Earth Day and Four Decades of Fear … A vast array of blatherings have accumulated over the years, warning the end is nigh. Earth Day means never having to say "Don't worry." For the environmental Left, the Passover seders may be past, but the plagues are eternal: floods, fires, cyclones, drought, extinctions, pestilence, famines, acid rain, ozone holes, cancer-causing power lines, global cooling, global warming, alar, plastics, mercury, depletions, deforestation, falling sperm counts, population bombs, plagues, water wars, nuclear winter, sex-changing fish, cancer-causing cell phones, pandemics, The Lifetime Channel. (OK, the last one is my personal nightmare.) You get the idea: doom, gloom, and apocalypse ad infinitum. – American Enterprise Institute

Dominant Social Theme: Watch out! Beware! Take Care! Only the UN can save you …

Free-Market Analysis: Since we just finished being a bit mean to the AEI in another article in this issue, perhaps it's only fair to write one that gives them a bit of a pat on the back.

This article, written to commemorate the ubiquitous and obnoxious Earth Day, is right on target when it comes to the kinds of tactics being used by those who want to convince us that the sky is falling and that only globalist institutions can save us.

This sort of approach uses what we call Dominant Social Themes, fear-based promotions that seek to convince Western middle classes to give up power and wealth to globalist institutions.

Interestingly, the article doesn't drive home this point, however. And, no, we didn't expect it to. The AEI has certain boundaries and it won't cross them and neither will its writers, columnists or editors.

Thus, this article has been positioned within the context of the weary left/right paradigm that haunts Western conversations generally and the US freedom narrative in particular.

The Republicans are for smaller government except when it comes to national security and defense spending. Fighting five or six undeclared wars is apparently not especially concerning to them.

The Democrats, in the meantime, are slightly less enthusiastic about the military-industrial complex but far more gratified about using Fedgov in particular as a way of influencing human behavior and creating social "fairness" via redistributionist schemes.

Basically, the US system in particular is verging on a paradigm that pits soft fascism against hard socialism. This is not exactly what the founders wanted but it is what's happened nonetheless.

The globalists basically control both parties, from what we can tell, and the fear-based memes being inflicted always end up enhancing government power. Again, you won't read that in this article, posted by AEI, but at least the mechanism is on display. That's progress. Here's more:

But amid the looming catastrophe, a tiny ray of hope survives: it is Earth Day, when all right-thinking members of the reality-based community proclaim their love of the Planet and their worship of Gaia. When many announce, as a matter of religious principle, their eagerness to allow others to suffer economically and physically so as to pursue the restoration of the Earth to its natural state of Eden, as it existed before mankind consumed the forbidden fruit of the tree of technological knowledge.

Which brings us to the Book of Modern Environmentalism, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, a deeply disingenuous propaganda exercise that nonetheless transformed pesticides — DDT in particular — and economic growth into political poison. How many mere humans, most of whom existed in grinding third-world poverty, have died because of it? The typical estimate is one of Stalin's statistics: at least 50 million.

Well, omelets require broken eggs. As that great philosopher Dogbert has noted: "You can't save the Earth unless you're willing to make other people sacrifice." Truer words were never spoken, in sharp contrast to the vast array of blatherings that have accumulated over the years in support of an expansion of government in the energy and environment context.

These predictions and lamentations make for amusing reading, in no small part because so many still believe such nonsense — and because a continued production of this silliness, for many decades to come, is as certain as the sunrise. The environmental Left is nothing if not inventive. And so, in honor of Lenin's birthday, oops, Earth Day, herewith a small sampling of this wisdom for the ages, in no particular order …

This last paragraph provides us with the kind of verbiage we find frustrating. Having made such a great start in defining these memes, the article breaks down when attributing them.

The environmental left has nothing much to do with the dissemination of these memes any more than the environmental left has to do with the creation of the central banking economy or the military-industrial complex.

These are joint operations of an elite that is interested in one thing: Expanding government power until it spreads across the globe in a single, seamless blanket. The left and right are merely enlisted to present these viewpoints so as to further the larger goal.

To characterize this mechanism as "right" – or more commonly as "left" – does little or nothing to clarify what is really going on.

Oh, well … half a loaf is better than none.