By Laura Trevelyan, BBC UN Correspondent
Bolivian President Evo Morales has told a UN forum that capitalism should be scrapped if the planet is to be saved from the effects of climate change. “If we want to save our planet earth, we have a duty to put an end to the capitalist system,” he said. Opening an UN meeting in New York on the rights of indigenous people, he also said the development of biofuels harmed the world’s poorest people.
The forum’s theme is the global impact of climate change on native people. Bolivia’s left-wing president said unbridled industrial development was responsible for the pillaging of natural resources. Speaking through an interpreter at the UN headquarters in New York, he had this uncompromising message: “If we want to save our planet earth, to save life, to save mankind, we have a duty to put an end to the capitalist system.”
Mr Morales also argued against biofuels, crops which are used to produce alternative energy rather than food. Biofuels resulted in poverty and hunger he said, and were very harmful to the poorest people in the world. In a side swipe at Brazil, major manufacturers of the biofuel ethanol, he said some presidents were putting cars ahead of people. Read more here.
By Frank Newport, Gallup
While 61% of Americans say the effects of global warming have already begun, just a little more than a third say they worry about it a great deal, a percentage that is roughly the same as the one Gallup measured 19 years ago. The public just can’t seem to get worked up about it.
Despite the enormous attention paid to global warming over the past several years, the average American is in some ways no more worried about it than in years past. Americans do appear to have become more likely to believe global warming’s effects are already taking place and that it could represent a threat to their way of life during their lifetimes. But the American public is more worried about a series of other environmental concerns than about global warming, and there has been no consistent upward trend on worry about global warming going back for two decades. Additionally, only a little more than a third of Americans say that immediate, drastic action is needed in order to maintain life as we know it on the planet.
The fact that a majority of Americans don’t believe global warming will pose a threat to them in their lifetimes makes it perhaps less surprising to find that significantly less than a majority of Americans say they worry a great deal about it. In fact, worry about global warming is low on a list of 12 environmental problems that Gallup asks about in the Environment surveys (ranking 10th out of 12 environmental issues). Gallup’s broad measure of worry about environmental issues does not show a concomitant increase in concern. Although there have been fluctuations on this measure of worry over the years, the percentage of Americans who worry a great deal about global warming is no higher now than it was 19 years ago. And the percentage who do worry a great deal—37%—is still well less than a majority, and in fact lower than the percentage who worry a great deal about such environmental issues as pollution of drinking water, pollution of lakes and reservoirs, and toxic waste in the soil. See more here.
By Max Schulz, New York Post
Tuesday is Earth Day, the calendar’s High Holy Day of Green theology. With each passing year, environmentalism more clearly assumes the trappings of a secular religion. Now, along comes Iain Murray to assert that the Green God is dead. Murray’s new book, “The Really Inconvenient Truths: Seven Environmental Catastrophes Liberals Don’t Want You to Know About - Because They Helped Cause Them,” clarifies the difference between caring for the environment - a reasonable and virtuous belief that people rightly harbor - and the modern-day movement known as environmentalism. The latter, Murray notes, has amassed a shameful legacy over a half century that has killed millions of people and consigned billions of others to backbreaking poverty. “Environmentalism deserves to be as discredited as Marxism,” Murray argues. His book does a superb job of doing just that.
Murray, an energy expert at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, lives a low-carbon lifestyle. He loves nature and the outdoors. He’s practically a tree-hugger. Nevertheless, he makes clear, “I am not an environmentalist.” Why? Because, as he explains, environmentalism has become a socio-political movement exploiting people’s genuine regard for nature as a smokescreen for expanding government and exercising power. And the results have been disastrous for both humanity and the environment. Murray chronicles seven environmental catastrophes, and shows the hand of the professional environmental movement in each one.
At bottom, Murray notes, the environmental movement is rooted not in a concern for the environment, but in a disdain for personal freedom and free-enterprise capitalism. Humanity is the disease plaguing the planet. The antidote must be environmental policies enforced by government diktat, relying on mandates, bans, orders, restrictions and punishments to achieve its goals. The better answer is conservation by private stewards, individuals and corporations, who understand caring for the environment is important, while making choices that are actually logical - and sustainable. Read more here.