Diana West in, “the Death of the Grown Up” urges us to stop our delusional thinking and challenges us to look accurately at the world around us. She focuses on a number of problems including, the loss of parenting skills, acceptance of nonjudgmental-multiculturalism, and politically-correct self-censorship. As well, today’s most glaring villain, clearly assess yesterday’s heroes.

But I want to talk about the biggest delusion of our day – the delusional idea that going green will benefit our lives. Sure there are many sincere, development-opposing individuals who want to keep things clean, to be less wasteful and who wish to ensure that future generations can live a good life. People with these beliefs are not a problem, they’ve only been mislead into thinking development is the problem. This I call small green thinking. Mostly these people have been convinced the earth cares and is harmed when you pick something up and put it down in a different place. But small green thinking is just silly rather than dangerous.

No, it’s the strident activist, the BIG Green folk who are a problem. These are the people that think there’s too many people on the earth, that our factory system is environmentally destructive, that our energy use is killing the planet. In other word, that all our development is bad and needs to be stopped. I call them the Luddites of our era.

Truly, in a scant 300 years our lives are now more than 20 times richer than the lives lived by our ancestors. Mostly because some very bright individuals learned how to tame the energy embedded in fossil fuel. Because they shared their discoveries and inventions with their fellow man, the world changed – for the better.

We live in a man made world. Roofs keep us dry. Walls and windows and central heating keep us warm. Roads and cars and airplanes cause us to forget how our ancestors lived and died in the same geographical place. Our modern medicine system means we will die after 80 years of life rather than 30 as those ancestors did.

Today in the developed world, virtually everyone lives a better life than the most privileged aristocracy of the past, despite as Milton Friedman said, “The ancient Greeks needed no running water; they had running slaves.” Measured in human energy output, the average energy budget of the country, each of us uses the energy output of more than 90 people. That is because we feed fuel into machines that do the work for us.

Everything that enriches our lives, and that we can afford, comes to us cheaply through the doors of a factory. The doors BIG Green want’s to slam shut.

And the destruction of ‘enterprise’ begins if we fail to add ‘free’. We would not expect good results if we put ignorant people in charge of brain surgery or rocket science….mechanics or construction, yet we have given the ‘right to impede’ to those who lack the ability to do or the desire to think about what they oppose.

BIG Green has lost its way. These folks want to end the industrial world. They don’t look at the world from a human health consideration. Their view is distorted by what my friend Alex Epstein calls the ‘perfect planet premise’, that a world untouched by man is paradise. Well in truth, without man’s intervention, called ‘natural’, life is more accurately described by Thomas Hobbes, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”

And it’s happening today. Development is being opposed at every level in the name of saving the planet…..from man rather than for man. For proof we have the ranting of the BIG Green leaders. An interesting book, Merchants of Despair” by Robert Zubrin provides a wealth of documentation on the people who hate humanity and in essence, seek to destroy human life..

It’s your life…..don’t let them steal it. No carbon footprint means no life. Exploit the earth or die.