There are a number of inexorable truths about the modern human condition that bear upon the left’s current fetish with global warming. The first is that achieving a significant reduction in carbon emissions is flatly impossible if the world’s population continues to grow. The second is that some amount of population growth is necessary to healthy and sustainable economic growth.

Liberals, of course, care nothing about the second point – but they are very enthusiastic about the first. The truth is, environmentalists have been trying to figure out a way to convince the world that humans are bad for the planet for the better part of 100 years. People often view the population control movement and the environmental movement as different aspects of liberalism – much in the same way that being pro-life and being a fiscal conservative are treated as different strains of emphasis within the conservative movement. But the truth is that their goals and aims are virtually indistinguishable.

They are both part of a single, broad, Malthusian movement that has managed to successfully work its tentacles into the conservative movement through groups like FAIR and NumbersUSA.

The most recent proof of this comes from California, where a proposed development called the Newhall Ranch project has been held up in court for years over completely unfounded environmental hysteria. The Newhall Ranch developers have in fact bent over backwards to make their new housing development, which would support 60,000 California residents, as green as possible:

The Newhall Ranch project in north Los Angeles County, which aims to provide housing for nearly 60,000 people as well as tens of thousands of jobs at stores, schools and recreational centers, is the most recent target. With energy-efficient lighting, comprehensive recycling, bike trails and drought-tolerant landscaping, the 12,000-acre planned community would be a green Levittown. But the proposed development—one of the biggest in state history—has been under siege from its inception in 1994 by environmental activists.

The California Supreme Court recently rejected Newhall’s final environmental-impact report. The court’s legally nebulous decision could delay construction for years—and cast a pall over future development.

Newhall’s report, which the Department of Fish and Wildlife approved in 2010, was more than 5,000 pages, with hundreds of pages dedicated to analyzing its greenhouse-gas emissions as required by recent regulatory amendments to the 1970 California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). The state wildlife agency projected that Newhall would reduce greenhouse-gas emissions 31% by 2020 relative to the California Air Resources Board’s 2008 “baseline” model. This was a larger reduction than the 29% cut that the board has mandated statewide.

The report also included measures for the developer to restore habitat for species potentially affected by the development, such as the coast horned lizard and Townsend’s big-eared bat. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials would move any unarmored threespine stickleback—a tiny fish protected under state and federal law—out of harm’s way.

 

The reality, of course, is that Jerry Brown and the rest of California’s government does not want people to move to California, or for anyone to be involved in a project that would allow for 60,000 more people to live in California in relative comfort. Brown has insanely pledged to reduce California’s carbon emissions by 80% by the year 2050, a completely unattainable target even if California’s population remains static, but flatly impossible if it continues to grow.

I suspect that most environmentalists do not even care whether man made global warming is a thing that actually exists, objectively speaking. They have been seeking for years for any even vaguely plausible doomsday scenario that they could use to encourage hysteria about population growth, and now they have it. Their dedication to this latest fixation, even in the face of contrary evidence and/or fraud by the scientific and governmental agencies that are allegedly involved in monitoring global warming, indicates the truth of their game.

The environmentalist of today – and yesterday – is only interested in preserving Earth if doing so means they get to fight for the existence of less humans.