Steve Milloy provides the only antidote strong enough to stop a plague of ignorance: a liberal dose of education
- A Nuclear Street Book Review by Randy Brich -
Sometimes a guy has to step back, take a long deep breath and reassess everything he thought he knew as fact. Some people conduct this exercise without even thinking, critically examining all that floats their way with the dispassionate eyes of an objective observer. Christopher Columbus did it. Galileo Galilei did it. Charles Darwin did it. Albert Einstein did it. And the world has not been the same since.
Now, Steve Milloy does it. Milloy chooses to question the core, the root beliefs, the very essence of the modern environmental movement that has swept across America and the western world like a plague. And, like any plague, it will have to run its course unless the proper antidote is developed and those at risk are inoculated. In GREEN HELL: HOW ENVIRONMENTALISTS PLAN TO CONTROL YOUR LIFE AND WHAT YOU CAN DO TO STOP THEM, Steve Milloy provides the only antidote strong enough to stop a plague of ignorance: a liberal dose of education. GREEN HELL describes example after example of the green’s agenda to control your life, your liberty, your economy and details several ways you can become personally involved to try to stop the spread of the plague.
A good example is his little exercise with Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream’s crusade against dioxins. After visiting a Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream shop and noticing promotional literature proclaiming, “The only safe level of dioxin exposure is no exposure at all,” Milloy and Michael Gough purchased a pint of Ben and Jerry’s “World’s Best Vanilla” ®, had it tested for dioxin, found it was 200 times the virtual safe dose prescribed by the EPA for adults and over 700 times the VSD for children, wrote a paper and presented the results at the Dioxin 2000 scientific conference in Monterey, California. Then the fun started as Milloy recounts,
“We then posed the following questions: ‘If dioxin is as dangerous as Ben and Jerry’s, Greenpeace—Ben and Jerry’s science advisor—and the EPA claim, then how can Ben & Jerry’s be permitted to sell its ice cream? Doesn’t the company care about ‘the children?’?” Our dioxin study was a huge hit. It throttled Ben & Jerry’s ill-conceived anti-dioxin campaign—an embarrassment the company is still trying to explain away on its website.”
Many readers will recognize Steve Milloy as the editor of Junkscience.com whose slogan is “All the junk that’s fit to debunk” and Milloy continues his campaign against environmentalism - scientifically, succinctly, and sarcastically arguing that progress, development and a healthier environment go hand in hand. He persuasively shows that curtailing the use of fossil fuels to combat global warming is futile. Milloy argues that the cooling experienced on the planet for the last 10 years while carbon dioxide levels continue to rise is enough proof for him that global warming isn’t happening, at least not at the levels purported by “Planetary Surgeon General” Al Gore. Milloy then proceeds to strip away the veneer covering Al Gore, exposing him as a hypocrite since his monthly electrical usage at his mansion exceeds the average American household use for an entire year. He does the same for Virgin Airways owner Branson, Google’s Corporate Officers, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who say one thing but act very differently.
Milloy’s irreverent style and unabashedly “in your face” approach distinguish him as a no BS, bottom line kind of guy. Milloy painstakingly outlines the environmentalists’ green agenda using their own words. He then compares their words with their actions, identifies disconnects and lets the chips fall where they may. From mandated rationing of population growth, to mandatory usage of specific types of energy generation, to limiting between basin exchanges of fresh water, to vegetarianism, to the real dangers of subcompact eco-cars, to an overbearing new big green brother, to a new social order, to devolving businesses, to watching America recede in the rearview mirror, to the first real green president, Milloy’s heavily referenced and footnoted tome brazenly challenges the environmentalists’ status quo and finds it wanting. Where there’s deception, he asks for honesty. Where there’s misinformation, he provides the facts. Where there are unknowns, he asks the questions.
Pondering the imponderable, questioning the unquestionable and seeking the truth as science best understands it at this current space in time, Milloy does a remarkable job keeping the reader interested, informed, educated and entertained. Authors like Milloy provide a service for any person concerned enough to read the material and find out on their own the facts surrounding a host of environmental topics. And Milloy saves his best for last, slaying the dragon of Global Warming using the sword of truth by stating,
“While we’re all in favor of protecting the environment and controlling pollution, the greens portray themselves as inhabiting a higher moral plane. Their underlying message is that if you don’t sign on to what they want, it means you don’t love the planet, or worse, you’re out to destroy it. And they have fingered their primary villain, or at least the villain of the moment: carbon dioxide—a colorless and odorless gas that exists naturally in the atmosphere at trace levels. Humans exhale it. Plants need it to grow. Both industrial and personal “manmade” emissions of carbon dioxide combined are vanishingly small when compared to natural CO^2 emissions. There’s no scientific data indicating that controlling human emissions of carbon dioxide will change, much less “improve,” global climate in any predictable or even detectable way.”
“Yet, according to the greens, your responsibility for carbon dioxide necessitates you sacrificing your standard of living. And not only you—think of all the people around the world denied the ability to use their own natural resources to better their lives, denied the ability to climb out of crushing poverty through economic development and free trade, and denied even the ability to use pesticides like DDT to protect themselves and their children against deadly Malaria-bearing mosquitoes. Now contrast their situation to how the green elites live—Al Gore and his prodigious personal consumption of electricity; Richard Branson and his private island getaways and space travel for VIPs only; the Google guys and their personal sky pig; and the World Wildlife Fund and its private jet expedition around the world, to name just a few examples.”
“Aside from providing perks and exemptions to be enjoyed by these folks and other special interests, green is a political movement that seeks to put a happy face on an otherwise oppressive and regressive social and political agenda. Green is not “green” as some ecoprofiteers would have you believe. As many free-market thinkers have warned us, green is the new red—both financially and politically.”
To his credit Milloy has written, at least to the best of my ability, an error-free treatise that will go down in history as a scathing expose’ of the self-proclaimed environmentalists who, in reality, are little more than anti-nuclear activists and true believers in every sense of the phrase first coined by Eric Hoffer way back in 1951.
Steve Milloy
GREEN HELL: HOW ENVIRONMENTALISTS PLAN TO CONTROL YOUR LIFE AND WHAT YOU CAN DO TO STOP THEM, 294 pp. Regnery Publishing, Inc., Hardcover, 2009
978-1-59698-585-8
About Randy Brich
Randy graduated from South Dakota State University in 1978 with a M.S. in Biology. After developing the State of South Dakota’s environmental radiological monitoring program, he became a Health Physicist with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, eventually transferring to the Department of Energy where he specialized in environmental monitoring, worker protection, waste cleanup and systems biology. Later in his career he published a multi-sport adventure guide book and became a regular contributor to The Entertainer Newspaper’s Great Outdoor section.
Since then he has retired from the federal government and, after taking time out to build an energy efficient house near the Missouri River, has formed Diamond B Communications LLC. Diamond B Communications LLC uses a multimedia approach to explain complex energy resource issues to technical and non-technical audiences. He also guides for Dakota Bike Tours, the Relaxed Adventure Company, offering tours of the Badlands National Park, the Black Hills and Devils Tower National Monument.