It was the famous libertarian, HL Mencken who said:

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

This is true not only of politics but also in the realm of environmentalism, especially when we consider the actions of environmentalists in recent times.  

Take Al Gore, the self-appointed chief inquisitor of global warming. Armed with a towering disregard of reason, truth or evidence, he preaches the coming Armageddon with all the fervor of a prophet of doom. He is a reincarnation of the mediaeval satirists, the opulent prince of religion on a magnificent progress through the land; gathering further wealth on his way and forever declaiming the eternal message of the ostentatiously and hypocritically devout to the common herd “Do as I say and not as I do!”

His familiar, James Hansen, shares his shameless addiction to self-promotion, gross exaggeration and contempt for reasoned debate. He manufactures the ammunition from behind a screen of secrecy and obfuscation. Behind them is a vast army of true believers, who propagate the lies and, just as importantly, suppress dissent. They actively penetrate and take control of the media, scientific institutions and educational establishments, turning our schools into a grotesque eco-thought police, in which the traditional religious service is replaced by five minutes hate against the innocent butt, carbon.

There is no scientific theory linking carbon dioxide to the “runaway” global warming that is the basis of the calamitous predictions. The contribution of the gas to the making of a comfortable planet by the greenhouse effect is well understood, modest and self-limiting. It is only turned into a terror by computer models. These are worthless; depending as they do on extensive guesswork about the ill-understood mechanisms and interactions involved in climate, and involving so many tunable parameters and feedback factors that they could produce any desired result by appropriate tweaking.  A quarter of a century ago, before science came under firm bureaucratic control, such models would have been laughed out of court.

It is this control of the media that allows deviant environmental organizations such as the inappropriately named Greenpeace and the Friends of the Earth (FOE) to launch their incomprehensible and irrational attacks against palm oil, accusing it of causing massive deforestation and consequently global warming.

The grotesque manipulation and utter disregard for true facts and figures by Greenpeace and FOE would have made the most dishonest weather scientist with their irreverent computer models, proud!

Making wild and exaggerated claims in their “report” of October 2008 and called: “Malaysian Palm Oil: Green Gold or Green Wash”, FOE accused the Malaysian State of Sarawak of developing “large-scale plantations at breath-taking speed having overexploited its timber resources and depleted its forests.”  The “report” contends that oil palm plantations are being expanded at the expense of tropical forests.

Let’s examine the facts. The agriculture to forest land ratio in Sarawak currently stands at 8:76. Repeat 8:76. Agricultural land in Sarawak is currently only 8%.  How could it even be remotely possible for Sarawak to be expanding palm oil plantations “at the expense of tropical forests”?   Isn’t it obvious then that the true situation in Sarawak is that palm oil plantations are primarily developed on legitimate agricultural land or previously logged over areas?

Not to be outdone, Greenpeace quickly joined the parade of the absurd!  Donning monkey suits and screeching like the juvenile delinquents that they really are, monkey suited Greenpeacers scaled the walls of Unilever factories throughout Europe, on the grounds that Unilever was a major consumer of palm oil, despite Unilever having helped initiate the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil.

Not to be outdone, the Rainforest Action Network (RAN), jumped into the “report” publishing business, publishing another “report” called “The Problem with Palm Oil”.  Like juvenile delinquents determined to see who could out-delinquent the other, RAN organized a sticker campaign encouraging its members to deface supermarket products on supermarket shelves with RAN produced stickers.  Their website even went so far as to claim that the orang utan are predicted to become extinct as early as 2011.

What RAN failed to consider in making their wild allegation that the orang utan would become extinct in 2 years is the facts.  Current estimates of orang utan population in the wild in Borneo alone stands at between 45,000 and 69,000.   It is obvious to even the casual observer that it cannot even be remotely possible for the orang utan, by any leap of logic or stretch of imagination, to go extinct within 2 years.  

This does not even take into account the many conservation programs and orang utan enclaves established by Malaysia and Indonesia. Orang utan conservation centres had been established in Indonesia including those at Tanjung Puting National Park in Central Kalimantan, Kutai in East Kalimantan, Gunung Palung National Park in West Kalimantan, and Bukit Lawang in the Gunung Leuser National Park on the border of Aceh and North Sumatra. In Malaysia, conservation areas have been set up and they include the Semenggoh Wildlife Centre in Sarawak and Matang Wildlife Centre also in Sarawak, and the Sepilok Orang Utan Sanctuary near Sandakan in Sabah. 

In the view of the Palm Oil Truth Foundation, what these irresponsible, rabble rousing bunch of environmental buffoons failed to take into account were the facts, for facts have a funny tendency to give a bloody nose to those who abuse and misuse them!  THE END.