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shop, what will we do then? They needed a new and better crisis.

Fortunately, some scientists in the late 1970s and early 1980s, looking at data from American and Soviet probes of Venus, a planet shrouded in thick, deadly clouds of various gasses, had theorized that increasing "greenhouse gasses" emitted by human activity would lead to the so-called "runaway greenhouse" or "Venus effect." This, it turns out, was to be the savior of those now radicalized (culturally, everything had to be XTREME by the 1990s, remember) environmentalists who would otherwise find themselves pounding the pavement looking for jobs. That did not appeal to them. They were used to the money and the power and yes, the prestige that being an advocate for their cause had brought them.

So they shifted gears beginning in the mid-1980s, and began talking not just about local pollution problems or even how those problems might impact larger ecologies, but how human activity was impacting not simply minor systems such as river or local air systems. And they needed to go global, just as industry, commerce, economics and even politics was doing. Moreover, and most importantly, they'd learned something from their yeoman like work on real issues of pollution since the 1970s. Then, nearly everyone would say that "in 20 years, unless something is done, this that or the other thing will happen." The problem with this timeframe is that twenty years comes around awfully quickly in a person's work life. Most of these advocates were still in the "business" when the twenty-year mark for all their predictions came and went and the problem had either long-ago been fixed or never materialized.

What to do?

Well, first they had to come up with a "global" issue. They tried animal extinctions. In the 1980s, they began issuing dire predictions that this, that or the other species would "be extinct!" in (you guessed it) twenty years. This had an impact, and governments and even regular folks acted to "save the whales," as it were. Now, many of the animals on the threatened and endangered lists are so numerous they regularly face famine as they outstrip the land's ability to support them. Elephants and polar bears are wonderful examples of this.

Today, national parks employees all over Africa cull elephants, lest they eat themselves into famine. Polar bears are still cleverly used by the marketing experts in the AGW movement, but the reality is this is the most numerous ursine on the planet. Due to an outright ban

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