Posted on 08/31/2002 3:17:41 AM PDT by JohnHuang2
How many times can you cry "wolf" before all credibility is lost? The environmental movement is getting close. The U.N. Summit on Sustainable Development, meeting in Johannesburg, South Africa, is screaming wolf all over the world. Fewer and fewer people are listening.
The environmental movement began with a series of wolf cries, by Rachel Carson, who claimed that DDT was destroying the world. Science has since proved her wrong. Paul Ehrlich cried wolf a few years later when he published his "Population Bomb" which predicted that millions of Americans would die of starvation by the mid 1980s. He was wrong.
Dr. Stephen Schneider, and many others, cried wolf in the 1970s, claiming that the earth was at the brink of a new "ice age," caused by man's use of fossil fuels. When that didn't pan out, Schneider and his buddies began crying wolf about global warming.
Urban sprawl is destroying biodiversity; Alar on apples is causing cancer; air conditioning is destroying the ozone layer; asbestos is causing cancer; coffee is causing cancer; genetically modified crops are causing cancer; McDonald's is causing fat people.
Now, the wolves gathered in Johannesburg are crying that we're running out of water.
The solution to all these problems, of course, is more government control – to implement corrective policies designed, implemented (with your tax money), and enforced by the wolves, with the authority of government.
The loss of DDT as an insecticide has resulted in far more deaths from malaria, and other vector-borne diseases, than any other single wolf cry. DDT was banned – not to protect people – but to protect birds from alleged egg-shell thinning.
Not only was Paul Ehrlich wrong about people starving to death, now his ilk is complaining about people eating too much, and becoming too fat. The global cooling-warming-ozone-depleting crowd can't make up their minds, so they cry "catastrophic climate change," and point to every weather anomaly as "proof" of their claims. The fact is, climate change and weather anomalies have occurred throughout history – well before human activity could have possibly had an impact, and they will continue to occur without consulting the environmental leadership or any U.N. conference.
The question is, when do we stop listening to the wolf criers?
The way to stop these wolf cries is to stop the flow of money to the organizations that make their living by creating the perceptions of one crisis after another. These organizations are masters at grant-writing, and the federal government, as well as the U.N., are much too eager to supply funding. During the last term of the Clinton-Gore administration, five of the most influential environmental organizations (The Nature Conservancy; Audubon Society; World Wildlife Fund; World Resources Institute; and the Natural Resources Defense Council) received more than $120 million dollars in federal grants to pursue their wolf crying.
The Nature Conservancy; the World Wildlife Fund; World Resources Institute; Greenpeace; and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature were also named as "executing agency" or "collaborating organization" on more than $700 million in grants from the U.N.'s Global Environment Facility during 1998, and more than $800 million in 1999.
Crying wolf is a big business for these environmental extremists. They are also masters at direct-mail solicitation. By the millions, they send out professionally produced wolf cries, about a crisis for a cute cuddly animal, or a vanishing flower, or an endangered something-or-other. Unaware victims respond with checks by the gazillions to support the work of wolf-crying organizations.
Stop the money flow, and the wolf-crying will go away.
Stop picking up the tab for the 60,000 or so folks who are gathered in Johannesburg, and these U.N. conferences will go away. Most of the official delegates who attend these meetings do so at taxpayers' expense. They stay in luxury hotels, eat caviar, filet mignon and lobster, and drink the finest wines and champagne. They are driven to the meeting venue in chauffeured limousines, and then talk endlessly about the world's poverty, and what to do about the United States' refusal to join the Kyoto Protocol.
If these people had to pay their own way, there would be no meeting, the finger-pointing at the U.S. would stop, and the wolf crying might turn to actually trying to help people.
Fat chance. There's too much money to be made crying wolf.
The Conservancy has reported assets of well over 2 billion, I know Audubon and WWF are huge as well.
That's easy. So they can burn, flood, bankrupt and bring affliction on American communities.
| Revenue | Expenses | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Total Revenue | $784,263,611 | NET GAIN/LOSS | $391,463,767 | |||||||||||||||||||||||
The financial statement above shows nothing in the "Government Grants" block, but that does not mean TNC receives no taxpayer funding. In fact TNC in FY 2000 received $60,085,455 in contract fees from the federal government, plus $81,925,124 from the sale of private land to federal agencies. Thus TNC received a total of at least $142,010,579, or a little more than 18% of its total revenue, from the federal government in 2000.
That's very true.
Also the average tree transpires 50 or more gallons of water into the air daily.
My point was that we, as household consumers, use very little of the water consumed for all uses daily and most all the water used is put back into the ground or air.
The "doomsdayers" would have us believe that when we flush a toilet the water goes to another universe to be lost forever.
Personally, I'm not going to live in a cave eating bugs and berries as the insane enviromentalists would have us.
I have my own well and am my own water company!
I maintain it, monitor it and use it.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.