The Ugly Truth Behind Environmentalism's Pretty Facade

Environmentalism has provided and is continuing to provide a respectable cover for elite Luddites. (If you don't know what a Luddite is, look it up or go elsewhere.)

There is no source of energy that meets with their approval. They are opposed to exploring for and extracting our own oil deposits and have succeeded in putting roughly 85% of potential sources of petroleum in the U.S. and under its outer continental shelf off limits for development. They have made it difficult to the point of impossibility to modernize or expand refineries or power plants or to build new ones. They oppose nuclear power. Coal is abhorrent to them. They won't even tolerate windmills on the horizon off the coast of their posh Cape Cod enclaves.

In short, their aim is to add energy shortages to the web of taxes and restrictive laws and regulations to enmesh and strangle our country's wonderful economic machine -- the mechanism that has (i) enabled ordinary people today to live better lives than rich people did just a few generations ago, and (ii) powered social and economic mobility by making it possible for any individual to improve his or her lot through individual talents and efforts.

Most of those who lead the environmental movement are very well off, often as a result of having inherited trust funds or otherwise gained a position of wealth, comfort, and privilege . If you doubt this, take a look at the boards of today's leading environmental organizations. One of them is made up almost entirely of partners of major Wall Street law firms who each make well over a million dollars a year.

Why, you may ask, do they and their lackeys care so much more about the spotted owl in the Northwest and the caribou in Alaska than they do about the Oregon logger or mill worker and the Alaskan homesteader or Eskimo? They really don't. Their aim is to transform our robust and chaotic society into a static and placid one, and our nation into parklike setting that they can enjoy privately while the rest of us function as their docile and subservient groundskeepers and servants.