Some reviews of: "How Green Were the Nazis? Nature, Environment, and Nation in the Third Reich"

Edited by Franz-Josef Bruggemeier, Mark Cioc and Thomas Zeller

"The environmental ideas, policies, and consequences of the Nazi regime pose controversial questions that have long begged for authoritative answers. At last, a team of highly qualified scholars has tackled these questions, with dispassionate judgment and deep research. Their assessment will stand for years to come as the fundamental work on the subject and provides a new angle of vision on 20th-century Europe's most disruptive force."

-John McNeill, author of Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World

"The thesis brought forward by the editors regarding the `modernity' of National Socialism is exciting.... The volume raises key questions and provides a very good basis for engaging with the history of conservation under Nazi rule."

-Historische Zeitschrift

"While it may not be the final statement on the Green dimension of National Socialism, it certainly counts among the most serious and thoughtful...."

-Technology & Culture

The Nazis created nature preserves, championed sustainable forestry, curbed air pollution, and designed the autobahn highway network as a way of bringing Germans closer to nature. How Green Were the Nazis?: Nature, Environment, and Nation in the Third Reich is the first book to examine the Third Reich's environmental policies and to offer an in-depth exploration of the intersections between brown ideologies and green practices.

Environmentalists and conservationists in Germany welcomed the rise of the Nazi regime with open arms and hoped that it would bring about legal and institutional changes. However, environmentalists soon realized that the rhetorical attention they received from the regime did not always translate into action. By the late 1930s, nature and the environment had become less pressing concerns as Nazi Germany prepared for and executed a global conflagration.

Based on prodigious archival research, and written by some of the most important scholars in the field of twentieth-century German history, How Green Were the Nazis? examines the overlap between Nazi ideology and conservationist agendas. This landmark book underscores the fact that the "green" policies of the Nazis were more than a mere episode or aberration in environmental history.

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"KEEP 'EM IN THE DARK" argue today's Greenie "scientists". Green Nazism is not dead

Airing the views of climate change sceptics in the media only serves to keep controversy boiling, scientists have told the World Conference of Science Journalists in Melbourne, Australia. Kevin Hennessy, Australian scientist and lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group II report, said today (18 April) that media attention on "the view of a handful of climate change sceptics" amplifies their opinions and "implies that there is little agreement about the basic facts of global warming".

Speaking in a session about climate change reporting, he said editors and journalists have a duty to ensure that facts are presented in context. Balanced reporting, he said, "perpetuates the public's perception that scientists are in disarray, which is misleading in the case of climate change".

Geoff Love, vice chair of the IPCC Working Group II, said that the IPCC assessment reports ― from 1990, 1995, 2001 and February 2007 ― are strong evidence of "the coming together of the scientific community" and that emphasis on the sceptic view does not help public understanding of climate change.

Media coverage has not always reflected the consensus of the majority of the scientific community, said Ian Lowe, president of the Australian Conservation Foundation. "That only makes the public and political discussion more difficult," he said.

The problem is compounded by a lack of reporting on climate change, according to Chris Mooney, a US-based science journalist. Although the 2006 hurricane season attracted a lot of media attention, Mooney presented statistics from the United States showing that climate change has never been a priority in the media.

The situation is similar in Africa, said Kenyan SciDev.Net correspondent Ochieng' Ogodo. Articles about deaths caused by floods or other natural disasters, and political scandals related to climate change tend to get precedence, he said.

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GREEN MYTHS: ENVIRO 'FACTS' THAT AREN'T

As we mark the 38th Earth Day tomorrow, it's worth noting that this secular "religion" has led many Americans to fervently believe some things that just aren't true. Environmentalist values plainly deserve a place in making public policy. But we shouldn't be guided by myths that are provably false. Yet a recent survey by Zogby International for the Manhattan Institute found that, when it comes to energy and the environment, the public is more inclined to believe myths than to have a firm grasp of basic facts. Polling 1,000 average Americans on assorted energy and environmental issues, we found a wide disconnect between what people "know" and what is actually true.

What are the myths propagated by the Church of Environmentalism? Consider the pronouncements from the greens' "Vatican": Last Earth Day, Greenpeace USA exhorted its followers to action because "our forests are being destroyed at an unprecedented rate." More, we must switch to "clean alternative" energies like wind power, because "we all know that fossil fuels contribute to global warming." A lot of people agree. Nearly 67 percent of those in our survey said they believe human activity, such as logging and development, is shrinking our forests. It seems self-evident; after all, the population continues to grow, and we build more and bigger buildings. So why wouldn't we be losing forestland?

But it's not so. Yes, the United States lost forestland throughout much of the 19th century, as the new nation grew - but the amount of forestland stabilized throughout much of the 20th century. You can thank technology and progress for that, not any government scheme to save trees. The fact is that our footprint over nature is shrinking - because housing and industry don't require anything approaching the acreage that farming demands, and we now need smaller and smaller spaces to provide the necessities of life. Machines have replaced work animals (also cutting down the land needed for grazing). Crops deliver richer yields in smaller spaces. Today we harvest 80 million fewer acres of cropland than we did 60 years ago. And our overall per-capita timber consumption is half of what it was a century ago. Result? According to the Forest Service, we have actually seen a net reforestation since 1985. We aren't losing forestland, we're gaining it.

Greenpeace's call for replacing fossil fuels with cleaner alternatives might make sense, but only if there were any realistic alternatives available. Presently renewable energies like wind power, solar power and ethanol aren't close to being able to substitute for the coal, natural gas and oil that make up the lion's share of our energy sources. Coal provides half our electricity today. Wind and solar provide less than 1 percent. More, alternative fuels can be as land-hungry as agriculture. The typical 1,000 megawatt coal or nuclear plant might sit on a few acres. To generate the same amount of electricity with renewables would require 60,000 acres for a utility-scale wind farm, or about 11,000 acres of photovoltaic cells capturing the sun's light. Ethanol, too, can't be produced in the massive quantities required to make a significant dent in our gasoline consumption - and its production depends on vast tracts of farmland, too.

Other myths?

* More than four of every five poll respondents said that our cities are getting dirtier. In fact, pollution has been slashed since 1970, and our cities are far cleaner today.

* A majority believes our chief supplier of foreign oil is Saudi Arabia. In fact, it is our friendly neighbor to the north, Canada. All told the Persian Gulf supplies just 17 percent of the oil we import, and just 11 percent of all the oil we use.

This Earth Day, Greenpeace and its fellow environmental ecclesiasts will once again call on their flocks to take action. By all means, let us safeguard the environment - but with steps rooted in fact, not myth.

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Global warming? Do the math

Originally from Canada's "National Post", Monday 9 Apr 2007

"UN Report Proves Canada Must Act Now On Climate Change," trumpeted the headline of a Liberal party press release on Friday, timed to correspond with the release of yet another alarmist UN summary on climate change. "Canada must act aggressively now to avert the destructive consequences of climate change," the Liberals insisted. "Canada must be ready for a carbon-constrained future," said party leader Stephane Dion. "Human beings can't continue to use the atmosphere as an unlimited and free dump . It is within our power to prevent the worst of the effects of climate change."

This, of course, marks the second alarmist release by the UN this year, both coming before its own scientific report on global warming is even out. Just why would the UN release these teaser summaries before its actual scientific findings are available? It could it be that the science is becoming less alarming as scientists learn more, so the UN wants to maximize the public hysteria before its catastrophic forecasts for the future can be checked against the more moderate scientific truth.

We already know that the coming report -- the fourth by the UN in 15 years -- will say that maximum projected temperatures over the next century will not be nearly as high as projected in the last report in 2001; that man has contributed less to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than originally thought; and that sea level rise will be only a few inches, rather than the several feet once thought. Yet the so-called "summaries for policy makers" are becoming more shrill each time: Species will be wiped out, crime will rise, starvation will kill hundreds of millions, disease will become rampant, islands will disappear beneath the waves, deserts will consume entire continents.

Science goes down, UN hysteria goes up. Curious, isn't it, how that plays into the UN's desire to be at the centre of a global effort to plan human activity? But let's look at just what the global-warming theory implies and at Mr. Dion's charge that humans, Canadians included, are dumping massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Think of the atmosphere as 100 cases of 24 one-litre bottles of water -- 2,400 litres in all. According to the global warming theory, rising levels of human-produced carbon dioxide are trapping more of the sun's reflected heat in the atmosphere and dangerously warming the planet. But 99 of our cases would be nitrogen (78%) and oxygen (21%), neither of which are greenhouse gases. Only one case -- just 24 bottles out of 2,400 -- would contain greenhouse gases. Of the bottles in the greenhouse gas case, 23 would be water vapour.

Water vapour is the most abundant greenhouse gas, yet scientists will admit they understand very little about its impact on global warming. (It may actually help cool the planet: As the earth heats up, water vapour may form into more clouds and reflect solar radiation before it reaches the surface. Maybe. We don't know.)

The very last bottle in that very last case would be carbon dioxide, one bottle out of 2,400. Carbon dioxide makes up just 0.04% of the entire atmosphere, and most of that -- at least 95% -- is naturally occurring (decaying plants, forest fires, volcanoes, releases from the oceans). At most, 5% of the carbon dioxide in the air comes from human sources such as power plants, cars, oilsands, etc. So in our single bottle of carbon dioxide, just 50 ml is man-made carbon dioxide. Out of our model atmosphere of 2,400 litres of water, just about a shot glassful is carbon dioxide put there by humans. And of that miniscule amount, Canada's contribution is just 2% -- about 1 ml.

If, as Mr. Dion demands, we honoured our Kyoto commitments and reduced our current CO2 emissions by one-third -- which would involve shutting down all the coal-fired power generating plants in Canada (and living with constant brownouts and blackouts); or taking all the cars or all the commercial vehicles off the roads; or shutting down the oilsands; or some combination of all these -- we would be saving one-third of 1 ml -- the tip of an eyedropper. And somehow, that is supposed to save the planet from warming; the tip of one eyedropper out of 2,400 bottles of water.

That might be true if carbon dioxide were the most toxic substance ever discovered by man. But it is not. We each expel it every time we exhale. It's hard to imagine how such a tiny amount of a benign substance could cause the end of the planet. Maybe Mr. Dion could explain that in his next press release.

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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 generally to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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