Michael Crichton, Glen Beck, the Washington Times, and the Randroids, have all equated environmentalism with eugenics, population control, and fascism. We environmentalists hate human beings, we want to exterminate the human race and have everything go back to a “garden of Eden,” to quote Crichton.
So what about the anti-environmentalists? The ones who don’t believe there is any value to water until it’s bottled, trees until they’re paper, and oil until it’s Carbon Dioxide? what value do the Randroids, Dittoheads, and Corporatists put on human life?
The Bush Administration’s EPA, which represents these ideologies, may provide an answer: $6.9 million, down from $7.8 million in 2003. The difference is $900,000, which looks suspiciously like those price tags you see at a used car dealership. Luckily, most of the media isn’t fooled, and is reporting it as an 11 percent devaluation or nearly one million dollars.
The Guardian’s Elana Schor provides a clear example of how this devaluation of human life impacts public policy:
Consider, for example, a hypothetical regulation that costs $18bn to enforce but will prevent 2,500 deaths. At $7.8m per person (the old figure), the lifesaving benefits outweigh the costs. But at $6.9m per person, the rule costs more than the lives it saves, so it may not be adopted.
So the dittoheads value human life one $900,000th less than environmentalists. That’s a $$271 X 1012 devaluation on the entire population of the United States.
What Beck, Crichton, Limbaugh, Hannity, O’Reilly, Coulter, and their zombie legions fail to understand is that humans are inseparable from the environment; no matter how much they would like to fool their audience into believing we are.
Note: I’ve got no objection to the EPA establishing a monetary value for human life. Despite being cold logic, such evaluations are important to decision-making.
You can read the reasoning behind the EPA’s reevaluation in their own report.
$2.07 X 1014 – Current value of American population according to the EPA.