The attention-seekers and people-haters never stop

Two Greenie organizations, the Foundation for Deep Ecology and Population Media Center have got together to commission and publish a set of magnificent color photos which display scenes said be of environmental degradation.  Needless to say, various newspapers and others have grabbed this free artwork and reprinted it.

But the text accompanying the pictures is systematically dishonest.  As usual, Greenies can only make their case by lying. I am not going to do a systematic fisking of such a large body of work but I will offer a few comments.  I will be referring to the pictures as reproduced by Britain's Daily Mail, a very widely accessed site.

As a preliminary comment, a lot of the unpleasant pictures come from Third World countries such as Indonesia and India.  Such scenes are not our fault and are certainly not the result of capitalism, market economies or modern industrial society.  They result primarily from a LACK of capitalism, market economies and  modern industrial society. They are the fruit of the low-energy economies that Greenies idolize.  A subset of the pictures could well be used to show the sad results of the lack of capitalism. So what the pictures show depends heavily on the text accompanying the pictures.

And the very first picture in the set is a case in point.  It shows an Indonesian surfer, surfing among trash. They had to go all the way to Indonesia to get that shot.  No distressing shots from neighboring Australia, with its thousands of miles of superb beach?  Australia has so much beach that you can find deserted and untouched ones with ease, just the sort that the people-haters want. Anyone who has taken the drive from Cairns to Mossman knows that.

The lesson to note is clearly that you can find bad examples of anything if you scour widely enough.  I think already at this point I have alerted readers to the essentially deceptive nature of the project but let me go on.

Next is a picture of power-station cooling towers in the UK.  The subtext reads: "Harder and harder to breathe: Air pollution, C02, and water vapor rise from that stacks at a coal-burning power plant in the United Kingdom".  That is an outright lie. With the scrubbers that modern power stations employ, the output of the towers is 99% pure steam --  and anything not caught by the scrubbers has certainly never been shown to hinder breathing! And do I need to point out that steam is just water?

The text beneath the next picture reads:  "Waterfall of melting ice: In both the Arctic and Antarctic regions, ice is retreating. Melting water on icecap, North East Land, Svalbard, Norway".  I have no doubt that the text is accurate but once again we encounter selective reporting and lack of any attempt at a balanced or comprehensive story.  I imagine the the picture and text are meant to assert that polar ice is in general melting.  It is not.

There has indeed been some melting of Arctic ice and ice associated with the Antarctic peninsula but Antarctica overall has been gaining ice at a rate which more than makes up for losses elsewhere. Why the ice cover in the Arctic and Antarctic sometimes moves in opposite directions nobody knows.  The one thing we DO know is that there has been no overall ice melt.  But who cares about the full story when you can cherrypick?

Then there is the dead polar bear -- with the probably made-up story of why it died.  Did they do an autopsy?  It was probably just old.  The story that it starved because it could not find a ice floe to hunt from is just fiction.  Polar bears do perch on ice floes at times but they don't need to.   Polar bears are extremely strong swimmers and can swim for hundreds of miles in search of food.  A few years ago, one swam from Greenland to Iceland.  The Icelanders promptly shot it.  Polar bears are dangerous predators and Icelanders are a no-nonsense sort of people. But the big point is that polar bear populations are increasing overall.  So again:  No cause for alarm.

And then there is the clear-felled forest.  Clear felling is normally done to make way for pine plantations.  Pines grow  rapidly so are a RENEWABLE resource.  Aren't Greenies supposed to LIKE renewable resources?

I could go on but I have spent too much time on this nonsense already.  Selective reporting is just as deceptive as an outright lie.  But the Green/Left rely on lies and don't even seem much bothered when their lies are exposed.  No amount of effort to rebut the lies will ever stop the cascade of them, it seems --JR.

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).