RUSH: We go to Whitney in Roanoke, Virginia. I’m glad you held on, Whitney. Thanks for your patience.
CALLER: Oh, thanks for having me.
RUSH: You bet.
CALLER: I had a rational and intelligent argument, but now I’m a little nervous. I’m not sure how I’m going — ha! ha! — to present it, but it seems like to me that you just dismiss the environmental concerns just right offhand, and what I’m trying to figure out is: Are you dismissing the harbingers of doom and gloom themselves, or the environmental concern?
RUSH: Uhhh. Am I just missing the harbingers of doom and gloom themselves?
CALLER: Yeah. Do you just not like to listen to them talk or do you just hate environmental policy? Is it possible to be an environmentally savvy conservative?
RUSH: Sure!
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: Yeah. Yeah. But I don’t believe that there are any harbingers of doom and gloom in the environment out there.
CALLER: So you don’t believe in global warming? (scoffs)
RUSH: No.
CALLER: Or that the large ozone hole?
RUSH: No. Wait, wait, wait, wait. I —
CALLER: Or that humans created the ozone, destruction of the ozone.
RUSH: No. No, no, no. I don’t. Because the hole closes every year and we don’t do anything to close it.
CALLER: Eh, ha ha ha.
RUSH: So how are we causing it? It’s the same thing.
CALLER: Well, that whole vortex and, uh, you know, spinning earth sort of theory, and that’s maybe pseudoscientific?
RUSH: (sigh)
CALLER: I just want you to clarify your position on the environment. I mean, do you hate the environment? Ha ha.
RUSH: You know, I’m glad you called. I really am, and I would love to talk to you about this.
CALLER: Mmm-hmm.
RUSH: So we’re going to. No, I don’t “hate” the environment. I don’t hate anything.
CALLER: That’s right. You’re an optimist. Ha ha ha.
RUSH: I am skeptical of liberals.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: I am totally skeptical of liberals. I am skeptical of any group of people who wants to say that we human beings in the advanced areas of existence, in the great democracies of the world are single-handedly responsible for destroying the environment, and if we don’t stop now, it’s all going to go away ? poof! I don’t buy that for a moment. I think the modern environmental movement is simply the latest refuge for communists and socialists who are opposed to capitalism.
CALLER: I think that’s where I’m confused, is the terminology. To me, “conservation” is not a liberal concept, and things like being conservative with your decisions about the environment —
RUSH: Well, that’s not —
CALLER: — is responsible.
RUSH: The thing you have to understand is the environmentalists are not concerned about the environment.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: The environmentalists are using the environment as a platform to attack a way of life they disagree with.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: And they’re working, and it’s succeeds with people like you, because after all, who wants dirty water?
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: Who wants dirty air?
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: And the environmentalists set up if you don’t disagree with them, oh you must be for pollution. I’m not for pollution. I just want the facts straight. There is more pollution in the underdeveloped world than in the United States. We clean up or messes better than anyone else does.
CALLER: That’s true.
RUSH: Well, then how at the same time with we be blamed for the destroying the planet and destroying the environment? We’re doing just the opposite! We’re going out of our way to protect it. We’re going out of our way to do what we can to hold great and responsible stewardship over it, but normal economic or environmental cycles? For example, go look at — if you can find it, go look at — a map of the way the earth looked hundreds of thousands of years ago and you’ll see the continents today don’t even exist as they do today.
CALLER: Oh, sure.
RUSH: Huh?
CALLER: Sure, but there’s seven billion — or six billion — more people. It seems like the cause and effect of that alone, without even the industry side of it, is going to have an environmental impact.
RUSH: Well, you know, Paul Ehrlich —
CALLER: Seven billion anything has an impact (giggles) I would think.
RUSH: (heavy sigh)
CALLER: I mean, isn’t it — I just wondering, is it responsible, or wise to err on the side of caution as far as the environment is concerned?
RUSH: Look it, we’re going to have a disconnect here, because you’re feeling about this —
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: — and I’m thinking about it.
CALLER: Right. Well, you’re right.
RUSH: And I don’t know how to get to your feelings. I don’t want to destroy your feelings here. I don’t own your feelings. They aren’t mine. I’m not responsible for your feelings, so I can’t talk you out of them.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: But if you wanted to think about this rationally rather than feel about it — that’s the appeal of the environmental movement. They want you to feel like, “Oh, my God, we’re striking this great place!” I don’t believe we have the ability to destroy it.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: Now, I’ve got to take a break. Are you interested in continuing this?
CALLER: Sure.
RUSH: Okay, well hang on through the break, and I’ll give it another stab. But you’ve got to let me answer the questions you ask me, okay?
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: We go back to Whitney in Roanoke, Virginia. I trust you’re still there?
CALLER: Yes, sir.
RUSH: Okay, let me just say a couple of things here, because you asked me why am I dismissing all the environmental damage and why do I believe what I believe, and I want to try to explain it to you so that, as you keep listening, you’ll be able to put the comments that I make on all this into context and into perspective.
CALLER: Mmm-hmm.
RUSH: The first thing in helping to explain my attitude on the environment. I think the environment is a political issue. I don’t even “think” it, I know it. The environment is a political issue, and environmental activists are liberals, they are leftists. Well, now, you know me. I don’t trust them. I disagree with them. I am suspicious of their motives. I know who the environmentalists are. I have listened to what they’ve said. I’ve read what they have written. I have debunked so much of what they have said. Michael Crichton has written a book called State of Fear, in which he documents the way they lie; the way they make things up, the way they basically exist as fund-raising organizations, and they use fear to raise money. They’re also anti-capitalists — and they’re big government types. They want government controlling your property, what’s called a “wetland” and all sorts of things. As to global warming, in 1975, Newsweek magazine had cover story on the coming global freeze. Six years later, I’m watching ABC’s This Week with David Brinkley and a scientist named Michael Oppenheimer is saying, “We’ve only got 20 years to stop global warming. If we don’t…” and Brinkley said, “Well, can you prove it’s happening now?”
He said, “No, but we need 20 more years, but we don’t have time to wait those 20 years because if we don’t act now it’s going to be too late.”
So 20 years has gone by and the environmentalists still cannot prove that this is manmade. They cannot prove that the current warming cycle that I admit we’re in, can be proved to be manmade and even man-caused. There have been too many global heating and cooling cycles long before man came along and industrialized the planet, and there have been way too many volcanoes spewing pollution that doubles the amount of the total of all the automobiles ever invented and manufactured in the world. That tells me that we human beings are very vain on one hand. We’ve got animal rights people telling us that we’re no different than rats and insects. We’ve got the environmentalists on the other hand telling us we are so powerful, that we have the ability to destroy this which we didn’t create. You asked about ozone. Do you know how ozone is created?
CALLER: You mean with coffee machines and car exhaust and all that?
RUSH: No, no, no. I mean atmospheric ozone. That’s where the ozone is. Do you know how that ozone is created?
CALLER: Uh, no. Go ahead.
RUSH: The sun manufactures it, interacting with other elements in the atmosphere.
CALLER: Right, with oxygen and creates O3. Right.
RUSH: Right. So, let’s assume that President Bush wanted all Democrats to get skin cancer.
CALLER: (laughs)
RUSH: So he orders the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, to destroy the ozone layer.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: We couldn’t do it if we wanted to.
CALLER: If he did, it wouldn’t just give the Democrats skin cancer. It would give us all skin cancer.
RUSH: Exactly. But the point is, we couldn’t do it!
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: We couldn’t destroy the ozone layer. We’d have to put out the sun. We would have to find a way to send fire trucks to the sun and put it out.
CALLER: Then what was the point of Reagan signing the Montreal protocol ending CFC productions, or restricting it at least?
RUSH: It’s all irrelevant to me. The ozone hole closes. When is the last time you heard the ozone hole as a big issue?
CALLER: No, that’s why I’m asking you.
RUSH: It’s been years, and all we’ve done is drive more cars, burn more fuel. We cool and do these sorts of things. The other day, some environmentalist group came out and said, “It’s too late. No matter what we do, we cannot solve and stop global warming. It’s too late now.” Well, my reaction to that is, if there’s nothing we can do to stop it, then there’s no way we could have caused it.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: Because if we caused it, we simply stopped what we’re doing to cause it, and they say it’s too late.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: These are just fear-mongering people who are on the left who are turning this whole issue into a political issue. You have this astronaut, Eileen Collins, and she’s flying all over the world in the space shuttle. She looks down and she sees what she thinks is destruction. I think she saw development. You know, if you didn’t know better, drive by a plot of land where it’s all plowed up and torn up and they’re getting ready to build a subdivision of homes there. You would think, “My God, what came along and destroyed this,” if you didn’t know it, if you had no clue what had come along, if you didn’t know that bulldozers had come in and plowed that land and dug it up in preparation for laying sewer lines and all that, to build a subdivision, you would think, “My God, we’re going to hell in a hand basket.”
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: By the same token when you’re flying over the earth — and I do this all the time — and you see rivers and streams after heavy rain, they’re always brown. The Mississippi River is brown as it can be after a heavy rain. The idea that rivers and streams are blue these days is a figment of people’s imagination based on artwork. They’re not. Swimming pools are blue, and the ocean is blue, if you have a blue sky. You ever seen the ocean when it’s overcast? It looks gray and green and dank and all that.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: It looks entirely different. It doesn’t mean it’s any dirtier that day than when the sun’s out and the sky is clear. But the reason this appeals to you is because nobody wants to destroy the planet, because it sustains us, and so people come along and say, ‘All these cars and all these barbecue pits and all, why, they have to be having an effect,” and your common sense says to you, when you couple it with your emotion, “Yeah, well, I think I’ll cut back,” and so you think everybody should cut back and in so doing you’re protecting the environment. My contention is that human beings living their lives, technologically advanced and improved at all times, in this country and around the world in democracies, are cleaning up their messes as fast as we make them. In fact, just the other day — what are we to make of this, Whitney? Some congressman or representative in northern California said, “You know what? It’s not automobiles that has been causing smog. It’s cow flatulence.”
CALLER: Ha ha ha.
RUSH: Did you hear about that?
CALLER: No, and California is its own country as far as that. I mean, I don’t even listen to anything that comes out of California. (laughing)
RUSH: Okay, well then why do you listen to what the environmentalists say?
CALLER: Well, again, Roanoke, Virginia, we live, it’s just streams and rivers and lakes everywhere.
RUSH: Yeah?
CALLER: I live near a paper plant.
RUSH: Yeah?
CALLER: It’s on the Jackson River, and if you want to fish, you’ve got to fish above the plant. If you fish below the plant, there are no fish.
RUSH: But there are fish if you go above it, right?
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: Okay so, the fish are smart enough to go where they can survive.
CALLER: That’s true. Wouldn’t you think there’s something about the plant that’s killing the fish?
RUSH: Uh, no.
CALLER: No, really?
RUSH: No. Are they finding a bunch of dead fish floating in the river?
CALLER: No, they just don’t live there. They’ve moved away. Well, there’s carp. You’re not going to eat that.
RUSH: (sigh)
CALLER: I guess you could.
RUSH: If there’s rampant fish dead — I keep hearing this — I want to see the bodies. I do!
CALLER: (laughs)
RUSH: I do. Look it. I’m just telling you: I don’t believe liberals, Whitney, and you shouldn’t, either, whether they’re talking about the economy, whether they’re talking about abortion, or they’re talking about Judge Roberts or they’re talking about the environment, because it’s all aimed as advancing a liberal agenda, which is largely an anti-capitalist agenda, a big-government agenda, and they want people to be as concerned about it as they can be because you’ll give up some of your freedoms in order to protect the environment. When you give up your freedoms, government gets the freedoms that you had.
CALLER: But these companies that invent things to clean up the environment. I mean, that’s a capitalist endeavor. I’m sure they make a fortune, making, you know…
RUSH: So? So?
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: So what’s wrong with that? They’re cleaning it up.
CALLER: That’s great. I don’t see how it’s anti-capitalism if a new company comes along with a new idea and makes a load of money off of it.
RUSH: Well because listen to what they say is the reason. They’re blaming the United States for all this pollution!
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: Look at the Kyoto protocol. China is the bigger polluter than the US could ever hope to be. They’re exempt from the Kyoto protocol.
CALLER: Which is ridiculous.
RUSH: Well, of course. The Kyoto protocol is nothing more than the world’s attempts to get its hands into our back pocket —
CALLER: Right. And I agree with that totally.
RUSH: — and to force us to be less competitive and less advanced economically so as to level the playing field. We are the world’s superpower. They’re coming after us every which way they can, wanting our money with their hands in our back pacts or what have you. Look, I don’t want to get sidetracked here. Let me give you my fundamental reason for this. Politics aside.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: And I’m just going to get as personal as I can with you.
CALLER: Appeal to my emotion, Rush.
RUSH: Pardon? No, I’m not going to appeal to your emotion.
CALLER: All right.
RUSH: Well, I don’t know where I’m going to appeal to.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: I’m just going to tell you why I don’t believe this stuff.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: I believe in Creation.
CALLER: Mmm-hmm.
RUSH: I believe in God.
CALLER: Mmm-hmm.
RUSH: I believe that the idea that human beings have the ability to destroy what we couldn’t create if we had to. No human being. Start from scratch. We can’t even explain the existence of the earth, scientifically. We’ve got to go back to something called the Big Bang, and then we’ve got to try to make guesses as to we were all spermazoid, promozoics. We came out of the ocean. We walked four legs and two legs, but nobody really knows for sure. We have these theories. There were the other day some theory was just debunked big time and I don’t remember off the top of my head what it is, but the idea if you look at this planet and you look at all the changes this planet has undergone that we can document historical for thousands of years, the forces that cause change on this planet dwarf the combined efforts of all human beings today. We couldn’t any more move a continent. We couldn’t any more destroy a mountain. We couldn’t any more drain an ocean. We couldn’t any more destroy ozone. We couldn’t any more raise the temperature if we were freezing to death. We couldn’t steer a hurricane away from where it’s headed. We can’t stop a thunderstorm. We can’t make a clear sky rain. We can’t do one thing climatologically that we wish we could do when we’re faced with disaster or when we’re faced with drought. We can’t make it stop raining. We can’t cause it to rain. We can’t raise the sea level. We can’t drain a river. We can’t fill a river. We can’t create the water out of nothing that will fill a river that used to run robustly and now is dried up for other economic reasons or evolutionary reasons. We can’t do any of these things. We don’t have the capacity. We don’t have the wherewithal. We don’t have the knowledge. We don’t have the equipment. We’re basically a bunch of passengers along for the ride on this planet. The idea that we can destroy this is simply above my ability to comprehend. Look at how Eileen Collins, the shuttle astronaut, spoke of how “thin” the atmosphere is.
CALLER: Ha ha ha. I know.
RUSH: No, she’s got a good point.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: “Look at how thin that atmosphere is.” Compared to the planet itself, it is really thin. You go up above 15,000 feet you can’t breathe without oxygen tanks.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: That’s barely three miles.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: Three miles three miles in the middle of the universe sustains us, right?
CALLER: That’s right.
RUSH: It’s been around for how many hundreds of thousands of years? How many volcanoes have belched pollution into it, how many jet planes have been flying around? and yet we’re just as sustained as ever. Back in 1979 Paul Ehrlich wrote a book, “Once we get to two billion, three billion people on the planet, there won’t be enough food. We’ll all starve.”
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: We’ve got six billion people on the planet, and we’re still feeding them.
CALLER: (garbled)
RUSH: Well, but it’s not the fault of the planet, and it’s not our fault.
CALLER: Right, right.
RUSH: It’s the fault of local governments who don’t give the people the freedom to live in a capitalistic free market economy.
CALLER: I agree.
RUSH: But the nations of the world that do produce food are able to provide aid when it’s necessary, are they not?
CALLER: That’s true.
RUSH: Absolutely. The only thing gets in the way is the warlords who steal the food that we give.
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: And of course the rock stars who think they’re doing something by singing a bunch of songs on a weekend. But my point is —
CALLER: Easy for them, they’re millionaires.
RUSH: Take a look at this. We orbit around the sun. We are roughly ninety-three million miles away from this sun.
CALLER: Mmm-hmm.
RUSH: If we were ninety-five million miles away from it, we wouldn’t exist. It would be too cold.
CALLER: It’s pretty delicate.
RUSH: If we were 90 million miles away from it, we would be boiling and we would never exist. The precision with which this planet functions and operates within its own solar system around its sun and not one thing — we couldn’t affect this orbit if we wanted to. If we were getting too close to the sun, there’s nothing we could do to stop it. It is so precise. I hear all these people talk about, “There have to be other places in the universe with life.” I’m not so sure, because you take a look at the size of the universe and look at the earth as relationship to the sun, within that context. We can’t even measure how small this precision is that. If we were just off, if our planet was just off a couple of million miles in the relationship to the whole universe is nothing. I mean, it’s literally zero, statistically zero, and yet for this to be recreated somewhere in the universe, the odds of this — and I heard a NASA scientist say this. The odds of the life producing conditions that are so precisely met on this planet with its atmosphere and all of its ecosystems that produce the necessities for life and the sun, to find this duplicated somewhere is going to be pretty statistically difficult. I just don’t believe that we have the ability to destroy the earth. Damage? Yes. Can we fix the damage? Yes. But can we stop the cycles that are going to happen regardless, the heating and the cooling and the climate and the weather? No we can’t. We’re not responsible for destroying the ozone because we can’t create it if we did and yet the ozone hole closes. How do you explain this? You explain it by telling people…. Well, you can’t explain it. The environmentalists will say, “Well, it’s a natural phenomenon but the whole wouldn’t exist at all if it weren’t for us,” and then we had stories years ago about how islands were sinking so fast in the sea because the ozone hole and people getting skin cancer. You don’t see those stories anymore. You saw them once or twice and that was it. They’re trying to gin up a bunch of fear, and they’re trying to get to people and make them afraid — and, by the way, when it gets to a hundred degrees in the summertime, what’s the first thing people think? Oh, global warming!
CALLER: (laughs)
RUSH: That’s how subtle and seductive it’s all been. I’m just trying to tell you I don’t buy any of this notion that we are causing it because we couldn’t if we wanted to.
CALLER: Well, then how does the public who wishes to be informed, like myself, on environmental facts, which scientists do I listen to and which do I dismiss?
RUSH: Common sense. Common sense! Of course you can (sigh). Look, this will go on forever.
CALLER: I know, sorry.
RUSH: No, but you could certainly engage in some destructive things, but do you destroy the ability of man to survive? No. But I mean there’s damage done to the planet… To use this kind of thinking that is seductive, we should never have built the first house in this country because something got destroyed to do it, something necessary to prolong life.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: They didn’t want us cutting down trees now. Of course beautiful things happen when you do cut them down. You get baseball bats, you get houses, all kinds of things — and trees are a renewable resource. Common sense much the common sense, and don’t forget that the people who try to make you feel guilty are a bunch of liberals and if you keep that in mind you’ll have a healthy skepticism about what they say.
CALLER: That’s what I wanted. That’s why I called, for you to elucidate this subject for me. I feel better informed now.
RUSH: I’m happy to have helped. I’m a little long in this segment, folks. I deeply apologize, but I as host considered it to be worthwhile.
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