Punditry and the reality of environmentalism

By C. Edmund Wright

Two pundits on one of D.C.'s most enlightened programs, the All Star Panel on Fox's "Special Report," sitting within five feet of the very reasonable Brit Hume and Charles Krauthammer, may have learned something yesterday. Or not.

Nina Easton of Fortune Magazine said with a straight face "to me our biggest freedom issue is our dependence on foreign oil...that's the biggest freedom issue we face, not environmental controls." Was she saying that the two are not related?

She was responding to comments by Czech Republic President Vaclav Klaus at the National Press Club, where he proclaimed that environmentalism was not about "cleaning a lake" or "using less electricity" but rather "an ideology that wants to control the world." Klaus, who knows totalitariansim when he sees it (living under Soviet control for a few decades will do that) said in broken English what Rush Limbaugh and others have been saying for many years... that the environmental movement is the new home of communist style totalitarianism.

People with real world experience often understand that it is precisely environmental controls that have insured our dependence on foreign oil. But there she was.... on national TV thinking she was being brilliant...going out of her way to separate foreign oil dependence and environmental controls as mutually exclusive and competing factors affecting our freedom.

When you understand this concept and examine the theory (also known as fact) that extreme environmentalism is a totalitarian ideology, it makes sense on many levels. Not the least of which are the resulting effects of totalitarianism or enviromentalism on free markets and more pointedly... the vast "coincidence" of the leftist and green movements' leaders. Apparently, inside The Beltway pundits have never bothered to even examine it. And they admit it.

"It's really interesting...I hadn't thought this through before" said Juan Williams in response to Klaus. "He's saying it's beyond the scientists and in fact an ideology that will tell us how to live and what cars to drive and whether or not we can have a refrigerator."

Well no kidding. Where have you been Juan? But better late than never.

"It struck me as something different," he added. "I had not heard this line of argument before. I had never felt threatened by an environmentalist before...I just felt my consiousness had been raised."

These folks need to do what George McGovern finally did after his public life ended... try to run a business coping with the messes they make in Washington. It was only then that McGovern "felt threatened by an environmentalist" and had his consciousness raised in a whole new way.