GREENIES LOSE A ROUND

The b******s even want to stop us using burnt trees! Note the arrogance:

Loggers began chopping down trees Monday inside a wildfire-ravaged old-growth forest after authorities hauled away environmentalists trying to block the logging from taking place. Loggers toting chainsaws, axes and fuel cans hiked past the protest site on the Siskiyou National Forest and a short while later the roar of chainsaws and trees crashing to earth could be heard. Authorities arrested 10 people and towed away a disabled pickup draped with an Earth First banner.

The battle has become the focus of a national debate between conservationists and the Bush administration over how to treat the millions of acres of national forest that burn every year in wildfires and whether to log any of the remaining old growth in national forests. Old-growth forest reserves were designated primarily for fish and wildlife habitat under a 1994 forest plan. That act was created to balance logging against habitat for salmon and the northern spotted owl.

About 50 protesters assembled at the forest before dawn in an attempt to stall logging that had been made possible by the expiration of an injunction. "We have no laws in our forest so we will be the law," said Joan Norman, 72, of Selma, before Forest Service law enforcement officers picked her up in her metal lawn chair blocking a logging road bridge.

John West, president of Silver Creek Logging Co., said the protesters had a right to their say, but a federal court injunction that held up the logging for months has expired, and work has to proceed quickly to avoid further loss of the fire-killed timber to insects and rot. "The people of this country have given the Forest Service the responsibility for taking care of this land," West said. "The Forest Service is trying to do that."

Monday's logging occurred at the site of a wildfire that charred 500,000 acres and was the largest in the nation in 2002.

The Forest Service and timber industry contend that by cutting trees on a small fraction of the forest burned by the fire, they can finance work to speed the growth of a new forest while providing much-needed timber for local mills.

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THE SKY IS NOT FALLING

A litany of false prophecies:

It's time for a new perspective on all the ominous warnings about global warming, scarcity of resources, overpopulation, deforestation, etc: Yes, we do have problems with the environment that we must address. But some of these problems no longer exist or never did, and our technological advances are doing a good job of addressing the others. Yet the doomsayers act as if the problems are ignored, which is just not true.

For one example, after hearing scary talk about global overpopulation for most of our lives, it is now predicted by U.N. and independent researchers that the world's population will stabilize by midcentury, then start declining. Why? Technological advances have yielded great affluence, and affluent families tend to be smaller.

The plunging fertility rate is already creating problems with Europe's social welfare programs. There aren't enough workers joining the job force to pay for benefits. But this phenomenon is not limited to developed countries. The fertility rate is also dropping in Third World nations as they become richer.

Along with talk about overpopulation, we also used to hear that if big industrial nations kept up their insatiable demands for limited resources, we would run out ofthose resources. Instead, thanks to technology, we enjoy abundance, not scarcity.

For another example, the green movement would have us believe that because of our indifference to environmental preservation, we are mowing down our forests to feed our rapacious industries.

But that's false, according to Jack Hollander, professor emeritus of energy and resources at UC Berkeley. "Technological advances [have] contributed to saving the American forests. As new fossil-fuel-powered agricultural machines were introduced early in the 20th century, farmers were able to produce crops more efficiently, so they needed less land for a given output," Hollander wrote in his book, "The Real Environmental Crisis: Why Poverty, Not Affluence, is the Environment's Number One Enemy."

What happened in Vermont is a good example. In the 1700s, Vermont was almost totally covered with forest, yet by 1850 so much clearing had taken place for agricultural use that the forest cover had dropped to 35 percent. People feared that Vermont would become a wasteland. Today, however, Vermont's forest cover has sharply rebounded to the point where it is now seen in 77 percent of the state.

In the United States as a whole, over 300 million acres of forest were lost between 1600 and 1920 due to farming and the use of wood for cooking and heating. Forest acreage began to stabilize around the turn of the 20th century and has been expanding since 1920. At present, total forest acreage is 737 million acres - almost three-quarters as much as in 1600.

Since the 1950s, timber growth has consistently exceeded harvest. The wood supply in the United States will be available indefinitely because industry and government continue to invest in efficient forest management techniques and technologies.

For a third example, let's look at global warming. Robert C. Balling Jr., a climatology professor at Arizona State University, points out that the Kyoto Treaty isn't so much about preventing this supposed phenomenon asit is about vindicating a political process that led to a dubious U.N. and world "consensus." This process has made it difficult for sound science to triumph in evaluating whether the threat is real, but what is known is hardly a cause for alarm, Balling and other respected scientists contend.

The key point here is that the possibility of global warming isn't just being ignored by Kyoto critics, as Kyoto supporters say. Instead, it's being taken seriously by scientists whose own research leads them to question the consensus.

Unfortunately, the environmental movement is now more about protecting its fund-raising efforts than protecting the environment. Whatever the facts, greens aim to scare people into thinking environmental catastrophe is right around the corner - and that only your dollars will allow them to stop it.

But the reality isn't that scary at all, and when real problems pop up, they are being dealt with, not ignored.

Source

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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, truth regardless.

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