Green Hell Blog

Check out this galling interview of William Ruckelshaus, the EPA administrator who banned DDT. While Ruckelshaus is correct in criticizing Members of Congress for essentially being willfully uninformed on environmental issues, his criticism is astonishingly arrogant given his own willful (and genocidal) ignorance of facts.

During 1971-1972, the EPA held seven months of hearings and produced 9,000 pages of testimony on DDT. In the end, the presiding EPA administrative law judge ruled that DDT use presented no danger to humans health or the environment. Without having attended a moment of the hearings or reading a page of the transcript, Ruckelshaus banned DDT in the U.S. anyway. The ban was then exported to the rest of the world, resulting in the unnecessary deaths of tens of millions, including millions of children under the age of 5 years.

The willful ignorance of the unapologetic Bill Ruckelshaus is still killing millions today. He’s the 20th century’s only mass murderer to survive and thrive (as a venture capitalist) in the 21st century.

On the bright side, New York Times film critic Neil Genzlinger reviewed the new DDT-malaria documentary “3 Billion and Counting” on the morning of the film’s premier in New York City.

On the less bright side, Genzlinger was decidedly less than impressed by the film’s message:

As for the argument, it’s not exactly new: advocates have been speaking out in support of increased DDT use for a decade, contending that its negative effects were exaggerated or misrepresented when it was banned by the United States in 1972 and that in any case they are outweighed by the millions of deaths caused by malaria.

No, it’s not news that millions of poor Africans (mostly children under 5) continue to die preventable deaths. That’s been going on for decades — ever since the New York Times helped advocate for DDT to be banned in the 1960s. The Times was even warned about the coming “genocide” in 1969 letters-to-the-editor by Thomas H. Jukes.

Then again, the Holocaust isn’t news either, yet when Genzlinger reviewed “Verdict on Auschwitz” in 2007, he found that film to be “emotionally draining.”

AIDS has been around since the early 1980s, but an HBO show about AIDS in Africa was “compelling.” That show’s producer told Genzlinger,

“Hopefully [the show] makes people who are maybe in more fortunate positions try to make a difference in whatever way they can. Even if they just think about [AIDS in Africa], that in itself is a significant thing.”

Apparently, the same consideration is not merited for the millions who have already died and will continue to die from malaria in Africa.

Genzlinger credited CNN’s “Planet in Peril” with being “thought-provoking” for showing how the introduction of the wolf into Yellowstone National Park had affected the ecosystem. But millions of kids allowed to die preventable deaths? Bo-ring.

What does a connoisseur of erotic gay cinema think of a documentary that’s trying to save children’s lives?

First-time film producer Dr. Rutledge Taylor’s new epic/call-to-action on DDT and malaria, “3 Billion and Counting,” opens Friday at the Quad Cinema in New York City.

Sadly, Left-wing media is already on the attack in its typical ad hominem, knee-jerk, ignorant and misanthropic ways. Take Village Voice movie critic Aaron Hillis who opens his commentary on the film as follows:

“The death toll is mounting,” shrieks the tagline of this dawdling, hysterical documentary that may as well be named Every 12 Seconds a Child Dies From Malaria, and Why Haven’t You Done Anything About It?

Compare that with Hillis’ opening line in his review of “No Impact Man” last September:

The bold environmental project Colin Beavan began in the fall of 2006—to expunge his carbon footprint by giving up material consumption, electricity, non-local foods, and basically all worldly pleasures in Manhattan for one full year—was always destined to have some naysayers crying “publicity stunt.”

So to Hillis, eco-self-flagellation is “bold” while trying to save millions of real children from dying real deaths from a preventable disease is “hysterical.”

Hillis criticizes “3 Billion and Counting” because it,

… hinges only on Rutledge Taylor’s findings…”

Aside from the fact that any documentary filmmaker can only ever present his findings, Hillis omitted mention of the numerous opportunities in the film that Taylor provided environmentalists and other DDT opponents to defend themselves. For the most part, DDT opponents don’t take Taylor up on his offers because they aren’t willing to defend their indefensible actions on camera.

Hillis objects in ad hominem fashion to Taylor’s vilification of William Ruckleshaus and Rachel Carson while erroneously writing that malaria is responsible for “hundreds of millions of deaths each year.” [Earth to Hillis, the annual malaria death toll is on the order of 1-3 million per year. If you had paid attention to the movie, you wouldn’t have made such a basic mistake.]

Aaron Hillis is too stupid to realize his good fortune in growing up to be a Manhattan-based film critic — as opposed to dying before the age of 5 years, which is what happens to about a million African children every year due to malaria. Worse, perhaps, is that once presented with uncontroverted facts about this ongoing tragedy, Generation Me’s Aaron Hillis is too callous to care.

Until he can complete some sort of program in compassion/humanity/empathy, maybe Hillis should just stick to reviewing films more up his alley, like gay zombie movies.

Question of the day: Exactly how much daylight is there between the population control rantings of Discovery Channel Channel gunman James Lee and the writings of Obama science advisor John Holdren?

From the AP:

Giving contraceptives to people in developing countries could help fight climate change by slowing population growth, experts said Friday.

These “experts” wouldn’t be so “expert” had they not been born.

From the Oregonian:

Some people who are serious about wanting to reduce their “carbon footprint” on the Earth have one choice available to them that may yield a large long-term benefit – have one less child.

And why should we have fewer children?

The average long-term carbon impact of a child born in the U.S. – along with all of its descendants – is more than 160 times the impact of a child born in Bangladesh.

“In discussions about climate change, we tend to focus on the carbon emissions of an individual over his or her lifetime,” said Paul Murtaugh, an OSU professor of statistics. “Those are important issues and it’s essential that they should be considered. But an added challenge facing us is continuing population growth and increasing global consumption of resources.”

In this debate, very little attention has been given to the overwhelming importance of reproductive choice, Murtaugh said. When an individual produces a child – and that child potentially produces more descendants in the future – the effect on the environment can be many times the impact produced by a person during their lifetime.

Under current conditions in the U.S., for instance, each child ultimately adds about 9,441 metric tons of carbon dioxide to the carbon legacy of an average parent – about 5.7 times the lifetime emissions for which, on average, a person is responsible.

Moving past the junk science-fueled notion of the “carbon footprint” and the discredited population-growth and resource-scarcity fearmongering of the likes of Thomas Malthus and Paul Ehrlich, Western birth rates are already falling precipitously — the U.S. replacement rate is barely at break-even. Having fewer children is tantamount to cultural suicide. Just who would we be saving the planet and its resources for?

Click here for the study.

Click here for study author Paul Murtaugh’s bio.

Genocide-lite study author Paul Murtaugh: Should his carbon footprint have been born?