Must Watch: Behind Obama’s Green Agenda

A post from Joseph Bast, president of The Heartland Institute [first posted at Somewhat Reasonable]:

On October 7, Fox News Channel aired "Behind Obama's Green Agenda," a 40-minute special report hosted by Bret Baier. Embedded at the bottom of this post, it is an outstanding expose of the Obama Administration's job-killing record on the environment and its plans to do even more damage if President Obama wins reelection. This should be required viewing for anyone concerned about the election, the environment, and the future of our country.

Baier interviews former EPA staff, members of Congress, and leading experts on the environmental movement to describe and critique the entire arc of the environmental movement from its birth in the 1960s to its status today as one of the world's most politically connected and powerful interest groups. He describes how concern over air and water pollution once was entirely legitimate, and Americans should be proud of the progress that has been made to clean and protect the environment. But he also shows how the leaders of the political and social movement we call environmentalism are now pursuing a hard-left agenda that is anti-business, anti-jobs, and even anti-science.

Climate change, an issue on which The Heartland Institute has done so much to expose the lies and exaggerations of the left, is discussed only late in the program and not in much depth. Perhaps that is appropriate, given that environmental activists have largely given up defending the flawed and faked science they used to generate public fear and then extort massive funding from taxpayers for themselves and their allies in the renewable energy field. As the scientific case for man-made global warming collapses, leaders of the environmental movement are doing what they did when their false claims and predictions about pesticides, population growth, resource depletion, and dioxin were exposed: They simply move on to another fake crisis, this time "sustainability."

Baier ends the program saying "this debate is far from over," and he is correct. Efforts by the left to shut down discussion and debate on environmental issues are failing, thanks to Fox News, thousands of bloggers, and some courageous policy experts and elected officials. This Fox News program recognizes those efforts, and therefore deserves to be widely circulated and viewed.