GREENIES ARE JUST FEELIES

Andrew Bolt notes how the very "Green" Peter Garrett thinks. Garrett is a recent high-profile recruit to Australia's major party of the Left and a probable future member of the Australian Federal parliament. Excerpts:

"Garrett the rocker and Australian Conservation Foundation president has rarely had to expose himself to hard questioning of his politics -- certainly not from a usually admiring media.

Lucky him, as we saw two years ago, when 60 Minutes did confront him with Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish statistician who has debunked the scare campaigns of our religious greens with facts, facts and more facts. Here's one exchange, when Lomborg asked doom-preaching Garrett to at least admit fewer people starved now than did 30 years ago.

Garrett: I don't think the statistics actually back you up, Professor Lomborg . . .

Lomborg: You're wrong. The UN Food and Agricultural Organisation have put out figures on starvation since 1970 and shown a dramatic decrease -- from 35 per cent to 18 per cent (of all people), from 947 million, now down to 840 million.

Garrett: Quite clearly whether it's 800 million people or four million kids who are suffering from starvation now it's still a problem for us and we haven't solved it in the world and to argue anything else is a statistical lie. (My emphasis.)

Lomborg: This is the problem I have with this kind of argument: you think you're so right that you can also just deny the numbers that we all understand and we all agree to.

Lomborg is right. Garrett feels his truths, like any post-modernist, and facts will not lightly change his mind. Indeed, they can become a "statistical lie".

Nothing shakes his faith, as a Christian green, that the world faces a biblical apocalypse if we don't take "the metaphysical jump (and) find the time to bond with the earth" and repent our environmental sins. As I said, this is the true sign of a religious fanatic -- having a faith that treats facts as lies. Statistical lies.

And so Garrett declares global warming dooms the islands of Tuvalu, where our "neighbours are in danger of losing their homes forever", when in fact Flinders University researchers can't detect a flicker of a rise in sea levels there.

He demands we scrap our uranium mines because radiation is so lethal that Chernobyl "caused the deaths of more than 30,000 people", when in fact United Nations agencies put the death toll at fewer than 50. But that's just more "statistical lies", I guess.

Likewise, Garrett rages at how Aboriginal elder Yami Lester "was blinded by the tests" at Maralinga and others "suffered terribly", when in fact a royal commission and every medical survey failed to find a single clear case of illness caused by those nuclear blasts.

He demands we spend tens of millions more to "save" the "sick" Murray from "rising salinity trends", when in fact the Murray has not been this fresh for half a century.

But no "statistical lies" will stop Garret from crying: "Repent! For the end of the world is nigh." He demands we ban all genetically modified crops as a menace to humanity, when in fact even the UN's own Food and Agricultural Organisation says they're safe, kind to the environment and "can help the poor" and starving.

*****************************************

Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else.

Comments? Email me or here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

*****************************************