Earth Day 2003 Fact Sheet

 

Reflections

 

• [The Endangered Species Act] has the power to halt even important and emergency life-saving operations.... common sense has little to do with the implementation." - Congressman Richard Pombo (R-CA), Shattered Dreams: 100 Stories of Government Abuse, The National Center for Public Policy Research (2003).
  
  
• "ANWR [the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge] provides expanded energy resources and increased work opportunities for Teamster members and their families. We cannot understand how so-called friends of working families can stand in the way of responsible job creation like ANWR, which already has bi-partisan support to pass on a straight up or down vote." - President of the Teamsters Union, Jimmy Hoffa, to The National Center for Public Policy Research, March 27, 2002.
  
  
• "In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate..." - Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (1971).
  
  
• "Rapid increase in household numbers, often manifested as urban sprawl, and resultant higher per capita resource consumption in smaller households pose serious challenges to biodiversity conservation." - Paul Ehrlich, Jianguo Liu (2003).
  
  
• "The standard of living has risen along with the size of the world's population since the beginning of recorded time. There is no convincing economic reason why these trends toward a better life should not continue indefinitely." - Julian Simon, former Professor of Business Administration at the University of Maryland, as quoted by Freedom's Nest at http://www.freedomsnest.com/cgi-bin/qa.cgi?ref=simjul.
  
  
• "Things are getting better and better despite what media and environmental organizations say." - Former Greenpeace activist Bjorn Lomborg, The Skeptical Environmentalist (2001).
  
  
• "Any increase in CAFE [corporate average fuel efficiency standards] as currently structured could produce additional road casualties... these [CAFE] changes in the fleet were responsible for an additional 13,000 to 26,000 incapacitating injuries and 97,000 to 195,000 total injuries in 1993... the reductions that have occurred in passenger-vehicle size from model year 1970 to 1982 are associated with approximately 2,000 additional occupant fatalities annually." - National Academy of Sciences study "Effectiveness and Impact of Corporate Average Fuel Economy Standards 2002."
  
  
• "The leadership of the [environmental] movement... does tend to draw from the upper middle class, well educated part of the social spectrum. Few of them go bowling or to car races." - Denis Hayes, executive director for Earth Day 1970, in a 1999 Time magazine interview.
  
  
• "The truth about climate change is that we don't know much about it... so far the scientific evidence does not support catastrophic warming, from any cause, human or otherwise." - James Glassman and Sallie Baliunas, The Weekly Standard.
  
  
• "[The] Kyoto [Protocol] reductions [of industrial emissions] will have little effect [on global temperature] in the 21st century, and 30 Kyotos' may be needed to reduce warming to an acceptable level." - NASA's Dr. James Hansen, a longtime global warming theory advocate in the August 30, 2000 issue of Electricity Daily.
  
  
• "From the tundra of Alaska to the wetlands of Louisiana, a host of advanced technologies enable the oil and gas industry to produce resources far beneath sensitive environments." - Bill Clinton's Department of Energy publication, "Environmental Benefits of Advanced Oil and Gas Exploration and Production Technology, " published October, 1999 by the U.S. Department of Energy, Assistant Secretary for Fossil Energy, Office of Natural Gas and Petroleum Technology.
  
  
• "On land and offshore, oil and gas producers have developed innovative ways to restore sites to original - and sometimes better-than-original - condition, for diverse uses ranging from housing to agriculture to wildlife habitats." - Bill Clinton's Department of Energy publication, "Environmental Benefits of Advanced Oil and Gas Exploration and Production Technology," published October, 1999 by the U.S. Department of Energy, Assistant Secretary for Fossil Energy, Office of Natural Gas and Petroleum Technology.

 

 

 

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