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GLOBAL MEDIA WARMING

Environmentalism, and its environmentalist believers, didn't become a potent public political movement until the 1960s and 70s in the US when college campuses, brimming with idealistic baby boomers, were determined to make every new emotional twitch a political movement a cause for revolution. This is when political movements, valid or not, became television news programming assets, and when anti-establishment and counter cultural influences became media partners in a way that is largely taken for granted today. Today, news and entertainment mass media have become indistinguishable and readily exploitable as the propaganda machine in the game of ecopolitics. In today's ecopolitics, environmentalists convene as media events. Politicians arrive to say "they care" to placate the environmentalists for short-term media and electoral rewards, enabling the irrational regulatory infrastructure to expand without end or accountability to measurable scientific cause and effect. Environmental policymakers have little patience for conclusive scientific evidence. Environmental policy is now achieved through regulatory fiat to sate political activists who themselves can no longer be bothered with letting scientific rigor get in the way of what they want. Here is a tragic legacy of the 1960s and 70s cultural revolution; where the "rhetoric of virtue" and well-intentioned compassion-baiting dialogue make truth a negotiable commodity to advance one's public political ideology.

Environmentalists and their groups do not make their reputations or raise funds by making public pronouncements about the enormous world progress in solving environmental problems. What environmentalists don't want you to know is that all human activities come under environmental regulation, and that most pollution problems are solved, or are under active management.

As the focus of environmentalists moves from once-immediate dangers now under control, to more abstract matters of aesthetics or sustainability or global warming, latent economic class conflicts are beginning to erupt. Pollution controls often impose highly regressive costs according to socio-economic class. For example, in the early 1990s, the cost burdens of Southern California's aggressive air quality management plans were estimated to have a three times greater impact upon the region's poorest households than on the wealthiest. Environmentalists dismiss such economic irritants by arguing that a better environment helps everyone. The proverbial ecological crisis notwithstanding, the adverse health consequences of reduced economic opportunities for the poor vastly overwhelm any environmental benefits they may enjoy from, say, marginally cleaner air quality. US air pollution reduces average life expectancy by approximately 30 days. Poverty strips away 10 years in life expectancy.

The experience of 30 years of environmental controls in the US is testament to conserved natural resources and solved pollution problems, and conclusively demonstrates that growth-oriented economies (i.e., free-market democracies) actually do a better job of managing natural resources than a society run on the myopic principles and utopian-directed theories of environmentalist dogma. With perverse global media complicity, global warming has spawned fanatic believers in abstract theories, mythologies and mysticism in today's environmental movement that reach a near fetishistic fervor. Sadly, the productive scientific motives and technologies that solve environmental problems have been bypassed and replaced by perverse political dogma, demagoguery and fearmongering propaganda.

Learn more about this author, Paul Taylor.
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