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Environmental Extremism


Extremism about any particular issue tends to lead to problems.  Religious extremism, for example, breeds suicide bombers and genocide (the Holocaust).  Reasonable people easily recognize when a view is taken too far in the religious realm, so why are we failing to recognize that extremism has gone too far in the environmental movement?  Check out this video before continuing to read this post (please note, the link and video contains no objectionable content and are safe to watch, but the website may contain such content):

Enviros in Mourning

The people in this video are clearly environmental extremists.  There are too many other examples.  Earlier this week, a woman pleaded guilty to eco-terrorism in Michigan in 1999 and admitted to being an accomplice in an additional 12 acts of domestic terrorism.  Last week, a group of Greenpeace eco-radicals were acquitted in the UK for causing $70,000 in damages to a coal-fired power station.  They were acquitted because the jury determined that their actions were justified because the threat of global warming is a grave threat to the well-being of the world.  The logic that justifies these types of actions is the same logic that justifies suicide bombing though.  That is, the belief the world is in a terrible state and it must be fixed by any means necessary, up to and including murder and property destruction.  These are all examples of extremism that any reasonable person would recognize as crazy.

Yet, in the environmental extremism case, we are letting these people drive our environmental policies.  We would not let suicide bombers determine our religious policies, so why on earth are we allowing these environmentalist ultra-radicals to determine our environmental policy?  The environmentalists are winning the policy battle at an alarming rate, and draconian environmental policies are being pushed hardest by the most radical of the groups.  If reasonable people don’t stand up to environmental extremism soon, there will be economically crippling consequences and life as we know it will be considerably worse.  But at least we won’t have to cry about dead trees anymore!

Tags:  activism, StateWatch

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