Strangling the Third World

The Green deindustrialization campaign proceeds apace.

The double lie that the Northern Spotted Owl is a species, and that it is endangered, is used to close down large sections of the timber industry.

Ignoring all counterevidence, the allegation that CFCs destroy the ozone layer is used to phase them out in any equipment using these innocuous substances with unsurpassed thermal qualities.

A furiously waged fear campaign against radiation and nuclear waste disposal is used to block nuclear power, the environ-mentally most benign and safest of all ways to generate electricity.

Pesticides, biotechnology, chemical wastes, disposable diapers, paper, and on and on . . . there is no industrial product that the Green priests and their mass media echo do not consider sinful, despicable and ready to be banned, for none of them is free of one dreadful flaw: it is an industrial product.

Under these circumstances, what's there left to destroy?

The rest of the world.

The National Resource Defense Council (NRDC), with hundreds of obstructionist suits recklessly filed against the sin-ners who produce instead of sponging, was among the first to lead the way: one of their suits succeeded in making US exported goods (with credit from the Export-Import Bank) liable to an environmental impact statement for the country of destination.

The ozone hoax was given a phony international veneer of re-spectability by the 1987 Montreal protocol phasing out CFCs. It was organized by an EPA-State Department cabal confronting the Reagan White House with an accomplished fact. Over the objections of his science advisor, Reagan did his usual thing: capitulate. No answer was provided why the ozone hole is in the Antarctic when most CFCs are discharged in the industrial north; no proof linking CFCs to the ozone layer was given; the data linking the ozone layer fluctuations to the solar-activity cycle and the numerous other counterevidence were stonewalled. In-stead, the developed countries are seeking to bribe the backward countries to join the CFC-banning ritual.

Brazil is now doing what Europeans did in the early centuries of the Christian era and what Americans did in the 17^th to 19^th century: clear the forests to make room for agriculture. The only thing involved then, and the only thing at stake now, is property rights. The global warming hoax is a pretext under which the Greenpests want to destroy them. Few of the Green zealots would be alive today if their ancestors had not burned the virgin forests to make room for civilization; yet they feel no shame in interfering with what the Brazilians choose to do with their property. Coercing them into what the Green faith decrees good for the world is best described by a word very dear to their Red brothers: imperialistic.

But perhaps the most outrageous war on the peoples of the Third World is waged against their food supply, and indeed, against their very population. Bishop Paul Ehrlich, vicar Lester Brown and the rest of the Green clergy keep repeating a tenet of their faith that population growth is outstripping food supplies. The statistics (see J. Simon's The Ultimate Resource and The Resourceful Earth) show this tenet to be a bold-faced lie: the food produced per head keeps on increasing; yes, even in most parts of Africa. As pointed out recently by E.F. Avery (see "Good Reading"), it takes the combined effects of drought and war to stop this steady and continuing increase. Population growth is not only drastically braked or completely stopped with in-dustrialization, but even in backward countries it is now running behind the lowest predictions. At the same time the "Green Revolution" is being refined with better pesticides that are nar-rowly targeted, used sparingly, and that degrade rapidly.

And this is where the Greens deliver their lowest blow: Bwana Ehrlich with the big vasectomy knife, and the Greenpests with their fear campaign against genetic engineering. They are op-posed to any serious agricultural research, which they are sup-planting by the chic people's hobby and the subsistence farmer's curse: organic farming.

There is an ugly undercurrent discernible in all this as the Green Herrenvolk, sitting in adjustable armchairs by their stereos, hand out advice and decrees to the wretched souls who eke out a living not for, but together with, their entire families in backbreaking work that lacks the most elementary machinery, automation, and technology in general. When you do not listen to the Greens' words, but watch the thrust of their actions, it is clear that they are based on the premise that the Third World needs help because they are incapable of what the white man did: help himself.

No, Bwana Ehrlich and Bishop Rifkin do not openly talk about keeping "inferior" races in their places; they just do not want them to have too many children, or modernize their agricul-ture, or God forbid, industrialize.