Show 218 The Really Inconvenient Truths: Seven Environmental Catastrophes Liberals Don"t Want You to Know About - Because They Helped Cause Them. Michael Medved talks to author Iain Murray.

Why environmentalists are the environment's worst enemy And why effective environmental stewardship depends on free enterprise and property rights

The liberal environmental movement takes for granted that strict government regulation and public ownership is necessary for the preservation of the environment. Yet who, in the end, is responsible for the great environmental catastrophes of the recent past? According to Iain Murray of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the real answer is: environmentalists themselves. "The dogmatic ideologies and restrictive policies pushed on us by the environmental Left have harmed nature more than helped it,” argues Murray, "but the environmentalists have never borne the blame.” Now, in The REALLY Inconvenient Truths: Seven Environmental Catastrophes Liberals Don"t Want You to Know About - Because They Helped Cause Them, Murray reveals just how often and gravely liberal environmentalists have harmed the environment, how they have covered up this fact, and how conservatives can reclaim the environmental issue by stressing free-enterprise, private-property solutions.

To make his case, Murray focuses on seven major modern environmental catastrophes that illustrate the failure of the liberal approach. All had tragic consequences for humans or the environment. All could have been avoided or mitigated by alternative approaches based on conservative thinking. Yet, in each case, the liberal approach was not to admit failure—but to condemn the alternative approach, deny the problem exists, blame it on something else or even to claim it as a victory.

The REALLY Inconvenient Truths reveals:

       The origins of the modern liberal environmental movement in the campaign to ban DDT—and how that led to the resurgence of malaria in the poorest countries, with devastatingly fatal consequences

       How the government-dictated preference for corn-based ethanol and other biofuels is causing massive land overuse, soaring food prices, and increased hunger in the poorest places

       How a single SUV tank of ethanol-based gasoline burns enough food to feed a starving African for a year

       How public ownership of waterways causes pollution—and was the real reason Cleveland's Cuyahoga River "caught fire” in 1969 (a founding myth of environmentalism)

       How hormones from contraceptive and "morning after” pills are literally being flushed into rivers and causing bizarre sexual malformations in fish—and why, for once, there has been no outcry from liberals

       Yellowstone in flames: How liberal-inspired management programs in the Forest Service and the National Parks have led to major wildfires—including a near-castrophic one in the nation"s crown jewel, Yellowstone Park

       How the Endangered Species Act actually increases the threat of wildlife extinction—while private approaches have helped species recover all over the world

       Getting the Green: how the environmental movement is funded by industries that reap enormous profits from environmental laws and regulations

       How overfishing of the oceans results directly from liberal opposition to property rights in the oceans, as embodied in the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST)

       Shut Up, He Explained: how censorship, manufactured outrage, and even phony “science” are being used to cut short the debate over global warming

       The Lost Sea: how the last attempt to “scientifically manage” an economy, in Soviet Russia, caused the destruction of the Aral Sea—which Al Gore and others now wrongly blame on global warming

       What history demonstrates about the importance of property rights in protecting the environment


In this election year, Republican politicians tell us that conservatives need to adapt and develop an “environmental” policy