Recalling the golden age of eco-skeptic think tank journalism
The following double book review ofThe Really Inconvenient Truths, by Iain Murray, and Eco-Freaks, by John Berlau, was written in 2009.
Murray’s book was good enough to earn status as “A Main Selection of the Conservative Book Club,” which no doubt has an endless trove of quality entrants to plow through. It makes one wonder though how Murray got the club’s main selection, when much of the information, chapters about DDT, CAFE fuel standards, the Endangered Species Act, property ownership, pollution, and climate change, are virtually the same as those found in, Berlau’s book, which came out two years earlier. No bad blood, though. 
They work for the same outfit, the Competitive Enterprise Institute which, like other think tanks, has streamlined the whole “journalism” racket by moving all operations in-house. My only question is: Why do so many think tanks have the word “enterprise” somewhere in their titles? They should give that some thought. I’m not sure if they saw it together in the theater, or if they rented Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth, and watched it back at the “Institute,” but Murray was deeply affected, coming “to the conclusion that the liberal environmental movement is grounded in the idea that freedom is detrimental to the environment." He argues is that if we blindly follow Gore’s liberal agenda, such tough environmental laws enforced on poor countries will drain their bank accounts and leave their citizens impoverished and starving. He accuses Gore of being disingenuous about morality, mocking his belief in the “God-given ability to reason with one another about our future.” Clearly the answer, Murray must think, is to let the “stewardship” of multinational capitalism impoverish third-world citizens, on its own.
Murray plays the hypocrisy card early on by going after Gore’s carbon footprint, in which nearly every kilowatt of energy put out by the whiney liberal, his family, and his staff of pansies is painstakingly accounted for. Turns out the ex Vice President isn’t so green after all. GOTCHA!
Murray and Berlau each have, as one of their main goals, the desire to highlight the liberal environmentalist’s anti-human agenda involving global population control. Not only do liberals ignore the interests of people in favor of animals or eco-systems (not to be confused with stewardship), but they would also rather kill unborn fetuses by the thousands, and allow thousands more people in other countries die just so we could bring a few bald eagles and fish back from near-extinction. Imagine, they say, if we had continued using DDT all over the world. We could have prevented so many of the malaria deaths over the last half-century.
Murray would rather see entire rain forests sprayed down with DDT, instead of attempting to expanding some crazy, socialist vaccination program, even at the expense of the ecosystem in his own country. But surely Murray won’t be deterred by Rachel Carson’s stupid book, Silent Spring, or let the EPA and their junk science scare him about DDT in America’s soil and drinking water.
Anyway if liberals are so concerned about pollution, why don’t they raise hell about all the hormones from the birth control pill passed through the bodies of women, into American water supplies? Obviously because they want to maintain their population control agenda.
Murray plays the hypocrisy card early on by going after Gore’s carbon footprint, in which nearly every kilowatt of energy put out by the whiney liberal, his family, and his staff of pansies is painstakingly accounted for. Turns out the ex Vice President isn’t so green after all. GOTCHA!
Murray and Berlau each have, as one of their main goals, the desire to highlight the liberal environmentalist’s anti-human agenda involving global population control. Not only do liberals ignore the interests of people in favor of animals or eco-systems (not to be confused with stewardship), but they would also rather kill unborn fetuses by the thousands, and allow thousands more people in other countries die just so we could bring a few bald eagles and fish back from near-extinction. Imagine, they say, if we had continued using DDT all over the world. We could have prevented so many of the malaria deaths over the last half-century.
Murray would rather see entire rain forests sprayed down with DDT, instead of attempting to expanding some crazy, socialist vaccination program, even at the expense of the ecosystem in his own country. But surely Murray won’t be deterred by Rachel Carson’s stupid book, Silent Spring, or let the EPA and their junk science scare him about DDT in America’s soil and drinking water.
Anyway if liberals are so concerned about pollution, why don’t they raise hell about all the hormones from the birth control pill passed through the bodies of women, into American water supplies? Obviously because they want to maintain their population control agenda.
In what seems like a stunning break with his core ideology, Murray lashes out against the pill as a pollutant, while displaying profound empathy for potential malaria victims who could be saved by DDT. You probably saw it coming, but these sentiments are coupled with the accusation that liberals are racist for not supporting DDT as a worldwide malaria cure. Perhaps it all has to do with the fact that Murray is religious, is an opponent of birth control to begin with, and is against big, expensive government health programs. After all, we don’t see much in his book about what he would do to help fight AIDS -- only malaria.
All of this nonsense is framed within a religious metaphor with Al Gore as “High Priest,” leading his flock of liberals through the wilderness of denial. The device is confusing however, because after Murray identifies himself as an Anglican, the intended insult seems to vanish. But of course, we learn Murray is picturing Gore as the high priest of some pagan cult, like Gaia, not a legitimate, modern belief like Christianity. Still, not too funny.
All of this nonsense is framed within a religious metaphor with Al Gore as “High Priest,” leading his flock of liberals through the wilderness of denial. The device is confusing however, because after Murray identifies himself as an Anglican, the intended insult seems to vanish. But of course, we learn Murray is picturing Gore as the high priest of some pagan cult, like Gaia, not a legitimate, modern belief like Christianity. Still, not too funny.
Always good to have God on your side, when writing a book
I almost wish, for the sake of making his argument slightly more cohesive, Murray would have left out all the religious stuff. But he couldn’t resist, and we soon realize why. He’s really just angry over liberals having re-interpreted the passage in Genesis that gives man “dominion over the fish of the sea . . . and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”
The Anglicans even made Australia’s Bishop of Canberra their environmental PR guy who audaciously announced that, “Willfully causing environmental degradation is a sin.” Clearly the liberal agenda has hit close to home with Murray. Confused, betrayed, and shaken to his spiritual core, he wonders how, if the liberals can reach even the highest members of his own church, will they be stopped from taking over everything?
Berlau on the other hand wisely withholds his own personal spiritual struggles, but also assumes we are all on the same page, here. “The book of Genesis clearly tells us that God intended us to have ‘dominion’ over and to ‘subdue’ the earth to our needs.” Having cleared that up, Berlau throws a tough curveball, showing just how complex a thinker he can be. “The ironic thing here is that environmentalists are actually the ones asking us to stand apart from nature. They’re asking us not to do the same things as other animals.”
Meanwhile, still fuming over infighting among the clergy, Murray channels his rage toward liberals for chopping down our country’s corn fields to burn them in our gas tanks as ethanol. He lambasts the EPA rules that reward fuel efficiency over safety, because even Ralph Nader says the bigger cars are safer. Murray figures the lefties got what they deserved by creating the light truck loophole in the first place. I cannot argue with that, although I would never drive the point home as crassly as Murray: “The tradeoff the liberal environmentalists demand is actually safety for gas mileage. In other words, blood for oil.” Oh, yes, he did.
The Anglicans even made Australia’s Bishop of Canberra their environmental PR guy who audaciously announced that, “Willfully causing environmental degradation is a sin.” Clearly the liberal agenda has hit close to home with Murray. Confused, betrayed, and shaken to his spiritual core, he wonders how, if the liberals can reach even the highest members of his own church, will they be stopped from taking over everything?
Berlau on the other hand wisely withholds his own personal spiritual struggles, but also assumes we are all on the same page, here. “The book of Genesis clearly tells us that God intended us to have ‘dominion’ over and to ‘subdue’ the earth to our needs.” Having cleared that up, Berlau throws a tough curveball, showing just how complex a thinker he can be. “The ironic thing here is that environmentalists are actually the ones asking us to stand apart from nature. They’re asking us not to do the same things as other animals.”
Meanwhile, still fuming over infighting among the clergy, Murray channels his rage toward liberals for chopping down our country’s corn fields to burn them in our gas tanks as ethanol. He lambasts the EPA rules that reward fuel efficiency over safety, because even Ralph Nader says the bigger cars are safer. Murray figures the lefties got what they deserved by creating the light truck loophole in the first place. I cannot argue with that, although I would never drive the point home as crassly as Murray: “The tradeoff the liberal environmentalists demand is actually safety for gas mileage. In other words, blood for oil.” Oh, yes, he did.
The corn problem is whole different animal
Besides, Murray is upset about corn for all the wrong reasons, the least of which is its capacity as a fuel source. For example you don’t hear complaints from him about the fact that most corn goes to feed the farm animals that are themselves part of a huge soil, water, and air pollution problem related to our growing meat consumption, which, along with our addiction to corn syrup, is related to our nation’s health crisis, which in turn is related to our health care crisis.No, Murray, as a concerned citizen of the world, is just mad because American corn-based ethanol is causing the price of tortillas in Mexico to rise, and causing a shortage of pig-food in China. And if the Chinese workers don’t have enough pork to eat, who will stay healthy enough to “keep american and European families well supplied with $49 DVD players and other popular consumer products”? The quote is from a New York Times article on the subject, and somehow I think Murray is honestly concerned about that issue, rather than seeing something wrong with the premise that no American outfit could currently build a DVD player, period.
Along the same lines, both Murray and Berlau attempt to debunk the notion that the earth’s soil has some kind of limited carrying capacity for human life, as argued in Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book, The Population Bomb. And both authors show little understanding of macro-agriculture. For starters, Murray uses the example of India, a place that he for some reason thinks is a flourishing place of economic equality.
Ehrlich’s said that India would not be able to feed itself by 1980. I honestly have no idea why Murray would attack this idea as irrational, because as it turns out, Ehrlich was only off by a decade or two. In 2003 alone, which was the first year they started keeping track, 17,107 Indian farmers committed suicide because their agricultural system has failed. A 2006 New York Times article describe how economic reforms had given farmers “. . . access to expensive and promising biotechnology, but not necessarily opened the way to higher prices, bank loans, irrigation or insurance against pests and rain.1” Once again, that’s over seventeen thousand farmers dead. Perhaps, Murray would have us believe, this is some kind of natural “correction,” in the self-regulating commodity market.
To be sure, Murray rails against the futility of subsidized farming, even in America, yet he’s careful not to make judgements on the American appetite, never suggesting that there’s something wrong with the excessive demand for quarter-pounders and corn syrup.
The claim of both authors that Endangered Species act has not been all-positive for all species involved, is something I can also agree with. But Murray and Berlau are not so concerned with the values in or interests of animals as species or individual creature as much as the interests of the property owner vis a vis the welfare of his property, whether private livestock, pets, or publicly shared wildlife.
Murray advocates a kind of wildlife stewardship, more closely resembling livestock husbandry, when he refers to the “private ownership of wildlife,” pointing out that it was private landowners who build the nesting boxes that facilitated their rebound. Again, he gets it wrong. Wild animals are public, even when they scamper across your property or choose to nest there. And the people were taxpayer and citizens in the original sense of the word who, out of a sense of citizenship, put in physical effort to help the wood ducks. If the ducks were privately held then they would have monetary value, rather than the value being placed upon the animal for animal’s own sake, or found within the hunter’s experience of killing the animal, and not the sale of its meat.
Berlau claims he is a conservationist, “in the vein of Theodore roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot.” Yet he “disagree[s] with them about government ownership of the land . . .” and lambasts Clinton’s 2001 “mad dash” to declare roadless areas out of 58.5 million acres of national forest. The care of our national forests, “has now been so hijacked by radical preservationist enviros that Roosevelt and Pinchot are probably rolling over in their graves.” You’re right, Berlau. Both men would surely prefer to see, hear, and smell four-wheelers and snowmobiles, instead of “elitist backpackers,” as you call them.
I think it is neither anti-capitalist, nor “anti-human” to consider the interests of a broader ecosystem within which we live, and the health of which has been scientifically proven to be not only subject to our modification, but also critical to our well-being. This paradox is easily handled by free-enterprisers who assume that whatever adjustments the market can’t make to help itself. Oil supplies dwindling or gone? No problem, Berlau says, “ . . . technology develops new ways of finding the resource.” Right. Except when it doesn’t.
Murray spends the last couple of chapters touting his cobbled-together brand of free market environmentalism and technical global warming solutions. He basically says wind and solar don’t produce enough electricity, the sequestering of CO2 is not yet proven, and nor has the panacea of “clean coal” come to fruition. Besides, abandoning the coal industry will cost millions of jobs and take many years -- frightful to consider. All this without any mention of the most promising options, which are probably geothermal and what we already use -- nuclear.
Murray concludes this dreadful book with a warm “promise of stewardship,” which will be held up, presumably by responsible governments and businesses all over the world, under the careful watch of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
As mentioned, there is much overlapping and concurrent information in these two books, although Berlau takes on a few different topics. First, he shows how crazy and reactionary liberals are, illustrated by the asbestos and lung cancer scare of the 1970s. Not realizing that it would be safer for breathing and fire protection if the all-natural building material was left in place, companies sprang up all over providing the toxic service of asbestos removal. Berlau provides tragic examples of structure fires that caused major casualties, including the final structural failures of the World Trade Center buildings on 9/11. All kinds of technical data are assembled, courtesy of the “Institute,” no doubt, to demonstrate that the collapses of the Trade Center, and other buildings could have been prevented if the liberals hadn’t outlawed asbestos. Perhaps in a forthcoming sequel, Berlau will reveal which powerful Jewish bankers secretly had their offices padded with extra thick, contraband asbestos, disguised as shaggy wall paper.
Some sixty pages later get to a tale of the poor, stranded victims of hurricane Katrina, who could have gotten out of town if it weren’t for that stupid New Orleans train system. For Berlau, having a car is a matter of safety.
Hitched to the wise parable about hurricanes, public transit, and the misuse of the “precautionary principle,” is an effort find some good standing with any greenish reader, calling his daily DC subway ride to work “the environmentally correct thing.” Without even waiting a full paragraph to assure us that’s not the main reason, he says, “I have a car but it’s prohibitively expensive to park in DC.” As if he never once stopped to think that just maybe some people ride the train, not because they can’t afford parking, but because they can’t afford the car.
It’s hard to believe he intentionally meant to sound so disingenuous. That is unless he was trying to raise liberal, egalitarian hackles by way of a veiled jab at the lower class, saying “I have a car. . .” and eliding, because I have my act together and I’m not poor.
I found in both books some interesting information that really did make me think about certain issues from a different angle. The unsettling fact was the proximity of this useful and seemingly credible data, to some of the most insane blathering one could image; The kind of stuff that makes a reader walk right past the fiction and science fiction sections, to the shelfs labeled Think Tank, because that’s where the real entertainment is.