If other countries jumped off a cliff, would we do it too? [update 2]

In the wake of that NZIER report saying, essentially, that NZ’s environmentalists should stop obsessing about feelgood bullshit like “greenhouse gas emissions” and “zero waste” [on which Crampton offers enthusiastic commentary] Nick Smith admitted in the midst of a TV3 report last night that the emissions trading scam he is about to impose on New Zealand industry will do precisely nothing to prevent, mitigate or roll back global warming.  It will do none of these things, he admits; but it is necessary, he says, ao we can impress people overseas. 

    “What we do with our emissions trading scheme, what we do around trying to convert to cleaner energy technology is, of itself, not going to change the future of the international climate,” he says.
    “What it is going to do is make plain that New Zealand is serious about doing its fair share.”

Given that Smith’s emissions trading scam is essentially a whole new burden on New Zealand’s struggling businessmen and women, this is the equivalent of saying we should shoot ourselves in the foot because everybody else is cutting off their leg.

When a NZ politician tells us we need to put the way others see us above our own well-being, it’s time to call foul – and “foul” is certainly the word to describe this minister.

And just who are we being forced to impress?  The environmentalists who are pushing this barrow? The Not Evil, Just Wrong blog reminds us just how interested in human well-being they are.  Here’s just some of the things said by some of the people who’ve at some stage recently inhabited the environmental movement:

10. “Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental.” - Dave Forman, Founder of Earth First!

9. “If I were reincarnated, I would wish to be returned to Earth as a killer virus to lower population levels.” - Prince Phillip, World Wildlife Fund

8. “We, in the green movement, aspire to a cultural model in which killing a forest will be considered more contemptible and more criminal than the sale of 6-year-old children to brothels.” - Carl Amery

7. “I suspect that eradicating small pox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems.” - John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal

6. “The extinction of human species may not only be inevitable, but a good thing...This is not to say that the rise of human civilization is insignificant, but there is no way of showing that it will be much help to the world in the long run.” - Economist editorial

5. “The collective needs of non-human species must take precedence over the needs and desires of humans”- Dr. Reed F. Noss, The Wildlands Project

4. “Cannabilism is a "radical but realistic solution to the problem of overpopulation." - Lyall Watson, The Financial Times, 15 July 1995

3. “To feed a starving child is to exacerbate the world population problem.”- Lamont Cole

2. “If radical environmentalists were to invent a disease to bring human populations back to sanity, it would probably be something like AIDS.” - Earth First! Newsletter

1. “We have wished, we ecofreaks, for a disaster or social change to come and bomb us back into the Stone Age, where we might live like Indians in our valley, with our localism, our appropriate technology, our gardens, our homemade religion -- guilt free at last!” - Stewart Brand (writing in the Whole Earth Catalogue)

These are not off-the-wall comments by fringe loonies (well, apart from Prince Phillip).  These people are mainstream environmentalists.

Astute readers will notice that a few of those quotes have appeared here before, in this comprehensive list of nastiness exhibited by the anti-human zealots of mainstream environmentalism.  Patrick Moore - a co-founder of Greenpeace - says in the film 'Not Evil Just Wrong' that he has a checklist he runs through when evaluating today’s environmentalists, and one of the first things he notices is that they tend to be 'anti-human.'

It’s these people Nick Smith thinks we should be sucking up to.

UPDATE 1:  There was something even more frightening in that TV3 report, which you can watch here.  See those kids at Pigeon Mountain Primary being indoctrinated – a ‘snapshot’ of school life that’s representative of what every NZ factory school is delivering to your children? Ten-year-old kids who don’t even know basic science who are being told by their “teachers” (who know little more) that their world is dying.

And people wonder why so many teenagers grow up so disenchanted.

UPDATE 2: The Ayn Rand Center’s Yaron Brook analyses the motives behind measures proposed in the name of combating climate change.  Watch Attack of the Warmists: The Battle for Climate Control at PJ TV.