WWF: The Doomsday PR Machine
The World Wildlife Federation, who along with a little help from Fairfax Media, a major media conglomerate in Australia and New Zealand, has made Earth Hour an annual eco-pagan “holiday” amongst the far left (including businesses either dumb enough to play along, or perhaps in the hopes of appeasement). But that isn’t their only effort at playing Chicken Little. This year, they managed to convince the New York Daily News (a center-left paper that should know better) to run an article titled “Two Earths would be needed to sustain human activity by 2030, report finds,” that’s really a glorified press release for the WWF:
Planet Earth in a tight spot.
Mankind is draining the earth’s resources so quickly the globe would be bled dry before the end of the century at this rate, a new report shows.
Humans are living outside their means, depleting natural resources like forests, air and water 50% faster than the planet can renew, according to the 2012 World Wildlife Fund’s “Living Planet Report” released this month.
If the trends aren’t reversed, by 2030 we’d need more than two Planet Earths to sustain human activity, according to the study.
“If we just do business as usual…we’re just going to continue moving in this direction. At some point, the earth’s going to just give out. We don’t know when. But that’s a pretty scary thing to think about,” said Colby Loucks, director of conservation science at WWF. “The question is, we don’t know what the tipping point is.”
But you sure know how to shout doomsday on a regular basis. In 2009, the WWF commissioned this ad, in both still and video versions, which they pulled at the last minute, perhaps risking the backlash from the general public over a form of agitprop that James Taranto once dubbed, “Green Supremacism:”
Having exploited 9/11 to play the Moral Equivalent of War cliche, a couple of months later, the WWF decided to use children as human shields for their next campaign:
embedded by Embedded VideoYouTube Direkt
That 2030 date randomly chosen by the WWF’s latest “report” is interesting — it’s at least far enough out that most people will have forgotten it by the time it arrives, unlike all of the “we only have five years/ten years/four years to save the earth” cri de coeurs, many of which date from the Bush administration era, and are coming due, and making the enviro-socialists who issued them look particularly silly. But it’s close enough to scare those who wish to be scared by the latest Malthusian doomsday scenario.
It’s like scaring the hell out of people is fine if it’s done over many years. If it’s done too quickly, then it becomes fraud.
Two earths, well that could be arranged, although I hate to think what they’d say about terraforming Venus or Mars. Of course their underlying assumption is that there will be no further technological progress and no further natural reductions in population (which is even now growing primarily in the under-developed countries – who can last afford the Green nonsense).
I would really like somebody to conduct a survey of these environmentalists to see what their mental concept of an ideal world is like. How many humans would be left, and what conditions would they live under (setting aside, for the sake of argument, the reality of those assumptions and how we’d go about getting there).
Two worlds, each to be populated with half liberals and half conservatives.
Would it not be preferable to learn how to manage this one?
So I don’t need to fund my retirement beyond the next 18 years?
The flaw in their “reasoning”, of course, is that unlike government budgeting, resource usage and population expansion do not permit “deficit consumption”. In simple terms; if you have only one apple, you cannot eat two.
Furthermore, their panicked cry that the expanding population will overwhelm our precious (and holy) ecosphere is called into question by the (excuse my yelling) FALLING BIRTH RATES WORLDWIDE. Even the Third World is now below the 2.1 children/couple replacement level, with most of the Second World in the 1.8 range, and Europe at only 1.3.
If they had argued that “the population implosion isn’t happening fast enough”, I might have believed they had at least tried to do their homework. As it is, this is just another screed intended to panic us into giving our “ecological gurus” and their political cronies “emergency powers” to deal with a crisis they are trying to create.
As Otto von Bismarck said, once you create a crisis to frighten the people into giving you emergency powers, to keep them all you have to do is create new crises as and when needed.
This is just one more example of Bismarckism from the deep-eco crowd. Enough already.
clear ether
eon
The World Wildlife Federation is a Communist front organization. I can smell it from here.
Probably, since they sued a patriotic company like WWE into changing its name.
Free tickets to wrestling events if you’re in the military, btw. Thanks, Mr. McMahon!
Truly chafes my BVD’s to have “Earth First” types like the commies in disguise over at the WWF to somehow link the actions of mooselimb terrorists and a natural disaster of a tsunami AND to say the later is more morally relevant. I suppose if we all used bicycles, ate tofu and lit our hovels with CFL’s, there’d be no undersea earthquakes?. To use children as propaganda pieces for your PR is even more despicable.
Only two earths? They’re wrong. We will need at least three. One for each of John Edwards and Al Gore, and one for the rest of us.
These predictions are rather like that Doomsday Clock, aren’t they? It’s always a few minutes to midnight, but midnight never arrives.
Dooms is always coming but never comes!