I’m celebrating…now that Earth Day is over. Actually, the Earth Day concept is quite noble. Some people involved have good intentions, but the mouth pieces have been wrong so frequently, we should have learned by now to stop listening to them.

Earth Day started in 1970. At the time, the air and water was far more polluted than it is today. The Earth Day-ers had a message. We are all going to die!  Their predictions were outrageous and wrong, but every year they return to come up with a modified message that is outrageous and wrong.

Here is a sample as reported by Reason.com

• By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.
• In January 1970, Life reported, “Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”
• Ecologist Kenneth Watt told Time that, “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.”

The truth of pollution is that our world is cleaner now than it was at the first Earth Day…and when I say our world…I don’t mean the planet. I mean the United States. Because we are wealthy, we were able to fight a growing pollution crisis. China is today just learning what we learned 30 years ago.

The environmentalist always have the same message. It is business and free markets that lead to pollution. Actually, the issue can be traced to the problem of the commons. When no one owns a resource…a piece of land, a river, the air…then no one takes care of it. A town could pump sewage into the river because they didn’t have to deal with the consequences. Cars could spit out smog because young drivers didn’t pay the price as older citizens with lung ailments did. Coal fired power plants could belch sulfur into the skies because acid rain didn’t hurt their bottom line. At least that was the common line of thinking until the 70′s.

Eventually our polluting ways caught up with us. I lived in Akron, OH when I was a teenager. I played soccer near the big tire factories. The air stunk and my clothes where ruined by black dirt. The river that ran behind my house was the Cuyahoga River. It is famous for starting of fire (although not in Akron). That river dumped into Lake Erie which was “dead”.

We learned that the problem of the commons needed to be dealt with. This is the one of the few areas where I think the federal government needed to get involved and it is Constitutional. Pollution from one state does not stay in that state. Smog floats to neighboring states. Rain washes into rivers that travel clear across the country. Pollution is an interstate commerce problem. The federal government therefore needed to take action to control the problem. They needed to claim ownership of the unclaimed commons and “secure the blessings of liberty…to our posterity”. It would be immoral to leave our children a stinking, rotting heap.

I feel that way about pollution and yes…I still think Earth Day is ridiculous. I would find it so much more palatable if it wasn’t run by a bunch of unscientific political activist with political goals disguised as concern for the Earth. Population control is some god complex disguised as science. When it runs amok, you end up with Hitler. Global Warming is a scare for international bodies to redistribute wealth from producers to non-producers….spreading the wealth. When these scares are lost to common sense and real world observations, new ones will be found. The new scares will be pushed by our public schools onto our children so that they can continue this nonsense for another 40 years.

That’s my problem with Earth Day.

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.