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Ex-Sierra Club Member: Global Warming Regulations Kill Phil Brennan In an exclusive interview with NewsMax, Paul Driessen, a senior fellow with the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, reveals the lethal side of the regulations the global warming swindlers would impose on those least able to cope with them.
The Committee is nonprofit public policy institutes that focus on energy, the environment, economic development, and international affairs. Driessen has been a tireless critic of global warming stringent regulations. Over the past 25 years, He has worked for the United States Senate, the Department of the Interior, and an energy trade association and has spoken and written frequently on energy and environmental policy, global climate change, corporate social responsibility, and other topics. A former member of the Sierra Club and Zero Population Growth, he abandoned their cause when he recognized that the environmental movement had become intolerant in its views, inflexible in its demands, unwilling to recognize our tremendous strides in protecting the environment, and insensitive to the needs of billions of people who lack the food, electricity, safe water, health care, and other basic necessities that we take for granted. In 2003, Driessen published "Eco Imperialism, Green Power, Black Death." He recently appeared in the blockbuster British documentary "The Great Global Warming Swindle." He conveys that global warming regulations would have a startling impact on Third World nations:
NewsMax: You have warned that millions of Africans will die if the punitive rules designed to stop alleged global warming are imposed on the African people. Can you explain?
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Driessen: There are a lot of parallels between this global warming thing and the DDT scare. Not only did they promote a lot of junk science with Rachel Carson's book ["Silent Spring"] and the development of environmental defense and this massive global propaganda campaign that they waged, but they paid no attention to the downside of what they were promoting. In the case of DDT it was taking away a powerful anti-malaria chemical . . . there's nothing more powerful, more long-lasting, or safe, especially the way it's used today: spraying the walls of houses. You can prevent 50 to 75 percent of malaria just by spraying the walls of these homes and keeping 90 percent of the mosquitoes out — they ignored all of that. There was an opportunity to cut in half the number of malaria cases and deaths [with DDT] a million people a year in over a 30 year period could have been saved — that's 25 to 30 million lives that they sacrificed on the altar of environmental ideology and purity. Now in the case of climate control, you've got a major effort to deny people access to affordable reliable abundant electricity. They don't want fossil-fuel-generating plants. Because of global warming they attack hydroelectric plants because [plants] damn up rivers. They attack nuclear power because they say it's risky. So essentially they're saying all you people of the Third World can't have electricity and that's unconscionable when, there again, you have a couple of million people dying every year because they don't have electricity.
NewsMax: Where we stand now with the use of DDT in Africa? Driessen: It's coming back slowly. The World Health Organization under the new director of the malaria program has reintroduced DDT and approved it once again. USAID now approves it and supports programs financially that are utilizing it and more countries in Africa are starting to use it. One spraying once or twice a year of a small amount of DDT on the walls [prevents] 90 percent of the mosquitoes from coming into the house.
NewsMax: Was there ever any real evidence that DDT was harmful? Driessen: No, there wasn't. In fact, EPA Director William Ruckelshaus convened a scientific board of inquiry and they spent six months gathering some eight to 10,000 pages worth of information and held hearings, and Ruckelshaus never went to one minute of the hearings, never read one page of the findings which completely exonerated DDT, and he said it's a political decision and I'm going to ban it. It came out later that he was actually working for Environmental Defense and some of these other organizations as a fund-raiser and adviser. So he had a major conflict of interest. He never apologized for what he did; never atoned in any way, or even said he was sorry for all the deaths he caused. They just vilified anyone who tried to stand up in defense of DDT — an inquisition threatening to burn them at the stake and they just beat them into silence. So that in the end you end up with the same situation you have now with global warming — incredibly nasty attacks on companies, on users of energy — a repeat of the same tactics, and they're gunning for the same power and control. It's not just over a chemical or the chemical industry or one particular insecticide[as in the case of DDT] but it is over the foundation of civilized society — energy, abundant reliable and affordable energy, and you don't get there with wind power or solar power or any of these other clean, green, fanciful, imaginary energy technologies that they approve. They approve them only until there's an actual proposal such as the Cape Cod wind farm. As soon as you've got an actual proposal for something like that, they come out of the woodwork opposing that too. A big part of it is they just don't like people on the planet.
NewsMax: Has this whole environmental movement become a quasi-religion? Driessen: It's a return to paganism, Gaiaism [earth worship] and that sort of thing. Reverend Al Gore is one of the high priests. They don't seem to mind any lie or half truth. If this is a critical problem it deserves more than a hypocritical solution, especially a hypocritical solution that's all pain and no gain. No control over the climate which is uncontrollable anyway. The fact is, these environmentalists [and] all their Hollywood friends don't even want to talk about what I think are the three or four forces that really drive climate. One of course is the sun, which is anything but stable. It's constantly fluctuating how much energy it puts out. And secondly you've got the cosmic rays coming off the sun and those effect cloud formation. You have changes of the Earth's orbit around the sun which goes from a circular to a really spread out ellipse. You have the very turbulent and dynamic fluid in the atmosphere in the oceans and that in itself s constantly is changing and with all four of those working together to some extent and I'm sure human emissions have at least a local effect on some aspects of the climate. Look throughout history: . . . look at all the different climate changes even in the 20th century, the warming that occurred between 1905 in 1940, the cooling that occurred between 1940 and 1975. You had warming when they weren't that many carbon emissions; you had cooling when you did have carbon emissions during World War II and beyond; and then all of a sudden when you really start having them and you get some warming, then in 1998 it stopped. For all appreciable purposes, we have not had any warming or cooling of the planet in the last eight years.
NewsMax: What is the motive behind all this? Is it Marxism? Driessen: They want control. What you're looking at is watermelon environmentalism — green on the outside and red on the inside. But whether you call it Marxism or Earth worship, it is basically environmentalist and government bureaucrats and politicians that are basically themselves environmentalists putting themselves in charge of the whole economic machinery of the world. They get to decide who has how much energy. They typically exempt those such as Al Gore and Hollywood and they play these games with carbon offset credits, but they control what's going on for everybody else. And when you start looking at what's being proposed or already implemented over in England, you start seeing what is going to happen here. Restrictions on what kind of car you can drive or charging you $50 a day to drive an SUV in London, or a World War II rationing again. The real killer is in the Third World. The ban on DDT was inconvenient for some farmers for a while here in the United States until we got some substitute chemicals, but when you're talking about health care [in the Third World] it was a killer; a lethal killer, an eco-manslaughter policy. We will pay much higher prices. There will be some elderly people who will die because they can't afford air-conditioning or heating in their homes here in the United States and Canada or Europe. But the real death toll, the real shutdown in the economy, the basic locking in of rampant poverty is going to occur in the Third World particularly in Africa. Ninety-five percent of the people in sub-Saharan Africa do not have electricity. The price we're going to have to pay will change life as we know it. It will end as we know it. And even if there were such a thing as a global warming crisis, it won't work because ultimately we don't control the environment and the climate.
Editor's note:
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