Enviorn-MENTAL-ism...
There was a quick report during Brit Hume's show last night that made reference to the fact that scientists have discovered that air cleanliness and quality is improving on a world-wide scale. I did not get the names of the enviro-whackos and scientists mentioned simply because a) you've never heard of them and b) you wouldn't really care (neither did I, truth to tell).

Now, clean air is a nifty thing, if you ask me, and i have no problem with the report of cleaner air planet-wide. I think that's a testiment to mankind's (and the free market's) ability to respond to a major problem in a pro-active way. After all, thanks to technology, reformulated fuels, and mroe efficient uses of existing energy sources, we're managing to roll back the tide of dirt that was threatening to one day choke us all to death. Of course, the greenie meanies will take credit for all of this development, but I will give them credit, at the very least, for bringing it to everyone's attention. After they did that, buisness, governments and private citizens did the rest.

What was even more surprising is that he report cited amazing increases in air quality over China and the former Soviet Union, despite the fact that the Russians are two-steps-removed from coal burning stoves and that China is the fastest-growing user of fossil fuels in the world. Both of these facts fly in the face of propaganda perpetuated by the tree huggers that you could not increase usage of fossil fuels and still maintain a clean enviornment or get cleaner emissions from facilities and equipment that were the most modern of their type in 1965 or 75, but which still operate today.

Now normally I would expect a dyed-in-the-wool enviornmentalist to be happy with such signals of progress. However, that would be wishful thinking on my part. Of course, no matter how much better things get, the eviornmentalist is never happy. I give you three examples:
One of these idiots actually claimed that the cleaner Chinese air must (must, mind you) be the result of the Chinese utilizing some unknown, new technology. It has to be that way because there's scenario known to him in which you could burn that much coal and oil and still maintain a healthier enviornment. Because the fact that the increased Chinese use of fossil fuels and the cleaner air fly in the face of the Green agenda, there must be some super-secret-scrubbing-bubbles-whiz-bang technology that the Chinese have developed and haven't shared with the rest of us. This leads us to the first premise of enviornmental "science": When facts contradict, make up a conspiracy theory. The guy who came up with this one should be taken away to a rubber room and taught to knit potholders with his feet.

Another interesting tidbit came fromt he mouth of another moron, who postulated that all of this cleaner air presents yet another dilemma: cleaner air lets in more sunlight which triggers gloabal warming. I'm sorry, but I don't get it on several levels;

1. Part of the Greenhouse Theory postulates that it's dirty air (full of soot, lead, extra ozone and fluorocarbons) that causes the phenomenon in the first place. Now we're expected to believe that if we clean the air up, we'll only increase the scope and depth of the problem. In other words, we want clean air, but now the question of how clean can it be before clean air becomes as dangerous as dirty air? So now we're expected to figure out how to balance the amount of clean and dirty air in order to keep them in proper proportions like we would check the Ph rating in a swimming pool. Does this mean if someone decided the air was too damn clean that it's my civic duty to go outside and go nuts with an aerosol can?

2. Global warming is a fallacy. According to these people, if it's too hot outside, global warming is blame. If it's too cold outside, global warming is to blame for that too. People wh believe in global warming as athreat are sorta like your paranoid, suspicious ex-wife, who never believed you went out bowling with the boys even when you come home with a trophy and your picture appears in the local newspaper because you bowled a perfect game All because you were five minutes late. IN her psycho eyes her illusion becomes the truth and your truth becomes an illusion. You can never convince her, and you can never reassure her. I remind these folks that science has reliably figured out that the Earth has gone through several epochs of severe weather changes. In fact, New York City has been proven to have been under a mile of ice as little as 10-12,000 years ago. Something had to happen to remove all that ice from Donald Trump's real estate, and that had to be some form of warming. Since there were no automobiles, factories, smelting plants, aerosol cans, garbage incinerators or toxic waste to cause the warming, it had to be something else. A natural process. And there's no reason to believe that a) the process has stopped dead in it's tracks or b) that the cycle does not repeat itself every several million years. The planet was here for 4-billion-plus years before we showed up and it will be here long after we are all long gone. Nature does what nature does, despite human intervention.

3. What drugs are these people taking and where can I get some?

Which brings us to the final points of this little screed; first point --- enviornmentalism is not so much concern for the planet as it is a cult of conservatism. In this case, the conservatism revolves around creating the best possible enviornment we can and then freezing that moment in time forever. Which is impossible when you consider all of the changes the Earth has undergone in it's development. It's nonsense to believe that one can stop the natural process of an evolving planet. yes, human beings can and do affect certain aspects of nature, but they cannot fundamentally alter it. "You can drive nature out with a pitchfork, but she will always return". That maxim is as valid today as it was when it was uttered at the height of the Roman Empire. The second point is that enviornmentalists really just have a problem with human beings --- they hate them. According to them, human beings were wrecking the planet and now that a positive sign of reversal has been recorded, now we're going way too far in the other direction. They're issue is not clean air or water it's that human beings utilize them. Better to let the grizzly bears, the fire ants and the tilefish have the planet to themselves and human beings with their progress and their engines go to blazes. The thrid, and final point; it seems that no matter what we do these people can never be satisfied.

I'll bet all of the idiots who got quoted still believe that Kyoto was a good idea.

This is not reasoned discourse, nor is it fanatical devotion to a point of principle. It hypocrisy and it's an illness elevated to the status of a religion. But of course, the goal was never a clean eviornment or protecting the planet from an imminent disaster; it was always about controlling people and regulating progress in an extreme manner. It still is.

So, let's all enjoy our clean air, for now. Ket's all go outside and run around like little kids, breathing in all that fresher air, until some Green moron comes along to tell us that fresh air will kill us. Or perhaps it'll be that the common use of water filters and bottled water puts us at risk for cancer or kills some obscure insect who really needs rice-patty-quality filth to thrive in. I guranetee you that day is coming real soon.