Bullies

by Ben Shapiro

  These environmentalists would be nothing but laughs were it not for their unfortunate tendency to bully the hell out of their opponents. They falsify science, and attempt to destroy the careers of those who disagree with their results. They tell Americans that they shouldn’t dare to enjoy high living standards—there are trees in China that are dying! And they build up a massive, nondemocratic regulatory state to tell you how much water should flush through your toilet, how much electricity you should use, and why you need to separate your garbage into separate piles before the state takes those piles in separate trucks to separate gates in the same dump.

  ORIGINS OF THE ENVIRONMENTAL BULLIES

  Environmentalism, more than any other bullying philosophy, relies on scare tactics. You know that guy with the long beard walking around in the comics carrying a sign reading THE END IS NEAR? That guy is an environmentalist, and he’s worried that soon Dennis Quaid and Jake Gyllenhaal will be surfing waves down Fifth Avenue.

  Leftists like to look back to Henry David Thoreau and Walden Pond as the origins of environmentalism. But real environmentalism goes back further, to Thomas Malthus, the philosopher and economist who suggested that man and nature are in constant tension, and that if we don’t restrict our use of nature, we’ll all end up dead. In Malthus’s words, “[I]n every age and in every State in which man has existed, or does now exist . . . the increase of population is necessarily limited by the means of subsistence. . . . [P]opulation does invariably increase when the means of subsistence increase, and . . . the superior power of population is repressed, and the actual population kept equal to the means of subsistence, by misery and vice.” Think of the world as a giant lifeboat. And there are three people on it. They’re running out of food. And Johnny’s just fat enough to feed two. Soon, says Malthus, there will be two people left on that lifeboat. Then one. Then none.

  Malthusian economics is the basis for today’s environmental movement. We live in a world of scarce resources, say the environmentalists. If we use those resources too fast, we’ll deplete the resources. Then we’ll all assume room temperature.

  Malthus’s thought process was echoed by ecologist Garrett Hardin in 1968, in a highly popular article called “The Tragedy of the Commons.” It’s a real barn burner. In it, Hardin talks about the riveting case of a cattle commons—a grazing area for all the herds in an area. As it turns out, all the farmers bring their cattle to graze. Soon the area has no more grass. The cows starve. And die. The end.

  What was needed? Sustainable development—a system by which the farmers would be restricted so that the grass remained green, the cows remained moderately fat, and sprinkler costs weren’t too high.

  Sounds great, right? But the question is this: What restrictions should be placed on the farmers? And what happens when we’re not talking about cows but about human beings? And are the world’s resources really being depleted to such an extent that we have to drastically reduce our consumption to prevent mass extinction?

  These questions may sound exaggerated, but they’re precisely what the radical environmentalists have been asking for decades. Back in 1968, Professor Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University penned one of the dumbest books of all time: The Population Bomb. He posited, in full watermelon fashion (green on the outside, red on the inside), that mankind had eleven inalienable rights, including the “right to eat well,” the “right to drink pure water,” the “right to freedom from thermonuclear war,” and the “right to decent, uncrowded shelter.” How would all of this be accomplished? By limiting consumption, particularly in First World countries. While Ehrlich said that mankind had a right “to avoid regimentation,” he didn’t really mean it—he wanted mankind regimented down to the barest bones. And that would start with the biggest problem of all: more people.

  Overpopulation, he said, was the crisis. “Too many cars, too many factories, too much detergent, too much pesticide, multiplying contrails, inadequate sewage treatment plants, too little water, too much carbon dioxide—all can be traced easily to too many people,” he wrote. He actually suggested that over the course of the decade, hundreds of millions of people would starve to death thanks to overpopulation.11

  So what should we do? Stop having babies. And stop buying and consuming things. Embrace the primitive. Remember your great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather walking the prairies of the West in nought but a loincloth? Wasn’t that great? “The key to the whole business, in my opinion, is held by the United States. We are the most influential superpower; we are the richest nation in the world. . . . We, of course, cannot remain affluent and isolated. At the moment the United States uses well over half of all the raw materials consumed each year.”12

  If this sounds familiar, it should. It’s a meme constantly trotted out by the left, including by President Obama: we consume far more than we should of the world’s resources. Usually, Obama’s talking about oil. You filling up your car means that some poor shlub in Sudan is getting murdered. “As a country that has 2 percent of the world’s oil reserves, but uses 20 percent of the world’s oil—I’m going to repeat that—we’ve got 2 percent of the world oil reserves; we use 20 percent,” said Obama in March 2012. He repeated the same fact over and over in many of his speeches. Because we’re nasty and greedy!13

  Ehrlich identified some solutions to problems like this: forcibly sterilize the American population via drugs in the water supply or food supply. So much for that right to pure water. Unfortunately, said Ehrlich, the technical abilities weren’t available. So they’d have to find other means.14

  There’s only one problem: The crisis never materialized. Millions didn’t starve. Resources didn’t deplete. Humanity’s population exploded. And we’re all still here.

  Ehrlich wasn’t the first environmentalist scare bully. Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring (1962), suggested that DDT, a pesticide used to kill malarial mosquitos, thinned the eggs of bald eagles and therefore should be banned. Frightened for the precious bird population, the EPA restricted the use of DDT on American soil. International governmental agencies did the same. Thanks to Carson, 30–60 million people have died from malaria. But Carson did get her own postage stamp.

  Overall, though, it’s the panic-creating watermelon Malthusianism of Ehrlich that has left its mark on the environmental movement. They create a crisis; they promote the crisis; they lie and falsify evidence to convince people of the crisis; and then they bully Americans into giving up their standard of living. Because, after all, Oh my God otherwise we’re all gonna die!

  CLIMATE CHANGE BULLIES

  Today’s great environmentalist bullies are the climate change bullies. The evidence that man’s production of greenhouse gases causes climate change is questionable at best; there is no question that man suddenly ceasing to produce greenhouse gases would bring down the global temperature in any case. Lest we forget, the climate change protagonists were global warming protagonists originally; when the earth got cooler, they simply changed their mantra to “climate change” so that they wouldn’t have to be pegged down to predictions of hotter temperatures. Now, as the ultimate scare tactic, environmentalists peg wild weather events like tornados and hurricanes to climate change. Thus, your Range Rover or F-150 is responsible for Katrina. Are you happy yet, you capitalist racist pig?!

  So, how do the environmentalist bullies prove all of this? They don’t. The truth is that the planet hasn’t warmed for fifteen years. According to new estimates, we might even be looking at an ice age rather than a warming period. Who admitted this? The University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU), one of the world’s leading anthropogenic global warming proponents (and a far less interesting place than CTU, the Jack Bauer–led Counter-Terrorism Unit). As Henrik Svensmark, director of the Center for Sun-Climate Research at Denmark’s National Space Institute—and a guy we should listen to because he sounds European—said, “World temperatures may end up a lot cooler than now for 50 years or more. It will take a long battle to convince some
climate scientists that the sun is important. It may well be that the sun is going to demonstrate this on its own, without the need for their help.” When you have to tell climate scientists that the sun—the giant ball of fire and gas that heats the earth—is important, you may have a problem.15

  So if they can’t prove it, how do the climate change extremists make their case? They destroy those who disagree.

  In 2009, a hacker broke into the CRU. What the emails showed is that the climate change left had involved itself in a concerted attempt to stifle opposing research and manipulate data.

  “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t,” read one weepy email. Emails between scientists asked each other to delete prior emails to cover the trail of evidence. Some emails fantasized about physical violence against those who disagreed: “Next time I see [climatologist] Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat the crap out of him. Very tempted.”

  Worst of all were the emails explicitly attempting to destroy the careers of those who disagreed. “I think we have to stop considering ‘Climate Research’ as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal,” read one email. “Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal.” Another email: “I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”16 Now that’s bullying.

  And it’s not rare for environmentalists. The libertarian Heartland Institute has spent tremendous resources exposing climate change fraud and manipulation. That’s made it the target of the radical left. In February 2012, leftists allegedly got hold of inside documents from the institute. Those documents supposedly said that the institute would spend $100,000 to fund schools to tell students that “the topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain—two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science.” The documents also included references to the Koch brothers. Greenpeace celebrated the supposed stolen document release. So did DeSmogBlog, an ardent Heartland Institute opponent, which released the documents.17

  The leftist media was jubilant. “The Heartland Institute Self Destructs,” celebrated a Huffington Post blogger. The incident was a “huge public fiasco.”18 “It costs a pretty penny to question the findings of scientific research. Just ask the Heartland Institute and the Koch brothers,” gloated Slate.19 The New York Times ran an article promoting the documents and ripping the Koch brothers.

  Only one problem: some of the crucial documents were fake, and others were altered. “We cannot authenticate any of the documents,” said Jim Lakely, communications director for Heartland. The institute filed legal action in the case. As it turned out, the documents had been stolen and some believe falsified by global warming leftist Peter Gleick.

  But that didn’t stop the New York Times. Even after the Koch brothers informed them that the documents linking them to Heartland were forged, the Times refused to pull the story. Tonya Mullins, director of communications for the Koch Foundation, wrote in fully justified disgust, “One might expect the Times to have some chagrin about its reporting that was based on material obtained by fraud, motivated by an ulterior ideological agenda, and suspect in its authenticity. Yet even though that source lied, cheated, and stole—and refuses to answer any further question from the Times or anyone—reporter Andrew Revkin nonetheless found room to praise him, writing, ‘It’s enormously creditable that Peter Gleick has owned up to his terrible error in judgment.’ ”20

  That’s how the climate change bullies work. They’re not interested in truth. They have an agenda. And that agenda includes ripping the Koch brothers, destroying the Heartland Institute, and lying about both in order to do it.

  Academic bullying and manipulation bleed down to the general population. All the lies of CRU were rehashed in Al Gore’s soporific An Inconvenient Truth. Truth be told, I’m grateful to Al for that film—my wife and I were dating when it came out, and she was forced to watch it for her class. She didn’t make it through the movie, and instead went out on a great date with me. So thanks, Mr. Vice President!

  Nonetheless, An Inconvenient Truth was filled with the same sort of bunk as the CRU research. It had dozens of errors, some big, some small. It manipulated data. And it won an Oscar, and Gore won a Nobel Prize, because we’re just supposed to accept that Gore knew what he was talking about. Of course, we were also supposed to accept that Al and Tipper were so in love that he just couldn’t keep his tongue out of her throat during the 2000 presidential campaign.

  Despite the errors, omissions, and scientific malfeasance, the environmentalist bullies pull out their brass knuckles when anyone questions the veracity of anthropogenic climate change. First, Gore pulls out the scare tactics: we’re all gonna die! “Are we destined to destroy this place that we call home, planet earth? I can’t believe that that’s our destiny. It is not our destiny. But we have to awaken to the moral duty that we have to do the right thing and get out of this silly political game-playing about it. This is about survival.” Says CBS News, Gore is “the popular prophet of global warming, and has helped change the way the country thinks about the issue.”21 Or not.

  But if you disagree, Gore bullies you. People who don’t believe Al Gore, says Al Gore, are like racists. At one point in time, said Gore, “people said, ‘Hey man, why do you talk that way? That’s wrong, I don’t go for that, so don’t talk that way around me. I just don’t believe that.’ That happened in millions of conversations, and slowly the conversation was won. And we still have racism, God knows, but it’s so different now and so much better. And we have to win the conversation on climate.”22 It’s so true. You never know when one of those flat-earther global warming opponents is going to string somebody to a tree. If they haven’t cut down all the trees by then.

  Many of the environmentalist bullies on the left simply call their opponents stupid if they disagree. Because the essence of the scientific process is noncritical thinking, of course. Peter Raven, a former advisor to President Clinton, says it’s “foolishness” to deny anthropogenic global warming. Thanks to the foolish crowd, Raven continues, the world has “pretty well given up” on the United States as a global leader. “It’s not a matter of conjecture anymore,” Raven explains. “Climate change is the most serious challenge probably that the human race has ever confronted.”23 Really? More serious than Hitler? Or the Black Plague? Or the rise of Hannah Montana?

  This sort of alarmism is incredibly common on the environmentalist left. That’s because shouting fire in a crowded theater is effective bullying. As Al Gore put it, “The planet has a fever. If your baby has a fever, you go to the doctor. If the doctor says you need to intervene here, you don’t say, ‘Well, I read a science fiction novel that told me it’s not a problem.’ If the crib’s on fire, you don’t speculate that the baby is flame retardant. You take action.”24 Don’t you see? If you do nothing, your baby will be on fire! And you know what you do with a burning baby? You put it out! In the ocean! Which will have risen to cover your house, you sick bastard!

  Thank God Pat Buchanan was on that butterfly ballot.

  But Gore’s just the ringmaster of this three-ring circus of bullying and stupidity. Finnish philosopher Pentti Linkola says that we should send global warming deniers to eco-gulags, deny people the freedom to have kids, get rid of fossil fuels altogether, end international trade, stop air travel, destroy suburbs, and plant parking lots with trees. “The sole glimmer of hope,” says this insane person, “lies in a centralized government and the tireless control of citizens.” Glad we have that glimmer of hope. Otherwise, sounds like things would get really nasty.

  Or try James Lovelock, the British scientist who created the “Gaia” theory of earth, positing that the planet was a single organism. He said in 2006, “[B]efore this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that surviv
e will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.” This may make a good pickup line in academic bars—“Hey, baby, are you ready for the climate apocalypse? I’ve got a nice futon where you can explore my North Pole”—but it’s also ridiculous. He declared in September 2010, “I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.”25 Because as we all know, an extraordinarily hot day means you shouldn’t vote. (A couple of years later, even Lifelock acknowledged he was being a douche. “The climate is doing its usual tricks. There’s nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now,” he said in 2012, undoubtedly disappointed that his plans for an Arctic harem had gone awry. Oops.)26

  Steve Zwick, another climate change guru, writes that deniers should be hunted down. “Let’s start keeping track of them now, and when the famines come, let’s make them pay. Let’s let their houses burn. Let’s swap their safe land for submerged islands. Let’s force them to bear the cost of rising food prices,” Zwick suggests. “They broke the climate. Why should the rest of us have to pay for it?”27 If that’s not extreme enough for you, check out columnist Richard Glover: “Surely it’s time for climate-change deniers to have their opinions forcibly tattooed on their bodies. . . . On second thought, maybe the tattooing along the arm is a bit Nazi-creepy. So how about they are forced to buy property on low-lying islands, the sort of property that will become worthless with a few more centimetres of ocean rise, so they are bankrupted by their own bloody-mindedness? Or what about their signed agreement to stand, in the year 2040, lashed to a pole at a certain point in the shallows off Manly?”28