BY SHERRI KUKLA
Reprinted from July 2008 San Diego Off Road Magazine
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Live Green and Die

    We walked into a doctor’s office waiting room recently and were greeted by a wall of magazines. The first one to catch my eye was Business Week. The cover story was GM: Live Green or Die. I immediately ignored it. I have this growing aversion to anything green! I’ve been propagandized to death and I’m starting my own personal little campaign to boycott as many green companies or products as I can.

    I made my reading choice and sat down. The next thing I know the guy-in-the-garage takes a seat next to me, and this guy, who never reads a magazine in a doctor’s office has one in his hand. "Look at this," he said. It was the Business Week. "Live Green or Die," he read aloud. I knew then the topic was one I could not ignore.

    For years in SDOR we’ve been railing against the environmentalists as we have seen off road vehicles shut out of millions of acres of land.

    A more recent threat to our off road way of life is that our governor has determined that California needs to lead the world in fighting global warming.

    Ocotillo Wells off road park is seriously threatened by his passion to fight this nonexistent threat. Geothermal companies are waiting in droves to destroy large portions of our riding area by putting in their wells in the never ending search for "renewable" energy.

    I would be very happy if I never again had to hear the words renewable or sustainable. In fact, let’s remove the rest of these buzz words from our language as well: fragile eco system, carbon footprints, climate change, global this and global that.

    I might even suggest we get rid of the word "consumer" and all its forms because even that has become something the enviros want us to be ashamed of.

    But I refuse. I am an American and I am a consumer in a capitalistic society that thrives on people producing products to be bought, sold, used and thoroughly enjoyed. The time has come to stand up to the environmental propaganda that demands that we feel guilty for driving, for using electricity, for drinking out of plastic water bottles and in some extreme instances, made to feel guilty for having children and even being alive.

    The time has come for us to stop being held hostage by environmentalism.

    For quite some time I have suspected that the green propaganda is unfactual, untrue and unhealthy for our economy and our freedom. Yet I had no facts to back up my suspicions other than a gut feeling.

    However, recently I have had the opportunity to research a number of the claims we have heard for years. Uppermost in everyone’s mind these days is the price of gas. A commodity we are told we are overusing and running out of. In fact that couldn’t be further from the truth. Two years ago Dean Smith wrote in an article entitled Fossil Fuel Fakery ". . . some suggest that we may have just pricked the surface of the known oil reserves. According to the US Department of Energy there is now 1.28 trillion barrels of proven oil reserves. This means that despite decades of consumption, the amount of oil available for human use is at its highest point in human history."

    We are made to believe that because oil is derived from fossils there will come a time when we will simply run completely out of oil. The late Dr. Thomas Gold in his book The Deep Hot Biosphere: The Myth of Fossil Fuels says that oil is a "renewable, primordial soup continually manufactured by the Earth . . ."

    Dire predictions also imply that other natural resources are running out as well. Yet of all places, on Ecoworld.com one can find statistics that refute those beliefs. The website sets forth several detailed charts regarding resources and then sums up their findings with this statement: ". . . at twice the current energy consumption overall, oil, gas and coal could potentially supply all the energy we need in the world for the next 300 years . . ."

    However, we aren’t made to feel guilty just because we are supposedly running out of resources, but also because our use of those resources is causing global warming. Another "fact" which simply is not true. Weather Channel founder and KUSI weather man John Coleman has an outstanding commentary posted on the KUSI website called Global Warming and the Price of a Gallon of Gas.

    In it he states: "I have dug through thousands of pages of research papers . . . I have worked my way through complicated math and complex theories. Here’s the bottom line: the entire global warming scientific case is based on the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere . . . They don’t have any other issue. Carbon Dioxide, that’s it. . . . . Here is the deal about CO2, carbon dioxide. It is a natural component of our atmosphere. It has been there since time began. . . . It is absorbed and emitted by the oceans . . . It is not a pollutant."

    John Coleman is a hero. He is a voice of reason standing up against the media that hasn’t reported on the 31,000 scientists who do not believe in global warming. John Coleman is actively looking into the legal possibilities of suing Al Gore for the global warming hoax. It is a "clear and present danger" to borrow a famous phrase. Our economy and our way of life are threatened because of decisions being made every day to combat this supposed threat.

    John Coleman sums up his article with these words: "If Al Gore and his global warming scare dictates the future policy of our governments, the current economic downturn could indeed become a recession, drift into a depression and our modern civilization could fall into an abyss."

    There is another consequence to the rampant environmentalism worse even than economic disaster.

    Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic is the author of Blue Planet in Green Shackles, What is Endangered: Climate or Freedom? In it he says "Mankind has already accumulated tragic experience with one very proud intellectual system that claimed that it knew how to manage society better than spontaneous market forces. It was Communism, and it failed, leaving behind millions of victims. Now, a new ‘-ism’ has emerged that claims to be able to manage even nature and, through it, people. This excessive human pride — just as the previous attempts — cannot but fail. The world is a complex and complicated system that cannot be organized according to an environmental human design without repeating the tragic experience of wasting resources, suppressing people’s freedom, and destroying the prosperity of the whole human society."

    Vaclav says that the only resource that is really threatened is the "human resource." He states the truth that is obvious to everyone but environmentalists that humans must have freedom ."

    This is America. Land that I love. But the question is: Are we going to live free or live green?

    Because we can’t do both.