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:”
[flashvideo file=http://pjmedia.com/media/video/DDB_Brazil_for_WWF_9-09.flv width=329 height=266 image=http://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll/files/2009/09/Pulled_DDB_Brazil_for_WWF-9-09-poster2.jpg /]
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:
[youtube K9Un3Xb9JOg]
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.
On the other hand, the WWF’s 2030 date dovetails remarkably well with another type of apocalypse that may be coming due soon. Based on this infamous moment during a Congressional budget debate back on February 17th, our economy itself only has less than 20 years to live, thanks to a different kind of out-of-control unsustainable growth:
TIM GEITHNER: You could have taken [the chart] out [to the year] 3000 or to 4000. [Laughs]
PAUL RYAN: Yeah, right. We cut it off at the end of the century because the economy, according to the CBO, shuts down in 2027 on this path.
How do we make ends meet during the three year gap between 2027 and the WWF’s 2030 eco-apocalypse?
Of course, if it’s a financial doomsday we want to envision, we needn’t wait at all. Unlike the WWF’s nightmarish fantasies, we can simply visit Greece, Detroit, Bell, California (or heck, just simply California), and numerous other deep Blue regions to see this Keynesian-built Apocalypse Now.
Perhaps Julia could accompany us on our next visit.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member