RUSH: To Melrose Park, Pennsylvania, this is Mark. I’m glad you called, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Mega dittos from ice-bound southeastern Pennsylvania.
RUSH: Well, thank you, sir, very much.
CALLER: Rush, I wanted to remind your audience that we just passed a very important anniversary. Your website has an Algore doomsday clock that’s been counting down a prediction of his that we had ten years left to save the planet from a scorching, and last week we reached the halfway point on that countdown.
RUSH: That is exactly right. I was afraid you were gonna tell me we’ve gone all ten years. Ha-ha-ha.
CALLER: No, no, no, no.
RUSH: (laughing) And I had missed it. So we’re halfway through the Algore ten-year doom prediction?
CALLER: That’s right.
RUSH: Save the planet from a scorching ending?
CALLER: Right. You know, back in the ’60s and ’70s your show wasn’t around to monitor the claims of the likes of Paul Ehrlich and Rachel Carson, because, as you were saying earlier in the show today, the left has lost its ability to hide.
RUSH: They really have, but they continue to act as though there is no counter-media to them, which in one way is beneficial. It demonstrates their arrogance, and it allows all of their beliefs to be destroyed, certainly a lot of holes to be poked through them. You talk about Rachel Carson, my gosh, DDT. I mean how many people have died because of that woman?
CALLER: Yeah, I know.
RUSH: Fifty million people have died because of Rachel Carson and DDT. I mean these people are absolutely totally irresponsible, and it’s always irritated me that they are the ones who somehow get all of this credit for compassion.
CALLER: Yeah. You know, Ronald Reagan used to have a five-minute radio show, and I bought a book called In His Own Words or something like that that basically was a transcript of those five-minute little blurbs. And Reagan back in those days before he was governor was pointing out the increase in malaria caused by the elimination of DDT. I mean he was way out in front of that.
RUSH: Yeah. Well, he was way out in front of a lot of things. Paul Ehrlich, I’ll tell you who did Paul Ehrlich in. When did his book come out? Well, it came out when I was in Pittsburgh. I was there from ’71 through ’75. The book came out then, and I remember I worked for a bunch of people who, at the time it didn’t register, I mean a bunch of pinkies and they’re touting this book at me and a bunch of stuff like it, and I looked at it and I read it, ah, ho-hum. I’ve never bought into apocalyptic anything. I could really get in trouble if I told you what I thought of The Book of Revelation, which I won’t. But nevertheless it was a guy named Julian Simon who was a well-known scientist in Maryland who made a bet with Ehrlich. He chose some minerals like copper, some commodities, and he said, ‘I’ll bet you in ten years they’re more plentiful and they’re cheaper.’ And Ehrlich took the bet and lost every one of them. Everything that Julian Simon bet him on, Ehrlich lost. He, to this day, remains a guru. He has yet to be right about anything. Ehrlich, in the ’70s wrote that by the year 2000 the world would not be able to sustain the population that it had, and that was the name of the stupid book, The Population Bomb.
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RUSH: Okay, here’s a place I’m unfamiliar with. I don’t think I’ve heard about this. It’s in North Carolina, Kannapolis, is that right? Kannapolis, North Carolina. Is this Gary?
CALLER: This is Gary. It’s Kannapolis.
RUSH: Kannapolis.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: Kannapolis. See, there’s two N’s in it.
CALLER: Twenty miles out of Charlotte.
RUSH: Okay. What’s up?
CALLER: In 1816 there was no summer. A volcano in Indonesia called Mount Tambora erupted after two others had.
RUSH: Yeah?
CALLER: And their ash went up and obscured the world, and it cooled the whole temperature. In New England there was snow in early June, during the months of July, August, and September, nighttime temperatures dipped and frost occurred on several occasions.
RUSH: If there were environmentalist wackos back then, what would they have said about that, Gary?
CALLER: It’s hard telling. Back then it would probably been demons.
RUSH: No. What they would have said was, ‘This is just temporary. This gives us no respite. It is a godsend and an illustration of what we must do.’ And we’d talk about how the eruption of the volcano and all of the stuff up there is incremental compared to what man will do in the future. They’d find a way to be as hypocritical and inconsistent as they could. Mt. Pinatubo alone, that eruption in the Philippines, somebody calculated the total gunk that came out of that volcano is by a factor of far more than the total amount of gunk that Americans have put in the atmosphere in every combined way we can. And the point was we don’t have the power, we don’t have anywhere near the power the environmentalists assign to us to have any impact on this climate whatsoever, zilch, zero, nada. All it takes is one average volcanic eruption to illustrate this. But people are vain.
The human being is an amazing creature. On the one hand, we’ll tell ourselves we’re no different than a rat or a tree, the animal rights people tell us that. On the other hand we look at ourselves and claim that we have the ability to destroy all of this. We’re just a confused bunch of people, led occasionally by a bunch of real sickos. But because everybody wants to matter — this is really what it boils down to — everybody wants their life to have meaning. They want to matter. That’s why a certain segment of our population will do anything to be on Jerry Springer. That’s why they’ll vomit every bit of information about themselves on My Butt, the website, whatever it is. This clamoring for fame, have everybody know who they are, they want meaning. So when somebody comes along and says you can save the planet, how much more meaning could your life have? Not only do you do what you’re told you have to do, you become an evangel for it. You start getting everybody else to do the same thing. Then you get a job as an actor, or vice-versa.