Duggan Flanakin
cfact.org
Duggan Flanakin is the director of policy research at the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow. A former senior fellow with the Texas Public Policy Foundation, Mr Flanakin authored definitive works on the creation of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and on environmental education in Texas. A brief history of his multifaceted career appears in his book, Infinite Galaxies: Poems from the Dugout.
One of the silliest phrases ever uttered is “Save the Planet”.
Okay, maybe the Earth IS threatened by the occasional meteor, comet, or giant asteroid – but then again, our planet has been hit multiple times by all of the above over its presumed eight billion year life. [Not even Nancy and Mitch have been around that long!]
And the planet is still here!
Does the environmentalist ethic value humanity? Or even see humans as part of nature?
Consider The Matrix’s Agent Smith, who sneered at Morpheus saying, “Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You’re the plague and we … we are the cure.”
But Agent Smith is not the only one. Noted abortionist Warren Hern wrote, in a paper published by the National Institutes of Health, that “The human species as a whole now displays all four major characteristics of a malignant process. The [major] difference between us and most forms of cancer is that we can think.”
Perhaps it was the late William Burroughs who planted the idea of humanity as a planet killer. Expanding on his 1961-64 Nova Trilogy thesis that language is a virus, he argued in a 1981 novel that “the whole quality of human consciousness, as expressed in male and female, is basically a virus mechanism”.
Even James Lovelock, author of the Gaia thesis, as recently as 2009 claimed that, “We [humans] became the Earth’s infection a long and uncertain time ago, but it was not until about 200 years ago that the Industrial Revolution began: then the infection of the Earth became irreversible.”
Media mogul Ted Turner infamously touted the ideal global population would be only 250 to 300 million humans, but he is far from alone in seeking dramatic erasures of humanity. Turner later revised his goal to two billion maximum, to be achieved through a one-child policy akin to that of the Communist China (which is now suffering the ill effects of a shortage of females).
The leadership at the World Economic Forum, the United Nations Environment Programme and many other enviro-globalist organizations all identify population control (and reduction) as the chief issue and absolutely necessary for “saving the planet”.
Thus, it is little wonder that environmentalists rarely act to improve the lives and health of the world’s poor, especially in developing nations. They, like former First Lady Hillary Clinton, see ordinary humans as “irredeemable deplorables”, or as Margaret Sanger used to say, “All of our problems are the result of overbreeding among the working class.”
But we should utilize 21st century (and older) technology (and expertise) to immediately work with our fellow humans to fulfill the “sustainable development” promise (empty words, it turned out) that Gro Brundtland, chair of the World Commission on Environment and Development, wrote in 1987 in the foreword to the Brundtland Report, Our Common Future:
(S)ustainable development requires meeting the basic needs of all and extending to all the opportunity to fulfill their aspirations for a better life… Meeting essential needs requires not only a new era of economic growth for nations in which the majority are poor, but an assurance that those poor get their fair share of the resources required to sustain that growth.
Yet the UN, and US and European Union policies and banking institutions have sabotaged economic growth across the African continent, suppressed growth-based economic and political structures in Latin America and let the Communist Chinese gain footholds on both continents to further enslave indigenous populations while gaining greater control over the world’s resources.
Nearly 20 years ago, Danish economist Bjorn Lomborg’s Copenhagen Consensus report ranked these as the highest yielding projects to improve the human condition. Listed as Very Good were control of HIV/AIDS, providing micronutrients to ward off malnutrition, trade liberalization and control of malaria.
Listed as Good: development of new agricultural technologies, small-scale water technology for livelihoods, community-managed water supply and sanitation, research on water productivity in food production and lowering the cost of starting a new business.
Listed as Bad were the following: guest worker programs for the unskilled, optimal climate taxes, the Kyoto Protocol and a value-at-risk carbon tax.
So what did the globalists do? Push for carbon taxes. HIV/AIDS and malaria still kill hundreds of thousands and infect millions more every year (though not in Europe or the US) and malnutrition remains the world’s leading cause of death and illness.
Global spending on the real-world low-priority climate change dwarfs Western investment in countering disease, malnutrition and trade liberalization combined. Fortunately, African nations last year finalized a pan-African free trade agreement – despite heavy resistance from the “sustainable development” crowd.
But business startups across the developing world remain plagued by restrictions on investment, needless regulations and other globalist schemes to slow, prevent or just redirect to cronies any opportunities for entrepreneurs to build prosperous societies in developing nations. [They were too late to stop such growth in the Pacific Rim.]
Sadly, few world “leaders” have taken the needs and opportunities outlined in the Copenhagen Consensus seriously enough to influence policy. The climate catastrophe crowd will never put people first, so who is left to step up to the plate?
The late, great Stan Lee, creator of Spider-Man, set out the challenge to fulfill the long-ignored true sustainable development mission in the end credits of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse: “That person who helps others simply because it should or must be done and because it is the right thing to do, is indeed, without a doubt, a real superhero.”
Maybe it is time to get up from the movie screen, the X-Box and the laptop, put on the cape and get to work.
