The Apocolypse Business

How do we get our money back from these people?

18 spectacularly wrong apocalyptic predictions made around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970, expect more this year

On the 30th anniversary of the first Earth Day in 1970, Ronald Bailey wrote an excellent article in the May 2000 edition of Reason Magazine titled “Earth Day, Then and Now.” In that article, Bailey noted that around the time of the first Earth Day, and in the years following, there was a “torrent of apocalyptic predictions” and many of those predictions were featured in his Reason article. Well, now that more than 40 years have passed, how accurate were those predictions around the time of the first Earth Day? Wrong, spectacularly wrong, and here are 18 examples:

1. Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”

2. “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation,” wrote Washington University biologist Barry Commoner in the Earth Day issue of the scholarly journal Environment.

3. The day after the first Earth Day, the New York Times editorial page warned, “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”

4. “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in the April 1970 Mademoiselle. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”

5. “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” wrote Paul Ehrlich in a 1969 essay titled “Eco-Catastrophe! “By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”

6. Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the 1970 Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.”

7. “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” declared Denis Hayes, the chief organizer for Earth Day, in the Spring 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness.

8. Peter Gunter, a North Texas State University professor, wrote in 1970, “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”

9. In January 1970, Life reported, “Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”

10. Ecologist Kenneth Watt told Time that, “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.”

11. Barry Commoner predicted that decaying organic pollutants would use up all of the oxygen in America’s rivers, causing freshwater fish to suffocate.

12. Paul Ehrlich chimed in, predicting in his 1970 that “air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” Ehrlich sketched a scenario in which 200,000 Americans would die in 1973 during “smog disasters” in New York and Los Angeles.

13. Paul Ehrlich warned in the May 1970 issue of Audubon that DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons “may have substantially reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945.” Ehrlich warned that Americans born since 1946…now had a life expectancy of only 49 years, and he predicted that if current patterns continued this expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980, when it might level out.

14. Ecologist Kenneth Watt declared, “By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.'”

15. Harrison Brown, a scientist at the National Academy of Sciences, published a chart in Scientific American that looked at metal reserves and estimated the humanity would totally run out of copper shortly after 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would be gone before 1990.

16. Sen. Gaylord Nelson wrote in Look that, “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”

17. In 1975, Paul Ehrlich predicted that “since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next 30 years or so, it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it.”

18. Kenneth Watt warned about a pending Ice Age in a speech. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years,” he declared. “If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”

MP: Let’s keep those spectacularly wrong predictions from the first Earth Day 1970 in mind when we’re bombarded tomorrow with media hype, and claims like this from the official Earth Day website:

The fight against climate change is at an impasse and life on Earth hangs in the balance. Help us save polar bears and other wildlife as their habitats disappear and their food sources become scarce. Like the polar bear, human life is under threat, too. Storms are becoming stronger, droughts are becoming more severe, and rising sea levels encroach on our cities. We need an active informed public to stand tall, stop and reverse climate change and protect our children’s future!

Finally, think about this question, posed by Ronald Bailey: What will Earth look like when Earth Day 60 rolls around in 2030? Bailey predicts a much cleaner, and much richer future world, with less hunger and malnutrition, less poverty, and longer life expectancy, and with lower mineral and metal prices. But he makes one final prediction about Earth Day in 2030: “There will be a disproportionately influential group of doomsters predicting that the future–and the present–never looked so bleak.” In other words, the hysteria and apocalyptic predictions will continue, promoted by the “environmental grievance hustlers.”

Cultural Marxism always needs Victimhood Classes to liberate; Gaia is always a good bet because school teachers love to promote it as "science", and children lap it up. So the parasites on environmentalism always have a good market (think about your chidren's children!!). And they never have to say they're sorry - or at least they don't. And you'll never get your money back, either.

Isoprene: Does Your Favorite Computer Model Account For ALL of It?

Scientists have discovered a hitherto unknown cooling process which may pose a serious threat to man-made global warming theory.

"According to a study by the Institute of Catalysis and Environment in Lyon (IRCELYON, CNRS / University Lyon 1) and the Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research (TROPOS), the oceans are producing unexpectedly large quantities of isoprene – a volatile organic compound (VOC) – which is known to have a cooling effect on climate.

Isoprene is a gas that is formed by both the vegetation and the oceans. It is very important for the climate because this gas can form particles that can become clouds and then later affect temperature and precipitation. Previously it was assumed that isoprene is primarily caused by biological processes from plankton in the sea water. The atmospheric chemists from France and Germany, however, could now show that isoprene could also be formed without biological sources in surface film of the oceans by sunlight and so explain the large discrepancy between field measurements and models. The new identified photochemical reaction is therefore important to improve the climate models.

The oceans not only take up heat and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, they are also sources of various gaseous compounds, thereby affecting the global climate. A key role is played by the so-called surface microlayer (SML), especially at low wind speed. In these few micrometers thin layer different organic substances such as dissolved organic matter, fat and amino acids, proteins, lipids are accumulating as well as trace metals, dust and microorganisms.

Though the cooling effects of isoprene are well known, what is new is the discovery that the oceans are producing much more of it than has been accounted for in the alarmists’ climate models. (H/T Lewis Page; The Register)

The computer models assume that the total quantity of isoprene produced by trees, plants and plankton amounts to 1.9 megatons per year. But what researchers have discovered is a process whereby isoprene is also produced in far greater quantities abiotically (ie not from plant or animal life) from the action of sunlight on chemicals in the ocean, possibly as much as 3.5 megatons more per year.

“We were able for the first time trace back the production of this important aerosol precursor to abiotic sources, so far global calculations consider only biological sources,” explains Dr. Christian George from IRCELYON.

Thus, it is now possible to estimate more closely the total amounts of isoprene, which are emitted. So far, however, local measurements indicated levels of about 0.3 megatonnes per year, global simulations of around 1.9 megatons per year. But the team of Lyon and Leipzig estimates that the newly discovered photochemical pathway alone contribute 0.2 to 3.5 megatons per year additionally and could explain the recent disagreements. “The existence of the organic films at the ocean surface due to biological activities therefore influences the exchange processes between air and sea in a unexpected strong way. The photochemical processes at this interface could be a very significant source of isoprene”, summarizes Prof. Hartmut Herrmann from TROPOS.

Climate skeptics have, of course, long argued that the models used by alarmists to predict future climate change are fatally flawed because they exaggerate the influence of man-made carbon dioxide and fail to take into account other unknown or ill-understood factors.

This discovery presents further proof that the skeptics are right: the reason that all that predicted “global warming” has failed to materialize is that it has been countered by the planet’s natural cooling effects."
Delingpole at Breitbart

It has long been known about computers and computing: garbage in; garbage out.

Of Course They Do: Leftist Science Becomes Marxist Lever

The natural consequences of AGW are now in place:

Poor nations want U.S. to pay reparations for extreme weather

Poorer nations suffering from extreme weather disasters, so much so that their citizens are seeking refuge in safer terrains outside their borders, want rich nations like the United States to pay for reparations and to relocate populations.

Preparatory talks ahead of the United Nations Conference on Climate Change to be held in Paris in December has representatives from developing nations asking for more than an already agreed upon $100 billion per year for climate change mitigation measures. They want additional compensation for weather-related disasters as well as a "displacement coordination facility" for refugees. And they want all this to be legally binding as part of the larger anticipated Paris accord.

When a "science" has a decidedly Leftist political leaning, it is inevitable that it will culminate in Marxist redistribution of wealth on grand scales. After all, these nations are "Victims", and Leftist "science" is the Messianic lever to enable plundering the Oppressors. It's always a great set-up for grabbing some significant graft right off the top, too.

And of course, it is NOT "just weather" for these Leftists: it is climate change due to the USA. They will not send a bill to China, or Russia, or to the faceless, stressed EU.

The fact is that most poor nations have plenty of money; it's just concentrated in the ruling class. Additional infused funds go to the already wealthy dictators and their cronies. Trickle down doesn't exist in these places.

EPA + "Science" = Corruption

What sort of science does $45 Million buy? Guaranteed to buy you just what you want.

Scientists May Have Lied To Promote EPA’s Global Warming Agenda

"Scientists may have lied about the EPA’s involvement in a recent study put out earlier this year claiming Obama administration regulations on carbon dioxide emissions will save thousands of lives every year.

Emails obtained by the blog JunkScience.com’s Steve Milloy show Harvard University and Syracuse University researchers involved in the study consulted with the EPA while conducting their study, contradicting their previous statements the study was done independently of the agency.

“Emails obtained from EPA through the Freedom of Information Act show that Harvard University, Syracuse University and two researchers falsely claimed a study supporting EPA’s upcoming global warming rules was conducted ‘independent’ of the agency,” Milloy wrote.

In May, scientists released a study finding the EPA’s so-called “Clean Power Plan” — which aims to reduce CO2 emissions 30 percent below 2005 levels by 2030 — would prevent 3,500 premature deaths every year because cutting CO2 emissions will also lower traditional air pollutants and allegedly save lives.

The Clean Power Plan is the linchpin of President Barack Obama’s climate agenda, so positive study’s like the Harvard-Syracuse one are welcomed by the White House and the EPA. Indeed, the EPA sent out favorable statements on the study’s release.

EPA spokeswoman Liz Purchia told The Washington Post the study showed the Clean Power Plan “is on the right track.” She said the “benefits are in addition to the benefits that will be realized by addressing a changing climate.”

The study claimed to be done independently of EPA influence, and researchers declared there was no conflict of interest in their study. Harvard University and media reports stressed the study as “independent.”

Study co-author Jonathan Buonocore of Harvard told U.S. News and World Report the EPA “did not participate in the study or interact with its authors” adding that “[w]ork on the paper began even before the EPA unveiled the Clean Power Plan.”

Lead author Charles Driscoll of Syracuse also said work on their study began before the Clean Power Plan was proposed and told The New York Times it “was a coincidence that one of the researchers’ models so closely resembled the federal proposal.”

Milloy, however, uncovered emails showing the study’s authors were in fact communicating with the EPA during the course of their study, setting up meetings to learn about the Clean Power Plan and meeting with key agency staffers to go over data.

On July 8, 2014 Harvard-Syracuse study author Kathy Lambert sent an email to EPA staffers Bryan Hubbell and Linda Chappell, the agency’s contact person for the Clean Power Plan’s cost-benefit analysis. Also copied on the email were Driscoll and Buonocore.

In the email, Lamberth works with EPA officials to set up an a conference call with the research team to “discuss methods for our next set of analyses.” Lamberth also asks the EPA for “IPM results for illustrative cases of [the] proposed carbon standard.”

In a follow-up email, EPA’s Chappell responded, saying she would loop in Amanda Curry-Brown who was responsible for the regulatory impact analysis “for the CPP final rule.”

Another email from Harvard’s Driscoll to EPA staffer Ellen Kurlansky sent on July 15, 2014, talks about how the study had been well-received by other groups (they aren’t specified) and even asks for help fundraising for the International Conference on Mercury as a Global Pollutant.

Milloy also found that authors involved in the Harvard-Syracuse study received or were involved with $45 million in EPA research grants. Driscoll has received or been involved with $3,654,608 in EPA grants and Buonocore has gotten $9,588 in grants. One of the study’s co-authors Joel Schwartz has received or been involved in $31,176,575 in EPA grants.

“Now how could Schwartz’s $31,176,575 or Levy’s $9,514,361 or Driscoll’s $3,654,608 from EPA possibly be considered as a ‘competing financial interest’ in an article they wrote in support of EPA’s flagship regulatory effort?” Milloy asked in a blog post.

Study co-author Jonathan Levy told The Daily Caller News Foundation that the definition of what constitutes a competing financial interest is set by the journal the study gets published in. Levy said “competitive grants awarded by EPA or other federal funders meet none of these criteria and therefore do not qualify as a competing interest.”

Levy, nor any of the study’s other authors, responded to TheDCNF’s questions about the emails uncovered by Milloy."

The EPA should be totally repurposed, with all EPA employees, top to bottom, doing nothing except mopping up spills. When they are not doing that, then they are laid off.

Save the Earth and Leftist Trash

Far Left Climate Activists Leave Mounds of Trash For Cities to Deal With

"Earth First!
On Sunday, tens of thousands of committed leftists held “climate change” world rallies. Thousands descended on New York City, marching through the heart of Manhattan with a message of alarm for world leaders.

The far left activists are worried about the effects of global warming despite the fact that the US just went through its coldest winter in a century and Antarctic sea ice is at record levels.

The alarmists are worried about global warming.
But, they let others worry about their trash.

Because nothing says, “I care about the environment,” like leaving heaps of trash for someone else to deal with.
"

Maybe they live with their Mommies who clean up after the dears. The Occupy movement did the same thing, as do all Leftist rallies on the Washington mall. They are entitled, you must remember, because they are morally superior to everyone else.

For graphic evidence of Leftist trash, follow the link above.

Alternative Environmental Disasters

Both wind farms and solar farms are deadly to wildlife, primarily birds. But solar farms are a short hop away from taking down airplanes as well.

" Workers at a state-of-the-art solar plant in the Mojave Desert have a name for birds that fly through the plant's concentrated sun rays — "streamers," for the smoke plume that comes from birds that ignite in midair.

Federal wildlife investigators who visited the BrightSource Energy plant last year and watched as birds burned and fell, reporting an average of one "streamer" every two minutes, are urging California officials to halt the operator's application to build a still-bigger version.

The investigators want the halt until the full extent of the deaths can be assessed. Estimates per year now range from a low of about a thousand by BrightSource to 28,000 by an expert for the Center for Biological Diversity environmental group.

The deaths are "alarming. It's hard to say whether that's the location or the technology," said Garry George, renewable-energy director for the California chapter of the Audubon Society. "There needs to be some caution."

The bird kills mark the latest instance in which the quest for clean energy sometimes has inadvertent environmental harm. Solar farms have been criticized for their impacts on desert tortoises, and wind farms have killed birds, including numerous raptors.

"We take this issue very seriously," said Jeff Holland, a spokesman for NRG Solar of Carlsbad, California, the second of the three companies behind the plant. The third, Google, deferred comment to its partners.

The $2.2 billion plant, which launched in February, is at Ivanpah Dry Lake near the California-Nevada border. The operator says it's the world's biggest plant to employ so-called power towers.

More than 300,000 mirrors, each the size of a garage door, reflect solar rays onto three boiler towers each looming up to 40 stories high. The water inside is heated to produce steam, which turns turbines that generate enough electricity for 140,000 homes.

Sun rays sent up by the field of mirrors are bright enough to dazzle pilots flying in and out of Las Vegas and Los Angeles.

Federal wildlife officials said Ivanpah might act as a "mega-trap" for wildlife, with the bright light of the plant attracting insects, which in turn attract insect-eating birds that fly to their death in the intensely focused light rays.

Federal and state biologists call the number of deaths significant, based on sightings of birds getting singed and falling, and on retrieval of carcasses with feathers charred too severely for flight.

Ivanpah officials dispute the source of the so-called streamers, saying at least some of the puffs of smoke mark insects and bits of airborne trash being ignited by the solar rays.

Wildlife officials who witnessed the phenomena say many of the clouds of smoke were too big to come from anything but a bird, and they add that they saw "birds entering the solar flux and igniting, consequently become a streamer.""

I'm not sure when coal-fired energy ignited birds, but coal is the "evil" energy source, by definition. Wind and solar generation will always be revered by the enviros regardless of what ever damage they do to birds. This problem has been known for some time; there is no protest to eliminate either the eagle exploding wind farms or the general bird arson of the solar farms. Tsk-tsking will not change the processes.

Was There Ever Any Doubt? 130 Enviro Groups Demand Totalitarian End To Capitalism

From Daily Caller:

"Environmentalists have declared that global warming can’t be stopped without ending the “hegemonic capitalist system,” saying that cap-and-trade systems and conservation efforts are “false solutions.”

“The structural causes of climate change are linked to the current capitalist hegemonic system,” reads the final draft of the Margarita Declaration, presented at a conference including about 130 environmental groups.

“To combat climate change it is necessary to change the system,” the declaration adds.

Environmental activists met in the oil producing, socialist country of Venezuela as part of a United Nations-backed event to increase civil engagement in the lead up to a major climate conference.

But environmentalists surprised U.N. officials by offering up a declaration that not only seeks to end capitalism, but one that also opposes U.N.-backed efforts to fight global warming — namely, cap-and-trade and forest conservation programs."

Managed economies have done so well historically that we should all have one, and starve like those subject to them historically did. History is no barrier to the stupidities of the Left. They have long ago left rationality for the will to power.

But this enviro-bleating is without any force, anywhere, except in places with very Leftist government in place, such as the EU and the USA, where enviro-cash is an important political sacrament.

Anonymous: “What did socialists use before candles? Electricity.”

HuffPo Solves A Non-Crisis

From BreitBart Big Journalism:

Huffington Post Has Seen the Face of Evil: The Bacon Cheeseburger


The Middle East in chaos driven by ISIS jihadists, the southern border of the U.S. overrun by a tsunami of illegal immigrants carrying contagious diseases and threatening our sovereignty, the Balkans endangered by a reinvigorated imperialist Russia: all are fountainheads of danger for Americans. But then comes the cheeseburger.

On Friday, the main headline on the Huffington Post posited the theory that vegetarianism reduces your carbon footprint (please excuse the technical terminology) a “ridiculous amount.” The progressive website offers a helpful solution to one of the great evils of the day: “As the economic, political and personal costs of doing nothing to mitigate climate change skyrocket, there's one lifestyle change that slashes dietary greenhouse gas emissions in half: Veganism.”

Breitbart News has reported on a number of scientists who claim the climate hasn’t warmed in 16 years and that some call global warming an unsubstantiated hypothesis. HuffPo has cited a survey that alleges climate change is costing the U.S. billions of dollars and poses a growing national security threat. "Reducing the intake of meat and other animal based products can make a valuable contribution to climate change mitigation," the report argues.

A study by the Environmental Working Group claims that, if all Americans went vegan, it would be equivalent to removing 46 million cars from the road. However, this would only provide a "moderate dent in overall carbon emissions.”

Breatharianism would work better; they should try it. All of them. And even that would work better if they don't exhale.

EPA: Corrupt From The GetGo.

From the very beginning, politics produced travesty at the EPA and affected the entire globe; it is institutionalized, the legacy of Ruckelshaus:

"First thing out of the box, newly minted EPA administrator William Ruckelshaus -- a respected attorney and excellent manager -- faced a world-changing decision: whether to ban DDT, the miracle insect killer that wiped out malaria in America.

Ruckelshaus inherited authority over pesticides from the Agriculture Department, so the fledgling EPA's first order of business was the DDT issue.

EPA Administrative Law Judge Edmund Sweeney held testimony hearings for seven months, concluding that DDT “does not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds, or other wildlife,” “is not a carcinogenic hazard to man" and that "there is a present need for the essential uses of DDT."

Ruckelshaus did not attend a single hearing or read Sweeney's report, but he clearly heard from readers of Rachel Carson's anti-pesticide mind-killer Silent Spring, from the old-line bird-protecting National Audubon Society and the new (1967) Environmental Defense Fund.

Carson lied, and lied unscientifically but emotionally, demonstrating the actual mindset of the Greenie-Leftists.

Ruckelshaus was a member of Audubon and later of the Environmental Defense Fund. He overruled Sweeney's decision and issued the ban, asserting that DDT was a “potential human carcinogen,” thus beginning EPA’s rogue disregard of court decisions — empire-building on the march.

A few years later, I had the opportunity to ask Ruckelshaus face-to-face about his decision: Was it political? He told me, “Yes, it was completely political. It was the right thing to do.”

Millions of Third World victims of malaria would disagree if the Republican DDT ban hadn’t killed them.

I contacted Alan Moghissi, who has a doctoral degree in physical chemistry, for his assessment of the EPA's bipartisan problems. He was there at the EPA's beginning -- a veritable charter member -- and has become legendary as a regulator for demanding accountability of the science used by policy makers. He served as EPA's principal science adviser for radiation and hazardous materials and as manager of the agency's Health and Environmental Risk Analysis Program, and has since been in high positions with several universities.

He developed the “Best Available Science” concept and its “metrics for evaluation of scientific claims,” which are notably absent from today's EPA: open-mindedness, skepticism, universal scientific principles, transparency and reproducibility.

Moghissi praised Ruckelshaus for establishing seven fundamental principles for running the EPA (which the boss preached but didn’t practice), including “Scientific decisions must be free of non-scientific influences.” If today’s EPA “climate scientists” had to obey that, they’d be jobless.

Most dismal, the Ruckelshaus dictum that “Governmental actions must be based on sound science” has degenerated into “noisy science.”"

It is certainly arguable that the Greens' politics has killed more people than any other single human contribution. They still persist, and are morally arrogant in their messiahism. They infect more than just the EPA, including the BLM, National Park Service, all energy decisions, and on and on. AGW fits perfectly into their schematic for government control of the Herd, with exceptions for the filthy rich who buy credits to enable their private jets and mansions (Al Gore and other 0.00001 percenter Leftist politicians). And the fight against drought and pest resistant crop foods for the starving nations is another indicator of the anti-science and anti-human traits of the now-powerful Greens (contrast the DDT ban and resistant crop fight to the claims of humanism with regard to salvation from AGW). It's just about political and ideological power, nothing more, certainly nothing scientific or humanitarian. Thanks, Wm Ruckelshaus.

There's more at the link.

Comments to Ponder

From some comments over at instapundit:

DirigoMark
"BUT MIGHT THIS HAVE LESS DESIRABLE EFFECTS ON WEATHER, TOO?"
If I've learned anything about climate science over the years, it's that the climate responds to human activity according to the intentions of the people involved. e.g. my Accord is killing the planet, but Al Gore's chartered jets are not a problem.
[Gore's Law of AntiEntropy of the Left]

jkmack
It is a very robust law in nature. If you have good intentions toward women, your are allowed to sexually harrass, assualt, and exploit them. And if you are a rock solid defender of abortion, you get at least one free rape as well.
[Principle of Clintonian Mesmerization]

More Green Fails (And Pathological Altruism)

The unintended consequences of dictatorial Greenism keep piling up, especially onto birds, bats and virgin plains.

"recent article by Vice author Lex Berko notes that dead birds are being found with "singed wings" around several California solar energy facilities.

It happens that many of California's solar plants are, the article claims, in the path of "the four major north-to-south trajectories for migratory birds" called "the Pacific Flyway."

Birds are dying in one of two ways. In some cases, they imagine the shining solar panels to be bodies of water and dive straight into them. There they die when they smash into the panels from the sky.

Others "feel the wrath of the harnessed sunlight." The ultra polished solar mirrors bounce sunrays strong enough to burn the feathers off birds that quickly crash to the ground, caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Many of the fowl dying as a result of their unfortunate flight paths over solar facilities are birds protected by the federal government under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act."

And as for corn in your gas tank,

"ROSCOE, S.D. (AP) — Robert Malsam nearly went broke in the 1980s when corn was cheap. So now that prices are high and he can finally make a profit, he's not about to apologize for ripping up prairieland to plant corn.

Across the Dakotas and Nebraska, more than 1 million acres of the Great Plains are giving way to corn fields as farmers transform the wild expanse that once served as the backdrop for American pioneers."

You'd think the elite greenies would think this stuff through. But like banning incandescent light bulbs in favor of mercury-laden flourescents, it's the initial narrative that counts, not the consequences.

Addendum:
There is now a term for this: Pathological Altruism, which is the term Barbara Oakley, Oakland University, has used for misguided ventures.

"She defines pathological altruism “as behavior in which attempts to promote the welfare of another, or others, results instead in harm that an external observer would conclude was reasonably foreseeable.” In her study Oakley explores the psychological and evolutionary underpinnings of empathy and altruism and how they can go wrong. It turns out that pathological altruism is a pervasive problem affecting public policy."