Ecoterrorism, Ecotyranny

[Gus Van Horn blog]

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Even in conservative Texas -- the "even" makes sense only if you remain under the delusion that the conservative movement is fundamentally opposed to environmentalism -- environmentalism has made significant progress in its drive towards ending industrial civilization.

First off, we have this story, from the Houston Chronicle, about a possible ecoterrorist in Lubbock.

A 62-year-old man is suspected of stringing wires at neck level across a popular bike path, as well as scattering nails, broken glass and rocks across the trail in a series of traps set because he wanted to protect the environment, police said.

"This could kill someone," said Dewayne Wallace, an avid cyclist who said his friend was cut across the neck by one of the wires and was thrown from his bike.

A grand jury was scheduled to review the case next week, to see if the man will face two third-degree felony charges of attempted aggravated assault with a weapon. Each count carries a maximum of 10 years in prison.

Detective Rene Martinez said he questioned the man about the traps set over at least a yearlong period, and the man told him he just wanted to protect wildlife.

"He just loves nature," Martinez said. [bold added]

You will note that I had to identify these attacks as "terrorism" since neither the paper nor Detective Rene "He just loves nature." Martinez would or could do this.

It is one thing for the government to be flat-footed in its response to an ecoterrorist, but quite another for it to be complicit in implementing this anti-man ideology. Unfortunately, complicity is closer to home for me, as indicated by this story about the City of Houston's new proposal to sue "emitters" (a Newspeak synonym for "polluters": both mean "producers"):

Houston is trying to become the first place in Texas to set a standard for hazardous air pollutants, a move that would make the city stricter than the state and federal government in policing the amount of cancer-causing substances in its air.

An amendment proposed to the city's nuisance ordinance would allow Houston to sue industrial facilities emitting toxic pollutants that, over time, could cause one additional person in 1 million to contract cancer. [bold added]

This "clear, transparent, nondiscriminatory standard" -- for the persecution of industrialists -- is in fact so "clear" and so "transparent" that the Chronicle felt the need to explain it in a sidebar:

A risk level of one in a million implies a likelihood that up to one person, out of 1 million equally exposed people, would develop cancer if exposed 24 hours per day to the specific concentration of a pollutant over 70 years (an assumed lifetime). This would be in addition to those cases that would normally occur in an unexposed population of 1 million.

Given that Houston's metro population is perhaps six million, this law would not save even six lives in seventy years for an ordinance violation for any given pollutant! This level of risk is nowhere near the level at which one could say that the activities of these "emitters" pose an objective danger to those nearby and so might warrant government intervention of some form. Clearly, the purpose of this law is to loot industrialists in the area during the process of further discouraging their valuable activities.

I am not happy to see the huge surge in green momentum since the Democrats won in November, but the very fact that even in Texas, environmentalism has this much of a cultural foothold -- along with its acceptance among so many within the mainstream conservative movement -- tells me that this intellectual tsunami was going to strike sooner or later.

At least with the Democrats in charge, capitalism won't get blamed for the inevitable consequences of any green policies that do get passed at the federal level.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Added a clarification.

http://ObjectivismOnline.com/blog/archives/002250.html