Earth Day!

Tuesday is Earth Day - the high holy day of the environmental movement. Started in 1970 the first Earth Day was celebrated amidst fears of an impending ice age. Today the "new" fear is global warming and of course we're at fault.

Interestingly enough, whenever you read accounts of the first Earth Day you never hear that the leading fear at the time was global cooling and you certainly never hear that that was the second time in the previous 75 or so years that a new ice age had been predicted separated only by a period of global warming hysteria (read founder Senator Gaylord Nelson's account here).

In fact, scientists and the media have regaled us with alternating warming or cooling doom and gloom scenarios for the past 100 years. Sometimes they even embraced both concepts at once as has recently happened with our own global warming scare (read about it here).

All of this is would be funny if sometime in the past 38 years the environmental movement hadn't morphed into a dangerous political movement. Look, we're not anti-environment. We think it's a really bad idea to foul your own nest. But the truth is the earth has survived cataclysmic events on a scale that we puny humans can't even imagine. There's very little chance that our collective carbon footprint is even noticed by the planet we inhabit even if we all took to driving Hummers and dumped all our hybrid vehicles in a landfill.

(Sidebar)
One of the easiest ways to reduce our "carbon footprint" and provide an almost unlimited supply of energy is to go nuclear - something almost every signatory of the Kyoto Treaty has already done. There really isn't another viable alternative to carbon producing natural gas, oil, or coal fired electric power generation. While there probably will be viable alternatives in the future, that time is not now and that time will never come if we don't have the energy necessary to create the required technology.
(End Sidebar)

What we're most concerned about is the effect that the environmental movement is having upon individual freedom. Make no mistake, environmental groups and unscrupulous politicians are using the movement to increase their own personal power and to strip you of your liberties.

Socialism refers to the goal of a socio-economic system in which property and the distribution of wealth are subject to control by the community.^[1] This control may be either direct—exercised through popular collectives such as workers' councils—or indirect—exercised on behalf of the people by the state. As an economic system, socialism is often characterized by state, worker, or community ownership of the means of production, goals which have been attributed to, and claimed by, a number of political parties and governments throughout history.

- Wikipedia

While the stated goal of the environmental movement is different the means and the effects are the same. Socialism advocates centralized control over the means of production. The modern political environmental movement takes it one step further advocating centralized governmental control over both the means and the uses of everything from energy to property.

Politicians of every stripe and governments at every level are participating in this rush to control our liberties and our lives. The city is planning to force homeowners to replace old heating equipment with slightly more efficient units at nearly double the cost. They're also advocating density at all costs. The theory is that density makes public transportation more effective and public transportation reduces our carbon footprint.

Councilor Benton's Form Based Code is designed to create density by inserting an alternate Form Based Code into the current function based code. The Planned Growth Strategy was an earlier attempt to increase city in-fill development by penalizing West Side developments. You can even find elements of the city's push for density in the Big Box Ordinance.

As federal, state, county, and municipal governments create their own regulatory structures designed to save the planet, they increasingly transfer power over resources and property to the state. By doing so, they transfer ownership over those resources in all but name. When a group, committee, or government dictates how we use our property there's a point where ownership is immaterial.

Our country was built upon the concept of liberty. It is the very foundation of our society. Today that liberty is threatened by a movement that started perhaps innocently, but has become a political movement that will end the world as we know it more surely than global warming, global cooling, or the even more terrifying climate change.

So... Happy Earth Day! The world is coming to an end after all.