Rush Limbaugh on Environment Conservative Talk-show Host

Climate change is a hoax

Environmentalists work by mandates for open space

RUSH: How old are you?

CALLER: I'm 12.

RUSH: Who was this speaker?

CALLER: He was from an organization called Greening Detroit. And he said that they're blowing up mountains and polluting water and killing wildlife.

RUSH: Wow. The rich mine owners are doing this in order to get coal?

CALLER: Yes. His alternatives were windmills and electric cars. [Commercial break]

RUSH: I looked up this outfit. The Greening of Detroit [works] to mandate that neighborhood groups, churches, and schools do everything their way to improve the so-called ecosystem in Detroit through tree planting projects, environmental mandates, urban mandates, open space mandates, and workforce development mandates. By the way, they didn't put "mandate" in there; I did. I just want to tell you the truth about what these people do.

FactCheck: No, forest acreage is not higher than ever

To condemn the environmental movement, Limbaugh wrote, "Do you know we have more acreage of forest land in the US today than we did at the time the Constitution was written?" FAIR noted: "In what are now the 50 US states, there were 850 million acres of forest land in the late 1700s vs. only 730 million acres today." Limbaugh tried to refute this be declaring, "In 1952, the US had 664 million acres of forest land. In 1987 the number had climbed to 731 million acres." But that reflects, in part, the success of the environmental movement in preventing deforestation. More important, such numbers have nothing to do with Limbaugh's original false claim about America in 1787.

Let’s count all the disproven environmental myths

On no issue has the evidence of my foresight and keen political instincts been more compelling than that of the environment. Come, let us count the ways:
• Despite the hysterics of a few pseudo-scientists, there is no reason to believe in global warming
• Mankind is not responsible for depleting the ozone layer
• The Earth’s ecosystem is not fragile, and humans are not capable of destroying it
• The real enemies of the radical environmental leadership are capitalism & the American way of life
• There are more acres of forest land in America today than in 1492
• Less-developed cultures are not kinder to nature than technologically sophisticated civilizations. The reverse more often is true
• Big-government regulation is not the best way to protect the environment
• Many environmental groups have adopted their cause with all the enthusiasm of a religious crusade, abandoning reason and accepting many faulty premises on faith
• Mankind is part of nature and not necessarily the enemy.

Animals have no fundamental rights; only people do

Animals often treat each other with no respect, and they have no redress, absent human intervention on their behalf. Regardless of that, I believe that if people use animals to achieve their goals, they must do so responsibly, so that we don’t eliminate any species from the planet. That would be wantonly stupid and selfish.

Animal rights movement is secular humanism vs. Bible

The Bible teaches that God created man in His own image and that He gave him dominion over animals and nature. God did not create animals in His own image. Even if you reject the Bible as the Word of God-even if you believe in evolution and disbelieve in creation-you must still admit that man is the only earthly creature capable of rational thought.

Human beings are the primary species on this planet. Animals and everything else are subspecies whose position is subordinate to that of humans. Humans have a responsibility toward lower species and must treat them humanely. Humanely. Why not treat them animally? Because that would mean killing them.

Economic growth is key to environmental cleanup

The key to cleaning up the environment is unfettered free enterprise, our system of reward. The more economic growth we have, the more a prosperous people will demand a cleaner environment. The poor have other things to worry about.

One of Rush’s Unalterable Laws is that man and the environment can live together in harmony. Capitalism is good for people AND for other living things. Take trees, for example. We have more trees in this country today than when the Declaration of Independence was written. Today, we put out a lot of fires that used to burn areas the size of Connecticut, and private companies are planting millions of trees on their own land and carefully harvesting them.

Gaia worship is religion of secular environmentalists

Many of these people have replaced religion with secular environmentalism. Some of them worship the earth goddess Gaia. Their gatherings take on the air of religious revival meetings.

There are two groups of people that have made environmentalism their new home: socialists and enviro-religious fanatics. With the collapse of Marxism, environmentalism has become the new refuge of socialist thinking. And the second group are the people who believe it is a religion; that God is the earth and that God is nothing more than the earth. Actually, it is a modern form of pantheism, where nature is divine. This group wants to preserve the earth at all costs. They want to roll us back, maybe not to the Stone Age, but at least to the horse-and-buggy era.

Priority on people, not on spotted owls

So I have the environmentalist in a corner: “So it is not the responsibility of the mouse to adapt to the potential threat of the owl?” “Oh yeah, man, but that’s nature.” Well, there you have it, I told him. If the owl can’t adapt to the superiority of humans, screw it. If a spotted owl can’t adapt, does the earth really need that particular species so much that hardship to human beings is worth enduring in the process of saving it? Thousands of species that roamed the earth are now extinct.

Of course, we do care about owls. Why isn’t it possible for both of us to coexist in harmony? There’s no reason to put the timber business out of commission just because of 2,200 pairs of one kind of owl [at the expense of] 30,000 jobs. That’s the wrong set of priorities.