Environmentalism is Anti-Environment! By James Reed
Environmentalism in the ideal situation should be a movement concerned with conservation of the environment, saving soils from erosion, preserving water quality and the like. Conservation should have been part of a conservative movement, to prevent countries like Australia becoming just migration sink holes. But, unfortunately after the end of World War II, environmentalism, which was once focussed towards the Right, was taken over by neo-Marxism, like much else, beginning with the long march through the universities and education system. By now this process is complete, and environmentalism, especially climate change alarmism, is the enemy of conservatives, since it has been forged into a political weapon of the Left. Notice how the Australian Greens support the present mass immigration program of Albo, and even want more, where any reasonable environmental party and environmentalist, should be opposing mass immigration, as did the Right-wing environmentalist, the late Professor Garrett Hardin, who saw mass immigration as socially and ecologically destructive, creating a "tragedy of the commons."
We are seeing this destructiveness of the environment today with the climate change "solutions," which only make matters worse for the environment, and human health. As detailed below, this is seen most clearly in the renewables push. The construction of solar panels and wind turbines have environmental problems from the very beginning, with pollution from mining the rare earths, to the massive amounts of greenhouse gasses produced to make the panels and turbines. Even at the end points, disposal of the panels and turbines pose environmental costs. Adding it all up, as well as the fact that these technologies are totally inadequate to power modern techno-industrial society, the environmentalist solution is totally anti-environment.
"Big government environmental "fixes" often result in unintended environmental or human health consequences that are worse than the original problem the government solution was meant to solve.
Nowhere is this clearer than with government efforts to fight climate change, an effort in vain if ever there was one.
In Climate Change Weekly, I have detailed the high environmental costs and dangers to people that come with electric vehicles, wind turbines, and solar panels -- from fires, to the human and environmental impact of the mining and refining of the minerals necessary to produce and operate them, to the waste problems they create.
As whale deaths mount on the East Coast, The Heartland Institute along with our allies at CFACT and the National Legal and Policy Center have filed a lawsuit seeking a temporary restraining order on Dominion Energy's plans to begin pile driving for construction of the base and tower portions of 176 giant offshore wind turbines it plans to erect at great economic and environmental costs off the coast of Virginia as part of President Biden's "all of government" approach to fight climate change.
CFACT has established a great resource devoted to the myriad environmental problems -- including the threat to the endangered North Atlantic Right Whale (NARW) from the push for offshore wind along the East Coast. These turbines are being erected right in the middle of NARW and other protected marine mammals' habitat and migration routes. In the rush to erect these turbines quickly, the federal government and Dominion played fast and loose with the rules and permits, in particular failing to follow the law and proper procedures in accounting for potential comprehensive, cumulative whale impacts.
Research released after Dominion had already received permission from the federal government to proceed, shows that, contrary to what Dominion and the Biden administration have claimed in their reports, the ships contracted to do the pile driving produce an amount of noise during operations that exceeds what federal biologists have determined to be safe for whales.
Mind you, for all the damage these offshore turbines will do to a variety of marine mammals and the ocean ecosystem, they will produce no measurable reduction on global temperatures.
Scotland provides an interesting case study concerning the environmentally harmful unintended consequences produced by government climate policies.
First, Scotland pitted one climate solution against another by cutting down nearly 16 million trees -- you know, those carbon sinks that everyone, including wildlife, loves -- to make way for wind turbines. That is an average of more than 1,700 trees destroyed each day."
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