Mark Thoma (who is now relatively famous for his Economist's View blog)
The House Resources Committee celebrates Earth Day:
On Earth Day website, House Republican Committee seeks to 'dispel environmental myths', by John Byrne, Raw Story: On a little-noticed inside page of the House Resources Committee website, the Republican majority staff have prepared a folio celebrating Earth Day. The focus of the site ... is aimed at dispelling the "'sky is falling' sensationalism of environmental activists [that] lead people to falsely believe that our environment is getting worse when it's actually getting better."
The site is cleanly designed and professional, conveying the "soft" aesthetic that has become a hallmark of the environmental movement. It begins in a nonpartisan fashion: "Earth Day is an opportunity for all Americans to educate themselves on the state of our environment, and to pitch-in in their local communities to make them better."
But from there it becomes clearly partisan, ... attacking those who would have Americans believe anything is wrong with the environment in the United States. There is no mention of global warming or climate change anywhere on the site.
A section titled "big business" -- which some might mistakenly imagine detailing the role of big business in environmental change, or even praising big business' role in helping the environment -- is instead dedicated to detailing the budgets of the largest environmental organizations and accusing them of spending money on themselves rather than on the environment. ...
The House Resources' Committee website also includes a page which breaks down "environmental myths."
The top five myths are 1) "Economic growth harms the environment," 2) "Emissions are devastating America's air quality," 3) "The evils of oil can easily be replaced with renewable energy," 4) "Humans will die of thirst, in the future we will have no more freshwater [sic]," 5) "America is losing its last pristine forest lands," 6) "40,000 species go extinct every year."
The facts?
- "The more wealth a nation has, the better its environmental performance."
- "Air quality has improved dramatically and is getting better all the time."
- "Oil is the lifeblood of the American economy."
- "We have plenty of freshwater, the issue is access to it."
- "Forest acreage is increasing."
- (On species extinction) "This is a 'hazarded guess' not based on fact."
...House Resources Committee Chairman Richard Pombo (R-CA) has long been in the crosshairs of the environmental movement. Critics accusePombo of weakening the Endangered Species Act, seeking to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the outer U.S. continental shelf to oil drilling, selling off national parks, and modifying mining laws to allow public lands to be transfered to private companies. Sierra Club and Defenders of Wildlife have targeted his California congressional race in November.
The full taxpayer-funded site can be found here.
via www.env-econ.net
