Environmentalism’s seven deadliest, most destructive power grabs
GANG GREEN’S SEVEN DEADLIEST, MOST DESTRUCTIVE POWER GRABS: #7 – The “Endangered Species Act”
Sold as legislation that would protect vulnerable species, the Endangered Species Act and other wildlife preservation laws are instead routinely abused by environmentalists as weapons against employers.
A favorite tactic is to use junk science and strong-arm tactics to get species that are not threatened or endangered listed as “threatened” or “endangered” to shut down agriculture, home building, energy and timber development and other job-creating activities in targeted areas.
Among the earliest attempts to pull such scams occurred in 1973 when radical environmentalists successfully delayed construction of the Tellico Dam when a University of Tennessee biology professor claimed a rare fish called the “snail darter.” Greens filed a lawsuit under the National Environmental Policy Act claiming construction of the dam would alter the Little Tennessee River and destroy the “snail darter,” which would be placed on the Endangered Species List in 1975.
They did not succeed in their goal of stopping construction of the dam, but they did succeed in inflicting lengthy and expensive delays in its construction.
Not only did the species not go extinct, it was plentiful enough to be taken off the Endangered Species List less only a year after completion of the dam environmentalists claimed would wipe it out.
In fact, environmentalists routinely falsify and outright lie about population numbers in order to shut down employment on millions of acres of land under the Act.
The ESA routinely hands out “endangered” declarations for species that were so invasive and populous the government was paying people to poison or catch them — up until Gang Green radicals pressured government officials to suddenly declare them “endangered” so they could target employers and landowners for extinction.
In the most famous case of fraudulent use of the ESA, environmentalists petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1986 to list the spotted owl as an “endangered species” in order to shut down timber harvesting across vast areas of the northwest United States. Waging a ferocious public pressure campaign, environmentalists claimed the bird could only nest in “old growth” forests, and logging would lead to the bird’s extinction.
The scare tactics paid off in 1990 when the government declared the owl threatened, forcing loggers to leave at least 40% of the old-growth forests intact within a 1.3 mile radius of any spotted owl nest or activity site.
The result? Timber harvesting was virtually shut down in the American northwest and thousands of loggers lost their jobs. To add insult to injury, not only is the spotted owl not threatened, it is more than capable of nesting in secondary and newer forests.
Environmentalists were not at all ashamed of their fraudulent use of the Endangered Species Act. League of Conservation Voters founder and former Sierra Club Executive Director David Brower proudly crowed, “Loggers losing their jobs because of Spotted Owl legislation is, in my eyes, no different than people being out of work after the furnaces of Dachau shut down.”
GANG GREEN’S SEVEN DEADLIEST, MOST DESTRUCTIVE POWER GRABS: #6 – The Antiquities Act land grab spree
The Antiquities Act of 1906 was signed into law over 100 years ago to protect tiny, individual Indian archaeological sites from looters. In one of Gang Green’s most brazen displays of abuse of power, the Act is now being used to snatch up millions of acres of land at a time and declare it a “national monument” – without congressional approval.
Under “national monument” designation, natural resource development and most recreational activities are outlawed, a move that eliminates badly-needed jobs and robs citizens of property rights.
The Clinton administration notably used the Act in 1996 to shut down clean coal development in 2,600 square miles of southern Utah.
The Obama administration is undertaking multiple abusive land grabs under the Act.
An Interior Department internal document indicates the Administration is considering using Antiquities Act to designate as many as seventeen different sections of the West as “national monuments.” The list was leaked just days after a story appeared in The New York Times outlining the administration’s plans to use executive power to pass Obama’s agenda over the disapproval of Congress, Fox News reports.
Obama’s use of the Antiquities Act comes as the administration also seeks to grab land and shut down recreational and employment activity through passage of the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act, the so-called “Clean Water Restoration Act” and a bill by Montana Senator Jon Tester to expand federal “wilderness” designations.
The intended product of Antiquities Act land grabs? Shut down resource development and eliminate jobs created by employers Gang Green considers their enemies.
GANG GREEN’S SEVEN DEADLIEST, MOST DESTRUCTIVE POWER GRABS: #5 – “Biofuel” mandates cause mass starvation, pollution
To environmentalists ethanol and biofuels, which they also coincidentally happen to be heavily invested in financially, are magic potions that will cure an Earth they claim is dying from automobile use.
To the environment, however, they are poison.
* To grow the massive amounts of corn and other crops needed to create ethanol and other biofuels, farmers must use millions of gallons of pesticides and water, burn millions of gallons of fuel to operate farming equipment and convert vast amounts of prairie, forests and other natural environments into farmland.
* Environmentalists, many of whom are invested financially in biofuels, are pushing farmers in environmentally sensitive areas like the Amazon to slash-and-burn vast swaths of ecosystems to plant biofuel crops.
* Biofuels cannot be pipelined, requiring thousands of trucks to burn millions of gallons of fuel to transport it.
* Producing biofuels takes millions of acres of farmland out of food production, reducing the supply of crops like corn, which is not only food itself but is feed for farm animals. As ethanol and biofuel production rise, the costs of creating food skyrocket. Starvation spiked in Mexico, for example, when environmentalist efforts to boost ethanol production created a corn shortage and sent the price of food through the roof.
* Biofuels are less efficient than more effective petro fuels, greatly reducing gas mileage. The E85 blend of ethanol drops gas mileage between 30% and 40%, depending on whether you use the EPA’s fuel mileage standards (fueleconomy.gov) or those of the Dept. of Energy, according to BusinessWeek
* Biofuels also have a nasty habit of destroying vehicle fuel pumps, according to BusinessWeek. In areas where environmentalist mandates force ethanol on drivers, auto repair shops report a spike in damaged fuel pumps, virtually all of which are traced back to ethanol in fuel. The average repair bill is between $900 and $1000. Biofuels are also destroying boat engines and other small engines by drawing water into the fuel system.
* Many biofuels generate as much as, and sometimes more than, the amount of greenhouse gases than petro fuels.
Rather than reduce pollution, producing biolfuels is pollution on steroids. The EPA’s own attorneys even admitted in court biofuels and ethanol are more polluting than petro fuels (API v. EPA, 1995, Third Circuit Court of Appeals.)
Sadly, use of biofuels and ethanol are only increased as radical environmentalists with large amounts of money invested in the failed, more-polluting technology press government to bail them out by increasing use mandates.
GANG GREEN’S SEVEN DEADLIEST, MOST DESTRUCTIVE POWER GRABS: #4 – Campaign of terror against safe, clean hydraulic fracturing
“Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.” – Environmentalist “founding father” Dr. Paul Erlich.
“[W]e have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.” – Professor of Environmental Biology and Global Change at Stanford University and Obama adviser Stephen Schneider
Don’t believe Gang Green when they openly admit they must destroy any form of clean, affordable energy, and lying is a perfectly acceptable means to environmentalist ends?
Always ready to destroy any form of clean, affordable energy by any means necessary, Gang Green is waging a nasty multi-million war of lies, smear tactics and outright terror in an effort to stop the safe, clean practice of hydraulic fracturing, in which high-pressure water is used to break shale and capture the natural gas inside.
The practice not only creates thousands of jobs and provides millions of Americans with affordable energy, the practice is 100% safe and clean.
But Gang Green’s war on working families includes paid agitators who travel to communities to terrorize families with debunked urban legends and even a fake documentary whose multi-million dollar publicity campaign bought it an Oscar nomination, despite the fact it was utterly falsified.
Because as with virtually every effort of Gang Green to limit energy and prosperity, it’s all based on admitted lies.
Gang Green openly admits they are lying about hydraulic fracturing. For example, there is this exchange between “Energy & the Environment TV” and the Environmental Defense Fund’s Scott Anderson:
E&E TV: “Do you believe that [hydraulic fracturing] can be used safely?” (5:23)
EDF’s Scott Anderson: “Yes I do. I think in the vast majority of cases, if wells are constructed right and operated right, that hydraulic fracturing will not cause a problem.” (5:19) [ATP notes: Wells ARE constructed and operated correctly, with no proven cases of contamination whatsoever.]
E&E TV: “How difficult is it for states to regulate this practice? And should it be done on a state-by-state bases, a region-by-region bases or nationally?” (2:11)
EDF’s Scott Anderson: “The states actually have a lot of knowledge and experience in regulating well construction and operation. We think that states have every reason to be able to tackle this issue and do it well. We also think that if states fail in that and the federal government has to takeover, the states will have no one but themselves to blame.” (2:00)
E&E TV: “Without this practice of hydraulic fracturing, what would our natural gas supplies look like?” (1:38)
EDF’s Scott Anderson: “Our natural gas supplies would plummet precipitously without hydraulic fracturing. About 90 percent of gas wells in the United States are hydraulically fractured, and the shale gas that everyone talks about as being a large part of the future of natural gas production is absolutely dependent on fracturing in each case.” (1:33)
E&E TV: “So you would say that this is a necessary part of our energy future?” (1:09)
EDF’s Scott Anderson: “Yes. At the Environmental Defense Fund we don’t pick fuels, we are realist, we recognize that fossil fuels will be around for a while, a long while most likely. We recognize that natural gas has some environmental advantages compared to other fossil fuels, so we do believe that natural gas will be around, and has a significant role to play….” (1:05)
Tennessee State Rep. David Hawk also notes hydraulic fracturing is absolutely safe and clean.
“Hydraulic fracturing is routinely and safely performed nationwide. Production is carefully regulated and closely monitored by federal, state and local regulators. The Environmental Protection Agency, the Ground Water Protection Council and the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission have examined the process and found it to be safe.” Rep. Hawk writes in the Nashville Tennessean.
“Over the past 60 years, more than 1 million wells in the U.S. have successfully used hydraulic fracturing. This proven process has unlocked access to more natural gas in the U.S. than Saudi Arabia has oil, and has allowed for the success of an industry that supports more than 2.8 million jobs and contributed $385 billion to our nation’s economy in 2008,” writes Rep. Hawk.
GANG GREEN’S SEVEN DEADLIEST, MOST DESTRUCTIVE POWER GRABS: #3 – Expensive Energy Mandates
Gang Green is deadly serious about aggressively pushing policies intended to make energy unaffordable.
And the Expensive Energy Mandate is one of their biggest weapons.
Sold to consumers as “doing your part for the environment” by forcing them to buy a specific percentage of their electricity from more expensive wind and solar experiments, the unpopular Mandates not only fail at reducing air pollution, they also send electric prices skyrocketing.
The only ones who benefit from the Expensive Energy Mandate are wind and solar speculators and Gang Green politicians. Money forcibly taken from the pockets of consumers bails out the speculators who invested in failing wind and solar experiments. Speculators then funnel much of their ill-gotten profit into the campaign accounts of Gang Green politicians.
The new Gang Green politicians then join up with Gang Green incumbents to raise the Expensive Energy Mandate on consumers, forcing you to hand more of your money to the politically-connected speculators in a vicious cycle of crony corporatism.
Those most punished by the Expensive Energy Mandate are working families on a budget.
Research by American Tradition Partnership’s sister organization, the American Tradition Institute think tank, finds the higher electricity prices under a 30 percent Expensive Energy Mandate would force employers to eliminate between 409,000 and 1.526 million jobs by 2021 to stay in business. The workers who manage to keep their jobs would see their gross wages plummet between $416 and $1,552.
Under a 20 percent Expensive Energy Mandate, residents would face $175 in higher electric bills, commercial business would pay $1,204 more and industrial companies would pay $20,613 more for electricity in 2021. A 30 percent Expensive Energy Mandate would more than double these figures.
Expensive Energy Mandates are already the law in many states, and Gang Green is assembling the votes in Congress to impose one nationally. American Tradition Partnership is taking action to stop the damage caused by Gang Green’s Expensive Energy Mandates by repealing them in the states and stopping it in Washington.
GANG GREEN’S SEVEN DEADLIEST, MOST DESTRUCTIVE POWER GRABS: #2 – The unelected, unaccountable and radical EPA
The Endangered Species Act. Vicious federal attacks on a safe and long-used drilling method. National carbon dioxide caps. The Expensive Energy Mandate.
None of it would be possible without Gang Green’s bureaucratic “enforcers” – the Environmental Protection Agency.
Launched in 1970 by Richard Nixon, the EPA has mutated from a consolidation of several then-existing smaller agencies into an unaccountable, unchecked and power-hungry Leviathan. Not content with simply monitoring air pollution, today’s EPA has declared an all-out war on the American economy.
And now Barack Obama plans to use this bureaucratic army to launch a full scale invasion of virtually every American employer and home through his calls for Cap and Tax, national carbon dioxide limits the Expensive Energy Mandate, all of which would be enforced with the lead pipe that is unaccountable EPA regulation.
The EPA has rightfully been criticized for:
* Abandoning reliance on scientific data to make decisions in favor of the opinions of political activists.
* Doctoring and outright falsifying documents on so-called “global warming” in order to steer the political agenda in favor of Gang Green.
* Proposing federally-dictated controls on”very fine airborne particulates” with no scientific evidence to back such a decision.
* Proposing to regulate the natural dust that kicks up behind a truck or tractor as a toxic pollutant.
* Proposing to regulate spilled milk as toxic waste.
And that’s just a tiny handful of the radical and abusive power grabs in recent history. Barack Obama proposes to unleash the EPA’s bureaucratic power and simply declare as federal regulations any law Congress deems to radical to pass.
GANG GREEN’S SEVEN DEADLIEST, MOST DESTRUCTIVE POWER GRABS: #1 – Gang Green declares war on Africans by unleashing DDT ban
For Africans struggling to survive against malaria and starvation, DDT was a lifesaver. The pesticide not only killed the disease-carrying mosquitos that killed millions, it also killed the ravenous pests that ate their crops.
“In 1970, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences estimated that DDT saved more than 500 million lives during the time it was widely used,” writes economist Dr. Walter Williams.
But riding a wave of public sentiment fueled by Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring,” which falsely claimed DDT would cause many species of birds to go extinct, radical environmentalists pushed for a ban on the life-saving chemical.
The facts didn’t matter. “A scientific review board of the EPA showed that DDT is not harmful to the environment and showed it to be a beneficial substance that ‘should not be banned.’ According to the World Health Organization, worldwide malaria infects 300 million people. About 1 million die of malaria each year. Most of the victims are in Africa, and most are children,” writes Williams.
EPA Administrative Law Judge Edmund Sweeney stated that “DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man. … The uses of DDT under the regulations involved here do not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds, or other wildlife. … The evidence in this proceeding supports the conclusion that there is a present need for the essential uses of DDT.”
But armed with falsified environmental “studies,” they succeeded in winning an EPA ban on the chemical 1972, and bans in other countries. EPA Administration William Ruckelshaus, who was also a fundraiser for the Environmental Defense Fund, overturned Sweeney’s ruling despite never having attended a single hearing on DDT and banned the chemical entirely.
The result?
“In Sri Lanka, in 1948, there were 2.8 million malaria cases and 7,300 malaria deaths. With widespread DDT use, malaria cases fell to 17 and no deaths in 1963. After DDT use was discontinued, Sri Lankan malaria cases rose to 2.5 million in the years 1968 and 1969, and the disease remains a killer in Sri Lanka today. More than 100,000 people died during malaria epidemics in Swaziland and Madagascar in the mid-1980s, following the suspension of DDT house spraying. After South Africa stopped using DDT in 1996, the number of malaria cases in KwaZulu-Natal province skyrocketed from 8,000 to 42,000. By 2000, there had been an approximate 400 percent increase in malaria deaths. Now that DDT is being used again, the number of deaths from malaria in the region has dropped from 340 in 2000 to none at the last reporting in February 2003,” writes Williams.
An estimated 102 million people have needlessly died from malaria since DDT was banned.
Why would environmentalists push for a worldwide ban on a chemical that saved the lives of millions of people living in Third World countries? Ask the environmentalists themselves:
“People are the cause of all the problems. We have too many of them. We need to get rid of some of them, and this (referring to malaria deaths) is as good a way as any.” – Dr. Charles Foster, one of the architects of the ban on DDT
“My own doubts came when DDT was introduced. In Guyana, within two years, it had almost eliminated malaria. So my chief quarrel with DDT, in hindsight, is that it has greatly added to the population problem.” – Alexander King, founder of the Malthusian Club of Rome
And those aren’t isolated cases. Viewing humans as the parasite to be exterminated is a mainstream view in the environmentalist community:
“I suspect that eradicating small pox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems.” — John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal
“Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs.” — John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal
“The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable but a good thing….This is not to say that the rise of human civilization is insignificant, but there is no way of showing that it will be much help to the world in the long run.” — Economist editorial
“We advocate biodiversity for biodiversity’s sake. It may take our extinction to set things straight/” — David Foreman, Earth First!
“Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental.” — Dave Forman, Founder of Earth First!
“If radical environmentalists were to invent a disease to bring human populations back to sanity, it would probably be something like AIDS.” — Earth First! Newsletter
“Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, is not as important as a wild and healthy planets…Some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.” — David Graber, biologist, National Park Service
“The collective needs of non-human species must take precedence over the needs and desires of humans.” — Dr. Reed F. Noss, The Wildlands Project
“If I were reincarnated, I would wish to be returned to Earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels.” — Prince Phillip, World Wildlife Fund
Cannibalism is a “radical but realistic solution to the problem of overpopulation.” — Lyall Watson, The Financial Times, 15 July 1995
Sold as legislation that would protect vulnerable species, the Endangered Species Act and other wildlife preservation laws are instead routinely abused by environmentalists as weapons against employers.
A favorite tactic is to use junk science and strong-arm tactics to get species that are not threatened or endangered listed as “threatened” or “endangered” to shut down agriculture, home building, energy and timber development and other job-creating activities in targeted areas.
Among the earliest attempts to pull such scams occurred in 1973 when radical environmentalists successfully delayed construction of the Tellico Dam when a University of Tennessee biology professor claimed a rare fish called the “snail darter.” Greens filed a lawsuit under the National Environmental Policy Act claiming construction of the dam would alter the Little Tennessee River and destroy the “snail darter,” which would be placed on the Endangered Species List in 1975.
They did not succeed in their goal of stopping construction of the dam, but they did succeed in inflicting lengthy and expensive delays in its construction.
Not only did the species not go extinct, it was plentiful enough to be taken off the Endangered Species List less only a year after completion of the dam environmentalists claimed would wipe it out.
In fact, environmentalists routinely falsify and outright lie about population numbers in order to shut down employment on millions of acres of land under the Act.
The ESA routinely hands out “endangered” declarations for species that were so invasive and populous the government was paying people to poison or catch them — up until Gang Green radicals pressured government officials to suddenly declare them “endangered” so they could target employers and landowners for extinction.
In the most famous case of fraudulent use of the ESA, environmentalists petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1986 to list the spotted owl as an “endangered species” in order to shut down timber harvesting across vast areas of the northwest United States. Waging a ferocious public pressure campaign, environmentalists claimed the bird could only nest in “old growth” forests, and logging would lead to the bird’s extinction.
The scare tactics paid off in 1990 when the government declared the owl threatened, forcing loggers to leave at least 40% of the old-growth forests intact within a 1.3 mile radius of any spotted owl nest or activity site.
The result? Timber harvesting was virtually shut down in the American northwest and thousands of loggers lost their jobs. To add insult to injury, not only is the spotted owl not threatened, it is more than capable of nesting in secondary and newer forests.
Environmentalists were not at all ashamed of their fraudulent use of the Endangered Species Act. League of Conservation Voters founder and former Sierra Club Executive Director David Brower proudly crowed, “Loggers losing their jobs because of Spotted Owl legislation is, in my eyes, no different than people being out of work after the furnaces of Dachau shut down.”
GANG GREEN’S SEVEN DEADLIEST, MOST DESTRUCTIVE POWER GRABS: #6 – The Antiquities Act land grab spree
The Antiquities Act of 1906 was signed into law over 100 years ago to protect tiny, individual Indian archaeological sites from looters. In one of Gang Green’s most brazen displays of abuse of power, the Act is now being used to snatch up millions of acres of land at a time and declare it a “national monument” – without congressional approval.
Under “national monument” designation, natural resource development and most recreational activities are outlawed, a move that eliminates badly-needed jobs and robs citizens of property rights.
The Clinton administration notably used the Act in 1996 to shut down clean coal development in 2,600 square miles of southern Utah.
The Obama administration is undertaking multiple abusive land grabs under the Act.
An Interior Department internal document indicates the Administration is considering using Antiquities Act to designate as many as seventeen different sections of the West as “national monuments.” The list was leaked just days after a story appeared in The New York Times outlining the administration’s plans to use executive power to pass Obama’s agenda over the disapproval of Congress, Fox News reports.
Obama’s use of the Antiquities Act comes as the administration also seeks to grab land and shut down recreational and employment activity through passage of the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act, the so-called “Clean Water Restoration Act” and a bill by Montana Senator Jon Tester to expand federal “wilderness” designations.
The intended product of Antiquities Act land grabs? Shut down resource development and eliminate jobs created by employers Gang Green considers their enemies.
GANG GREEN’S SEVEN DEADLIEST, MOST DESTRUCTIVE POWER GRABS: #5 – “Biofuel” mandates cause mass starvation, pollution
To environmentalists ethanol and biofuels, which they also coincidentally happen to be heavily invested in financially, are magic potions that will cure an Earth they claim is dying from automobile use.
To the environment, however, they are poison.
* To grow the massive amounts of corn and other crops needed to create ethanol and other biofuels, farmers must use millions of gallons of pesticides and water, burn millions of gallons of fuel to operate farming equipment and convert vast amounts of prairie, forests and other natural environments into farmland.
* Environmentalists, many of whom are invested financially in biofuels, are pushing farmers in environmentally sensitive areas like the Amazon to slash-and-burn vast swaths of ecosystems to plant biofuel crops.
* Biofuels cannot be pipelined, requiring thousands of trucks to burn millions of gallons of fuel to transport it.
* Producing biofuels takes millions of acres of farmland out of food production, reducing the supply of crops like corn, which is not only food itself but is feed for farm animals. As ethanol and biofuel production rise, the costs of creating food skyrocket. Starvation spiked in Mexico, for example, when environmentalist efforts to boost ethanol production created a corn shortage and sent the price of food through the roof.
* Biofuels are less efficient than more effective petro fuels, greatly reducing gas mileage. The E85 blend of ethanol drops gas mileage between 30% and 40%, depending on whether you use the EPA’s fuel mileage standards (fueleconomy.gov) or those of the Dept. of Energy, according to BusinessWeek
* Biofuels also have a nasty habit of destroying vehicle fuel pumps, according to BusinessWeek. In areas where environmentalist mandates force ethanol on drivers, auto repair shops report a spike in damaged fuel pumps, virtually all of which are traced back to ethanol in fuel. The average repair bill is between $900 and $1000. Biofuels are also destroying boat engines and other small engines by drawing water into the fuel system.
* Many biofuels generate as much as, and sometimes more than, the amount of greenhouse gases than petro fuels.
Rather than reduce pollution, producing biolfuels is pollution on steroids. The EPA’s own attorneys even admitted in court biofuels and ethanol are more polluting than petro fuels (API v. EPA, 1995, Third Circuit Court of Appeals.)
Sadly, use of biofuels and ethanol are only increased as radical environmentalists with large amounts of money invested in the failed, more-polluting technology press government to bail them out by increasing use mandates.
GANG GREEN’S SEVEN DEADLIEST, MOST DESTRUCTIVE POWER GRABS: #4 – Campaign of terror against safe, clean hydraulic fracturing
“Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.” – Environmentalist “founding father” Dr. Paul Erlich.
“[W]e have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.” – Professor of Environmental Biology and Global Change at Stanford University and Obama adviser Stephen Schneider
Don’t believe Gang Green when they openly admit they must destroy any form of clean, affordable energy, and lying is a perfectly acceptable means to environmentalist ends?
Always ready to destroy any form of clean, affordable energy by any means necessary, Gang Green is waging a nasty multi-million war of lies, smear tactics and outright terror in an effort to stop the safe, clean practice of hydraulic fracturing, in which high-pressure water is used to break shale and capture the natural gas inside.
The practice not only creates thousands of jobs and provides millions of Americans with affordable energy, the practice is 100% safe and clean.
But Gang Green’s war on working families includes paid agitators who travel to communities to terrorize families with debunked urban legends and even a fake documentary whose multi-million dollar publicity campaign bought it an Oscar nomination, despite the fact it was utterly falsified.
Because as with virtually every effort of Gang Green to limit energy and prosperity, it’s all based on admitted lies.
Gang Green openly admits they are lying about hydraulic fracturing. For example, there is this exchange between “Energy & the Environment TV” and the Environmental Defense Fund’s Scott Anderson:
E&E TV: “Do you believe that [hydraulic fracturing] can be used safely?” (5:23)
EDF’s Scott Anderson: “Yes I do. I think in the vast majority of cases, if wells are constructed right and operated right, that hydraulic fracturing will not cause a problem.” (5:19) [ATP notes: Wells ARE constructed and operated correctly, with no proven cases of contamination whatsoever.]
E&E TV: “How difficult is it for states to regulate this practice? And should it be done on a state-by-state bases, a region-by-region bases or nationally?” (2:11)
EDF’s Scott Anderson: “The states actually have a lot of knowledge and experience in regulating well construction and operation. We think that states have every reason to be able to tackle this issue and do it well. We also think that if states fail in that and the federal government has to takeover, the states will have no one but themselves to blame.” (2:00)
E&E TV: “Without this practice of hydraulic fracturing, what would our natural gas supplies look like?” (1:38)
EDF’s Scott Anderson: “Our natural gas supplies would plummet precipitously without hydraulic fracturing. About 90 percent of gas wells in the United States are hydraulically fractured, and the shale gas that everyone talks about as being a large part of the future of natural gas production is absolutely dependent on fracturing in each case.” (1:33)
E&E TV: “So you would say that this is a necessary part of our energy future?” (1:09)
EDF’s Scott Anderson: “Yes. At the Environmental Defense Fund we don’t pick fuels, we are realist, we recognize that fossil fuels will be around for a while, a long while most likely. We recognize that natural gas has some environmental advantages compared to other fossil fuels, so we do believe that natural gas will be around, and has a significant role to play….” (1:05)
Tennessee State Rep. David Hawk also notes hydraulic fracturing is absolutely safe and clean.
“Hydraulic fracturing is routinely and safely performed nationwide. Production is carefully regulated and closely monitored by federal, state and local regulators. The Environmental Protection Agency, the Ground Water Protection Council and the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission have examined the process and found it to be safe.” Rep. Hawk writes in the Nashville Tennessean.
“Over the past 60 years, more than 1 million wells in the U.S. have successfully used hydraulic fracturing. This proven process has unlocked access to more natural gas in the U.S. than Saudi Arabia has oil, and has allowed for the success of an industry that supports more than 2.8 million jobs and contributed $385 billion to our nation’s economy in 2008,” writes Rep. Hawk.
GANG GREEN’S SEVEN DEADLIEST, MOST DESTRUCTIVE POWER GRABS: #3 – Expensive Energy Mandates
Gang Green is deadly serious about aggressively pushing policies intended to make energy unaffordable.
And the Expensive Energy Mandate is one of their biggest weapons.
Sold to consumers as “doing your part for the environment” by forcing them to buy a specific percentage of their electricity from more expensive wind and solar experiments, the unpopular Mandates not only fail at reducing air pollution, they also send electric prices skyrocketing.
The only ones who benefit from the Expensive Energy Mandate are wind and solar speculators and Gang Green politicians. Money forcibly taken from the pockets of consumers bails out the speculators who invested in failing wind and solar experiments. Speculators then funnel much of their ill-gotten profit into the campaign accounts of Gang Green politicians.
The new Gang Green politicians then join up with Gang Green incumbents to raise the Expensive Energy Mandate on consumers, forcing you to hand more of your money to the politically-connected speculators in a vicious cycle of crony corporatism.
Those most punished by the Expensive Energy Mandate are working families on a budget.
Research by American Tradition Partnership’s sister organization, the American Tradition Institute think tank, finds the higher electricity prices under a 30 percent Expensive Energy Mandate would force employers to eliminate between 409,000 and 1.526 million jobs by 2021 to stay in business. The workers who manage to keep their jobs would see their gross wages plummet between $416 and $1,552.
Under a 20 percent Expensive Energy Mandate, residents would face $175 in higher electric bills, commercial business would pay $1,204 more and industrial companies would pay $20,613 more for electricity in 2021. A 30 percent Expensive Energy Mandate would more than double these figures.
Expensive Energy Mandates are already the law in many states, and Gang Green is assembling the votes in Congress to impose one nationally. American Tradition Partnership is taking action to stop the damage caused by Gang Green’s Expensive Energy Mandates by repealing them in the states and stopping it in Washington.
GANG GREEN’S SEVEN DEADLIEST, MOST DESTRUCTIVE POWER GRABS: #2 – The unelected, unaccountable and radical EPA
The Endangered Species Act. Vicious federal attacks on a safe and long-used drilling method. National carbon dioxide caps. The Expensive Energy Mandate.
None of it would be possible without Gang Green’s bureaucratic “enforcers” – the Environmental Protection Agency.
Launched in 1970 by Richard Nixon, the EPA has mutated from a consolidation of several then-existing smaller agencies into an unaccountable, unchecked and power-hungry Leviathan. Not content with simply monitoring air pollution, today’s EPA has declared an all-out war on the American economy.
And now Barack Obama plans to use this bureaucratic army to launch a full scale invasion of virtually every American employer and home through his calls for Cap and Tax, national carbon dioxide limits the Expensive Energy Mandate, all of which would be enforced with the lead pipe that is unaccountable EPA regulation.
The EPA has rightfully been criticized for:
* Abandoning reliance on scientific data to make decisions in favor of the opinions of political activists.
* Doctoring and outright falsifying documents on so-called “global warming” in order to steer the political agenda in favor of Gang Green.
* Proposing federally-dictated controls on”very fine airborne particulates” with no scientific evidence to back such a decision.
* Proposing to regulate the natural dust that kicks up behind a truck or tractor as a toxic pollutant.
* Proposing to regulate spilled milk as toxic waste.
And that’s just a tiny handful of the radical and abusive power grabs in recent history. Barack Obama proposes to unleash the EPA’s bureaucratic power and simply declare as federal regulations any law Congress deems to radical to pass.
GANG GREEN’S SEVEN DEADLIEST, MOST DESTRUCTIVE POWER GRABS: #1 – Gang Green declares war on Africans by unleashing DDT ban
For Africans struggling to survive against malaria and starvation, DDT was a lifesaver. The pesticide not only killed the disease-carrying mosquitos that killed millions, it also killed the ravenous pests that ate their crops.
“In 1970, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences estimated that DDT saved more than 500 million lives during the time it was widely used,” writes economist Dr. Walter Williams.
But riding a wave of public sentiment fueled by Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring,” which falsely claimed DDT would cause many species of birds to go extinct, radical environmentalists pushed for a ban on the life-saving chemical.
The facts didn’t matter. “A scientific review board of the EPA showed that DDT is not harmful to the environment and showed it to be a beneficial substance that ‘should not be banned.’ According to the World Health Organization, worldwide malaria infects 300 million people. About 1 million die of malaria each year. Most of the victims are in Africa, and most are children,” writes Williams.
EPA Administrative Law Judge Edmund Sweeney stated that “DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man. … The uses of DDT under the regulations involved here do not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds, or other wildlife. … The evidence in this proceeding supports the conclusion that there is a present need for the essential uses of DDT.”
But armed with falsified environmental “studies,” they succeeded in winning an EPA ban on the chemical 1972, and bans in other countries. EPA Administration William Ruckelshaus, who was also a fundraiser for the Environmental Defense Fund, overturned Sweeney’s ruling despite never having attended a single hearing on DDT and banned the chemical entirely.
The result?
“In Sri Lanka, in 1948, there were 2.8 million malaria cases and 7,300 malaria deaths. With widespread DDT use, malaria cases fell to 17 and no deaths in 1963. After DDT use was discontinued, Sri Lankan malaria cases rose to 2.5 million in the years 1968 and 1969, and the disease remains a killer in Sri Lanka today. More than 100,000 people died during malaria epidemics in Swaziland and Madagascar in the mid-1980s, following the suspension of DDT house spraying. After South Africa stopped using DDT in 1996, the number of malaria cases in KwaZulu-Natal province skyrocketed from 8,000 to 42,000. By 2000, there had been an approximate 400 percent increase in malaria deaths. Now that DDT is being used again, the number of deaths from malaria in the region has dropped from 340 in 2000 to none at the last reporting in February 2003,” writes Williams.
An estimated 102 million people have needlessly died from malaria since DDT was banned.
Why would environmentalists push for a worldwide ban on a chemical that saved the lives of millions of people living in Third World countries? Ask the environmentalists themselves:
“People are the cause of all the problems. We have too many of them. We need to get rid of some of them, and this (referring to malaria deaths) is as good a way as any.” – Dr. Charles Foster, one of the architects of the ban on DDT
“My own doubts came when DDT was introduced. In Guyana, within two years, it had almost eliminated malaria. So my chief quarrel with DDT, in hindsight, is that it has greatly added to the population problem.” – Alexander King, founder of the Malthusian Club of Rome
And those aren’t isolated cases. Viewing humans as the parasite to be exterminated is a mainstream view in the environmentalist community:
“I suspect that eradicating small pox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems.” — John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal
“Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs.” — John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal
“The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable but a good thing….This is not to say that the rise of human civilization is insignificant, but there is no way of showing that it will be much help to the world in the long run.” — Economist editorial
“We advocate biodiversity for biodiversity’s sake. It may take our extinction to set things straight/” — David Foreman, Earth First!
“Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental.” — Dave Forman, Founder of Earth First!
“If radical environmentalists were to invent a disease to bring human populations back to sanity, it would probably be something like AIDS.” — Earth First! Newsletter
“Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, is not as important as a wild and healthy planets…Some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.” — David Graber, biologist, National Park Service
“The collective needs of non-human species must take precedence over the needs and desires of humans.” — Dr. Reed F. Noss, The Wildlands Project
“If I were reincarnated, I would wish to be returned to Earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels.” — Prince Phillip, World Wildlife Fund
Cannibalism is a “radical but realistic solution to the problem of overpopulation.” — Lyall Watson, The Financial Times, 15 July 1995
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