This weekly newsletter, focused on environmental issues, highlights relevant analysis done by the John Locke Foundation and other think tanks, as well as items in the news.
1. This should scare us–Gore calls for "empowering" girls and women to control population
One thing that is certain, Al Gore has never perceived an environmental threat that he was not willing to use state coercion to address. That is why, in spite of the fact that he is using the language of "empowerment" and voluntary choice, we need to be particularly fearful of his call for "stabilizing" population growth in the name of reducing pollution.
Of course in Gore’s world this makes complete sense. According to Gore, the environmental movement and their minions currently running the EPA, CO2 is a pollutant. Humans emit CO2 by merely existing. Therefore, the existence of humans is an environmental problem.
During a speech Monday night in New York city, in which, among other things, Gore complained that Obama has been a disappointment in the fight against global warming (it is Obama’s EPA that has declared CO2 a pollutant and has chosen to regulate it as a health hazard), the former VP said the following about the too-many-people "problem":
"One of the things we could do about it is to change technologies, to put out less of this pollution, to stabilize the population, and one of the principle ways of doing that is to empower and educate girls and women," Gore said. "You have to have ubiquitous availability of fertility management so women can choose how many children have, the spacing of the children.
"You have to lift child survival rates so that parents feel comfortable having small families and most important — you have to educate girls and empower women," he said. "And that’s the most powerful leveraging factor, and when that happens, then the population begins to stabilize and societies begin to make better choices and more balanced choices."
Of course all this begs the question of what if these "empowered" women chose not to make the "more balanced" choices Gore and his allies in the environmental movement would want? Could subsidized or even forced sterilizations or abortions be far behind? After all, earth is "in the balance," you know.
Here is what the hero of the environmental movement, Paul Ehrlich, had to say in his 1968 movement holy book The Population Bomb:
The first task is population control at home. How do we go about it? Many of my colleagues feel that some sort of compulsory birth regulation would be necessary to achieve such control. One plan often mentioned involves the addition of temporary sterilants to water supplies or staple food. Doses of the antidote would be carefully rationed by the government to produce the desired population size (pp. 130-131).
Also, a little history is worth reflecting upon. Gore and his allies in the environmental movement have their roots in early 20th Century progressivism, a main tenet of which was eugenics. In fact, one of the founders of the World Wildlife Federation and a leading light of contemporary environmentalism, Sir Julian Huxley, was not only a strong advocate of eugenics but served as the president of the British Eugenics Society. (As an aside, this is the same progressive movement that gave rise to the thousands of forced sterilizations in North Carolina from the 1920s to the 1970s.
2. IPCC uses advocacy "research" to make claims about renewable energy (where is the US press?)
Another major scandal is brewing at the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and as usual, one has to turn to the British press to find any coverage of it. The UK Daily Mail reports that:
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a study last month claiming that the world could meet nearly 80 per cent of its energy by 2050 from renewable sources such as wind farms and solar panels.
But the full version of report published this week revealed that one of the lead authors was an employee of Greenpeace — a group that fiercely opposes nuclear power and which has campaigned on the perils of global warming for decades.
And according to the UK Telegram, it predictably has led to a clearly slanted report:
…in supporting documents released this week, it emerged that the claim was based on a real-terms decline in worldwide energy consumption over the next 40 years. … Not only that, but the modeling scenario used was the most optimistic of the 164 investigated by the IPCC.
3. Ozone Report
Each week during the summer ozone season this newsletter will report how many, if any, high-ozone days had been experienced throughout the state during the previous week, where they were experienced, and how many have been recorded during the entire season to date. While many environmental groups express concern about air quality, the John Locke Foundation is the only organization that keeps up-to-date track of the actual ozone data and reports it in an unfiltered manner on a regular basis.
The ozone season began on April 1 and ends October 31. All reported data are from the North Carolina Division of Air Quality, which is part of the state’s Department of Environment and Natural Resources.
During the period from June 13 through June 19 there were two reported high-ozone readings, which occurred on two different monitors on the same day in Mecklenburg County. So far this season there have been 45 readings on various North Carolina monitors that have exceeded federal standards of 0.75 parts per billion. The two this past week were slightly above the standard at 0.77 ppb.
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