George Will and Ayn Rand on Environmentalism

I have posted a reply to George Will’s excellent column, “The United States’ New Pre-Emptive War.” Although there is one sentence about abortion rights that I would argue with, in the rest of the essay Mr.Will eloquently and accurately analyzes environmentalism, with reference to declaring polar bears “endangered” based on “future global warming,” and quotations from Nigel Lawson.

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/GeorgeWill/2008/05/22/the_united_states_new_pre-emptive_war

Here is my comment:

Ayn Rand Foresaw This Outcome

Almost four decades ago, Ayn Rand predicted that leftist environmentalists would seek to justify all-encompassing regulations, as George Will accurately describes above. She wrote in her essay “The Anti-Industrial Revolution”: “The immediate goal is obvious: the destruction of the remnants of capitalism in today’s mixed economy, and the establishment of a global dictatorship. This goal does not have to be inferred —- many speeches and books on the subject state explicitly that the ecological crusade is a means to that end.” (From “Return of the Primitive”)