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| The Really Inconvenient Truths: Seven Environmental Catastrophes Liberals Don't Want You to Know About--Because They Helped Cause Them | 
 enlarge | Author: Iain Murray
Publisher: Regnery Publishing
Category: Book
List Price: $27.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  (24 reviews)
Sales Rank: 8699
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 354
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.4
ISBN: 1596980540
Dewey Decimal Number: 363.7
EAN: 9781596980549
ASIN: 1596980540
Publication Date: April 22, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Iain Murray's rollicking exposA reveals how environmental blowhards waste more energy, endanger more species, and actually kill more people than the environmental villains they finger.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 19 more reviews...
 A valuable, eye-opening contribution to the environmental debate November 14, 2008
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
Murray's work, "The Really Inconvenient Truths: Seven Environmental Catastrophes Liberals Don't Want You to Know About--Because They Helped Cause Them", does a superb job of revealing the deep interplay of politics in the environmental debate. Murray illustrates, through sources readily available but often bypassed by mainstream media, how environmentalists distort the truths they purport to represent, and how politics guides which causes they select to represent or ignore. My eyes were opened reading about documented genetic damage caused by hormones flushed into the water supply via millions of birth control pills. The media silence on that issue is scandalous, but unsurprising given the implications of a genuine investigation into the problem.
Murray shows methodically how politicians subverted genuine experts with policies disguised as public-interest management that, while achieving political aims, also resulted in a river set on fire, national parks transformed into tinderboxes and lakes dried into deserts. When the consequences arrived, Murray shows these same politicians (and their allied "environmental groups") manipulated public opinion to twist responsibility onto industry -- often industry whose practices were dictated by the politicians' "public interest" policies.
It's a pity Murray didn't include Love Canal in his work. The granddaddy of the Environmental Superfund is a textbook rendition of how state officials, pursuing naked political ambition, overran the safety efforts of a chemical company, then blamed their own disaster on the company that tried to stop them. Perhaps Murray will get to that in volume 2. Until then, this work will have you running from every giant "Green" government initiative, clutching desperately to your wallet, while seeing state "protection" policies in a new, more realistic light.
Good arguments October 6, 2008
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
This is an outstanding read for a technical person. Sums things up well. Sometimes was a little repetitive but when your finished the info is in your head.
 The Really Inconvenient Truths: Seven Environmental Catastrophes Liberals Don't Want You to Know About--Because They Helped Caus September 10, 2008
5 out of 10 found this review helpful
I found this book brings balance to the whole Global Warming debate.
The facts and arguments presented in the book are not often, if at all, mentioned in the main stream press.
It is compelling reading for anyone wanting to fully understand the complete truth on this very important subject.
It exposes some of the hypocrisy and flawed science behind the push on Global Warming, (now called climate change)
 the really inconvenient truths August 10, 2008
5 out of 9 found this review helpful
The Author makes very sound arguments as to the underlying reasons liberals have such an intense disdain for anything that is contrary to their position. When real truth is held up and given a fair stage onto which to expound its arguments, honest logic prevails. After all real truth is meant to set us free, and any censorship of that or intentional manipulation of such should sour any reader association to that element. The author has done us all a great service by letting us have a peek at what really motivates the liberal mentality
Jeanne
From a former environmentalist teacher, now a conservationist steward August 9, 2008
13 out of 18 found this review helpful
I once proudly called myself an environmentalist. Now I am a conservationist and a steward.
I believe some wild spaces should be saved. I recycle (A lot!). I coordinate my school's paper recycling program. I own several of those little flourescent bulbs and I use them every day. I don't spray chemicals all over my yard. I don't dump motor oil down the drain. I pick up garbage when I walk the dog. I go camping. I go to the Earth Day celebration in downtown Indianapolis because it's a great place to get information on clean-up events and they give away free trees! I also love it when they assume that I must be an ultra-liberal just to be there!
Now that I've said all of this, let me say that I am not an environmentalist. I used to be. Way back when, when I first started teaching, I showed movies to my kids in world geography that said the world as we know it is going to end by the year 2000. Mass flooding, all of the fish dead, mass starvation, etc. They were older versions of the "Inconvenient Truth" that featured Hollywood stars and quoted heavily from Gore's "Earth in the Balance".
I am now embarrassed by all of that.
Why? Because I fell for the hype and did not do simple things like check sources and see if what I was being told was backed up by other testimony. Sometimes, simple facts get in the way (like Ehrlich's "Population Bomb" book predictions never quite came true, like those predictions in the videos I showed to my class) and make it hard to follow that line of reasoning any longer.
So, what are the 7 environmental catastrophes:
1. DDT & Malaria in Africa
2. Ethanol as fuel
3. The "Pill" and its effect on fish downstream from water treatment plants.
4. The burning of Yellowstone and other National lands
5. The Cuyahoga River burning
6. The Endangered Species Act "Shoot, Shovel and Shut up!"
7. The Aral Sea
Positives:
This book is extremely well-written and approachable. It is also well-documented with more than 300 footnotes.
His commentary on DDT & Malaria is not only well thought out, but correctly placed as the first disaster since it causes around 1 Million deaths per year. He does not deny that DDT can have an affect on large birds, but he points out that it was not the use of DDT that caused it, but rather the mis-use of it. DDT is effective in small doses and does not need multiple applications to control bug populations. The multiple applications is a mis-use that makes it dangerous for birds (although it begs the question: Is any bird species worth 1 million lives every year - we are now up to nearly 40 million dead due to malaria carried by mosquitos). It does not cause human birth defects as Rachel "Silent Spring" Carson suggested. He skewers her research. Why it is still held up with pride as the start of the modern environmental movement is a mystery to me.
His commentary on Al Gore (do as I say, not as I do) and what he characterizes as the Church of Eco-Paganism are brilliant. He builds on Michael Crichton's commentary along the same lines and calls it a form of eco-Lutheranism (not to insult Lutherans - I am one and thought it was brilliant) since it is based on "Not one works, but on Faith alone," which is why the high priest of the movement, Al Gore, can use more than 20 times the electricity of the average Tennessean, own 2 more homes and jet around the world while telling us to cut back - he has the Faith!
The commentary on the Endangered Species Act was strong and largely built on an essay by the author of Freakonomics [Revised and Expanded]: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, Steven D. Levitt. It studies the unintended consequences of the Endangered Species Act in which some people kill endangered species or destroy their habitats so they don't lose their property rights to a series of federal mandates.
Negatives:
His commentary on ethanol is strong, but goes overboard. His math sometimes does not make sense. He claims (correctly, I'm pretty sure) that all of the gasoline must be 10% ethanol. A few pages later he notes that if this were to happen an extra 55 million acres of corn would have to be planted. Well, we're already doing it. He also cites sources that claim we'd have to clear cut forests to plant all of this corn. I live in the cornbelt (Indiana) and I grew up on the farm. Every farmer has fields that are devoted to hay, straw or pastureland that will be converted to fields before we start clearing forests. Plus, increased yields (an achievement Murray points out in this chapter) will make up some of the difference as well.
The Aral Sea disaster (it was drained to provide water to meet Soviet cotton crop targets) is awful, but can only loosely be placed at the feet of environmentalists. He cites it as an example of poor choices of central planning and a cautionary tale to central planning schemes like Kyoto or carbon credits, but this is a loose association at best.
So, in sum, this is a pleasure to read. Well-cited, but not a perfect book.
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