Don't give in to environmental extremism
By Jay Ambrose
Scripps Howard News Service

This wonderful world needs a sane environmental movement, one that is practical enough to get results and balanced enough to recognize other precious values, weighing the benefits of policies against their costs.
But glance over your shoulder and you see a different kind of movement bearing down on us. Extreme and unyielding, it is smashing the more temperate voices that stand in its way, and while its leaders may count that a victory, it isn't. Their dominance as champions for their cause could be disastrous for planet Earth.
What's my evidence of extremism?
I offer up the Kyoto Protocol, a supposed solution to global warming that would yank between $100 billion and $400 billion a year out of workaday affairs in this country alone. It is preposterous to think you can do that without harm, without depriving people of goods they would otherwise have, without some degree of suffering, much of it among the poor. Yet there is an end that justifies such desperate means, isn't there?
As a matter of fact, there isn't.
Even most proponents concede that, at best, this treaty will retard warming only marginally. It is, they say, a first step, meaning that there would have to be a second step, maybe a third and more — in other words, the proposed battering that Europeans are already promising to endure will only get worse.
The issue of human-induced global warming is replete with uncertainties. All the studies endorsed by major institutions say as much, and none of them predicts a major catastrophe lying just beyond the bend. In the discussion of warming, however, the extremists keep shouting with certainty about horrors we face. Some of the shouters are scientists, but theirs is not the detached, coolly analytical mode of scientific discourse; theirs is the passion of the ideologue.
Other examples of environmental extremism?
You might not recognize it as one because of the propagandizing, but opposition to exploring for oil in Alaska qualifies. The designated area is roughly 1/10,000th of a wildlife refuge and an out-of-the-way spot described as muck and mud in the summer and below-zero ice in the relentlessly dark winter. Where might drilling be more acceptable?
It is extreme to try to delay the inevitable movement of nuclear waste to a safe spot in Nevada when the waste poses a greater threat in present locations.
It is extreme to oppose the use of biotechnology to produce great amounts of food that could help feed the hungry when this food has never harmed a soul.
It is extreme to fight for fuel limits resulting in smaller cars when the smaller cars can lead to increased traffic fatalities and there are other ways of getting the gas savings.
How is it that such radical views come to be advocated?
I think some of the leaders on this front are true believers, people who have adopted environmentalism as their religion, the Earth as their god, and who are both fundamentalist and fanatical in the faith.
I think some of them are truly superstitious about modern-world technology; that some of them genuinely hate and want to hamper free enterprise; that many believe that giving an inch is surrendering all and that some think the rest of us are too dumb and apathetic to act unless they scare us to death with their exaggerations.
But it will be more dangerous to the cause if they succeed.
If this nation adopts needless measures that have unbearable consequences, the public could grow skeptical of measures that are necessary. If we expend resources unwisely, we will not have them to expend wisely. And if the extremists engage in endless hyperbole, we will not believe those who tell the truth.
Most Americans care about the preservation of wilderness, about animal life, about the beauty of nature, about the health effects of pollution. They have supported reasonable policies that have given us an extraordinary and insufficiently noted reduction in air and water pollution, growth of green space and the rescue of a number of endangered species. Through reasonable measures, we can deal with the likes of global warming, too. For starters, far more research is needed.
It would be a shame — an extreme shame — to let the zealots reverse this remarkable progress.

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