PrintApril 22, 2010
Earth Day: An Assault on Man
In recent weeks while addressing Tea Party rallies here on the left coast, I ask the assembled patriots what appears to be an odd question: "Would all those from the former Soviet Union please raise your hands?"
A notable number of hands are always raised -- the San Francisco Bay Area is home to a diverse population.
I then ask another curious question: "What does April 22 signify to you?"
Without exception, someone will shout with great displeasure, "Lenin's birth date!"
The crowd clearly sees that I'm on to something. I next ask the former Soviets, "And as a young child in school, who were you told is your grandfather?"
At this point several painfully respond, "Vladimir Ilyich Lenin!"
"And in the United States, do you know what we celebrate on April 22?" I ask. "Earth Day. Grandfather Lenin has been conjoined with Mother Earth -- and it's no coincidence."
In my new book Climategate (released today), I detail the doings of Earth Day's devious founders. It seems that this crafty crew were cut from cloth that resembles Marx and Lenin, as opposed to Madison and Jefferson.
In 1970, Senator Gaylord Nelson (D-WS) was Congress's leading environmentalist activist. Nelson was the mastermind behind those ridiculous teach-ins, which were in vogue in the late sixties and early seventies. During the teach-ins, mutinous school instructors would scrap the day's assigned curriculum, pressure their students to sit cross-legged on the floor, "rap" about how America is an imperialist nation, and discuss why communism really isn't such a bad form of government -- it just needs to be implemented properly.
Nelson's teach-in efforts were aided by a young man named Denis Hayes. Hayes was student body president while an undergrad at Stanford, and well known for organizing anti-Vietnam war protests. Later, while pursuing a masters degree in public policy at Harvard, Hayes heard about Senator Nelson's teach-in concept and eventually helped Nelson institute the practice nationwide. Denis Hayes would also conspire with the senator to found Earth Day.
Rounding out the troika was Professor Paul Ehrlich of Stanford. In 1968 Ehrlich authored the Malthusian missive, The Population Bomb, in which he infamously spouted wild allegations which included equating the earth's supposed surplus of people with a cancer that needs to be eradicated: "A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people. ... We must shift our efforts from treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions."
In 1969, following a much-hyped oil spill off the Santa Barbara coast, an overblown patch of fire on Cleveland's Cuyahoga River, and the pharmaceutically induced vibes cast across the nation via the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, Senator Nelson met with Ehrlich and reportedly said, "My God -- why not a national teach-in on the environment?" Hayes was brought in to play a pivotal role with organization and implementation. After careful consideration, a name and date for the event were chosen: The inaugural Earth Day would be celebrated April 22, 1970.
Skeptical historians immediately noted a bizarre coincidence. The date coincided with the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Lenin. Earth Day organizers have since tried to brush aside the odd synchronization of dates with lame retorts like "Lenin wasn't an environmentalist." But he didn't have to be. Lenin's core political philosophy was linked at the hip with these newfangled eco-zealots, who maintained that America's government must be altered, its economy planned and regulated, and its citizens better-controlled. The environment would be the perfect tool to force these changes, and the most efficient way to gain converts would be through the public school system -- the earlier, the better.
Nelson and Ehrlich were already known as non-traditional crackpots, but young Hayes was that and more. In a New York Times article published the morning after the first Earth Day entitled "Angry Coordinator of Earth Day," young Hayes bragged that five years earlier, he fled overseas because "I had to get away from America." Hayes was so committed to his anti-capitalist cause that he made sure that his organization did not even produce Earth Day bumper stickers. "You want to know why?" He explained to the Times: "Because they go on automobiles."
As I write in Climategate:
Earth Day has never been a celebration of God's wonderful creation; instead it's always been an assault on man. "Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources," championed the New York Times in an April 23, 1970 editorial, "not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction."During that first Earth Day man was proclaimed the polluter and would remain as such for subsequent observances that decade. By the Eighties the event's organizers cast man as the tree killer, and, with the Nineties, man evolved into the animal species annihilator. The global warming scare never really became popular until the late Nineties, and when it did, it provided a hook that the compatriots at the Earth Day headquarters could hang their red berets on. Known as anthropogenic global warming, it was a sexy sell: humans-particularly Americans-were now screwing up the entire planet's weather. By 2000 Earth Day organizers took ownership of this new angle and would never let go.
Senator Nelson has since passed into the great beyond, Denis Hayes is a board member of the international Earth Day Network, and Paul Ehrlich continues to promote Malthus' machinations at Stanford. In fact, Ehrlich's close associate and co-author of many of his books, John Holdren, is now Barack Obama's official science and technology advisor.
While today is the official Earth Day, the biggest gaggle of true believers will assemble on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. on Sunday. According to the Earth Day Network, the list of featured speakers confirms my premise that Earth Day is an assault on man. The mouthpieces include AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, the guy who is widely reported as having encouraged striking United Mine Worker to "kick the shit out of " mine employees who were resisting union demands.
Another featured speaker will be Hollywood director James Cameron, who recently said that he wanted to take anthropogenic global warming deniers "into the street and shoot it out with those boneheads." In the same interview, he also stated that global warning deniers "have their head so deeply up their ass I'm not sure if they could hear me."
Also included to share his CO2 with the audience is activist Jesse Jackson. We haven't heard as much from Jackson since he was forced to apologize after an open microphone caught him whispering, "See, Barack's been talking down to black people ... I want to cut his nuts off."
These three speakers take "assault on man" to a whole new level.
Of course, Denis Hayes will be the keynote for this Sunday event. According to the Earth Day Network press release:
Denis Hayes, national coordinator for the first Earth Day in 1970 and international chair of Earth Day 2010, will speak about the urgency of addressing climate change and the need to set a framework for a green economy.
Carefully note the last words summarizing Hayes' forthcoming speech: "... the need to set a framework for a green economy." Hayes' speech is perfectly planned to kick off debate on the Energy/Cap-and-Trade Bill in the Senate, which is scheduled to begin the very next day.
As I have noted previously here at American Thinker, the American Clean Energy and Security Act passed by the House proposes green economic schemes that should frighten us greatly.
For example, buried on pages 1014-1016 of the bill is the "Monthly Energy Refund." According to this trick, for those with a gross income that "does not exceed 150 percent of the poverty line ... a direct deposit" of an undisclosed amount of money will be sent "into the eligible household's designated bank account[.]"
On pages 502-503 we find the "Low Income Community Energy Efficiency Program," whereby grants will be issued "to increase the flow of capital and benefits to low income communities, minority-owned and woman-owned businesses and entrepreneurs[.]"
Further proving that this is actually a welfare scheme, on page 973 we discover that for workers who lose their manufacturing jobs because the caps on their companies are too repressive and their employer either has to shut down or move operations to the third world to avoid regulation, the "adversely affected worker" shall receive 70 percent of his prior weekly wage, "payable for a period not longer than 156 weeks." In addition, on pages 986-987 we read that the unemployed worker can submit up to $1,500 in job search reimbursements and get another $1,500 to cover his moving expenses.
And then there are the new federally mandated building codes, which will supersede local rules and regulations. The new codes will be enforced by what I refer to in Climategate as a "green goon squad." On pages 319-324 of the House bill we read that the Secretary of Energy "shall enhance compliance by conducting training and education of builders and other professionals in the jurisdiction concerning the national energy efficiency building code." These EPA badge-wearing G-Men will be funded through global warming revenues procured through the cap-and-trade scheme, as well as by $25 million designated annually from the Department of Energy "to provide necessary enforcement of a national energy efficiency building code[.]"
Earth Day is not a celebration of this glorious planet, but instead an assault on man -- and the current energy bill is an assault on America. We must equip ourselves with a complete understanding of the facts so that we can prevent these elitist social engineers from passing this liberty-sapping piece of legislation.
For two decades, Brian Sussman served the San Francisco Bay Area with his award-winning television weathercasts. He now serves the same region as the morning talk show host on KSFO radio (560-AM). His book, Climategate: A Veteran Meteorologist Exposes The Global Warming Scam, is being released today.
