Finally, my take on the environment

Published: Sunday, March 3, 2013 at 4:30 a.m.
Last Modified: Thursday, February 28, 2013 at 6:32 p.m.

I have never shared my opinions regarding the environmental debate, and some readers have asked why. Considering I have taken on other controversial topics such as illegal immigration, gay marriage, abortion, Muslims, gun control, etc., it’s certainly a fair question.

I think the reason for not writing about this highly debated topic sooner is because it took me a long time to make up my mind about which side I could most logically support.

Whenever I see almost always passionate environmentalists discuss climate change, their arguments are usually quite compelling. After all, how can anyone ignore the explosive global expansion of burning fossil fuels without wondering if the exhaust might harm us and our planet?

Over a long life, though, I have been repeatedly reminded of the capacity for human greed to drive some individuals to inflame public debate for personal gain. Al Gore became wealthy touting climate change dangers. Ethanol, with government support, was invented by the corn and ethanol industries. It resulted in adding instead of reducing pollution, while increasing the wealth of both industries and their backers. The losers, of course, are consumers who now pay more to fuel their cars and for most food grain products. Solar energy corporate crooks lined up at the federal money trough to take advantage of environmentalist-driven concerns. It doesn’t appear many in that industry have remained in business once the taxpayer supports expired.

I have also been fortunate to travel throughout the world (61 countries at last count) and have driven extensively through every state in America. My travels have helped me realize how massive our planet is and how tiny a footprint humans actually make. For example, close to 80 percent of the U.S. is virtually uninhabited.

Most environmentalists naturally use human time frames like years, decades and even centuries in framing their arguments. They correctly say the world is warming, ice caps and glaciers are melting, and more frequent and severe droughts and forest fires are realities. However, little more than theoretical and anecdotal evidence connects these real events to human activities.

In general, environmentalists seem to purposefully ignore geologic time frames. The Earth is billions of years old, and evidence shows the planet has repeatedly had episodes of climate change during the millenniums. Each period of change was characterized by climate warming and cooling. Very few experts have argued that biological life forms had any relationship to those cyclical changes. Heck, the last ice age (more accurately referred to as a glaciation period) only ended 10,000 or so years ago. It lasted tens of thousands of years. Some experts believe the recent global warming observations may simply show that the ice age just hasn’t finished ending.

It seems unlikely that the many generations of humans who lived during the last ice age blamed themselves as they repeatedly relocated to warmer parts of the planet to survive. Perhaps they blamed it on some greater power we would call God. More likely, these ancient folks understood, better than modern environmentalists, that humans don’t control the planet’s weather — we only exist within it. Nature controls our planet’s cycles of warming and cooling.

Many environmentalists also protest unsustainable human population growth as a plunderer of our planet’s resources. Guess what? Since these concerns were first theorized, our global population growth rates have begun to decline. Birthrate declines have resulted from ordinary people worldwide, knowing they can’t afford large families and having greater access to birth control. Scientists are now expecting global population declines, which will help reduce demands on our planet’s resources — and shatter this argument.

We are now seeing increasing supplies of cleaner burning and less expensive natural gas replacing oil and coal consumption. We will continue to pursue and eventually develop truly cost-effective renewable sources of energy. Inevitably though, economics will guide these gains much more than environmental concerns.

Even if all Americans followed every suggestion to reduce our so-called carbon footprint, it would have little impact on reducing pollution compared to what is added by the much larger populations of China and India as they rapidly industrialize.

Humans with our short life spans shouldn’t waste time, energy and resources on perceived problems that we don’t have a remote probability of controlling. Mother Earth will continue to cycle through warming and cooling cycles until the sun finally and naturally burns itself out. We humans have as much of a chance of impacting short-term climate change as we do stopping the certain life-ending death of our sun. Human egos amazingly allow many to believe we can change the global environment when we can’t even accurately predict next week’s weather!

Frankly, I wish environmentalists would redirect their anger and incredible passion against the greedy who capitalize on their fears to make money, and on behalf of the hundreds of millions in the world who go to bed hungry every night.

Finally, we should all demand that our elected leaders unite to prevent the increasing likelihood of a global economic collapse. If and when such a collapse occurs, the last thing any of us will be worried about is climate change.

These are my opinions about environmental issues. What do you think?


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