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Earth Day is All Politics

As well-meaning liberals around the nation gather to celebrate Earth Day this Sunday, it might be a good time to observe that the celebration’s promoters are, generally speaking, more interested in leftist politics than they are in clean air and water.

Conservative, or course, are interested in conservation, but we value the environment for its own sake, and not as an excuse for increasing the size and power of Government. That’s why conservatives are the ones who like to point out that the government’s ethanol mandates do more environmental harm than good.

Conservatives are also working to protect the environment when they oppose spending any more government money on the highly toxic photocells and batteries required for generating tiny amounts of solar energy. This was true even before bankruptcy allowed Solyndra to leave a toxic nightmare in a leased building in Milpitas, CA.

Conservatives at the National Rifle Association promote conservation for reasons that should be obvious.

The founders and promoters of Earth Day, on the other hand, put politics ahead of the environment.  It may or may not be a coincidence that the date leftists chose for Earth Day, April 22, is also Lenin’s birthday. The first Earth Day celebration was on that day in 1970, the hundredth anniversary of Lenin’s birth. It’s principle founder was Senator Gaylord Nelson, a liberal Democrat from Wisconsin who was, in 1970, fiercely opposing America’s war effort in Vietnam.

The founding Earth Day celebration in New York was organized by a group of students at Columbia University where, two years earlier, Columbia students had violently occupied the schools administrative offices in protest of American involvement in the war. Columbia, of course, is the most radically leftists campus in the country; during the Cold War it was the Communist Party’s best recruiting ground in the United States. The history of Cold War espionage lists more Soviet Agents from Columbia University than from any other campus, by far.

If the Earth Day founders really were trying to honor Lenin it was an ironic touch. Heaven knows Communism has not been good for the environment, at least not in the areas directly under Communist control. The Soviets poisoned their environment to a shocking extent.

And, of course, if Earth Day is celebrated on Lenin’s birthday by pure coincidence, then it must also be a coincidence that Earth Hour is celebrated by “environmentalist” leftists on March 30, Al Gore’s birthday.