Happy Earth Day

Happy Earth Day to everyone! As a person who loves nature and the outdoors, I'd like to urge my fellow men and women to make a few sacrifices today to save energy, conserve resources, and appreciate the beauty of planet earth. I'm confident that the United States, as the greatest country of this earth, can make strides towards cleaning up our environment, conserving land for its natural wildlife, and do everything possible to maintain a healthy respect to the land we live on.

That being said, I'd like to enter a post from the Heartland Institute that makes some sense to me. Conservation and capitalism go hand in hand - they are not incompatible at all. With the right tax/financial incentives and a culture that appreciates and rewards responsible behavior, we can make this work. Larger government and totalitarian laws are not the answer. Neither is Al Gore.

From Heartland:

Contrary to the slogans of demonstrators throughout the world, the nations that have the best track records on environmental protection and improvement are those with the highest amount of free-market capitalism.
Make no mistake, the anti-capitalism demonstrators often add environmentalism to their claimed objectives solely because it attracts many gullible young persons and appears to legitimize their activities, which often have little or nothing to do with the environment.
Nations with the freest economic systems are the ones whose citizens can afford the luxury of protecting their environments. Conversely, persons living in command-and-control economies barely surviving on life’s necessities of food, clothing, and shelter use their natural resources to the absolute limit. They have no other choice in providing for themselves and their families…
…Beware the individual, group, or organization that relentlessly attacks the free enterprise system, bashes big business, and bashes corporations. Too often their real agenda is power–power to remake the economic and social systems to suit their own command-and-control goals, not to serve the public good as they so loudly proclaim.
Free enterprise capitalism provides the economic lifeblood for many of the world’s poor. The late senator Paul Tsongas said in his speech at the 1992 Democratic Convention, “You cannot redistribute wealth you never created. You can’t be pro-jobs and anti-business at the same time. You cannot love employment and hate employers.”
The extremes of big government socialism and communism have been tried and found wanting in many nations, but their principles still dominate the thinking in world environmental conferences and are widely taught in many major U.S. universities.
For three-quarters of a century the Soviet Union was touted as the model of what a planned economy could do for its people. To the embarrassment of many economics professors, it imploded. It could never afford environmental protection or improvement.
Environmentalists who sincerely desire to advance their cause must disassociate themselves from anti-capitalists and destroyers of the social orders of communities, nations, and the world.
Nothing highlights this problem more than the Heidelberg Statement, which was signed in the spring of 199[2] by 250 prominent scientists, including 27 Nobel Prize winners. It noted, “We are worried at the emergence of an irrational ideology which is opposed to scientific and industrial progress and impedes economic and social development. The greatest evils which stalk our Earth are ignorance and oppression, not science, technology, and industry. We do forewarn the authorities in charge of our planet’s destiny against decisions which are supported by pseudo-scientific arguments or false and non-relevant data.”