]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]        THE NEW BOGEYMAN        [[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[ 
                  By Oleg Panczenko (10602PANC)            (10/25/88)

   The source  of a  pollutant is  politically important,  as the
lead  editorial in  this month's  AtE points  out.  It  is widely
accepted in America that "corporate  chemical = bad chemical", so
that greenhouse  gases produced  by industry  are clearly harmful
while those same gases produced naturally are clearly benign.  Dr
Beckmann observes that  "the man-engendered methane (fertilizers,
cattle, rice  paddies) lacks  a sufficiently  repugnant corporate
image  to lend  itself to  resentment."  But  the anti-industrial
revolutionaries among us  have grounds for  declaring a substance
objectionable  other than those of production  by a  corporation.
Any connection with man is sufficient to condemn a chemical.
   On the  front page  of today's  (24 October  1988) Wall Street
Journal is the headline:
      "Global  Threat   /  New   Culprit  Is   Indicted  In
      Greenhouse Effect: Rising  Methane Level / Scientists
      Point  to  Cattle,  Termites   and  Rice  Paddies  As
      Contributing Sources / Scarier Than Carbon Dioxide?"
   This new bogey  will lead not to  corporation-bashing but to a
renewal of  population-bashing.  Fertilizer and  rice paddies are
used to produce  food for the  "relentlessly increasing burden of
population".  The  statists, population-control special-interests
and ecological radicals have  too much to gain  to let this bogey
go unexploited.  Population  control is one  of the sicknesses of
the New  York Times.   A number  of universities  (1) and private
organizations get a tidy sum  from the government for "population
control   activities".    A   burger  is   enough   to   send  an
"ecologically"  sensitive type  into  a rabid  froth  because the
production  of  beef  is   so  "wasteful  of  rapidly-diminishing
resources".    We  will  hear  increasingly  strident  calls  for
population control from a  Left which is suffused  by a hatred of
mankind.

Notes:
1. Columbia  University, University  of North  Carolina at Chapel
Hill, Johns Hopkins.

More: Kasun, Jacqueline.  The War Against Population: The Economics
and Ideology of Population Control.  Harrison, NY: Ignatius Press,
1988.  Zimmerman, P.R. et al. "Termites: A Potentially Large Source of
Atmospheric Methane, Carbon Dioxide, and Molecular Hydrogen", Science
218:563-565 (5 November 1982).

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