The debate is far from over

“German psychologists have diagnosed ‘environmental angst’ and ‘ecochondria’ to describe the resulting migraines and depression, which are especially prevalent among the young” - Newsweek, December 2006.

Campaigning TV producers might not know much about kids, but they all know one thing: kids scare easily.

“When it comes to environmental manipulation,” reasons James Hirsen in Tales From The Left Coast, “Hollywood wouldn’t be so shortsighted as to leave out the kiddies. In September 1990 a show called Captain Planet and the Planeteers muscled its way into the minds of our little ones under the guise of a cartoon show.” Do we ever learn?

Explains Hirsen: “In the now-defunct show, Captain Planet … uses his powers to stop other beings from messing with the environment”. And the wickedest kid of all in this “multicultural” show, of course, is the “over-consuming ugly American who always seems to want food to satisfy his voracious appetite”.

Even, “the names of villains are crafted to help vent some animosity towards the stereotypical environmental abuser”. Yes, kids scare easily.

Captain Planet, however, didn’t foresee the scientific scandals now being exposed in the new millennium, or today’s backlash.

Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring, first published in 1960s, for instance, was the launching pad for the cultural left’s anti-DDT crusade. The result? Millions died because the chattering classes’ fondness for “organic” apples blinded their eyes to Africa’s poverty. Today, however, DDT is back. Africans are, once again, winning the war against malaria. This is good news.

Think, too, about why Captain Planet’s hysterical theme song (“Captain Planet, he’s our hero, gonna take pollution down to zero”), was so attractive to TV producers. They didn’t have to showcase African cartoons dying of malaria. Dead people can’t argue back.

Another voice of sanity, Andrew Bolt, a Herald-Sun columnist, finds more comically absurd examples of environmental manipulation (from Free Willy to Finding Nemo) in his book The Best of Andrew Bolt.

States Bolt: “In Brother Bear, for instance, the hunter Kenai kills a bear, only to become a bear himself. He then finds that the bears are love and their human hunters are hate - so much so that when he is able to live again as a human, he refuses.” Bor-ing.

To argue that flooding a child’s school, television programs, reading materials, and soul, with apocalyptic visions isn’t psychologically harmful, is to live in denial. Right now, on some level, a young subject is consciously (or subconsciously) processing this moral garbage. Meanwhile, cashed-up fear merchants are fuelling pupils’ insecurities with yet more false prophecies.

How many messages of doom will the suicidal teenager, for example, receive before deciding that his or her life is nothing more than an inconvenient carbon footprint? “Environmental angst” and “ecochondria,” after all, are symptoms of a much larger problem. Groupthink.

For sure, children must be given a fair and balanced view of current issues in small doses. But the media tells children otherwise. The real debate (we never had), they falsely claim, is over. Then, they pile on, and on, and on.

Apparently, “the gun debate” is also over, “the abortion debate” is over, and even the “capital punishment debate” is over (in spite of the fact that over 50 per cent of Australians support the death penalty). In other words, whenever the cultural left is lost for words, the debate is always over. Then, they pile on, and on, and on.

Funnily enough, in Stalin’s Red Russia, the “debate over Christianity” was always over too. And, how long will sceptics have to wait to hear that the “debate” over “global warming” is over for the 100th time? Translation: shut up, and stop thinking.

“I got the impression that instead of going out to shoot the birds, I should go out and shoot the kids who shoot the birds,” said Paul Watson, the overwrought co-founder of Greenpeace in Access to Energy, December 1982.

The debate is over? Today, Channel 7’s campaigning journalists treat Greenpeace’s talking points as indisputable facts. Revealingly, “fair debate” in this country is reduced to listening to Captain Planet’s recycled monologues.

And consider this: “We in the Green movement,” said Carl Amery of the Green Party in Mensch & Energie, April, 1983, “aspire to a cultural model in which the killing of a forest will be considered more contemptible and more criminal than the sale of six-year-old children to Asian brothels.” The debate is over?

Perhaps our watchdog media needs to reexamine the root causes of this “green” movement. In 2007, the writing and presenting classes seem more emotionally invested in proclaiming the rights of “drowning polar bears” over defenceless children in brothels.

Ignore the fact that many scientists are breaking ranks. The very “debate is over” argument, to be sure, was always cultic in nature. Science shouldn’t ever be based on a show of hands, or Channel Seven’s Sunrise show sermons. Verifying facts, questioning hypotheses, and so on, is not a sign of weakness, but one of strength. The rest is garbage.