The following editorial posted here at National Review Online, but it is written by two gentlemen from the Competitive Enterprise Institute so I am using the link from their website. There are several major ideological battles which need political decisions and how humans interact with the environment is one of these core issues. Government policies make real world differences, therefore, they need to be based on valid science and not emotional reaction. "We are approaching a half century of amassing detailed photos of the Earth's surface viewed from the heavens." There are no secrets on the surface of the world.
Spaceship Earth: An Astronaut is up above the Clouds: NASA, the EPA, and the Greens have been trying desperately to turn the space program into an Earth observation program—the Mission to Planet Earth—for almost 20 years, to justify perpetual funding as part of the nation's and world's environmental protection mission.”To sum up, wind, rain, storms and erosion are natural processes on a dynamic planet and mankind is doing the most damage is in areas without a property based free market alternative to the exploitation of common areas. The environmental socialists see an opportunity in the infrastructure of the existing space program and all the tax dollars used to finance people flying around in low orbits. Private enterprise has demonstrated you don’t need tax dollars to place functioning satellites into Earth orbit and it is time to decide if America can afford the perpetual funding of these near Earth missions.
The nonsense is that everything evaluated is done so simply in area extent. The desert is larger! And so man or development is evil. They never look at causes or incentives: Why do the tropical forests continue to decline? Does NASA or the White House science adviser ever suggest any institutional factors? No one owns the forests and people in many of those forested countries live in dire poverty in nations with no free-market economies, no jobs, no food.
As for Eileen Collins’s comments themselves, a moment’s thought reveals them for the platitudinous claptrap we have come to expect from people who don’t know all that much about Spaceship Earth. She has seen “widespread environmental damage,” whatever that may be. “Sometimes you can see how there is erosion.” Huh? That is one of the most fundamental and basic processes on the planet. There is uplift and there is erosion—the two big players in the geological game. What are wind and rain and freezing and thawing supposed to do besides erode?
