You might have noticed that Al Gore has recently been saying some very immodest things about anyone who dares to disagree with his views. Of course, when someone like Mr. Gore says things like that, it tells us more about his views than about those of his opponents.

And what is the real agenda of Mr. Gore and his fellow-traveling greenshirts?

If you want to find all of that scary information in one place, read “Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do To Stop Them,” by Steve Milloy.

More below the fold.

Mr. Milloy is the founder and publisher of the web site JunkScience.com, and so has been in the forefront of observing the greens and their wide-ranging efforts to get their tentacles into every facet, nook, and cranny of your life.

And as Mr. Milloy notes, that agenda is frighteningly ambitious; it intends to force us all into rationing of just about everything (electricity, water, food – even health and safety, and births), the forced-downsizing of our lifestyles, massive social re-engineering, and the altering of business in both its methods and its outcomes. None of this is supposition or extrapolation; Mr. Milloy has compiled the pillars of this green-dystopian nightmare from the greens’ own statements.

The green agenda is just the most recent recycling of a deeply misanthropic agenda – and the greens have adopted – from whole cloth – much of the prior agenda items of earlier misanthropes.

In the world of energy, the greens profess hatred of all carbon-based forms of energy – and want to end the use of oil, coal, natural gas, etc. as soon as possible as an act of moral hygiene. However, the green energy agenda – like communism – is fatally-flawed with a large number of irreconcilable contradictions; these contradictions end up amounting to trying to prevent everything.

Mr. Milloy trenchantly observes that the greens are all for wind and solar power – until plans to actually build such facilities threaten (in the case of wind) to mar the view and kill birds, or require (as in the case of solar) that vast regions of fragile desert be carpeted with paneling. Similarly, greens loved biofuels until efforts were made at large-scale production – which diverted food to fuel, caused food shortages and sharply higher prices, and induced destabilization in the developing world. In a similar way, greens were for hydro power before they were against it; when this carbon-free method of generating electricity was “discovered” (by greens) to involve the flooding of large areas for reservoirs and such, the greens turned against hydro.

The greens’ pathological hatred of motor vehicles remains as virulent as ever. One of the latest green-coercion plans is the wish to require mileage metering in all vehicles, so that drivers can be taxed based on how many miles they drive – and if necessary regulated to “permitted mileages” and punished for exceeding mileage quotas.

Mr. Milloy describes the bizarre jihad against bottled water (a new green fetish), and the green schizophrenia about farming; in the latter case, greens can’t decide if farming is good (the farmer is a “little guy”) or bad (farms use chemicals, and produce both run-off and greenhouse gases). This is an extension of the extremely destructive and long-running campaign against DDT – even though we know from good studies that DDT can be used very well in small, targeted doses, and was never nearly as dangerous as the late Rachel Carson implied. The green insistence on allowing no DDT use whatsoever is costing thousands of lives (mostly of children) every year.

In a similar notion, the greens will soon (2012) have succeeded in forcing the elimination (in the United States) of Edison’s marvelous incandescent light bulb – to be replaced by the ugly and dangerous compact fluorescent (CFL) bulbs. Not only do these bulbs give off a fatiguing and flickering light; they contain mercury (an element that was diligently sidelined in recent years), and breaking one causes your house to become unsafe and contaminated – requiring a very expensive environmental clean-up.

As Mr. Milloy, notes, perhaps the most disturbing thing about the greens is their furious efforts to silence any all dissenters – not just via “social pressure,” but also via repeated calls for criminal prosecutions of those who dare to as much as disagree in word.

One example of the bluntness of the green agenda is summed up by this story from Germany:

In a typical example of voluntary participation giving way to compulsory green living, the town council of Marburg, Germany in June 2008 moved from mere encouragement of solar panels on homes to a first-of-its-kind mandate. New homes and those with renovated roofs or heating systems must install solar panels or face a $1,500 fine. Although the mandate had one local politician accusing the town council of operating as a “green dictatorship,” the local greens were unfazed. “What they are doing in Marburg is good and progressive, and we, and other cities, need to move forward with similar initiatives as well,” a Green Party member declared.

Apparently, old habits die hard in Germany – and are now being reborn in the service of a new master.

Of course, this is where Mr. Gore has his analogies correct – but he has them pointed in the opposite direction of the truth. And – surprise – none of these things apply to Mr. Gore and the rest of the green elite, who are free to consume massive amounts of energy in the service of forcing the rest of us to live in caves; Mr. Gore’s Nashville mansion notoriously consumes twenty-five times the electricity that is consumed by a typical American household.

Not surprisingly, the demands of the green elite for more and more coercive control extends far beyond individual countries – since the greens are fully aware that inter-jurisdictional competition is a powerful counter-weapon, making that something that they must eliminate. Thus, the green elite demands global “governance” mechanisms that will allow them to force their agenda onto everyone, everywhere – so that no one can keep themselves outside of the “system” and profit from the folly of others.

One problem that this book faces is that events have been moving so quickly; it came out earlier this year when the “Obama glow” was still strong and the potential for a big, successful green push was real. Realities may have rendered that possibility less likely, since (among other things) the science, economics, and politics are all now running against the green agenda; the world (if anything) is cooling, the world’s economies are in crisis, the absurd cost of the green agenda can no longer be fudged or hidden – and China and India have made it perfectly clear that they have no intention of joining what amount to economic suicide pacts.

After leading us through a long and frightening litany, Mr. Milloy devotes the final chapter to what may end up mattering more than anything – fighting back, and winning. Some of this involves direct activism – such as having a plane pulling an anti-Gore banner buzz Giants’ Stadium during a concert address by Al Gore back in July 2007 (a Milloy-instigated effort that he proudly calls “The first pro-free-market air raid in history”). But much of this will simply require persistence – and an unwillingness to be rolled by outright green aggression.

Mr. Milloy’s book is well-written, and is easy to read. As a compendium of the multiple spearheads of green aggression, it is a recommended read.

---

I was in Washington back in June, and Mr. Milloy graciously agreed to sit down for an interview about “Green Hell” and related topics. That interview will be presented a little later as “Part II.”