Cheap fuel is “folly,” part of a “gusher mentality [that] deforms our society and economy,” according to Carl Pope, the longtime Sierra Club executive director. Inexpensive energy is positively un-American, Pope argues:
“It leads the United States to sabotage international efforts to combat global warming, tolerate a huge trade deficit that has destroyed millions of manufacturing jobs, and keep military bases in the Middle East, where they serve as rallying points for terrorists. And it’s why the U.S. auto industry continues to promote size and performance over safety and efficiency.”
Environmentalists have done this very thing by compelling us to buy fuel from overseas. They cause all the impacts they claim.
Consumers do not consume, tourism suffers, enjoying a ride in the country becomes an "extravagance".
People did cut down in their gas consumption....and guess what...the government says it needs more money because "fuel tax income" is down.
The solution IS more homegrown oil and gas...
Great but long article. If you want to debate your liberal friends or econuts, you have to know their arguments and be ready with the facts to refute them.
If the American people can be made to grasp all of this, the dems should never win another election.
His "overpopulation" hysteria in the late '60s-early '70s led to Roe v. Wade (overpopulation was used as a justification), an entire generation being convinced not to have children (thus leading to the "birth dearth" of the mid-70s); and ultimately, to the dramatic nation destroying mass immigration of the 80's and 90's, as Third World "immigrants" flooded in to take the place of the native born who never were. The economy still needed people to keep going; the Fed still prints money.
Ehrlich's simplistic Malthusian analysis was trumpeted by every newspaper in this country 40 years ago. Movies were made, demonstrations staged, politicians elected. The famous Rockefeller Commission in 1972 concluded "the nation has no need of further population".
And national suicide ensued.
The Ehrlich's are a laughable pair of misanthropes who, if put on national TV now, would immediately be the objects of ridicule, two solitary fools who would have starved to death if it weren't for tenure at Stanford.
But the effects of their stupidity, amplified through the media, are not laughable: the crippling, and perhaps end, of a great nation.