As Richard Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at MIT and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, has said, “Even in 1990 no one at MIT called themselves a ‘climate scientist,’ and then all of a sudden everyone was. They only entered it because of the bucks; they realized it was a gravy train. You have to get it back to the people who only care about the science.”2
Trump’s election may be changing the way the wind blows in this area. Regardless of his pick for secretary of state, Trump himself has expressed skepticism about the global warming hoax in the past and that’s all we really need. Unlike the pseudoscientists in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), I don’t suggest the other side of the debate be silenced or imprisoned. I have a more reasonable suggestion for the Trump administration: Fund all climate science research to include the skeptics.
By all means continue to study global temperatures and other weather phenomena with reasonable funding from the federal government. But the funding has to include those who have valid concerns or criticisms of what has become “conventional wisdom” on climate.
I believe this would mark the beginning of the end of the global warming hoax. The reason so many scientists are willing to go along with this preposterous theory is that they are dependent upon government money. Balance the funding and we’ll see a sudden uptick in skepticism about the real effects of man’s activities on climate. Once the two theories compete on a level playing field based on real evidence and honest science, I’m confident the truth will prevail.
Once it does, conservatives should reclaim their leading role in truly preserving the environment.
CONSERVATISM AND CONSERVATION
Global warming may be a lie, but ecosystems are not. That’s the real science of the environment. I’ve been a lifelong conservationist; but I’m not an environmentalist. There’s a huge difference between the two.
Environmentalists use the animals, land, air, and water as political tools to advance a global socialist agenda. A conservationist is something quite different. In case you haven’t noticed, conservationist and conservative come from the same root word. The conservationist movement in this country was originally led by conservatives like Teddy Roosevelt, who understood that conserving the earth was every bit as important as conserving the social, cultural, and political traditions that form the basis of our liberty.
We on the conservative side of the band should own the environment. We shouldn’t have let the Marxists take control of this issue, with the scare tactics that have, frankly, come back to bite them. Other than the academics, and the businessmen who make a fortune off the global green mafia, very few people believe any of the statements that are being made. Eddie isn’t as dumb as the liberal elites think he is.
We all know that the evidence has been skewed, lied about. Made up. The “hockey stick” data, for example, is shown to be completely fraudulent.3
Does that mean that we as conservatives should just walk away from the whole issue and laugh about it? And go about eating our cheeseburgers and say anyone who wants to save the trees or save the air or save the waters or save the elephants or save the whales is a commie wacko?
Well, do so at your own risk of being a moron. If you want to think like a Neanderthal from another era, go ahead. Sit in your chair, smoke a cigar, drink your scotch, and laugh at anyone who wants to save the whales. Call them environmental wackos. You can laugh, but nature will have the last laugh.
Slaughtering wildlife is one thing. Hunting for food is another. And conserving what is not yours to kill is yet another. Protecting ecosystems and species is protecting yourself. By safeguarding the biodiversity of our balanced, ocean ecosystems, including the whale, you are protecting yourself and your descendants. That’s hard for the average Neanderthal to understand. But just remember, the original Neanderthals are extinct.
Within the microcosm of conservative politics, I own the environmental issue. There is certainly no one else in talk radio who has my credentials to talk about it.
Seven collections of my plants are in museums around the world. That’s important, because if you’re a plant collector and you observe botanical species over a long period of time, and compare them with past samples of these botanical species, you get to see certain things. I’ve done so and made certain observations.
I’ve worked in the environmental field since the 1970s. In fact, one of my earliest and most popular books was Plant a Tree: A Plan for the Regreening of America. I worked on that for three years, going city to city, state to state, to devise plans for regreening America. I was like a Johnny Appleseed in those days.
So, I’ve been deeply involved in this. I’ve saved portions of rain forests here and there. I’m not a Johnny-come-lately to the conservation movement.
WHY CONSERVATIVES SHOULD SAVE THE WHALES
I want to save the whales. I’ll bet you never thought you’d hear that from the most conservative talk show host on the radio. You’ve been told only whacked-out liberals care about anything to do with nature, but that’s a lie.
Many of you may never have heard about the early days of the ecology movement, which would be considered quaint by today’s standards. If you studied ecology in my day, you came to understand that we’re part of a large ecosystem. Even if you live in an insulated world of your own making, you’re part of a large harmonium of living creatures. The earth itself is a living organism.
When you come to understand what deep ecology really means, you realize that if you poison the earth, whatever your reasons may be, you’re poisoning yourself. When you destroy the eggshell of an eagle and the eagle can no longer reproduce, you’ve destroyed yourself. You are the eagle. And someday, the same poison that killed the eagle will kill you.
Why in 2017 do we permit these throwbacks from Japan, Russia, Norway, and Finland to kill whales? There is no reason for it. It’s pure, unadulterated throwback behavior. Effectively enforcing international laws to protect these magnificent creatures would do far more good than wasting resources on the nonexistent global warming “crisis.”
This ties in to the Trump presidency in many different ways. Trump’s secretary of state nominee Rex Tillerson has gone on record saying he does believe there is evidence of global warming, but… The “but” is whatever he wants it to be. It’s a clever way of triangulating the opposition. You throw them a bone by saying their positions have validity, but then you don’t do anything about it.
Instead of employing that tactic, I want the Trump administration to redirect the environmental movement away from the Marxists and back to its conservative, conservationist roots. Just because I know the global warming hoax is false doesn’t mean I like pollution. Nobody hates it more than I do. I’ve run all over the globe to get away from pollution.
I remember living in Queens when I was young. I left because the air was polluted and I couldn’t stand it. It was that polluted because there were no environmental laws to prevent people from burning garbage in their apartment building incinerators. I’d wake up in Queens to this tremendous soot that was falling all over the street, which I was inhaling. I knew that if I stayed there, I’d get sick and die a premature death. I left for more pristine lands.
Where are we today with environmental regulations? Have we gone too far or not far enough? We certainly have the wrong regulations in a lot of areas. That’s because the liberals have been in charge and they pass environmental regulations to attack free enterprise, not protect the environment. But where will Trump go?
Despite his statements in the past, I believe Trump is going to move radically in directions that will surprise you. He’s going to embrace the Al Gore view of global warming. That’s why he had Gore and Leo DiCaprio in the tower. He’s going to push the big lie and then back off and not do anything about it. He’ll have the liberals completely neutralized. They won’t be able to say Trump is a global warming denier and they won’t be able to get the Republican Congress to pass anything meaningf
ul. It’s ingenious when you think about it, but it doesn’t help conservatives reclaim the conservation movement they rightfully own.
Protecting the environment is patriotic. It is a duty, to your country, to the human race, and to God. By protecting the environment, you’re honoring creation and demonstrating the respect that underlies a conservative’s religious and political background.
Whales are the largest animals on the planet. Killing them isn’t easy; it’s very hard. Whale hunting is unimaginably cruel. Whales are social animals. They know when they’re being killed. Their friends in the pod know when a mother is being killed and pulled apart by these vermin from Japan, Norway, and Finland.
Whalers are the last remnant of a Neanderthal past. In a way, they are worse than ISIS, because the whales have no guns. They have no way to protect themselves. And they are some of the gentlest creatures on the planet.
Just ask anyone who travels to California or Mexico to go whale watching, where they know the whales are safe. The whales swim up to the tour boats and open their big eyes, which are the size of saucers. They look back at the people looking at them because they’re social animals.
Whales love human beings and we reward them for their love and their trust by butchering them in the most brutal way you can ever imagine. It has to stop.
Back in December, I had a guest on my show who is actually doing something about this problem. Paul Watson founded the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society to take direct action on protecting marine wildlife and ecosystems from poachers. His group operates on a tiny fraction of the budget Greenpeace operates on, but accomplishes far more.
Watson’s group is controversial. They have been called vigilantes and worse by detractors for taking the law into their own hands. Admittedly, their practices walk a fine line. But they exist for only one reason: Governments, including our own, have failed in their duty to enforce international laws protecting whales and other endangered species. The poachers must be stopped.
NOT ALL ENVIRONMENTAL REGULATIONS ARE COMMUNIST
I read a heartbreaking story4 a few months back. It was about thousands of snow geese dying when they landed on a toxic, open pit mine while trying to escape a snowstorm in Montana. Twenty-seven years of copper mining had laced the pit with arsenic, iron, zinc, and sulfuric acid. This was a mine that had been closed for more than thirty years, becoming a Superfund cleanup site soon after it closed.
Ten thousand geese landed in this poisoned pond of toxic waste and many of them died. They died because we have criminals in the business world who have created hazardous waste and neglected to clean up after themselves. This is why we need very strong environmental laws.
I realize Trump has appointed a leading critic of the Environmental Protection Agency, Oklahoma attorney Scott Pruitt, to lead the agency. That’s a very good thing because the EPA has to be brought under control. However, I will stand vigil at my microphone every day on The Savage Nation warning America against going back seventy years and erasing all the environmental laws. We’d be committing a crime against the earth and against our animal friends.
We cannot go backward in order to go forward. I agree the EPA shouldn’t even exist, but we cannot let for-profit businesses have free rein over the air, water, and land, with no controls on how they use or abuse them. For those dogmatic conservatives who disagree, I’ll remind them there was a time when pollution was so bad rivers actually caught on fire.5 There are still places in the world where it happens.6 The smog in Los Angeles was so bad in the 1960s that you couldn’t see the mountains.7
When it was found that the eggs of eagles were being destroyed by DDT, because the shells were too thin to support the gestation and birth of the bird, DDT was banned.
If you don’t understand that you are the eagle, you understand nothing. Within the ecological chain of life, we are the eagle. It was only by understanding the eagle was going to die that we were going to die next. Where do you think the cancer epidemic is coming from? It’s coming from the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the water we drink, which are all filled with toxins.
Creating an unconstitutional agency may not have been the answer, but something had to be done. And let’s not forget the EPA was created by a Republican.
We must take care of our animal friends and not poison them. We must not go back to turning our bays into sludge and our rivers and streams into flammable hazardous waste dumps. We must not go back to turning our air into soot-filled landscapes. We must not rape our forests. I am very much like Teddy Roosevelt in that regard.
We must be very careful because we have a polar opposite of Obama in the executive branch in many ways. We have people coming into very high positions who are the opposite of the so-called progressives Obama appointed. For the most part, that’s a good thing.
I see Trump as very much a fiscal conservative and a security conservative. His appointments for national security and the departments of State, Health and Human Services, and Defense are all very good people. But we have to be very careful we don’t eliminate laws and regulations that protect our little friends with wings, fins, and fur from the rapacious vermin who would kill them all off for a dollar’s profit.
When it comes to most of the policies we’ve suffered under for the past eight years, including social policies, we need to do a complete 180. But in terms of environmental policy, we must be careful we do not go back a hundred years and make the mistakes that were made before.
CLEAN UP THE NIH AND CDC
In 2015, during one of Donald Trump’s many appearances on my radio show, The Savage Nation, I rhetorically offered to head up the National Institutes of Health if Trump won. I said, “When you become president, I want you to consider appointing me to head of the NIH. I will make sure that America has real science and real medicine again in this country because I know the corruption. I know how to clean it up and I know how to make real research work again.”8
Trump replied very positively, saying, “You know, you’d get common sense if that were the case because I hear so much about the NIH and it’s terrible.”
It was just two like-minded people talking about the abysmal lack of real science being done at the agency, which has been completely politicized, just like the CDC. Neither of us considered it a serious proposition. But the liberal media went berserk, excoriating Trump for even considering such a “deplorable” right-winger as Michael Savage to head up the sacred agency.
In truth, I would bring a lot of common sense to the agency, along with a lot of pink slips, if it were under my direction. But as I’ve said many times, I am not cut out to be a bureaucrat. I am a writer, a thinker, and a radio talk show host. That is where I belong and that is where I intend to stay.
Nevertheless, Trump needs someone in that job who would approach the agency the same way I would, as a scientist interested in public health, first and foremost. He needs to clean house there and at the CDC, which has falsified scientific data for Obama’s entire term to hide how destructive his immigration policies have been.
The good news is Thomas Frieden resigned as head of the CDC.9 This was the man, appointed by Obama in 2009, who oversaw the complete eradication of any scientific methodology at that agency, in my opinion. Under his leadership, we saw outbreaks of measles, tuberculosis, EV-D68, and other new or previously eradicated diseases. And what did Frieden’s CDC do in virtually each case? Blame the victims. Blame anti-vaccination groups and not even consider that the source of the diseases might be immigrants.
Let me be clear on one thing: I am not anti-vaccine. Somehow the liberal media has created that story out of my saying precisely the opposite to a caller on my radio show in 2015. The caller asked if it was true that pharmaceutical companies put aluminum and mercury in vaccines and if they were dangerous. I’ll give you my exact words, direct from a transcript of the show.
All right. This is a very serious question. There are vaccines which still contain a form of mercury, although there are reports that som
e manufacturers have removed the mercury from the vaccinations. Now, you’re asking about a very big topic. Do I believe in vaccinations? Yes. Do I believe in all the vaccinations? Not necessarily. So, which vaccination are we talking about? (Emphasis added)10
The man eventually told me his daughter had not had any vaccinations. Here is what I told him:
Well, you’ve got to be very cautious. If you don’t permit your beautiful child to have a vaccine, you’re putting her at risk of a disease, so, you know, be careful. And it’s going to require a lot more research on your part, but don’t put your daughter at risk for these diseases. They were brought in by illegal aliens, these new diseases, or the old diseases which are now resurgent, and now we have to protect our children.11
If you can somehow conclude my advice to the caller to have his child vaccinated proves I am an anti-vaxxer, then I must diagnosis you as suffering from that mental disorder called liberalism. Like everything else related to medicine, health, and nutrition, I approach vaccinations like the scientist I am. I look at the known data and draw the best conclusions I can, always ready to consider new, even contradictory data.
I don’t pick a camp based on my political beliefs and believe whatever the talking heads in that camp tell me to. And when it comes to public health questions, my priority is always what is best for public health, not my political beliefs. That’s what was missing at the NIH and CDC under Obama.
So, you can understand my frustration at Trump’s decision to appoint Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to chair a vaccine safety commission.12 I know a lot more about science than RFK Jr. This is a man who has likened vaccines to the Holocaust. Why would Trump bring a man like this into his inner circle? That’s not advancing the cause of restoring real science at the federal government level, in my opinion.
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