The new Halloween?

Celebrate Earth Daze!

Green Day: The day set aside to save the planet has become a second Halloween where we fear imaginary planetary ghouls and goblins. Greenies get the treats, but the trick has been on us.

It is appropriate that Earth Day comes a week after Tax Day, for our slavish dedication to saving the planet rather than saving jobs imposes a hidden tax on all of us in the form of reduced economic growth and rising inflation.

This Earth Day, we have more to fear from rising gas and food prices than from rising sea levels.

We have long argued that wealthier societies are healthier societies and that reducing emission levels to those desired by such entities as the U.N.'s International Panel on Climate Change and treaties like Kyoto was a recipe for global poverty.

Consider that a 2008 MIT study showed that even the carbon footprint of a homeless person in the United States is more than four times the U.N. recommendation.

Last week, after a record 92 tornadoes struck North Carolina over the weekend, a Time magazine blog seriously asked the question, "Did climate change play a role in this violent outbreak of tornadoes?"

It is such constant fearmongering that drives climate change hysteria. Consider that the worst tornado outbreak in U.S. history occurred in 1974 — the year Nixon resigned.

That was also around the time that major media outlets like Newsweek were warning of a coming Ice Age. That year, there were at least 163 tornadoes in 13 states.

The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration has produced a chart showing tornado frequency fluctuating over time but in general decline even as levels of carbon dioxide increased since that record year and as improvements in storm detection, reporting and monitoring occurred.

Hurricane frequency and intensity, as well, are a natural cyclical phenomenon, made worse only by growing numbers rushing to the coasts, not fleeing from them.

Chalk this latest fear mongering next to the myth of Himalayan glaciers that were supposed to banish by 2035.

Fear is the warm-mongers' stock in trade. Facts are not. But they lead us to do things like ban offshore drilling to save the fruitful and multiplying polar bears and to put corn in our gas tanks in the form of ethanol.

This only drives up demand for corn and food prices while the gas used to get to the supermarket soars in price as well.

Read more:
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/569972/201104211848/Celebrate-Earth-Daze.htm