Environment

FIGHTING EXTREMISM: Doco speaks inconvenient truth to enviro-power

Doomsday scenarios are as old as time itself.

We love them.

They appeal to our sense of ego, making us the most important generation of all time.

And much of the debate about global warming appears to be directed by those who are seeking to combat capitalism under the cloak of extreme environmentalism by brilliantly appealing to the doomsday egomania within us.

Sea ice is melting or growing, the climate is changing, warming or cooling, or whatever and it must be us. Our fault. In a secular world, we’re godly in our impact, we convince ourselves.

THE MADNESS OF CROWDS
There’s another driver which is explored in probably our favourite book: Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.

Its central thesis is:

“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”

While arguments about pollution, regulating and taxing pollution have their place,  it has been apparent to us for a long time that climate change/global warming has been used as a catalyst for the far left to push for massive new taxes on economic activity of all kinds so that government might distribute the proceeds to deserving causes.

An important step to recovering a sense of balance and proportion in the broader environmental and climate change/global warming debate is to engage in the arguments, in detail.

NOT EVIL JUST WRONG
An important documentary Not Evil Just Wrong has been produced by an Irish husband and wife team Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer, both former journalists that argues much of the global warming movement is led by extremists who have a callous disregard for both the truth and the consequences of their policies on the most vulnerable people in the world.

Naturally, the far left has denounced it. They don’t want to be exposed. They have vilified the two as being comparable to Hitler and much else:

“hillbillies,” “rednecks,” “zombies,” “dimwits,” “brainwashed idiots,” “muppets” and “slaves to greedy elitists”

Looks like some of text messages we get.

This isn’t the place for detailed scientific arguments or charts.

THE LEFT’S AGENDA SHIFTS FROM RED TO GREEN
But when we hear and see the usual suspects of the far left pushing an agenda that includes big taxes on production and consumption, an ever bigger role for government, emotive arguments about doomsdays to come, claims of certainty in academic disciplines known for disagreement, it is right for us to be sceptical.

Prosperity, globalisation, genetically enhanced crops, free markets, using natural resources to make our lives better and easier, these are the issues that often flush out the far left which says it’s concerned about the welfare of people.

Too often it’s just revealed as an anti-capitalist, pro-big-government agenda.

Grabbing the once politically-moderate but now easily demonised Al Gore, who is probably roughed up a little too much in the documentary for our taste, as their spokesman was very shrewd.

His famous documentary Inconvenient Truth – now exposed as substantially factually dubious – helped give momentum to the politics driving the Rudd Government’s CPRS plan and that is causing so much trouble in the Turnbull Opposition.

COAT OF MANY COLOURS
Once, it was egalitarianism and equality among men (women missed out) that drove this agenda. Marxism et al. That’s been discredited, so the left has artfully move on.

They now cloak their arguments in a technicolour coat of images of endangered cuddly mammals, majestic whales and the destruction of the world itself.

As the film makes clear and many Australian parents have seen with their own kids, students are often targetted with the most hard-hitting of extreme environmental propaganda.

It is the Marxism of our time. And we fear it is just as destructive. And just as doomed to be exposed as an elaborate and shabby fraud.

Fuelled by hysteria, alarmism, fanaticism, hidden agendas, short memories that forget the falsehoods of flip-flopping academics like Professor Stephen Schneider  who change their mind to suit politics not to reflect science, blatant distortions and questionable science, it is about achieving a political objective otherwise out of reach.

Statism, socialism, was proved to be a failure. It imploded despite looking so formidable for so long. Modern history’s greatest house of cards collapsed on itself.

So it reinvented. Rebadged. The mighty and Soviet backed Communist party of the 1950s became the anti-American activists of the 1960s and 70s, the Nuclear Disarmament party of the 1980s became the Greens political party of today. We cannot lose sight of the political traditions pushing this global warming agenda now. If they get something right, let’s embrace it. But, as ever, they won’t very often.

DON’T PREACH TO ME COMRADE
The ugliest part of their agenda is explored in the documentary when it exposes the willingness of the richest and most privileged people in the world to impose their extreme environmental agenda on the world’s poorest and most vulnerable. Banning DDT is explored as a particularly powerful example. They could just have easily looked at genetically enhanced crops and its power in battling famine.

A popular expression some in the developed world use about the developing world is that “life is cheap, there.” Of course that’s never true. A mum’s grief over a dead child is the same in Mali as Melbourne.

Consigning whole nations and continents to perpetual poverty, permanent epidemics, exclusion from free-trade is morally unacceptable. Good people – left and right – need to fight for the victims of extreme environmentalism.

LOVING THE PLANET NEED NOT BE OWNED BY EXTREMISTS
Patriots need not be opposed to taxing and otherwise regulating pollution. Nor should they oppose using technology to minimise our use and waste of natural resources. While it’s a tenth-order issue, we’re not opposed to an emissions trading scheme. But we’re most emphatically opposed to the far left bullying its way through any debate without a very level of scrutiny.

Because while we must conserve natural resources and protect the planet of which we are all temporary custodians, our most precious natural resource is humanity itself.

The usually fanatical anti-Israel types can label a legitimate questioning of their agenda about the use of fossil fuels as climate-change ‘denial’ (an attempt to link it with Holocaust denial) all they want, it won’t stop the inevitable path back to the world recovering its senses on climate change.

The documentary Not Evil Just Wrong is to be screened in what is expected to be a world record-breaking effort on Sunday October 18th. VEXNEWS will provide details of screening locations in major Australian centres closer to the date.

If you’d like to buy the DVD, you can do that from their website. They have an affiliate programme which would give us a cut, but we’ve decided to eschew that to support their important work in speaking truth to the power of extremist environmentalists. We hope you do too, if you order it this week, you should get it in time for the screening day, so please get on to it.

We’re going to pursue this issue in more detail in coming weeks, not to shut-down a debate, not to ‘deny’ the real impact of pollution and our need to tackle it, but to closely examine the real agenda and the inconvenient truths at the heart of the ongoing debate on climate change.

UPDATE:

Because in the spirit of hippydom we waved our commish, the good folk at Not Evil Just Wrong have very generously offered a 10% discount to VEXNEWS readers who are going to buy a copy of the DVD, so please take advantage of that by typing in VEXNEWS in the box marked ‘coupon code’.

UPDATE: Fellow Suzanne Carbone admirer, the mononymous Prodos (Ayn Rand fan and podcaster before both became hot) will be screening this important doco at the Hollywood Palace, 179 Bridge Road, Richmond at 7pm, Sunday October 18. Melbourne patriots, please pencil this in.

Because of his unnatural fondness for Melbourne’s finest souvlaki, our beloved publisher Andrew Landeryou might even put in a rare public appearance at the venue should anyone wish to plot any Mike Rann rolled-up mag style facial attacks or have their cast signed with a message of patriotic fervour.

If you want to warn Prodos of your plans to attend, please do so on his email prodos@prodos.com or phone him on 9428 1234. Offering Prodos a fiver with the picture of our reigning monarch upon it on the night might also be nice to help him cover costs but that’s entirely up to you.

Please let us know of the whereabouts of other Aussie and NZ screenings and we’ll put them up here.

Host:
Not Evil Just Wrong
Type:
Party – Movie/TV Night
Network:
Global
Date:
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Time:
7:30pm – 9:30pm
Description
New South Wales
Time: 7:30pm
Date: 18 October
Location: Level 3, Manning Building
Manning Rd
University of Sydney
Organizer: New South Wales Liberal Students’ Federation
Cost: $10 University of Sydney Access Card Holders/$15 Other
RSVP: sashauher@gmail.com

Victoria
Time: 7:00pm
Date: 18 October
Location: Sun Theatre
8 Ballarat Street
Yarraville
Organizer: The Climate Skeptics
Cost: $10 Climate Skeptics Members/$15 other
RSVP: noteviljustwrong@climatesceptics.com.au

Time: 7:00pm
Date: 18 October
Location: Hollywood Palace
179 Bridge Road
Richmond
Organizer: Prodos
Cost: $5 Optional Donation
RSVP: prodos@prods.com

Time: unconfirmed
Date: unconfirmed
Location: University of Melbourne
Organizer: Melbourne University Liberal Club
Cost: Unknown
RSVP: tandrews@noteviljustwrong.com

South Australia

Time: 7:30pm
Date: 18 October
Location: University Cinema
Level 5, Union House
University of Adelaide
Organizer: Conservative Leadership Foundation & Adelaide University Liberal Club
Cost: unknown
RSVP: tandrews@noteviljustwrong.com
Extra Note: Professor Ian Plimer will be in speaking after the meeting

Queensland

Time: 7:30pm
Date: 18 October
Location: Noosa 5 Cinemas
29 Sunshine Beach Road
Noosa Heads
Organizer: unknown
Cost: $15
RSVP: case.smit@gmail.com
Extra Note: Professor Garth Paltridge will be speaking prior to the screening.

Australian Capital Territory

Time: 8:00pm
Date: 18 October
Location: Manning Clark Centre
Theatre 4
Australian National University
Organizer: ACT Young Liberals & ANU Liberal Club
Cost: $10 (includes drinks and pizza)
RSVP: cburch88@yahoo.com.au

Tasmania

Time: 7:30pm
Date: 18 October
Location: UniBar
University of Tasmania
Organizer: University of Tasmania Liberal Club
Cost: Free
RSVP: whittneyjago@hotmail.com

Western Australia

Time: unconfirmed
Date: 18 October
Location: Room unconfirmed
University of Western Australia
Organizer: Australian Liberal Students’ Federation
Cost: unconfirmed
RSVP: tandrews@noteviljustwrong.com

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