ABSTRACT
The modern environmentalist movement, which in some ways was born in 1962 with the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, expands apace. The major environmentalist lobbies have found their greatest success in harvesting the Beltway's kind of green: rectangular notes imprinted with images of dead Presidents and signatures of the forgotten hacks who have served sinecures as Treasurer of the United States. Although the knee-jerk response of the modern environmentalist is to look to Washington for a solution, the federal government has been a large part of the problem. The late Julian Simon wrote, the vanishing farmland scare is a crystal-clear example of concerted false scaremongering in which the perverse roles of the federal government and environmental organizations. Organizations like the Renewable Energy Policy Project, which is funded in part by the United States Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency, push solar, wind, biomass, and other "alternative" energies with an almost religious fervor.
