Bret Stephens: Does Environmentalism Cause Amnesia? - WSJ.com:
Warming is becoming a major problem.
"A change in our climate," writes one deservedly famous American naturalist, "is taking place very sensibly."
Snowfall, he notes, has become "less frequent and less deep."
Rivers that once "seldom failed to freeze over in the course of the winter, scarcely ever do so now."
(the author is listed below)
China, once the 'land of famine,' nowadays faces a growing problem of childhood obesity."
Only in Africa is food scarcity still an issue, but even there recent food crises in Malawi and Niger did not result in major loss of life.
What does hurt people is bad public policy.
-Exhibit A is the U.S. ethanol mandate—justified in part as a response to global warming—which diverted the corn crop to fuel production and sent global food prices soaring in 2008.
-Exhibit B is the cult of organic farming and knee-jerk opposition to GMOs, which risk depriving farmers in poor countries of high-yield, nutrient-rich crops.
-Exhibit C was the effort to ban DDT without adequate substitutes to stop the spread of malaria, which kills nearly 900,000 people, mostly children, in sub-Saharan Africa alone with each passing year. The list goes on and on.
Environmentalists tend to have conveniently short memories, especially when it comes to their own mistakes. They would do better to learn from history.
Just take the quote about the warming climate with which this column began.
It's from "Notes on the State of Virginia" by Thomas Jefferson, published in 1785.
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