Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them
By Steven Milloy
Regnery Press, 2009, 294 pages
ISBN-13: 978-1596985858
Steven Milloy, an adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, frequent contributor to Fox News Network, and founder/editor of JunkScience.com, should get the Presidential Medal of Freedom for penning the most accurate and most comprehensive take-no-prisoners description of the demonic green “crisis” that grips society today.
His new book, Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them, is a must-read for people seeking to understand the underworld of environmental scaremongering.
Nefarious ‘Green’ Vision
We did not believe Aldous Huxley’s vision of a future world enslaved by drugs in his 1932 novel, Brave New World. We did not believe George Orwell’s vision of a dastardly authoritarian future in his 1949 novel 1984.
But we had better believe Steve Milloy’s recitation of evil scaremongering in Green Hell because, unlike Huxley and Orwell, Milloy is not predicting the future but instead describing the present.
Milloy summarizes the environmental activist worldview as follows: We are going to live in a sustainable manner and be kind to the planet. We will shrink our carbon footprints, eventually becoming carbon-neutral. Thinking globally and acting locally, we will stop climate change and protect wildlife and wilderness from mankind’s destructive ways. We will end our addiction to oil by re-powering America with clean renewable energy. Our goal is a healthy and just planet where folks live in harmony with nature.
Make no mistake, Milloy tells us: Living green is really about someone else micromanaging you, downsizing your dreams, and plugging each of us into a brand-new social order for which we never bargained.
A powerful network of individuals and organizations is propelling this agenda, he notes. Its adherents have sought for decades to transform our economy and our way of life based on various environmental pretexts. Looming food shortages, deforestation, unsustainable population growth, and alternating global cooling and warming scares have served as successive proposed excuses to restructure society to fit a collectivist, anti-wealth vision.
Money and Power
An extensive, multilayered network of private organizations works to advance the goals of environmental collectivism, writes Milloy. These groups encompass the terrorist Earth Liberation Front, more “mainstream” activists such as the Natural Resources Defense Council, old-money groups such as the Rockefeller Foundation, and the media darling Pew Charitable Trusts.
The 10 largest environmental activist groups have total annual revenues of well more than $1 billion and assets exceeding $7 billion. While accumulating their massive wealth and financial reserves, they rail against economic growth as a blight upon society and the planet.
Opposing Western Values
It is an article of faith among environmental activist groups that saving the planet requires us to eviscerate our standard of living and social freedoms. The activists deplore consumption of all kinds, and they would like to see a lot less of it, regardless of the fact that our lives, jobs, and economic well-being depend on it.
“Smart growth” is one of the latest rallying points of environmental extremists, Milloy notes. In truth, smart growth is the prevailing euphemism for “where the greens allow you to live.”
Milloy correctly points out that smart growth is ultimately Soviet-style central planning. It aims to combat urban sprawl by keeping people from using too much space, cramming them into high-density areas and reducing geographic mobility.
Anti-Energy Agenda
While greens publicly claim to support sustainable use of fossil fuels, in fact they are ideologically opposed to any use of fossil fuels, making every effort to render them off-limits and prohibitively expensive, Milloy notes. Environmental activists profess concern about an alleged “peak oil” crisis, but there is enough oil in U.S. oil shale to replace 600 years of all U.S. oil imports combined, yet the environmental activists have fought tooth and nail to keep it from ever being recovered.
U.S. oil shale reserves are seven times greater than the proven Saudi oil reserves, but environmental extremists are doing their best to make peak oil a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If coal and natural gas are all off the table as electricity sources, one might expect the greens to support nuclear power, the one source of emissions-free power generation not subject to resource depletion or dependence upon foreign suppliers. Wrong again. Most environmental activist groups oppose all things nuclear as well.
Their opposition to all but the least reliable, most expensive forms of electricity reveals the true motivation behind environmental activists: Blanket opposition to rising living standards and the consumerism that is made possible by wealth creation.
Time for Action
In many ways this thoughtfully written, concise, and well-documented 235-page book is depressing for its honesty, showing clearly that evil is hammering at the good in society by appealing to human and institutional weaknesses at every turn.
But it is also true that, as the saying goes, all it takes for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing. It is time to read and absorb this book and then rise up to oppose the disastrous path on which we are being led away from all the freedoms we once treasured.
Jay Lehr, Ph.D. ([email protected]) is science director of The Heartland Institute.
