Big Green beaten black and blue

Although the media had been telling voters that California's "Big Green" initiative was too close to call, it went down to igno-minious defeat by a 63% to 37% margin. It would have banned all "cancer causing" pesticides, meaning cancer in mice when applied in mammoth doses and utterly negligible compared with the carcinogenity of many natural foods. It would have severely restricted all emissions "linked to" global warming and ozone depletion; linked by unscrupulous or incompetent scientists who painstakingly select the evidence to exclude all inconvenient data. Directly or indirectly, it put prohibitive restrictions on vir-tually any industry. It provided for an "environmental advocate," with powers hitherto unheard of in peace time since 1776; its al-ternating bans and compulsions would have pleased Ceausescu.

Other states also defeated, though narrowly, less drastic sham-environmental initiatives. Oregon voters rejected a plan to force more recycled food and product packaging, and to shut down the Trojan nuclear plant. New Yorkers said no to the issue of environmental-project bonds for up to $1.9 billion. Thrown out was the "Keep Washington [state] livable," which would have empowered bureaucrats to decide what's liveable. Abroad, the Swiss defeated yet another attempt to shut down nuclear power, though they accepted a postponement of a decision for 10 years, presumably to give more time to a miracle blessing the country with coal, oil, gas, unharnessed hydropower or a new sun that gives more than 900 W per square meter.

The Green explanation that they were defeated by industry money adds amusement to delight: no billions in labeled adver-tising can ever compete with the free publicity disguised as news and comment, brainwashing the viewers at all hours of every day. And the additional advertising by the Green demagogues (a 4-year old, hairless cancer victim squeaking "I am too young to vote, but you are not") was partly paid for by the Princes of Exxon and similar corporate wimps as protection money or as plain stupidity tax.

Yet I must forego the pleasure of gloating, and it is not, as the observant reader may have noticed, that I suffer from an exaggerated devotion to etiquette and diplomacy. But for one thing a lot of the professional baby kissers got elected by waving the Green flag, and more important, as any reader of Bush's lips knows, elections don't mean that much. Elections or not, the Greens are winning. They will replace Big Green with ten Little Greens more likely to pass. But if they do, they will only put a cloak of respectability on an accomplished fact. Yet the politicians can live well enough without such respectable cloaks as the defeat of all antinuclear initiatives in 7 states has shown. Political power in contemporary America is wielded by mass media opinion molding, not by the ballot box.

The other cloak of respectability is even more fraudulent, the cloak of alleged science. Like an inter-tribal meeting of medicine-men discussing the sacrifices to be offered to the Gods of Rain, so Bush, Thatcher, and the other green-flag wavers sent their emissaries to a Geneva conference on measures to humor the Gods of the Greenhouse and the Ozone Layer. This was just about the time when the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (October 1990) brought more news of climatologists rejecting the whole idea of global warming. Prof. Patrick Michaels of the U. of Va. notes that the Northern hemisphere has had no net warming over the last 55 years, and after discuss-ing the detail of this heresy concludes that "global warming is not occurring."

An abundance of such counterevidence worries Western policy makers no more than it worries a jamboree of savages. The difference between Mrs. Thatcher and a dancing shaman is twofold: she holds a degree in chemistry, and the shaman's equally effective witchcraft is cheaper.

The Green shams will keep winning for some time. But they cannot forever hold back the day when the climatologists, and not the media monkeys in climatologist garb, provide the data on which to base decisions.