"GREENS" REALLY REDS

David's Medienkritik shows that Europe's most successful Green party is really just another frantically Leftist party. It might also be noted that the Greenie leader quoted, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, was known in the 60's as "Danny the Red":

"As many of our readers already know, Germany's Foreign Minister, Joschka Fischer, is a member of the Green party, which along with the SPD (Social Democrats) comprises the ruling coalition government in Germany. The Foreign Minister's party recently published an article as a part of its platform for European parliamentary elections on international issues entitled "Do Whatever it Takes to Get Bush Voted Out." The article is taken from the transcript of an interview conducted by the "Frankfurter Rundschau" with the Green's Chairman in the European parliament, Daniel Cohn-Bendit.

The first paragraph of the platform states:

"We have to, as Europeans, do whatever is possible so that this Bush Administration is voted out in November. With this US government no peace is achievable in the Middle East."

It is interesting to note that the Bush Administration is seen as the greatest impediment to peace in the Middle East, and not say, terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda or Hamas or autocratic governments such as those in Syria, Iran or Libya. Cohn-Bendit further states:

"Basically, it should be forbidden for US Presidents to make any type of decision on the Middle East during an election period."

We at Medienkritik wonder who Mr. Cohn-Bendit expects to enforce this special new rule of his, the UN? When it came to enforcing the 17 UN Security Council resolutions aimed at disarming Saddam Hussein's regime, a deafening silence was to be heard from Mr. Cohn-Bendit and other members of his Green party."

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USING A MOVIE TO PROMOTE A GREENIE FANTASY


"In the upcoming movie "The Day After Tomorrow", German director Roland Emmerich lets the glaciers roll over Manhattan following an abrupt change in climate...

The ice sheets that roll over Wall Street are caused by manmade global warming. You read that right. In some environmental alarmists' computer models, global warming threatens to shut down the Gulf Stream and bring a new ice age to Europe and North America. Al Gore, indeed, is so impressed by the argument that he told Variety, "The Day After Tomorrow presents us with a great opportunity to talk about the scientific realities of climate change. Millions of people will be coming out of theaters on Memorial Day weekend asking the question, 'Could this really happen?' I think we need to answer that question."

The answer to the former vice president's question is well known. It's about as likely as a 30-story-tall monster emerging from the depths. MIT's Carl Wunsch, a leading expert in ocean-circulation systems, said recently in a letter to Nature magazine that "The only way to produce an ocean circulation without a Gulf Stream is either to turn off the wind system, or to stop the Earth's rotation, or both.... The occurrence of a climate state without the Gulf Stream any time soon - within tens of millions of years - has a probability of little more than zero."

Even more succinctly, Canadian experts Andrew Weaver and Claude Hillaire-Marcel said in the April 26 issue of Science magazine, referring directly to the movie, "it is safe to say that global warming will not lead to the onset of a new ice age." But climate alarmists like Al Gore push this fantasy - however implausible - to blame greed and consumerism for the energy use and greenhouse gases they say threaten the planet. Therefore, New York, the icon of American capitalism, is the ideal target to underline the threat.

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NUCLEAR ENERGY: BRAZIL DEFEATED GREENPEACE

By publicizing the truth about the Greenies

"Brazil is now enjoying a rejuvenation of nuclear energy, with the completion of its second nuclear plant, Angra 2, and the defeat of the anti-nuclear Greenpeace-in the population, in the media, and in the political arena. This dramatic turnaround, from Brazil's greenie-engineered nuclear retreat of the early 1990s, was the result of a head-on war against Greenpeace waged by the Brazilian Nuclear Energy Association (ABEN)....

The director of the Brazilian Nuclear Energy Association, nuclear engineer Guilherme Camargo, tells the fascinating story of how the truth won out over Greenpeace's lies... Inspired by articles in Executive Intelligence Review and 21st Century magazines, Camargo got in touch with the Icelandic journalist Magnus Gudmundsson, who had made two films documenting in graphic detail the lies of Greenpeace. He was stunned by what the films showed of the self-righteous Greenpeace group. Greenpeace had even staged the grisly killing of a baby seal just to make a fundraising film that purported to show how bad fishermen were killing baby seals.

Camargo put this information together with the EIR documentation of Prince Charles's influence in Greenpeace, and Prince Philip's control over the World Wildlife Fund, and their anti-population agenda. Then ABEN brought this information to the Brazilian press. At the same time, ABEN arranged a visit of Gudmundsson to Brazil. As Carmargo said, "We spent almost eight months, hitting Greenpeace in the liver, very carefully and very sharply."

At first, there was opposition to this campaign among the engineers and scientists in the nuclear ranks, who were used to apologetically defending the safety of nuclear plants, saying things like "the probability of an accident is 10 to the minus so-and-so"-true, but ineffective in the face of irrationality. Camargo said that ABEN was persuaded "that there was a war, and that war must be taken on, and that there was no other way. That we had to defeat the enemy in order to succeed in our aims."

"The whole nuclear sector in Brazil-because they are not idiots, they just needed somebody to wake them up from this psychotic trance-this woke them up to the real fight. The real fight has nothing to do with technical issues; it is purely political, and mainly emotional and psychological warfare. As a matter of fact, we used the same tactics as the anti-nuclear people used against us," Camargo said.

The ABEN campaign expanded from using the truth to defeat Greenpeace, to using the truth to attack the rest of the green groups and non-governmental organizations, which in Brazil are funded almost entirely by international organizations like WWF. "I wrote a very strategic article in O Estado de Sao Paulo, one of the most important newspapers," Camargo said, "stating the truth about the NGOs and the whole grand strategy about using them to eliminate the sovereignty of the country."

Although Greenpeace has dropped its anti-nuclear campaign -Brazil is probably the only country in which this has happened- the ABEN is continuing to fight on the sovereignty question. And in the transformed political climate, there are now plans to build two more nuclear plants at the Angra site."

More detail here

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THERE'S MILLIONS OF KANGAROOS

The latest Greenie scare is the sort of joke that all Greenie scares that I know of have turned out to be. They say that kangaroos could soon become extinct. Like all Greenie scares, when you know the facts you just have to laugh. Kangaroos are a protected species under Australian law and, as one result, they are in plague proportions in much of rural Australia. That's why the government licenses professional shooters to kill large numbers of them -- despite the incessant shrieks of the Greenies and the animal rights protesters. And, even so, farmers and graziers (ranchers) have a lot of trouble getting permission to kill enough of them to make much of a difference.

And kangaroos are not confined to rural areas either. You can see them hopping about the place even in certain suburbs of my home city of Brisbane -- and Brisbane is Australia's third largest city. They are among the many species that have thrived as a result of human intervention in nature.

All Australian governments do their best to placate the Greenies so you can be sure that there have to be strong reasons for them not to cave in to any particular Greenie demand. The current Greenie shriek seems to refer to the situation in the State of South Australia and the relevant government Department there says: "These species are widespread and secure across South Australia.... Kangaroo populations in South Australia are monitored regularly, using either aerial survey or ground survey techniques. Most of the commercial harvest zone is monitored annually by aerial survey. This survey is one of the longest wildlife surveys of its type in the world, and has been running since 1978 in collaboration with staff from the University of Queensland." So NOTHING adverse is going to happen to kangaroo populations.

And the situation in other Australian States is similar. See here for a brief summary of the situation in Queensland.

A CONCISE DEMOLITION OF THE GLOBAL WARMING MYTH

From Tech Central Station -- some excerpts

"The first thing to be clear about is that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. Rather, the presence of this trace gas in Earth's atmosphere is vitally important for the growth of plants. And in extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, plants in turn release the oxygen that is required for the respiration of most animal life forms, you and me included.....

An accurate 25-year-long record of atmospheric temperature is now available from both satellite and weather balloon measurements. These show virtually no long-term trend of temperature increase despite the increased carbon dioxide levels over the last 25 years. Finally, a recent study by Bill Ruddiman of the University of Virginia suggests that the clearance of forests and development of agriculture by neolithic and early modern peoples, since about 8,000 years ago, have caused the release of sufficient "extra" greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide and methane) into the atmosphere to have already prevented the earth's expected decline into its next glacial episode. What, then, can we conclude from all these, sometimes conflicting, lines of evidence?

It is that, contrary to strong public belief, the effects of increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are generally beneficial. Enhanced plant growth has many obvious benefits, amongst them increased natural vegetation growth in general, and increased agricultural production in particular. And to maintain or slightly increase planetary temperature is also very much a global good if -- as Ruddiman and other scientists assert -- the human production of greenhouse gases is helping to hold our planetary environment in its historic, benignly warm, interglacial mode.

This news has yet to percolate up to the policy level within western governments, most of whom are still preoccupied with the politics of the now obsolete Kyoto protocol...

There is an urgent need for governments to shake themselves free of the partial advice provided by environmental advocacy groups and government science agencies, all of whom have a strong and often undeclared self-interest in most environmental matters. Nowhere is this need greater than in the debate over climate change."

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NOW BREAST MILK IS SUSPECT

California State Sen. Deborah Ortiz, D-Sacramento, is pushing legislation intended to scare Californians about their own bodies. Doing the bidding of environmental extremists, apparently, is more important to Sen. Ortiz than the health and welfare of her constituents.

In March, Sen. Ortiz introduced California Sen. Bill 1168 requiring the monitoring of chemicals in the bodies and breast milk of Californians. This "biomonitoring" bill passed the Senate Environmental Quality Committee last week. The bill calls for examination by June 2006 of breast milk for the presence of chemical contaminants in three economically, racially and geographically diverse communities. The program will expand to include additional communities by 2008. Participants' bodies will also be evaluated for the presence of "toxic" chemicals.

Sen. Ortiz's "rationale" for the bill goes as follows: There are an estimated 125 million Americans who have at least one chronic health condition and there are an estimated 85,000 synthetic chemicals registered for use in the U.S. with another 2,000 added each year.

That's it. That's her entire "reasoning" - two distinct observations that have no demonstrable relationship between them despite decades and billions of dollars of research.

(Via "Junk Science")


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GREENIES ARE ANTISEMITIC

Excerpt from "Why Does the Left Hate Israel?" by Richard Baehr

"In Europe there are a much larger number of hardcore leftists than we have in the United States. Score one for America, I think. Two percent of the population vote for the Green Party here, 10% or more do so in European countries. While many think the Greens are primarily an environmental movement, the party platform in every country in which they are a factor, including the US, is replete with harsh attacks on Israel. In many European countries, the Greens are part of a left of center governing coalition, which helps explain why there is so little sympathy for Israel in Europe.

Why do the Greens hate Israel? The Greens hate the western consumer society in which they live, they hate corporations and capitalism, and they hate globalization. America is the great Satan for the Greens - the killer of Kyoto, the maker of genetically modified foods, the exporter of McDonald's, Disney, Hollywood trash and Starbucks. So the Greens are leftist by definition. And economic leftists have an anti-American world view which tends to make them reflexively pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel."

MORE ON GREENIE MISANTHROPY

I have on a number of occasions referred to Greenies as people-haters. I thought therefore that it might be useful to reproduce here some excerpts from an article that appeared late last year in "Spiked" that gives some detail of their jaundiced view of humanity

"Britain's most famous naturalist, David Attenborough, is backing a campaign to reduce the UK population by half. He claims that if population control doesn't become government policy, nature will do the job for us - and the poor will suffer most.

The campaign is organised by the Optimum Population Trust (OPT), a group set up in 1991 by environmentalists and population campaigners, whose current patrons include Paul Ehrlich, Norman Myers and Jonathan Porritt.

In the 1960s, Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb, which claimed that 'the battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines. Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.. Population control is the only answer'. In 1969 he said: 'If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.' Three years after doomsday, we're still here.

According to OPT, 'failure to reduce population is likely to lead to a population crash when fossil fuels, fresh water and other resources become scarce'. But do its arguments stand up to scrutiny?


Global warming

Even if Earth gets much warmer, increasing development will allow us to cope with such climate changes. Rising living standards and rising populations go hand-in-hand. The solution could be, not to reduce the population, but to speed up development so that more of the world can live comfortable lives and cope with change.


Food shortages

A classic Malthusian argument: population will outstrip food supply, leading to shortages in the future. Yet this has simply not been the case in the developed world. Indeed, current panics claim that we are eating too much. The average number of calories consumed per head in the West has risen steadily over the decades. About half the world's cultivable land is not used to grow food at present. If we used the best technology available today, a population of 32billion people could be supported on just the land available in the developing world.


Energy shortages

'UK sources of oil and gas are likely to be almost depleted by 2050.. Britain will become dependent on imports of oil and gas from foreign sources.'

You would have thought that Ehrlich and co might have learned their lesson about resource shortages. Known reserves have tended to go up, rather than down, over the past 30 years. As for energy, there is no problem - Britain could easily replace imports with nuclear power if it needed to....

The list goes on: road congestion, an ageing population, urban crime - you name it, there isn't a social problem that, apparently, could not be solved by controlling population growth. OPT has its fingers on the pulse of Britain's fears and panics. Every one of the concerns it raises is the subject of handwringing in Whitehall and Westminster (apart from the imports thing - they gave up all hope for British industry decades ago).

The reason that these have become big concerns is an underlying outlook that views people, especially too many people, as a problem. Human beings are seen as greedy, rapacious and destructive, and the solution is apparently to cut our numbers. In truth, the fact that six billion people can live on Earth - while living conditions continue, in the main, to improve - suggests that people are the solution, not the problem


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MERCURY MADNESS

Mercury: "While political debate rages about what regulatory method would most effectively and efficiently reduce mercury emissions, the scientific debate is largely settled: Mercury poses little or no threat to the health and well-being of U.S. citizens. Steven Milloy, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute and author of Junk Science Judo: Self-Defense Against Health Scares and Scams, questioned the need for even the limited EPA/FDA advisory."

I mentioned the mercury issue on 18th April below also.

AUSTRALIAN GREENIES ATTACK HOLLYWOOD

On their usual flimsy grounds

"Because of the remote possibility a few dragonfly larvas in the Blue Mountains might be disturbed, green groups have managed to shut down filming of the big-budget Hollywood blockbuster Stealth and jeopardise the state's $4 billion film industry.

Yet the swampy habitat of the giant dragonfly and the Blue Mountains water skink that Greens MLC Ian Cohen and his hangers-on care for so deeply was annihilated by ferocious bushfires two years ago - 12,200 hectares incinerated at Mount Hay in October 2002.

And the reason those fires were so ferocious was the irrational opposition by those very same green groups to regular hazard reduction burning.

Blind to the irony, on Sunday night green protesters and the usual NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) locals who abound in the mountains blockaded Mount Hay Road in Leura, to stop the planned 2 days' filming, which was to have finished tomorrow. Then, on Thursday, the Blue Mountains Conservation Society persuaded the Land and Environment Court to ban filming at Mount Hay, not on environmental grounds but on a legal technicality.

Losing a staggering $500,000 a day, Columbia Pictures decided on Friday to abandon the Blue Mountains"

More here and here

A reader comments on the damage done to Australia's film production industry:

"More absurd greenie values: Destroying an industry to 'protect' a dragonfly that doesn't sound as if it was in danger anyhow. I suspect there is some kneejerk anti-Americanism at work here too. I can just see them tut-tutting at a Hollywood action epic with its US military hardware. I wonder how many of the local Greenies even knew about the dragonflies before their protest? I also wonder if the Australian film industry heavies who protested against free trade will come out against this attack on their industry?"

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DRAT! THERE IS NO SIGN OF OIL RUNNING OUT

What a disappointment for all the Greenie prophets of doom

"Officials from Saudi Arabia's oil industry and the international petroleum organizations shocked a gathering of foreign policy experts in Washington yesterday with an announcement that the Kingdom's previous estimate of 261 billion barrels of recoverable petroleum has now more than tripled, to 1.2 trillion barrels. Additionally, Saudi Arabia's key oil and finance ministers assured the audience - which included US Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan - that the Kingdom has the capability to quickly double its oil output and sustain such a production surge for as long as 50 years.....

"Saudi Arabia now has 1.2 trillion barrels of estimated reserve. This estimate is very conservative. Our analysis gives us reason to be very optimistic. We are continuing to discover new resources, and we are using new technologies to extract even more oil from existing reserves," the minister said..... "Saudi Arabia's vast oil reserves are certainly there," Naimi added. "None of these reserves requires advanced recovery techniques. We have more than sufficient reserves to increase output. If required, we can increase output from 10.5 million barrels a day to 12-15 million barrels a day. And we can sustain this increased output for 50 years or more. There will be no shortage of oil for the next 50 years. Perhaps much longer.""

More here.

The Swordsman has some good comments on the matter too. He refers in passing to physicist Tom Gold's argument that oil is not a fossil fuel anyway and that there are still vast amounts of it to be discovered beneath the earth. Hydrocarbons (the principal components of crude oil) have been observed throughout the universe -- including on planet Jupiter -- so clearly are far too common to be explained as the product of living organisms.

The only real answer to Tom Gold's argument is that crude oil does normally have many traces of living organisms in it -- which proves precisely nothing. The sea has got lots of living organisms in it too but that does not mean that the organisms concerned created the sea, does it?

PATRICK MOORE

Patrick Moore has been called a sellout, traitor, parasite, and prostitute - and that's by critics exercising self-restraint. It's not hard to see why they're angry. Moore helped found Greenpeace and devoted 15 years to waging the organization's flamboyant brand of environmental warfare. He campaigned against nuclear testing, whaling, seal hunting, pesticides, supertankers, uranium mining, and toxic waste dumping. As the nonprofit's scientific spokesperson, he was widely quoted and frequently photographed, often while being taken into custody.

Then, in 1986, the PhD ecologist abruptly turned his back on the environmental movement. He didn't just retire; he joined the other side. Today, he's a mouthpiece for some of the very interests Greenpeace was founded to counter, notably the timber and plastics industries. He argues that the Amazon rain forest is doing fine, that the Three Gorges Dam is the smartest thing China could do for its energy supply, and that opposition to genetically modified foods is tantamount to mass murder.

Moore's turnabout was the biggest change of heart since Harold "Kim" Philby left Her Majesty's secret service for the Soviet Union - or was it? Moore insists that he hasn't changed a bit. His professional life, he says, has been a single-minded quest for true ecological sustainability. To his opponents, however, it adds up to little more than an ideologically bankrupt series of betrayals.

Consider the public hearing held at Boston City Hall on October 23 last year. The matter at hand was a proposal to ban the purchase of polyvinyl chloride products using city funds. An impressive array of expert witnesses testified in favor of the resolution - an Environmental Protection Agency toxicologist, a Tufts University economist, a Boston Public Health Commission official, the head of purchasing for a cancer research center. The production and incineration of PVC products, they argued, releases chemicals known as dioxins, exposure to which can lead to endocrine disorders, cancer, diabetes, infant mortality, and cognitive and developmental problems in children.

Then Patrick Moore took the floor. "It's a good thing most of the people who got up here before me weren't under oath," he began. "There is not a public benefit to be derived from a ban on PVC." The whole issue is "based on bad science and misinformation."

First of all, Moore argued, total dioxin emissions have dropped 90 percent since 1970, to levels safely below those that cause health problems. Furthermore, dioxins are not some newfangled product of the industrial age. They've been around as long as fire. If the council wanted to make a real difference, he said, it could ban backyard burning, which spews nearly 60 times more dioxins than PVC manufacturing, or residential fireplaces, which emit 10 times more.

Throughout his presentation, Moore made barbed references to the devious forces behind the legislation, the same pack of Luddites who "hijacked a considerable portion of the environmental movement back in the mid-'80s and who have become very clever at using green language to cloak campaigns that have more to do with anti-industrialism, antiglobalization, anticorporate, all of those things which are basically political campaigns."

More here

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GREENIES ARE MISANTHROPES (ANTI-HUMAN)

Excerpts from an article in the April 22 edition of Front Page Magazine

"Earth Day dawns on us today, and with it a grave danger faces mankind. The danger is not from acid rain, global warming, smog, or the logging of rain forests, as environmentalists would have us believe. The danger to mankind is from environmentalism. The fundamental goal of environmentalism is not clean air and clean water; rather, it is the demolition of technological/industrial civilization. Environmentalism's goal is not the advancement of human health, human happiness, and human life; rather, it is a subhuman world where "nature" is worshipped like the totem of some primitive religion.

In a nation founded on the pioneer spirit, environmentalists have made "development" an evil word.... Nature, they insist, has "intrinsic value," to be revered for its own sake, irrespective of any benefit to man. As a consequence, man is to be prohibited from using nature for his own ends....

The ideal world of environmentalism is not twenty-first-century Western civilization; it is the Garden of Eden, a world with no human intervention in nature, a world without innovation or change, a world without effort, a world where survival is somehow guaranteed, a world where man has mystically merged with the "environment." Had the environmentalist mentality prevailed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we would have had no Industrial Revolution, a situation that consistent environmentalists would cheer--at least those few who might have managed to survive without the life-saving benefits of modern science and technology.

The expressed goal of environmentalism is to prevent man from changing his environment, from intruding on nature. That is why environmentalism is fundamentally anti-man. Intrusion is necessary for human survival. Only by intrusion can man avoid pestilence and famine. Only by intrusion can man control his life and project long-range goals. Intrusion improves the environment, if by "environment" one means the surroundings of man--the external material conditions of human life....

To save mankind requires the wholesale rejection of environmentalism as hatred of science, technology, progress, and human life. To save mankind requires the return to a philosophy of reason and individualism, a philosophy that makes life on earth possible".

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THAT NAUGHTY NUCLEAR WASTE AGAIN

Tim Worstall says the U.S. government is starting to build its Yucca mountain disposal facility for nuclear waste despite last ditch Greenie efforts to stop it.




In the same connection I got the following email from a reader:

"In the late 50's a number of fellows in Pittsburgh PA buried some spent rods in their poured concrete driveways. They never had to worry about ice and snow. In fact, that was how they finally got caught. Thirty-five years ago, a science teacher gave me a pellet of spent uranium. I carried it around in my pants pocket for years! - Maybe that's why my kids are so smart".

The reader is of course referring to hormesis -- the basis for low-level radioactivity actually being GOOD for you. See my posts below of 18th and 14th.

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URBAN PLANNERS COST US A FORTUNE

Excerpts from an article by Australian economist Alan Wood

WHAT'S wrong with urban sprawl? It's the way that Australia's cities have traditionally accommodated increasing populations for generations, and around most cities there is still plenty of land to go on doing so. Yet over the past decade state governments have increasingly sought to place limits on the expansion of their capital cities' urban areas and encourage higher density living.

In its submission to the Productivity Commission's inquiry into first home ownership, the NSW Government gave some figures for Sydney. They show that from the late 1970s until the early '90s more than 40 per cent of the additions to the dwelling stock each year in metropolitan Sydney were in greenfields sites on the fringes. But from 1996 to 2001 it dropped to 28 per cent and is projected to drop to 25 per cent during the following five years.

Sydney is something of a special case because physical barriers, such as the Blue Mountains to the west, place limits on its expansion that don't affect other capital cities. But even allowing for those limits, the supply of land on the fringe has been artificially constrained by government intervention. Urban growth boundaries have been established in Melbourne, Perth and Adelaide, where no similar physical constraints apply.

The aim, according to the Productivity Commission's draft report on first home ownership, is to encourage higher density redevelopments within established areas to achieve better use of existing social and economic infrastructure. However, these policies come at a cost; they push up the price of land, and they can push it up quite a lot. Undeveloped blocks on Melbourne's fringe reportedly more than doubled in price when its new growth boundary was declared last year....
During the past 30 years, the cost of building a 135sqm house has increased sevenfold. The cost of land during the same time has increased 70-fold. Thirty years ago, the land component of a house-land package represented 20 per cent of the total cost; today it is about 60per cent....

The motivation for this intervention isn't only more efficient use of the economic and social infrastructure. There is an ideological component to which Labor state governments are particularly prone. Day calls it an urban myth -- "that fringe growth is an economic, social and environmental burden on the community. Those of us who wish to build or buy houses on the urban fringe are portrayed as environmental vandals who do not appreciate the charm of cosmopolitan inner-city life."

It is not so much a myth as another example of the latte Left's contempt for ordinary Australians. Combined with the socialist instincts of urban planners and the greens' hatred of cars -- shared by Labor governments with a predilection to public transport -- it is a pernicious cocktail. Its effects won't be confined to the cost of land to first-home buyers and other young families wanting to buy cheaper house and land packages on the urban fringe....

The argument that this increased population density is warranted by the cost of extending economic and social infrastructure to the fringes is not convincing. One reason is that the cost of upgrading infrastructure in existing suburbs can exceed the cost of providing new infrastructure on the fringe in some areas. Another is that governments are increasingly moving to user-pays infrastructure charges on development.

And the hatred of suburbia is not limited to Australia. The following is an excerpt from an article by Stephanie Marsh that apparently appeared initially in the London "Times" and which also appeared on p. 37 of "The Australian" of April 28, 2004 under the heading: "Scholars stand up for the suburbs":

"George Orwell detested them and John Betjeman wished to see them bombed. Britain's suburbs, however, are no longer the enclaves of curtain-twitching conformity that they once were. In the streets where gin and tonics, Ford Cortinas and privet hedges once reigned, Ikea furniture, nail bars and a preoccupation with the latest fashionable restaurant have taken over, say researchers at the Centre for Suburban Studies, the first in Britain devoted to studying suburban culture. It opened at Kingston University, southwest London, last Friday.

The researchers say that the suburbs have long been neglected as a subject for serious scholarship. Although commuter belts are in the throes of an image crisis that prompts many of their inhabitants to refuse to admit where thev live, the suburbs no longer bear any resemblance to the suburbs of the popular imagination. says the new centre's Velna Goldsworthy.

The suburbs are unfairly maligned and misunderstood, despite more than half the population living in them.

"Today's suburbs are vibrant communities. often rejuvenated by ethnic communities," she says. "This idea of twitching net curtains. rows of identical terraced houses and the grind of the daily commute is an anachronism. The popular image is that people who live in the suburbs are chronically dissatisfied with their lives, bored and a bit prejudiced against strangers. But that is not the case. Suburbanites are much more fashionable, much more consumer conscious than they ever were. Even the notion of the commute is often no longer relevant, as many suburbs have become self-contained communities."...

However, if the suburbs are no longer defined by quiet gentility, a report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has found that assumptions about stability and untroubled lifestyles in suburbia are also wide of the mark. Health and community centres are run down and there is a gradual rise in unemployment. Public transport has failed to adapt to the changing needs of the mixed communities, which has led to a marked dependency on cars. The precious green space that prompts so many urban dwellers to move there is rapidly disappearing, the report says....

In September the centre will host a conference on the '70s British TV serial The Good Life. Goldsworthy says: "We have set up this centre because there is a need for the suburbs to be spoken for. City centres and the countryside are idealised by the urban fashionable elite".

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ERADICATING MOSQUITOES: THE U.N. TAKES THE LONG WAY AROUND

DDT did the job simply, effectively and safely 50 years ago -- until the Greenies got it banned. Any guesses about what the Greenie reaction to releasing millions of irradiated insects into the environment might be?

The United Nations is harnessing nuclear technology to try to eradicate the mosquitoes whose bite transmits malaria, a deadly disease devastating the African continent.

Sunday is Africa Malaria Day, when governments will focus attention on a disease which kills millions of Africans a year, most of them children, and costs the continent at least $12 billion in lost gross domestic product. Bart Knols, a Dutch entomologist at the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), estimates there are "three to five hundred million cases of malaria every year on a world-wide scale, 90 percent of which occur in sub-Saharan Africa." "Sub-Saharan Africa also suffers the major burden... of mortality," he told Reuters during a tour of the IAEA's entomology laboratories. One African child dies of malaria every 20 seconds. People in poor, remote villages are usually unable to get treatment and so Knols's research aims to nip the problem in the bud by destroying the mosquito that transmits the malaria parasite.

The Sterile Insect Technique (SIT) is a simple idea. Scientists breed insects and expose the males to enough radiation to render them sterile. The males are then released into the environment to breed with the females, whose eggs are unfertilized and never hatch. "The whole idea or concept is that the population would actually start to crash and eventually may actually lead to eradication of the insect, and therefore eradication of the disease and less malaria," said Knols, who has personally suffered nine bouts of malaria through working with mosquitoes. Alan Robinson, the entomologist in charge of the IAEA's entomology unit, said the $4 million project was still in its infancy. He described it as a "high-risk project" with many hurdles to overcome before it is ready for field trials. Over the next five years, they need to reach a point where they can produce a million sterile male insects a day. The males they breed must be robust enough to survive when released from planes into the environment and tough enough to compete with fertile males during mating. The females, the ones which bite humans, only mate once in their two-week lives.

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DDT and West Nile: "The study, Pesticides and the West Nile Virus: An Examination of Environmentalist Claims, also illustrates the parallel between current opposition to pesticide spraying to counter West Nile and the calamitous results of banning the use of DDT for disease control in developing nations. Though no longer used agriculturally, DDT remains the most affordable and effective way to battle another mosquito-borne killer, malaria."

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HATING SUBURBS

"Smart Growth" lies: "Author Douglas Morris and other 'smart growth' advocates claim that suburban sprawl contributes to increased violent crime rates. But a comparison of crime rates among cities characterized as 'smart growth' and 'sprawlers' reveals a different story. ... In 2002, Los Angeles' violent crime rate of 1,349 per 100,000 was more than double that of the Riverside-San Bernardino metro area, considered the country's most sprawling area by Smart Growth America."

CLOSING OFF NATIONAL FORESTS

Keep out! Forests must NOT be used!

"Most of us who now have either retired from the Forest Service, or are darn close to it, vividly remember the environmental radicals from a couple or three decades ago. They were there, even then, and they had the same silly ideology they have today. We put up with them, back then, but we largely ignored their bleating complains or silly whining. They wanted us to quit making roads, for heavens sake, and to quit cutting trees. Back then we just rolled our eyes, winked, and gave each other meaningful glances while they sniveled on and on. Then we ignored them. It was great, and it was the way it should be.

It was easier then to be in favor of "multiple use." It was easier then to reject the illogical demands that were placed on us. It was easier then because the illogic complainer had no power. Today they do. Today they have power....

The changes in the way multiple-use attitudes were affected can be traced to just before the twinkie-twins hit the scene. Before Clinton/Gore gained political power and made damaging decisions, the radical environmentalists were being heard. In the 80s, they were having an effect on the sympathetic Democrat controlled Congress which, in turn, had an effect on the land management agencies. Wacko environmentalists were successful in holding the Forest Service budget particularly as a hostage. They were successful in convincing the Democratic leaders that no more roads should be built, unless they were "temporary." The ploy was that critters must be protected from the humans. The Forest Service did what they were told. They had no choice. They needed the budget.

The classification for Temporary Roads was invoked and low standard roads were built to remove timber. Temporary roads, however, were not actually temporary, but were rather gated to keep the general public from using them....

After the 1992 election, the door was open, and the greenies smelled the sweet sour of success. With a goof-ball elected as President and his dangerous partner drooling at the elimination of engines, the greenies shifted into overdrive. They easily got the support of Monica's moaner and convinced him to designate many million of acres as some valuable Monument. He liked the notoriety from the left, and gladly became the hope and prayer for radical enviros who wished to implement the closing of vast amount of National Forest lands, some 60 million more acres....

Why won't the greenies just go away? Because too many folks believe greenie lies. Because too many folks and companies give them lots of money so lots more money can be raised. Because the east coast and west coast citizens believe every environmental gratuitous assertion is a fact. Because the environmentalists have learned they can raise unlimited money by preaching fear, and using pseudoscience as support Because too many believe the sky will fall and the oceans will rise if the proven methods of capitalism are not stopped. They just won't go away because we have been too tolerant of them. I think it is time to be intolerant and call them on their phony claims. It's time to be intolerant. It's time."

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BIOTECH HYSTERIA

Earth Day is now more about dire prediction than sober reflection and provides an opportunity for environmental extremists to hog the spotlight, dish anti-technology dirt and proselytize. A favorite target this year is biotechnology, which one activist has characterized as threatening 'a form of annihilation every bit as deadly as nuclear holocaust.'"






DEFINING THE PROBLEM

Tim Worstall has been working on the "problem" of high usage of petroleum products and has come up with a "modest proposal" to solve the problem that is almost cynical enough to come from a politician!






SCARCITY PANIC ALL WRONG

Are we running out of natural resources? "If something is running out, the price goes up. In 1980, the economist Julian Simon bet a prominent environmentalist, Paul Ehrlich, that after a period of ten years, a set of natural resources (decided upon by the Ehrlich) would be cheaper in constant dollars than they were at the start. He won the bet.

Scarcity of a resource encourages businesses to make their operations more efficient, to invest in new ways of finding the resource, or to develop new technologies to harness alternative resources. Over the last forty years, wheat production has increased from under 2 tons per hectare to over 6 tons. More efficient farming techniques, such as the use of genetically modified crops, will mean that food production will continue to grow and be more than enough to cope with increasing population. Improvements in technology will mean that natural resources in general will continue to be used more efficiently. Consequently, in 2050, the vast majority of natural resources will be much more plentiful and affordable than they are today. This has always been the case historically, and there is no reason to believe it will not be the case in the future.





WOULD GLOBAL WARMING BE A BAD THING ANYWAY?

A good comment from cold Finland: "One of the biggest misconceptions is that global warming can only be a bad thing; this is certainly not true, considering that even the IPCC report openly admits that benefits are likely to be gained at least in the form of lenghtened growing season, reduced energy needs and a more hospitable world in general. At the same time they admit that many of the negative issues related to this phenomenon are still very much in doubt. Eventhough global warming is likely to demand some adjustments in the short term, we must note that it is generally better to live in a warmer world than a colder one".

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DIAPERLESS BABIES

Where specious reasoning about non-existent scarcities and other myths can lead you:

The latest Greenie fad is "Diaperless babies". Yes. They actually see virtue in having babies shit all over the place!

"Scott Noelle, editor of the Continuum Concept website and a father, explained why he eventually stopped using diapers on his infant daughter Olivia, in a web essay titled "Going Diaperless."

"In my mind, diapers became the symbol of the Evil Empire of Western Parenting in which babies must suffer to accommodate the needs of their parents' broken-continuum culture: a controlled, sterile, odorless, wall-to-wall carpeted fortress in which to live with the illusion of dominion over nature," wrote Noelle, on the website livingharmony.com. Despite his concerns, Noelle continued to use diapers on his daughter, despite the fact that he "felt like a monster and a fraud."

Noelle finally chose to go diaperless and looked to traditional cultures for inspiration. "How I longed for a simple, dirt-floored, baby-friendly hut like that of a Yequana family," he wrote."