You have got to love the sheer devotion of environmentalists to their cause no matter what the cost in human suffering. We used to call them "tree huggers" in an endearing way. When they used to just hug trees they were harmless. However, since then 1960s they have become dangerous. Their record is one of good intentions but deadly results.

In his Sarasota Herald-Tribune guest column "Florida needs more energy efficiency, not another nuclear plant", Glenn Compton, Chairman of Manasota-88 comes out against nuclear power.

Glenn's standard for building nuclear power plants is, "the nuclear power industry should prove that nuclear plants, fuel and waste would pose no significant danger before a new nuclear plant is built in Florida."

We love Glenn's high standard and wish environmentalists like Glenn kept to this standard themselves. Let us give you just a few examples of the "pose no serious threat" standard as applied to Glenn and his ilk.

The DDT scare of the 1960s. A nationwide hysteria followed the publication of Rachel Carson's book, Silent Spring in 1962, in which she labeled DDT a dangerous chemical that might be causing cancer in humans. It was the Sierra Club that led the charge to ban DDT. The Sierra Club went from a little known group of activists to today an international environmental force. They pointed to research, later proven to be totally false, that bird eggs were thinning due to use of DDT. There has never been any research that has linked DDT usage with the death of any animal species or human illness. Their efforts, the banning of DDT here in the U.S. and overseas, particularly in Africa, have directly led to the deaths of tens of millions of men, women and innocent children from mosquito born malaria.

Environmentalists "posed a serious threat" to human life in their race to ban the use of DDT. It should be noted that the UN now supports the use of DDT, finally recognizing the horrible results of banning it.

Next came the nuclear scare of the 1970s with the founding of Greenpeace. As Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace said, "In the early 1970s when I helped found Greenpeace, I believed that nuclear energy was synonymous with nuclear holocaust, as did most of my compatriots. That's the conviction that inspired Greenpeace's first voyage up the spectacular rocky northwest coast to protest the testing of U.S. hydrogen bombs in Alaska's Aleutian Islands."

The result of Greenpeace's efforts, a total shutdown of the then budding nuclear power industry. This led to the U.S. move to fossil fuels (coal, oil and natural gas) to meet our ever growing demand for cheap and reliable power.

Today, Patrick Moore admits the error of his ways and supports nuclear power. Patrick states, "Thirty years on, my views have changed, and the rest of the environmental movement needs to update its views, too, because nuclear energy may just be the energy source that can save our planet from another possible disaster: catastrophic climate change."

Glenn in his column uses the old Greenpeace scare tactics when he without proof states, "The cumulative health effect from all of the daily individual safe doses of radiation exposure on humans is not known." What Glenn fails to point out is that we have had U.S. Navy nuclear powered aircraft carriers and submarines for decades with no incidents and no human caused health problems. Our sailors and Marines are living, eating and sleeping just yards away from nuclear power plants with no ill effects.

Finally, we have the big Kahuna of environmental bad boys - Global Warming. This is the greatest environmentalist political movement of all time. It has joined all environmentalist groups with the far left in a coalition to stop the use of oil, coal, natural gas and nuclear power. They actually believe that burning of fossil fuels is the primary cause of global warming.

We say political movement because the science behind human caused global warming has been debunked. Go here, here, here and here to learn why human caused global warming is a hoax. Global warming stopped in 1998 even though CO2 emissions have increased dramatically since then.

The human caused global warming hoax promoted by Glenn and his fellow environmentalists have brought us corn based ethanol. Environmentalists and their Democratic partners in Congress were behind the energy bill passed in December 2007, which mandates a huge spike in the biofuel production requirements from 7.5 billion gallons in 2012 to 36 billion in 2022. This means approximately 20 million new acres of U.S. farmland will have to be dedicated to biofuel crops to meet this mandate. What is interesting is that it takes more than a gallon of oil to produce a gallon of ethanol. Go figure.

What has the environmentalist solution to reduce carbon emissions by using ethanol done? This good idea has caused the price of food to rise. The skyrocketing cost of food staples like grain has caused protests involving thousands of people in places such as South Africa, Egypt and Pakistan. These protests turned deadly in Haiti and even led to the ouster of Prime Minister Jacques-Edouard Alexis. Rice is being rationed in the U.S. According to the UN the worst is yet to come as we take more and more farmland away from producing food to producing fuel.

So what is Glenn's new solution to stop global warming. Given all the previous great ideas of environmentalism that have killed millions, polluted our rivers, streams and the Gulf of Mexico, caused food riots, destroyed the nuclear power industry, taken coal, oil and natural gas powered plants off the table, raised our gas and energy prices? Conserve.

We love the childish innocence of this solution. We can save the planet by conserving. Sounds so simple, wonderful and naive.

The real solution is nothing is off the table.

When it comes to the production of energy our economy and the global economy demand cheap reliable power. That means we need to develop and wisely use all the resources we have been blessed with. Oil, coal, natural gas, nuclear, wind and solar.

Given their dismal and deadly record it is time for environmentalists to step aside and let the best interests of the human race take precedent.