The OC celebrates

Happy LeninEarth Day!

Any time a reporter uses expressions like “indisputably” and “vast majority” you should be nervous, of course, but after you’re done being nervous, you should ask to see the Greenpeace or Environmental Defense Fund press release they cribbed the assertion from. As for me, one of the virtues of age is that I can readily remember other times, not that long ago, when “the vast majority of scientists” assured us with equal conviction that we were “indisputably” on the brink of a new ice age, or that we would “indisputably” run out of oil by the year 1985, or that the Great Plains were about to become a vast desert with consequent global famines, or that by the year 2000 we would have a world population of over 20 billion souls all fighting tooth and claw for what little food and water remained, or my personal favorite, that we were “indisputably” about to run out of mineable copper, which would result in the complete collapse of all industrial economies based on electricity and electronics.

If you don’t understand the connection between Vladimir Lenin and Earth Day, try to see if you can come up with an expansion of central state power NOT supported by the so-called environmentalists. Scratch a green deeply enough and you’ll almost invariably find that they’re red on the inside. This is, of course, ironic considering what the Russian and Chinese Communists managed to do to the environment.

If you want to protect the environment, buy land and leave it alone. That’s about all you can reasonably do. But don’t think that having the government buy it for you is a reasonable substitute, as that’s about the most effective way to guarantee that it will be pillaged without mercy by the best-connected interest.