Why Republicans Don't Believe in Global Warming

By Robert Moranto
WashingtonExaminer.com

We have entered a holy season.

No, not Easter, when Christians celebrate Christ's resurrection. Not Passover, when Jews exult in liberation from bondage. Those are already behind us on the calendar. And I'm not talking about Ramadan, the Islamic month of fasting and devotion.

No, I am referring to Earth Day, when Earth-firsters mourn the loss of the planet. Environmentalism is a faith without joy, a religion lacking hope of redemption. Every April 22, the group of Americans most determined to show their superiority can be found worshipping dirt.

Environmentalists have replaced joy with scorn — scorn for followers of other faiths, and most of all scorn for the heathen who dare question the holy trinity of global warming, overpopulation, and eventual starvation.

How can they remain in darkness? Don't they love the children? (Not to mention the polar bears?) In short, environmentalists have scorn for Republicans.

Don't get me wrong. I am an environmentalist myself — a card carrying member of the Nature Conservancy. I believe in global warming and I worry about biodiversity. Yet I'm also a small government Republican. And I understand why my fellow Republicans trust my fellow environmentalists as much as African-Americans trust cops at traffic stops. The reason? There's a history there.

Back in the 1960s, environmentalists declared with great authority that pesticides would wipe out birdlife. Remember Silent Spring? I do. After reading it I was one terrified sixth-grader, convinced that the next robin I saw would be my last. My backyard birds, not to mention the far away whales and forests, were on their way out, thanks to man's greed and corporate transgressions against divine Gaia.

While I feared for the birds, self-righteous professors preached that unless we changed our sinful ways there would be hell to pay. As Alex Berezow and Hank Campbell detail in Science Left Behind, in 1977 then Harvard Professor and current Obama "science czar" John Holdren co-authored a book predicting mass starvation by the 1980s due to overpopulation. Governments would need to consider extreme methods, including forced sterilization, for humanity to survive.

Meanwhile, in the real world, this all proved to be false. The percentage of the population in developing nations living in extreme poverty shrank from 50 percent to 21 percent from 1981 to 2010. Serious thinkers like International Monetary Fund Director Christine Lagarde now think we have a chance of ending starvation altogether by 2030, something never before contemplated in human history.

Ever-greater agricultural productivity resulted from the spread of free markets — a development Holdren opposed — preferring to put his faith in government-led policies propounded by brilliant prognosticators like himself.

Luckily, most other predictions of environmental devastation have also failed to materialize. Globally, deforestation has slowed. Blue whales no longer face imminent extinction. As Paul Sabin chronicles in The Bet, contrary to judgment day warnings from Paul Ehrlich (and, again, John Holdren), precious metals are not running out.

Challenges remain, particularly global warming. But with a little free market innovation, we can beat those challenges, just like other false doom and gloom environmentalist predictions of the past.

Given the history of the past half century, environmentalists come off to normal thinking people as the boys who cried wolf, rather than the men who saved the wolves.