Posted on 04/22/2009 11:27:58 AM PDT by Scanian
The Environment: Wednesday's airwaves, print media, cable news shows and Webosphere will be filled with nonsense about the scourge of capitalism, corporations and humanity. All of it will ignore the real truth.
Buried beneath all the badgering and fear-mongering about lavish Western lifestyles is a reality that the stuck-on-green left won't talk about and the average American isn't aware of: The world, especially in developed nations, is a cleaner — and greener — place than it was when the environmental movement began.
Every year Steven Hayward, a scholar at the Pacific Research Institute and the American Enterprise Institute, compiles his Index of Leading Environmental Indicators. And every year, his findings contradict the alarmists' warnings that the world is on the edge of environmental cataclysm.
From evidence "that tropical rain forests may now be expanding faster than they are being cut down" to the improving health of U.S. ocean fisheries to better outdoor air quality in American cities with the worst air pollution, Hayward shows there's more to be optimistic about than there is to be troubled about.
The Environmental Protection Agency has also published its own Report on the environment. Last year's report, the most recent, indicates outdoor air quality has improved, there's been a net gain in wetland acreage, public-source drinking-water problems are uncommon and forest land is expanding after declining for a century.
Americans are actually generating no more trash per-capita than they were in 1990, our production of hazardous waste has fallen from 36 million tons in 1999 to 28 million tons in 2005, and lead levels in our blood have shown "a steady decline since the 1980s."
And then there's carbon dioxide. We are pumping out more than ever. But there's no evidence, only speculation, that this weak greenhouse gas is having any effect
(Excerpt) Read more at investors.com ...
I believe that cars have 95% less pollution than cars of the late 1960s. I even read in the WSJ that a car running down the road at 60 miles per hour pollutes less than a 1970 car did sitting in the driveway turned off! (the evaporation of leaded gas pollutes more than the car running down the road).
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