Brendan Bordelon
The Daily Caller
4/22/2014
Fox News host Greg Gutfeld commemorated Earth Day on his show “The Five” with an appropriate dose of mockery, declaring that after 44 years, the true takeaway from the holiday is “how anti-poor the green movement is.”
Gutfeld noted that although none of 1970′s environmental doomsday prophecies have come to pass, the debate over proper environmental protection policies rages unabated.
“The only problem with this is that the hysteria is actually worse than the calamity,” he claimed, “because we are drawing danger to something that’s less dangerous than other things.”
“For example, we are condemning coal when billions of people around the world would die for coal,” he continued. “They would love to have a carbon footprint. Instead they are burning dung and they’re burning twigs inside their houses, killing 4 million people.”
“The big story here is really how anti-poor the green movement is,” he asserted. “There are 3 billion people who need heat. They need coal. And instead we’re lecturing them on fossil fuels and the evil of coal, and that’s just ridiculous.”
Watch the video at The Daily Caller.
Related: Mapping Poverty in America. Data from the Census Bureau show where the poor live
50 Years Into the War on Poverty, Hardship Hits Back
…McDowell County, the poorest in West Virginia, has been emblematic of entrenched American poverty for more than a half-century. John F. Kennedy campaigned here in 1960 and was so appalled that he promised to send help if elected president. His first executive order created the modern food stamp program, whose first recipients were McDowell County residents. When President Lyndon B. Johnson declared “unconditional war on poverty” in 1964, it was the squalor of Appalachia he had in mind. The federal programs that followed — Medicare, Medicaid, free school lunches and others — lifted tens of thousands above a subsistence standard of living.
But a half-century later, with the poverty rate again on the rise, hardship seems merely to have taken on a new face in McDowell County. The economy is declining along with the coal industry, towns are hollowed out as people flee, and communities are scarred by family dissolution, prescription drug abuse and a high rate of imprisonment…
Update: In this clip from “FrackNation,” we discuss how cheap, abundant, reliable energy makes life outstanding. #EnergyMatters. And irrational environmentalist policies have serious consequences.
So instead of celebrating “Earth Day” on April 22, let’s celebrate “Energy Day.” Let’s celebrate human achievement and the cleanest, safest, most prosperous human environment in history.
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Update: Sierra Club top officials promote fuel efficiency, but drive gas-guzzling Jaguars
…The average fuel economy for the for 30 of the Club’s measurable vehicles was only 27.4 mpg, far below the 54.5 mpg the Club publicly supports. Only two members of the Club’s Board of Directors own cars meeting the 54.5 mpg threshold that environmental activists push for. The Alliance used insurance and vehicle registration data to find out exactly what top environmental activists were driving.
Two of the Club’s directors buck environmental protection for riding in style, by owning luxury Jaguars which have an average fuel economy of 18 mpg — much lower than the U.S. average fuel economy of 24.8 mpg in 2013…
