Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #91712 in Books
• Published on: 2002-10-10
• Format: Illustrated
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

Review
Praise for "Global Warming and Other Eco-Myths
""Global Warming and Other Eco-Myths challenges the tired orthodoxies of ideological environmentalism. It's refreshing to read that there is no environmental 'cancer epidemic, ' that climatologist John Christy says there is no imminent global warming catastrophe, and that Nobel Peace Prize winner Norman Borlaug predicts that we will be able to feed 10 billion people using less land. If market forces are unleashed, even drinking water can last forever. I just wish the environmentalists would read Bailey's book." -- John Stossel, ABC News "20/20
"Facts are stubborn things, and Ronald Bailey has once again assembled the best environmental fact-checkers in the business to explode the common misconceptions and distortions about the real state of our planet." -- Steven Hayward, resident scholar, American Enterprise Institute, and author of the "Index of Leading Environmental Indicators
"A stunning riposte to the eco-alarmists. Beyond debunking environmentalist scare mongering, "Global Warming and Other Eco-Myths is the clearest explanation in print of the promise that eco-friendly technology offers to the human race. A must read for anyone who wants to know how we can build a healthy world environment for our children and grandchildren." -- Denis Dutton, editor of "Arts & Letters Daily on the Web and professor, University of Canterbury, New Zealand

Synopsis
The modern environmentalist movement began with the publication of three seminal works: Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb, and the Club of Rome's The Limits to Growth. These books' dismal visions of a poisoned, overpopulated, polluted, resource-depleted world spiralling downward toward environmental collapse are today's conventional wisdom. According to a number of respected scientists, however, leaders of the environmental movement are guilty of twisting - and sometimes manufacturing - facts in an effort to frighten people into joining their cause. In this eye-opening book, some of the most respected researchers in the US explode the myths behind much of the doom and gloom of today's environmental movement. Readers will discover how the hysteria about global warming, overpopulation, mass extinctions, coming food shortages, biotechnology, energy shortages and more are grounded not in reason but in false science and a fear of progress. Ultimately, this book will show that uniting much of the environmental movement is an agenda that is not so much antipollution as antihuman.

Customer Reviews

Useful account of environmentalism
The issue of global warming is scaremongering, a massive red herring to make workers take their eyes off the tasks facing us -stopping deindustrialisation, unemployment, the destruction of our services, the European Union's destruction of our nation Britain. Scare stories about global warming, melting ice caps and glaciers, intensifying storms and droughts, a 'Day After Tomorrow'-style ice age, overpopulation, mass extinctions, imminent famines, nuclear proliferation and energy shortages are grounded not in reason but in false science and a fear of progress. They are kin to medieval fears of apocalypse. We need to denounce the doom-mongers who portray us as helpless victims, at the mercy of events beyond our control as a nation.
The facts are that Antarctica has been cooling and its glaciers thickening for the past 30 years. Global fertility rates are falling dramatically, and with advanced technology, farmers are producing more food using fewer resources than ever before. Environmental pollution accounts for at most 2% of all cancer cases versus 30% caused by tobacco use. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, the world's forests covered 40.24 million square kilometres in 1950, and 43.04 million in 1994. 80% of the world's original rainforest is still intact. Sea levels in the region of the Pacific around the island nation of Tuvalu have been falling.
Some see all problems as supranational, requiring supranational solutions, worldwide action through intrusive international agreements like Kyoto, with cartoon cries to 'save the world' through pre-emptive actions. They revive the anarchist slogan 'No states, no borders', mirroring the capitalist agenda of 'globalisation'.
Amicus and the NUM recently warned that a growing crisis in our electricity industry will lead to blackouts and further electricity price rises. They warned against relying on oil and gas from unstable regions like southern Russia, the Middle East and North and West Africa. Powergen confirmed how right the unions are when it recently told us, "From 29 November 2004 your electricity prices will rise by around 44p a week. Why the price increase? There are many reasons, for example: producing energy is now more expensive, so the wholesale price of energy has risen for all suppliers. The UK's gas supply is also declining so we must now spend more importing gas from around the world."
The unions warned that EU directives would add to our energy problems, particularly the carbon emissions trading directive which would curtail the lifetime of existing power stations. The unions believe it is vital that the nation invests in clean coal fired power stations and in power engineering and manufacturing industries to develop expertise in designing and building new power stations.

In 2003 nuclear power stations provided 23% of Britain's electricity. By 2010, a third of these will have reached the end of their operating lives and will be closed, and nuclear power will account for just 16% of our electricity supply. Only two new stations are under construction. The closures will reduce Britain's ability to generate our own dependable energy supply. We need to plan and build more new nuclear power stations. France's nuclear plants produce three quarters of the country's power, one of the cheapest energy supplies in Europe.

We need to reduce energy waste, estimated to cost 5 billion pounds a year, and rationally use our resources. We need to develop new technologies to economise on energy use. The government has failed to invest in Combined Heat and Power. We need more R&D into carbon free and carbon sequestration technologies. Biomass crops could be grown especially for use as environmentally-friendly fuel. This would boost farm diversity and create rural jobs. It could be competitive against conventional hydrocarbon-based energy generation, and could meet 10% of our energy needs.

Friends of the Earth say, "Renewable energy has the potential to provide all our needs." Not so - hydroelectricity, wind and tidal sources provide just 3% of our present energy, and wind and solar energy are intermittent: their annual power output is only 25% of the potential output if operating always at full power; by contrast, nuclear power's output is 90%. Blackouts three quarters of the time, anyone?

Human innovation is the ultimate resource. Workers are wonderfully creative. The Greens, with their contempt for productive forces, line up with the anti-industry parson Malthus against the pro-industry Marx. The working class cannot conduct its present policy on the basis of scares about a possible future ice age in 50,000 years.