By E. Thomas McClanahan, Kansas City Star Editorial Page columnist

Google "ice free 2030" and you'll come up with all sorts of stuff from environmental groups braying about the arctic ice melting by that year. Greenpeace now disavows that claim.
In a BBC interview, retiring Greenpeace leader Gerd Leipold admitted, "I don't think it will be melting by 2030. That may have been a mistake."
Last month, the group put out a press release saying the ice cap could vanish because of global warming.
After the interviewer accused Leipold of publishing misleading data and using "exaggeration and alarmism," Leipold made a much more revealing admission: He acknowledged the group tries to influence public opinion by "emotionalizing issues."
His said his mission is curbing economic growth in the United States and around the world. Growth rates of 3 percent to 8 percent can't continue because of the risk of harm to the climate, he says. The growth of modern economies isn't sustainable.
“We will definitely have to move to a different concept of growth. … The lifestyle of the rich in the world is not a sustainable model,” Leipold said. “If you take the lifestyle, its cost on the environment, and you multiply it with the billions of people and an increasing world population, you come up with numbers which are truly scary.”
The fallacy here is believing the technologies available in the future -- and the mix of resources used -- will be the same as in the present.
Compare the resources used in devices used to play music today with those of 40 years ago. Two generations ago, those devices -- radios and hi-fi's -- used much more metal, glass, plasic, copper and the like than today's tiny iPods. Moreover, we cannot know what resources will be made available through human ingenuity. Before human creativity found a use for it, oil was a nuisance.
People like Liepold embody environmentalism's crabbed vision and subtle authoritarianism. He says growth should be suppressed, but it is the prosperity of the modern economy that makes his movement possible.
In a Pew Research poll, the percentage of respondents who called the environment a top priority fell from 56 to 41 percent last year, a year in which the economy rapidly lost momentum. In March, more Americans said they would prioritize economic growth, "even if the environment suffers to some extent." If Greenpeace got its wish and suppressed growth, Greenpeace would rapidly lose support. In countries were people are just trying to get by, environmentalism is an elist indulgence.