March 7, 2007

Environmental Facism?

The documentary Mine Your Own Business, which exposes the dark side of the international environmental movement, was shown at the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada annual meeting. Mineweb.com reviews the film, which documents the negative impacts and dubious claims of the international environmental NGOs opposing mine projects in three poverty-stricken towns in Romania, Madagascar and Chile. The writer of the Mineweb.com piece also notes the efforts of the environmental groups to suppress the documentary, which he called "environmental facism."

There have been attempts to suppress this film and prevent it being shown. The filmmakers have even received death threats because of it. Documentary TV channels and film festivals won't screen it, although will happily carry works which try to paint the opposite picture.

Reviewer Marty Dodge at Blogcritics recently called MYOB "an excellent piece of documentary filmmaking" and describes it as "a fascinating examination of the motivation and end result of extreme environmentalist paranoia about the mining industry."

In it we see how caring and sharing environmentalists feel the need to tell people in the poorest parts of the world that they do not deserve good modern jobs and should go back to subsistence farming whether or not it was ever possible to do this in the area in which they live.

The irony is that not one of the environmentalists interviewed actually lives in the area they are pontificating about... This is only overshadowed by some of the untruths these people spew. The contrast between the actual inhabitants and the patronizing mentality of the environmentalists cannot be underestimated.

Now if we could just get a copy of MYOB into the hands of every child whose schoolteacher forced them to watch An Inconvenient Truth.

Past posts here.

Update: Aussie blogger Jack Lacton likes MYOB too - but he doesn't much like environmentalists.

Update: I wondered if Al Gore and Mark Fenn have ever crossed paths, so I Googled it and didn't find anything that suggested they had. But I did come across a Mark Steyn column from the Feb. 4 Chicago Sun-Times in which Steyn tackles the "solid science" of global warming.

The question is whether what's happening now is just the natural give and take of the planet, as Erik the Red and my town's early settlers understood it. Or whether it's something so unprecedented that we need to divert vast resources to a transnational elite bureaucracy so that they can do their best to cripple the global economy and deny much of the developing world access to the healthier and longer lives that capitalism brings. To the eco-chondriacs that's a no-brainer. As Mark Fenn of the Worldwide Fund for Nature says in the new documentary ''Mine Your Own Business'':

''In Madagascar, the indicators of quality of life are not housing. They're not nutrition, specifically. They're not health in a lot of cases. It's not education. A lot of children in Fort Dauphin do not go to school because the parents don't consider that to be important. . . . People have no jobs, but if I could put you with a family and you could count how many times in a day that that family smiles. Then I put you with a family well off, in New York or London, and you count how many times people smile. . . . You tell me who is rich and who is poor."

Well, if smiles are the measure of quality of life, I'm Bill Gates; I'm laughing my head off. Male life expectancy in Madagascar is 52.5 years. But Mark Fenn is right: Those l'il malnourished villagers sure look awful cute dancing up and down when the big environmentalist activist flies in to shoot the fund-raising video.

If "global warming" is real and if man is responsible, why then do so many "experts" need to rely on obviously fraudulent data? The famous "hockey stick" graph showed the planet's climate history as basically one long bungalow with the Empire State Building tacked on the end. Completely false. In evaluating industrial impact, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change used GDP estimates based on exchange rates rather than purchasing power: As a result, they assume by the year 2100 that not only South Africans but also North Koreans will have a higher per capita income than Americans. That's why the climate-change computer models look scary. That's how "solid" the science is: It's predicated on the North Korean economy overtaking the United States.

All this talk of global warming science makes me wonder, though, why Fenn is building his dream home on the coast. He's an environmentalist. He works for World Wildlife Fund, which calls climate change "among the most pervasive threats" to the environment. I'd bet money Fenn's seen An Inconvenient Truth, or at least got the memo about global warming and how it is going to raise sea levels and swamp the coasts - and yet he's building his dream home on the coast of Madagascar. Doesn't he believe it?