Ahoy Mateys, Captain Conundrum is at the Helm of the Earth Ship

I guess I feel a little nostalgia today. My mind was brought back to my youth, and the cartoons that I remember that took up my time after school. One such cartoon was Captain Planet, which detailed a group of kids saving the planet from eeevil capitalist polluters. Not knowing much about Ted Turner at the time, I remember rooting for the villains almost everytime even though the show made them out to be despicable. I think that I at an early age resisted indoctrination of the inherent "goodness" of the environmental movement, and thus my shouting at the television rooting for Captain Pollution (an early villain of Captain Planet) was how I fought back.
There was a lot to be afraid of at the time. There was war in the Middle East, the Soviet Union still existed, and magazines and television were replete with environmental disasters and problems that would make our world uninhabitable. I remember one specific story about a young boy who lived in a garbage dump because the entire surface of the earth was covered in garbage. Even though my head got past it, such early fear mongering about the environment still lingers, corrupting my heart. Oh, and if one did not realize, the overflow of garbage scare was a bit overblown, as nearly twenty years later I still don't live in a garbage dump, no matter what my apartment looks like.
The environmental movement is full of these scare tactics, absurd predictions and blatant hypocrisy. We have heard that the oceans would boil, freeze, flood our cities and dry up. The ozone hole was going to disappear and we would all fry. Our water would turn to acid and our food would become irradiated. Not to mention the mutant animals that would come from polluted areas, like mutated frogs with six legs, all of which appear broken. We have been told that we must fix this now, or die. Scary stuff for a grown man, not to mention a young child. And that is just the purpose of why these things are said. The environmental movement relies on fear. They tell you that the world will end, and the only way to stop it is to believe them. Powerful stuff eh?
The truth is quite simple. In every case, those who support the environment are wrong, and only out for power. It is a little known secret that environmentalism is the new home for ex-Communists after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Communists for those with a public school education are the true villains of humanity, seeking to enslave people in order to make everyone equal. Of course, this mass of enslaved humanity needs leaders, and this is the place that the Communists have put themselves. Environmentalism follows this same course. They want to remove the modern life, which liberates people from the drudgery and danger of the past, and replace it with a low impact life. Now, they aren't themselves going to do this, but will lord it over everyone else who is required to do so. But, to figure out that the environmentalists are wrong can be done another way. A case-by-case basis can debunk each of their causes, with little effort.
One of the first environmental crisis was overpopulation. Tracing its roots from Johnathan Swift's A Modest Proposal, this idea was that the carrying capacity of the Earth was limited, and that humans would ruin the Earth by outstripping the land of production. Modern agriculture proved this wrong, as we stand today. There is plenty of food for the foreseeable future, with no end in sight. Famine does exist in places on Earth, but their causes are political (wars, forced starvation) rather than there being no food period for the people. Related to this is the availability of other resources, such as oil. It is a common misconception that oil will soon run out. While oil is produced by the Earth very slowly, the vast majority of it remains undisturbed. Many places are untapped, for a number of reasons. The shortest estimates of the world wide supply of oil give our supply at about 200 years, if no more deposits are discovered (which have a tendency to being found at a rate of about every three to five years). The only problems that prevent our claiming of these resources are technological, economic and political. Oil extraction is a safe process, with modern technological progress.
Another recent environmental scares have been the destruction of the land, with acid rain, the ozone hole and garbage dumps. Acid rain was to make our lakes uninhabitable. A simple technology (scrubbers) ended that scare. The ozone hole scare also faded away, when scientists discovered that it was a natural phenomenon, and was cyclical. It seems that over the poles the ozone is naturally thinner, and the extreme cold over the poles during the winter months makes it more so. During the summer months the hole disappears. Banning CFC's had little effect on this natural process. CFC's, an extremely useful compound, only made this effect more pronounced, but did not cause it. The scare over garbage was simply ludicrous, as again modern technology and good ole fashioned capitalism rendered the garbage planet a thing of bad science fiction. If you doubt me, go and find out how much money there is in garbage (salvage). Salvage yard owners are often the richest people around, and the old axiom one man's trash is another man's treasure is especially true here.
A special mention here is Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, probably the bloodiest book of the twentieth century. This book was responsible for banning DDT, and launching the environmental movement. Because of the hysteria in the book (and it is hysteria, I have read the book) DDT manufacture was banned in the United States, and malaria deaths skyrocketed around the world, especially in Africa. There is little direct danger to people from DDT, as several people have literally bathed in it with no effects. The other major problem presented by the book were the effects of birds that DDT supposedly had. Even if these were true, more careful applications of this beneficial chemical would lessen the risk. But environmentalists pushed to ban, and thus the primary producer of DDT ceased production. DDT works to remove malaria, and with proper application can reduce the death rate by multitude of orders.
Before we get the big one, there is another environmental concern that bears mentioning. Environmentalists have been on a crusade against nuclear power since its inception, and the benefits that this clean, unlimited power provide. Nuclear power is safe, as the record proves. Nuclear accidents today are unheard of, while our biggest "accident" at Three Mile Island in retrospect in fact had little short or long term impact on the surrounding community. The largest accident in world history happened at Chernobyl. Faulty Soviet safety systems are responsible for the disaster. Reactors in the United States can never meltdown like Chernobyl. The only problem with nuclear power is the disposal of the waste products, which becomes a political issue as the Yucca Mountain facility has been designed to do just that.
Now the for granddaddy - global climate change. A bigger hoax that Y2K, global cooling, global warming and global climate change have been the evolutions of this monster. For those of you who did not take high school biology, the villain is carbon dioxide, which will heat our planet and make it lifeless. Carbon dioxide is a naturally occurring compound, which plants use for food. It is not the primary greenhouse gas (water vapor is) nor is it a major component of the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is absorbed by plants, and the oceans which serve as a sink for it. There are several major problems with the global climate change theory. The first is that climate is not stationary, and changes over time, often in a cyclical fashion. This is driven by solar output (which produces the heat), not the gases in our atmosphere. In fact, carbon dioxide has been shown to follow temperature changes, not as a precursor. Related to this issue is the fact that warmer temperatures at the poles will actually moderate global temperatures. Warmer temperatures globally make storms less likely, and those that do happen are less severe. The planet has been warmer even in human history, as wine had been produced in England in the medieval period (grapes require warmer weather, and England today doesn't have it). This changed with the Little Ice Age, which was a period of colder temperatures and more powerful storms (such as the one that destroyed the Spanish Armada). The depths of this period are evidenced in the Year Without A Summer (1816). Part of the reason of this event are an actual factor in climate change, volcanic eruptions.
The next large problem is determining a global mean temperature. This is far more difficult that it would appear, as just the methodology to do so is up for debate. Most environmentalists when asked could not tell you what the average temperature for the Earth for one day is, much less an entire week. This lack of a foundation is compounded by climate models, which inaccurately forecast future climate. At present, the limit of our knowledge states that over thirty factors effect climate, while the best models use seven to determine forecasts. Therefore, it is nearly mathematically certain that these forecasts would be wrong, as any variation in the variables would produce dramatically different results as the model progressed through time. Climate models are guesses, and not very good ones at that.
Finally, the last major problem with global climate change is determining how much impact humans can have on the environment itself. Even at our most destructive, we pale in comparison to what nature can do. Our greatest destructive device - the Tsar Bomba - had little effect on the global climate. Its explosive power was dwarfed by the eruption of Mount Krakatoa and Pinatubo, which actually had some effect on global climate for a short period of years after. Volcanic eruptions put out far more gas and "pollutants" each decade than humans do in the same period of time. Our miraculous planet finds a way to repair the damage done quite quickly, and does the exact same with our relatively lower amounts of emissions. Our release of carbon dioxide (which is the same carbon dioxide that was in the atmosphere long ago) if it were to have any effect, it would be the greening of the planet, as the Earth produces more plant material to remove the excess gas.
Don't get me wrong. I am not for the destruction of the world, and neither is anyone else. Those who fight against the environmentalists do so because we value human freedom, and believe with good reason that our modern way of life helps the planet. Humanity is not apart from nature, but an integral part of it. As any other creature changes its environment to suit itself, we do the same. We aren't cowed by the fear used by the environmentalists, who as ex-Commies seek world domination. This point is made obvious as to what the target of the environmentalist movement truly is, the United States. Here we have some of the most clean and safe environments, while former and current Communist governments like the old Soviet Union and Communist China are dirty, heavily polluted areas. The environmentalist's true aim is control, not protection, and they are not above propagandizing young and impressionable people into supporting them. They are pirates, seeking control over the ship of Earth. For our future generations, we must not allow them to succeed.