Last Wednesday, Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney screened their new documentary Not Evil Just Wrong: The True Cost of Global Warming Hysteria. This feature-length documentary takes on the claims made in Al Gore’s alarmist documentary An Inconvenient Truth, a film that was determined by a British High Court judge to contain at least nine significant errors.
 
The film shows the other side of the scientific debate, the side that doesn’t exist according to the global warming extremists, with people such as Dr. Patrick Moore, founding member of Greenpeace, who said in the film, “I don’t believe that there is a climate catastrophe; I don’t use the word chaos or disaster to describe the present changes in climate, which are well within natural variations that have occurred in the past history of the earth.”
 
After debunking many of the claims made by Gore and other extreme environmentalists as false, misleading, or grossly exaggerated, the film looks at the human costs of anti-global warming policies and other misguided environmentalist policies. The actions of these do-gooder greenies have led to the deaths of millions of people in developing countries do to malaria outbreaks that could have been prevented with the use of DDT. The current proposals to limit CO2 emissions will have equally devastating effects to not only Americans but to the rest of the world as well.
 
In the United States, actions such as moratoriums on coal plants and taxes on energy will increase costs for everyone, send jobs overseas, diminish our standard of living, and restrict our technological progress. These actions will hurt the poor and middle class much more than the rich, but will ultimately hurt as all. An increase in the costs of energy is going to have a much more devastating effect on a family making $50,000 per year than it will on one making $100,000. Leo Murray, a spokesman for Plane Stupid, a British group that uses non-violent protests to try to stop people from flying, said in an interview in the film, “The truth is that the measures that the science is demanding to prevent very catastrophic climate change will affect the American way. It’s not going to be painless. Al Gore is giving us the impression that we can do it and not really make much of a change to our lifestyle. It’s not true.” At least he is honest about the devastating impact the policies he advocates will have on our lives, more than I can say about his fellow global warming alarmists.
 
Environmental extremists are not content to harm only the poor and middle class in America. There policies, such as banning DDT world-wide and now trying to limit the availability to cheap electric sources like coal and oil, have resulted in millions of preventable deaths in developing countries from malaria and are dooming them to perpetual poverty. The United States used DDT heavily to eradicate malaria from the country and save the lives of millions. After Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring, however, there was a near worldwide ban on DDT. Many of the fears of DDT have been largely discredited, but millions of people died needlessly. What do the environmentalists care about some poor people in Africa as long as they can do their part for Mother Earth?
 
This same kind of knee-jerk hysteria is being practiced in the global warming scare. The environmental extremists want us to pass massive energy taxes and restrictions in a belief that the world is going to end if we don’t. Without any idea if schemes like cap and trade will have any impact of the climate, environmentalists and politicians are willing to rush forward and impose this burden on average Americans, without considering the devastating effects. This agenda is leading us down a very dangerous path that in all likelihood is more dangerous than the “disaster” they are trying to avert.