Thursday, April 22, 2021 5 P.M.
Lot’s of things have changed since the first Earth Day in 1970. Our air is much cleaner; so is our water. The warming of Earth has brought huge gains in agriculture and our ability to feed our rapidly growing population. We are approaching 8 billion of us on this planet. True, we still have 100’s of millions of underfed people, but the problem is not our ability to raise enough food! No, the problem is political. (Forced starvation, after all, has been a major military tactic for eons.)
The reason we’ve been able to raise so much food was called the “Green Revolution” years ago. Improved farming methods have helped. But the primary reason agricultural production has increased so much so fast is biochemistry – genetically improved crops have enabled us to feed the world. The Green Revolution has been one of the most important aspects to our much improved living conditions worldwide over the past 50 – 75 years.
Although environmentalists (the so-called “greens”) embraced the Green Revolution at first, now it appears that a large part of the green-culture now thinks GMOs are a bad thing and should be eliminated. To me, this amounts to “Stop GMOs…let half the world starve.” I just can’t understand what thought process goes through the minds of anti-GMOers. Don’t they know that ever since agriculture began, farmers have been genetically altering crops through natural selection (Does the name DARWIN ring a bell?). No crop today is anything like its ancestors centuries ago. Genetic modification is a wonderful thing. And now it’s gotten better since we can save many years by doing it in a lab rather than out in the fields. In essence, every crop we grow is a GMO. Maybe the anti-GMO folks should chew on that for awhile.
The Earth Day environmentalists have gone awry in other areas as well. Just today, President Biden said we’re going the cut our carbon dioxide production by 50% by 2030. There is only one way that can happen. Shut down the country. You thought Covid restrictions were bad? Wait until you see what 50% less carbon does to us. To accomplish this task, the U.S. would go from Earth’s biggest economy to Third World status in just nine years!
Even a more realistic goal to cut carbon 50% by 2050 can only be done by switching our power source to nuclear. Yes, nuclear. I know that’s a dirty world in the U.S. and especially to environmentalists, but keep in mind no one in the U.S. has ever died from a nuclear power plant accident. How does that compare to deaths in the coal, oil and gas industries? And modern reactors are smaller, mostly underground and highly reliable. It’s definitely the way to go.
Continued tomorrow…