California Proposition 87 would add an addition tax (about 2 to 6% depending on the price of oil per barrel) produced in the state of California amounting to an additional 4 billion dollars drain on the oil industry. This loot is to be diverted to research in alternative energy sources. This proposition is made possible by and enjoys the support of the Environmentalist movement. If passed, it would be the latest salvo fired by the Environmentalism against industrialized civilization.
Many people believe that the core of the Environmentalist movement seeks merely the protection of the environment for the sake of human health and benefit. In fact, this movement poses a grave threat to human life. Radical Environmentalists are not motivated by a desire to protect the environment for the benefit to mankind. Rather, it holds that nature has intrinsic value - that is to say that the environment has value in and of itself, apart from human beings. As evidence of this fact, note that Environmentalist have successfully lobbied to prevent exploitation of the Alaskan National Wildlife Reserve by oil companies, despite the fact that it a barren wasteland with very few human inhabitants. Also note that large portions of state parks such as Yellowstone are set off limits to benefits of human beings in order to preserve its “pristine” state - that is, a state apart from the influence, and enjoyment, of mankind.
As novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand points out, man's very existence requires that he alter nature in order to survive. Even in most primitive agriculture alters the existing plant and animal life in a given area, in favor of those he sees fit to
deposit. The more an activity promotes human life, the greater the alteration of nature is involved. As man reaches ever
greater levels of technological - building ever larger skyscrapers and shopping centers, and more extensive freeways - the
more evil he is in the eyes of Environmentalists. It is not surprising that U.S. National Park Service biologist David Graber
proclaimed in 1989 that man is a “cancer” and longed for the “right virus to come along” to wipe him out.
Environmentalism has a long track record of attacking man's use of nature precisely because it is useful to him. When it was discovered that the cancer fighting drug - taxol could treat ovarian and uterine cancer in women, the Environmentalist opposed the harvest of its source - the Pacific Yew Tree - and succeeded in placing it off limits to drug companies. Former Vice President and Presidential Candidate Al Gore in his book - “Earth in the Balance” - explains Environmentalist ethics thus: “It seems an easy choice - sacrifice the tree for a human life - until one learns that three trees must be destroyed for each patient treated…Suddenly we must confront some tough questions.” Environmentalists care about trees, not women with breast cancer.
The pesticide DDT has saved an estimated half billion according to the National Academy of Sciences by destroying malaria
carrying mosquitoes. This rivals the number of lives saved by the drug penicillin. Nevertheless, Environmentalists
successfully lobbied for its world-wide ban, claiming that it is a carcinogen in humans. This is in spite of the fact
that tests in animals and humans, show that it safe even at thousands of times the concentration of normal exposure.
The actual reason for Environmentalist opposition to DDT is not concern for human health, but for alleged harm done to
certain species of birds, as well as the mosquitoes killed by the insecticide. When a reporter asked Dr. Charles Wurster,
chief scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund, why the attack on this beneficent chemical, he responded that there were
too many people and “this was as good a way to get rid of them as any.”
Environmentalism is one of many movements that have demanded sacrifice of people for some “higher” goal. Nazism demanded the murder of millions of Jews, Slavs, and homosexuals for the sake of the German Race. The Communists murdered the bourgeoisie for the alleged benefit of the proletariat. Islamic Fundamentalism demands the sacrifice of its practitioners (as well as the “infidels”) for the sake of 70 virgins in a mystical afterworld. The Environmentalists, however, demand human sacrifice not even for the sake of another group of human beings, but for the sake of trees, birds, bugs, and arctic tundra. It is for this reason that Environmentalism is the most evil ideology in the history of human thought.
And now the Environmentalists have turned their venomous hatred toward the producers of one of the most beneficial commodity in the history of human kind - oil. Oil has made possible the highly developed industrial society we see today. One would be hard-pressed to name one product used in daily life that has made possible using factories powered by oil and petroleum. Each product has been transported to market by means of oil. It is thanks to oil, that our houses are lit with electric lights instead of candles, are warmed with central heat, not wood-burning stoves. Oil is the reason why we travel in
airplanes and automobiles instead of on horseback. Even the vast arrays of plastics are chemically derived from petroleum.
Oil has allowed the stupendous wealth manifested in the vast array of goods and services it has made possible. This wealth
has made possible the research into new technologies and medicines that have allowed the standard of living, leisure time,
longevity to progressively increase as the decades by. And this is the reason why Environmentalists have launched their
attack on the producers of oil.
One would run kicking and screaming if one knew what this movement actually represents, if one discovered what their real
motive was with respect to the oil industry. So Environmentalists who support Proposition 87 hide their true motives by
listing all of the benefits this measure supposedly provides.
According to the Environmental California website, this new tax will improve air quality by reducing oil production and
therefore consumption. But if Environmentalists were truly concerned about air pollution, they would support expansion of
the use of nuclear power - an energy source that has resulted in not one human death in the western world. Thanks to
Environmentalist lobbying, not one nuclear power plant has been contructed in the U.S. for three decades. They would also
support the use and expansion of hydroelectric dams, not oppose them for the sake of the habitat of fish.
Even wind-power, once endorsed by Environmentalists, has earned the ire of the greens now that it is becoming economically competitive with fossil fuels. Environmentalists now complain that wind farms are a “visual blight” and that rare birds are killed by wind mill propeller blades.
Not even geothermal power is acceptable to Environmentalists. Local Environmentalists groups oppose the building of
geothermal plants at Medicine Lake in California, citing concern that the plants threaten the Shasta crayfish, an endangered
species.
Felice Pace of the Klamath Forest Alliance best sums up the Environmentalist position on energy use in particular, and
industrial civilization in general, by stating that “Essentially, in our minds, what it boils down to is any human act,
any energy development, is going to have some impacts.” Anything man does in order to live, in other words, is evil.
Perhaps the most ridiculous of the Environmentalist rationalization for this new tax is that it will reduce our dependence
on foreign oil according the Environment California website. We must remember that it was the Environmentalists who
lobbied successfully against the drilling of oil in regions of Southern California, the Gulf of Mexico, and in the Alaskan
National Wildlife reserve. The ANWR reserve alone has an estimated 10.4 billion barrels, the amount of oil imported from Saudi Arabia in thirty years. Environmentalists are not interested in reducing dependence on foreign oil or maintaining
national security.
And finally, Environment California claims that Prop 87 would be good for the economy. It would “generate” $4 billion in new revenue which would be used among other things, for investment in alternative energy sources. It is a Marxist view, shared by the Environmentalist’s fellow travelers that money looted by taxes belongs to no one in particular, and simply exists out in nature to be harvested by government. In fact, the government produces nothing. It only transfers wealth from one source to another. The billion dollars robbed from oil companies would result in reduced investment, production, and employment on the part of oil companies. But it is far too generous to say that the Environmentalists hold that economic prosperity is good, but are mistaken about how to achieve it. Environmentalists oppose all the things that an industrialized nation benefits from - the expansion of freeways, utilization of energy sources, and genetically engineered foods. These polices reduce the standard of living in the Western World and condemn to grinding poverty those in the Third World. Their view of economic development is best captured in the slogan: “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell.”
Regarding the claim that this new looting of oil companies would be spent on alternative energy research, any resulting
new technology would probably be opposed by Environmentalists anyway.
Contact Jason at: hoskin@usc.edu
Jason Hoskin is a graduate student in Pathobiology at the University of Southern California. He is President and Founder of the USC Objectivist Club. He is a a staff writer for USC’s Daily Trojan, as well as for Capitalism Magazine. He writes on a wide range of topics from U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East to Environmentalism.