Our View - Friday

PELOSI-GREENGRICH THE END IS NEAR
Extreme green activism starves kids

Food riots in Haiti, Egypt, Cameroon, the Ivory Coast, Senegal and Ethiopia. Middle Class Americans rationing their household food. Consumers rushing to Sam's Club and Costco to stock up on flour and rice, rationed by the stores. Supermarket prices are soaring at alarming rates.

We have the makings of a crisis, it's immediate, and it's more than theory. The United Nation's top humanitarian official warns that continuing food shortages and escalating prices may result in sustained worldwide political unrest and social instability.

Never in the lifetimes of most living Americans has the mere availability of food been so in doubt. And never in the history of America has "going green" been so en vogue. There's a connection here.

A record spike in fuel prices serves as a major contributor to record-high food prices. The oil supply is limited, and mostly controlled by a handful of entities, including OPEC. The United States has neglected to locate and extract much of its own oil because wealthy environmental "green" activists have worked tirelessly at leading Americans to believe that it's a fundamental virtue to put "Earth first."

If we're putting the interest of earth above the interests of humanity, then it's hard to justify drilling for oil in pristine areas of Alaska, or anywhere else for that matter. Perhaps Earth doesn't want to be stuck with a drill. As a result, foreigners who wish us dead mostly control our oil supply. Less oil = higher oil prices = higher cost to get food to market = higher food prices.

But it doesn't stop there. Because the greens don't like oil at all, much less the extraction of oil from beneath American soil, they've promoted the agenda of so-called biofuels. On the surface, the idea sounds wonderful. Farmers will grow corn, which will be turned into fuel. Problem is, the fuel doesn't work so well. It's inefficient, costing more to produce than it's worth. The unworkable industry sustains itself on a government welfare program that rewards farmers and biofuels producers with government checks. Nobody can make the numbers work, to show that corn will ever work as a legitimate source of engine fuel.

The rush to grow corn, which gets fed to cars, has created a shortage of other crops and the shortage has escalated food prices. It's been reported that a third of wheat farmers have switched to growing corn to cash in on the subsidies. It's yet another direct cost of the green movement's Earth-first agenda.

"When millions of people are going hungry, it's a crime against humanity that food should be diverted to biofuels," an Indian government official told the Wall Street Journal recently. Turkey's finance minister told the Journal that a government subsidy to divert human food to automobiles during a food crisis is nothing less than "appalling."

Appalling indeed. If Sally Struthers still wants to save starving children, she'll produce infomercials that show food going into gas tanks, rather than mouths.

The more-popular-than-ever green activists are largely responsible for every hardship suddenly challenging humanity. They've made it difficult to fill up a car; they've driven up the costs of food; and they're determined to make it hard for people to heat their businesses and homes, and for businesses to power buildings and factories.

The Sierra Club wants to shut down coal-fired electric plants, which will eliminate a major source of energy. At the same time, the Natural Resources Defense Council rails against nuclear power plants, which we'll need in order to replace coal.

Though government regulation designed to put the Earth first is taking a heavy toll on humanity, it's not only the environmental movement that's to blame. Strangely, some misguided conservatives have found themselves in bed with leftist environmental organizations such as Californians for Population Stabilization and Floridians for a Sustainable Population. These and other socalled environmental green organizations have taken to railing against immigrant laborers in order to save the United States from the environmental effects of "overpopulation."

Like other anti-immigration activists, they claim a concern based in the legal status of immigrants, yet they fight any effort to adjust antiquated quotas to meet modern needs and allow for adequate legal immigration. They've succeeded in turning back immigrant farm workers who've come to the United States for decades to harvest crops. The result: crops rotting in fields, as food prices soar.

A new TV ad features conservative former Speaker of the House New Gingrich teamed up with far-left-wing Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. The two are chummed up talking about the need for America to reverse "climate change." It's the new term for "global warming," a change necessitated by recent evidence that suggests the globe is cooling. The theory is that Americans are destroying the planet and must go green in order to reverse the trend.

Sound-minded skeptics can hope the Pelosi-Gingrich hug-fest signals the pinnacle of the green movement. Perhaps it has come so mainstream, and caused so much harm to humans who'd like to eat and stay warm, that it's about to come crashing down. Pelosi and Gingrich, side-by-side loving Mother Earth? Surely the end is near.

With much of the world rioting for food, and middle class Americans racing to warehouses for rice, perhaps it's time to reconsider the ill-conceived religious mantra that says we should always put "Earth first." Perhaps we should consider a return to those days when humans put humanity first, a time when starving children gleaned more concern than ill-conceived global temperature theories.