Thoughts on Earth Day 2010

In honor of Earth Day, I would like to bust a few myths out there. How can you solve a problem without being honest about it?? First, hybrid cars are actually WORSE for the environment over the long term, due to the highly toxic battery that never biodegrades (and that you have to replace twice over the life of the car, approximately). One of the leading causes of deforestation of the Amazon? Soybeans... yes you tofu eaters, you thought you were being environmentally friendly, didn’t you... This situation is exacerbated by the high levels of corn we grow in the United States (that pushed out the soybean crop) in order to create ethanol. Ethanol being the highly praised alternative fuel that requires just as much fuel to make it as it produces. So why do so many grow corn for ethanol, pushing out actual consumable crops? Government subsidies! These farmers get paid to grow a crop that is of no real worth to the American people because our beloved government decided to throw our money at ANY alternative fuel creation, despite whether or not it is viable. Even though we now know all of this, we are still subsidizing it!!! (I personally think hydrogen is the way to go, but I could be wrong.) Some organic farming (a small portion) is highly destructive to the environment. For example, instead of using a pest control that is required by law to biodegrade, they use mulched copper, which after several years of use renders the farm land unusable.

The root of the problem is that we rarely ever get the facts about the pros and cons of the currently vogue method of “saving the planet” and end up making shoot from the hip decisions that end up hurting rather than helping. This is why alarmists like Al Gore can be so counterproductive to the environmentalist movement. If you are told that that earth is going to be irrevocably decimated in ten years and the gluttonous homo sapiens who mar its serene surface are shortly to be beyond hope of amendment (like Al Gore proclaimed with all the reliability and self-indulgence of a doomsday soothsayer on the corner of a New York street with a sign stretching around his overfed carcass of a neck declaring he is the prophet of the apocalypse) you start making sloppy decisions and not really evaluating the best choices to coexist with our remarkably beautiful planet. (Which, I need not add, is an absolute farce since the amount of toxic gases that the earth emits of its own accord through volcanoes, plate rifts, swamps, animals, and, according to recent research, our sinister earth-hating pets, all make the United States’ carbon footprint look so much more manageable and yet the earth is able to surprise us and continually renew itself. Anyone seen Mount St. Helens recently?)

The reality is that vast majority of us want our water to be clean, our air to be healthy and our wild places to be pristine to hand down to our children. We have more in common on this issue than many of us realize, but we are being force fed what politicians think will get them the most support. It is all political posturing to divide right from left, liberal from conservative and not about solving the problem. I think we forget how far we have come since the 1970s: how much smog choked our cities, how many endangered species have been nursed back from the brink, and anyone remember the non-biodegradable styrofoam containers? Of course, we have new problems now, but I really believe being honest about our choices would make finding truly sustainable solutions to taking care of our planet much more attainable. It will take time, but I have faith that we will get there. The question is how many large and costly blunders we will make along the way because our politicians can’t help themselves by playing the game and not solving the problem.