Recently, radical environmentalists have waged a campaign to stifle free enterprise and economic freedom. Here are some of their recent skirmishes, ranging from crop destruction in Australia to attacks on toy companies like Lego and Disney:
- Photos of Greenpeace activists destroying an experimental crop of genetically modified (GM) wheat earlier this month in Australia. They apparently decided that they have the right to act lawlessly and destroy work by scientists designed to feed a hungry world. Even The New York Times rebuked Greenpeace’s actions and argued that the GM wheat field destruction “threatens to completely marginalize the group, and presumably will undercut its credibility when it takes stands on other issues, from climate to palm oil.”
- And this follows a recent high-profile attack that Greenpeace led against iconic Western toy companies Lego, Mattel, Hasbro, and Disney. Greenpeace obviously cares so little about private business growth in the developing world that it has foisted its own skewed version of “Corporate Social Responsibility” on every company it targets until it capitulates to Greenpeace’s anti-growth pressure campaigns. The result is less trade and more constraints on job creation in the developing world.
- Meanwhile, as Walter Russell Mead notes, America’s poorly designed and counterproductive ethanol subsidies (pushed by global warming alarmists and big agribusinesses) are driving up the price of food all over the world and causing terrible hardship to poor families.
- Or take the logging industry out West. In Arizona, environmental groups have used federal laws and regulations to “create a paralysis” within federal agencies—to the point where employees “can no longer manage their lands unless it’s for the fish, the frog or the owl.”
- In Pennsylvania, scientists report that with “fracking” techniques to extract natural gas and reduce U.S. dependency on foreign oil, the “typical Marcellus shale well generates about $4 million in economic benefits while generating only $14,000 in economic damages from environmental impacts” (a ratio of 1:285). Yet environmentalists oppose it and have hijacked media outlets like The New York Times to run biased reports against fracking’s key contributions to America’s current and future energy supplies that would be a tremendous catalyst for the country’s economic recovery.