  And, if the deaths are of poor people in Africa or even poor people in the United States, not of wealthy environmentalists, and especially if the deaths occur one or two at a time and are scattered out, they may be able to successfully ignore the serious harm they are causing to innocent people around the world. They are largely motivated by the desire to feel good about themselves, and if they actually took a hard look at the costs of their policies, to realize that their policies cost more lives than they save, they might not be able to continue feeling so self-satisfied and superior.  Better to ignore the costs and feel good than to count the costs and feel bad. 

So, it seems that Al Gore the environmentalist, who also claims to have invented the Internet and says he was a main character in the movie “Love Story”, has taken to heart the theme of that movie, which is “Love means you never have to say you’re sorry.”  From the point of view of Al and his followers, as long as you are motivated by a good heart and good intentions, it doesn’t matter how many innocent people you kill as long as you feel good about yourself.

Al Gore and his Hollywood disciples are constantly exchanging the environmental equivalent of high-fives, and no liberal ever mentions the inconvenient truth that all of these people reside in mansions the size of hotels and fly all over the planet in private jets. Talk about carbon footprints! Dinosaurs didn’t have feet this big or this dirty. – Burt Prelusky

The current Democratic mantra on energy is: "We can't drill our way out of this problem." Apparently their plan is to talk our way out of this problem….They don't want drilling. They don't want more oil. They want humans to ride bicycles and then to die. We deserve it: We were mean to the polar bears. – Ann Coulter

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