Here in New York City, in the grip of the hysterical climate cult, we are undertaking a massive transformation of our energy system without anyone in authority having done the simple arithmetic to check whether the plans have any chance of succeeding. A big theme of this blog has been pointing out the obvious problems that mean that these “net zero” schemes can never work. But maybe it’s not really important whether they will ever work or not. Maybe the real point is just to spend a lot of (somebody else’s) money to show that you, somehow, “care.”
A very similar scenario is now playing out in the closely related category they are calling climate “resiliency.” The word means getting ready for the impending climate armaggedon. The armaggedon isn’t coming, of course, but we will anyway spend vast sums supposedly to show we are “doing something” about the problem. Whether the scheme in question might actually work is beside the point.
And thus a couple of days ago there debuted at the southern tip of Manhattan a completely remade Wagner Park. Wagner Park, originally opened in 1996 as part of the Battery Park City development, was previously just a pleasant waterfront lawn of about 3.5 acres. Then the eco-zealots came into the picture, and advocated that the park was at grave risk of inundation from the sea level rise attendant to anthropogenic global warming. The park needed to be raised up to save both itself and the larger inland areas of our fragile island.
About two years ago they began a massive earth-moving project to raise this park up about ten feet to stave off the sea. Now that the newly-renovated space has just re-opened, Steve Cuozzo at the New York Post has a piece reporting on the results, headline: “Wagner Park’s disastrous $300M eco-zealot makeover is an insult to downtown New York City.” Here is a picture from the Post of what the new space looks like:
You can see that the previous lawn has been mostly replaced by a series of terraces rising steeply from the waterfront. Cuozzo has nothing but harsh criticism for the aesthetics of the project:
The “new” Wagner Park in Battery Park City opened this week after a two-year closure and a nearly $300 million redesign. . . . Mature London plane trees were uprooted. The park’s central area was elevated 10 feet in order to conceal a buried flood wall. Much of the lawn was sliced and diced into a ziggurat of paver-surfaced ramps and stairs that have no clear entry points. The park’s once-level, river-facing side swelled into a stepped cliff of wooden, bleacher-like seats where I saw precious few users on two sunny afternoons this week.
And exactly why did they build this huge project to revamp a perfectly nice little park? Cuozzo:
Besides enriching a legion of architects, engineers and landscape designers, the mutant “park” is supposed to protect against a theoretical, worse-than-worst case, one-day-or-someday “100-year” flood caused by rising sea levels. In fact, no such catastrophe has ever occurred. The original park was so securely engineered that Wagner Park suffered no damage whatsoever when superstorm Sandy caused the city’s highest sea level rise ever recorded.
Cuozzo correctly belittles the idea that sea level rise caused by global warming is going to inundate Manhattan any time soon. But even if it were, this project would still be ridiculous. That’s because if the sea were to rise up, it would rise up everywhere, not just along this tiny stretch of downtown Manhattan.
The part of Manhattan south of Central Park, from 59th Street on the West Side to 59th Street on the East Side, is quite flat, with little elevation gain in the areas near the waterfront. (Above 59th Street the terrain is much hillier.). This southern part of Manhattan has about 10 miles of shoreline along the Hudson and East Rivers, all of it equally subject to flooding if the sea level were to rise. This Wagner Park project deals with only about 400 feet of this shoreline, or less than one percent. Here is a map of southern Manhattan showing the location and scope of this project:
The red arrow has been inserted to be sure that you can find the tiny red mark that indicates the portion of the shoreline represented by Wagner Park. So if the sea level were to rise up, how is that 400 feet of raised land going to prevent the water from coming inland along the rest of the 10 or so miles of waterfront?
So they have spent $300 million for a project that will inevitably fail at its stated mission, while ruining what was previously a perfectly nice park. This is not really much different from spending hundreds of billions of dollars on an energy transition that can’t possibly work. Or, for that matter, from spending a trillion or so dollars per year on the project to cure poverty, without ever putting a dent into the poverty rate.
Make no mistake, the nature worshiping Druids
of ancient times would have been totally comfortable with the greenies
of today. The "modern" green movement has it's roots in the ancient
pagan Druidic nature worship originating in the dark forests of ancient
Germania. Embraced by 19th century German philosophers and codified into law by Nazi Germany.
Irrational, misanthropic and morally defective, the five
pillars of modern environmentalismare junk science, regulatory abuse, secular neo-paganism, insanity, and human sacrifice.
So, when I came upon an old article entitled, Global Warming must be true, Charles Manson believes in it ,
my first thought was......Manson was a greenie? Whodda thunk it?
Well, maybe that's not as strange as it seems since the greenies and
Manson have a common bond. Irrational, misanthropic and morally
defective.
Here are some of his thoughts:
'Everyone’s God and if we don’t wake up to that there’s going to be
no weather because our polar caps are melting because we’re doing bad
things to the atmosphere. ‘If we don’t change that as rapidly as I’m
speaking to you now, if we don’t put the green back on the planet and
put the trees back that we’ve butchered, if we don’t go to war against
the problem...'….On the environment, Manson said: 'Sooner or later the
will of God will prevail over all of you. And I was condemned as the
will of God.' 'We are all martyrs. Love is a martyr... I am a martyr.
But I am also a victim. And I'm a performer……I'm both. I am everything. I
am nothing.'
Yup…. he’s qualified…..he’s a greenie. Crazy as a loon and vicious as a viper!
Much of what you see being touted by animal rights and green activists
was first put into practice on a national level by the first green
government, Nazi Germany. Like the Nazi's, the greenies love the
world, its people they hate.
When I read comments from “normal” people who "know" that global warming
is "real", even after all that has come out demonstrating all the junk
science and political chicanery behind it, I wonder at which Temple of
the Church of the Warming Globe do they worship, and is smoking funny
cigarettes part of the worship service conducted by the High Priest, Al
Gore?
Do I believe in global warming? Yes, and I believe in global cooling
also. Why? Because we have more than enough historical data to show that
the Earth has warmed and cooled often in its history. That record also
shows huge swings in temperature, and mankind didn't have a thing to do
with any of it. And that's the issue. Not whether or not it's happening
or not happening, that's actually immaterial to the issue. The issue is whether or not mankind is responsible. We're
not!
What about the disasters they're predicting for today?
Did any of the disasters they're predicting for our modern times occur
when the temperatures during the Medieval Warming period, and the Roman
Warming Period, where temperatures were substantially higher than they are now?
There is
absolutely nothing in the historical record, nor any physical evidence, to show
the warming doom they're predicting for today ever happened then! Then why should we believe they will occur now?
We shouldn't!
In fact, during those warming periods mankind was
better off. It's the cold periods like the Little Ice Age which lasted from 1300 to 1850 that killed people. And mankind is in no way
responsible for those periods either.
So, what's the "normal" temperature for the Earth supposed to be? No
one can say. No one has come forward with that temperature because
there is no standard, nor is there any science to prove what should be
"normal" for the Earth. However, for argument's sake, if we arbitrarily
decide to make the Medieval Warming Period the standard for normal,
we've yet to recover from the Little Ice Age. And not only has the
warming stopped, over 25 years ago now, there's concern we may be
heading into another Solar Minimum
, where temperatures will start dropping.
As for
Ocean Acidification
- that's just more horsepucky to push an agenda of global governance.
If it isn’t CO2, it will be ocean acidification. If it isn’t that it
will be some other high sounding complicated claim that will be as
equally un-provable as all the other horsepucky they have spewed out
over the decades.
This issue is singular. Does mankind have the ability to control the
weather, let alone the climate, in any meaningful way? The answer is no!
So why should we believe that the minute amount of CO2 mankind puts
into the atmosphere will alter the climate, especially since we know
from the data that the amount of CO2 has fluctuated dramatically over
the eons. And data also shows that the CO2 increases did not precede the
warming periods, it followed them.
But hey! Charles Manson believed in global warming, right along with King Charles
who talks to plants to make them grow better, and his father, Prince
Phillip, who hoped after he died, and if he was reincarnated, he "would
wish to be returned to earth as a killer virus to lower human population
levels."
Definition leads to clarity, and that sure makes all it all clear to me. They're all nuts.
First, let's establish the logical foundation for this article. The modern green movement is a pagan religious movement and a scion of leftist misanthropic insanity, with academia used as an important primary tool to promote this insanity, including in science related fields.
Calling herself a poverty scholar...whatever the heck that
means....she led the class in a prayer to "Mama Earth", and to "the
ancestors", to "black, brown, and houseless (sic) people", that
capitalism and private property were evil, and on their knees mind you.
Then ranted about justice for Palestinians, and later claiming modern medicine is "white science". All of which was followed by a second prayer.
FOLKS........WE HAVE LOST OUR MINDS!
The EPA hasn't done anything worthwhile since 1980, and needs to be dismantled. Bold? Well, that was the view of my now passed friend Dr. Jay Lehr, one of the founders of EPA, who put together a five year plan to do it.
New EPA Emissions Standards Defy Reality - The recent stringent Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) carbon emissions standards for internal combustion engines defy economic realities. The EPA would have us believe that coercing folks to buy electric vehicles (EV) will somehow reduce alleged climate change extremes. The new rules will negatively affect California and the entire nation. Obviously,
most folks want to maintain clean air, land, and water ecosystems.
However, scientists haven’t agreed on what degree human activity
adversely impacts global climate change as opposed to natural causes for
extreme climate events. Several dire predictions of rising seas haven’t
panned out over several decades, while cooling and warming trends
haven’t been too much out of the ordinary.
I keep updated gazettes in queue in order to save as many articles as I can avoiding the past problem I created for myself with a massive number of "draft" articles, and that draft file is still massive, but I'm whittling it down. For years P&D was a "green issues" only blog but it became obvious "green" was nothing more than a sect of leftism, ergo, to discuss green meant taking on leftist insanity.
Recently there was an earthquake in New Jersey, and Nike Pope asked readers if the felt like they were losing brain cells, and my way of comparison made it clear their brain cells were totally safe compared to Christina Khalil who is running for the U.S. Senate to take Bob Menendez' seat. I wonder. Is stupid better than corrupt? Just a thought.
As President Trump coined: “Everything woke turns to s–t.” Literally. So
much for the idea of a clean planet, leftists only beget absolute
filth; any guesses as to what that rainwater runoff is carrying into the
bay?
In California virtually everything that makes modern civilization possible is under attack, yet everything leftism, and it's scion environmentalism, with their utopian delusions promotes, are always disasters.
;
Let's not just pick on California, although they deserve it, let's not lose sight that green is a ubiquitous neo-pagan secular nature worshiping religious movement, so let's go to New York, where the greenies cheered when New York shut down a nuclear power plant, but guess what happened next? Their claims the emissions would go down and electricity costs would go up turned out to be....wrong! That is absolutely the one thing they excel at. Being wrong....they almost have a monopoly on being wrong. The second thing they excel at is lying, lies of commission and lied of omission. So why do we listen to them? Oh, wait I know. If we listen to what they say and want, then we merely do the opposite in order to be successful. Sounds like a winner to me.
Does everyone remember when the greenies destroyed the logging industry in the North West claiming logging was destroying the spotted owl population? And of course under the insanity of the Endangered Species Act, the
spotted owl became a religious icon and no cost was too great to save
them. But guess what? They were wrong.... again....., it turns out it was the barred owl that was destroying the spotted owl population, not logging. But now it's been determined the the barred owls violate DEI standards! So, now the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has decided to eradicate around 500,000 barred owls in California, Oregon, and Washington in order to have "equity" for the spotted owl.
This delusional worship of nature isn't just out of the distant past led by ignorant tree worshiping druids, it's happening right here, right now. It turns out there are those who demand whales be accorded the status of, Legal Personhood, and rights to go along with that status, such as:
“Those rights include the right to freedom of movement, to natural
behavior development, to cultural expression, (whatever that means) which includes their
language, to a healthy environment, healthy oceans, and, indeed, the
restoration of their populations....”
Okay, I agree whales are in need of worldwide protection, but what is the reason behind this? It turns out some Polynesians consider whales to be "sacred ancestors". Green is a pagan religious movement, and it gets really insane.
We have animals with rights and lands that are sacred, all of which must be protected from the "new ways". In France rats have rights, and in 2012, so too in Washington DC, and in 2009, and plants now have rights. The Swiss, normally a sensible people, decided plants need to be accorded dignity.... yep you got it.... dignity.
They added an amendment to a law
that requires the Swiss to recognize the dignity of all living things to
include…..plants. Yes, even the “decapitation” of wildflowers at the
roadside “without rational reason”, will be punished.
What I think is truly telling is the fact
this actually made it through the court system to New York's Supreme
Court. Why's that telling? Because it's a demonstration of the
irrational societal paradigms infesting the nation's thinking today. The
West, especially Europe, has abandoned the Judaic/Christian values
and principles that have been foundational to our society. The only
stable moral foundation the world has known. What happens when a stable
moral foundation is abandoned? Then everything and nothing is
acceptable. Isn't that what we're seeing everywhere, especially at
America's schools of "higher" education?
Oil is the Earth’s miracle substance. Robert Bryce exposes the
foolishness of those who attack oil.....Petroleum will not be replaced by wind,
solar and batteries. Ever. It could be replaced by nuclear power, but we
have a long way to go before that happens. Meanwhile, let’s celebrate
oil, which has done more to improve human life than all the liberal
measures enacted by all governments in history, put together.
“Green” philosophic nature worship isn’t new. Historically the threads of green philosophical writings, an the idea that the earth and nature is superior
to man, goes back to the most ancient times. All religion based.
Make no mistake about this. Irrespective of one's personal
beliefs, this is a battle between neo-paganism, i.e. eco-religion, that
makes mankind a creation of nature versus the traditional Judaic-Christian
values where the Earth was created for mankind.
If alive today, the ancient druids would be very
comfortable with the modern green movement, especially with the idea
that people have to be sacrificed. Greenies are modern druids. And that's the real foundation of environmentalism. Not saving the environment, but destroying humanity. The druids and modern greenies share the sacrament of human sacrifice, the modern green movement is nothing short of Green Paganism!
For millennia, monarchs
ruled by some form of divine right. If not asserting god-like powers,
they claimed to be acting as God’s emissaries here on Earth. You can
imagine the effect this had on devout peoples of any faith. How could
the great unwashed masses dare question any royal’s divinely inspired
orders? This paradigm kept government authorities towering over those
they ruled.
The Enlightenment and the Scientific
Revolution crashed through the walls of absolute monarchies and
reoriented political systems on the foundations of natural law,
religious toleration, constitutional government, and individual
liberty. Twentieth-century postmodernism later led to a rise in
religious agnosticism and a growing uncertainty about even the existence
of God. First, philosophers stole monarchs’ divine right to rule; then
they convinced new generations to question God altogether.
Unsurprisingly,
both of these intellectual revolutions weakened the innate authority
upon which governments relied. Stripped of any divine pretense for
exerting power over their subjects, governments have been attempting to
justify their existence ever since..............To Read More....
People keep yammering about the need to
“return to nature” in order to restore their humanity and save the
planet. Return to organic farming. Eliminate pesticides. End the use of chemical
fertilizers. Absolutely no genetically modified foods. No roads, no cars, no running water, no electricity or modern central heating or cooling. Having
grown up on a farm in an area that had a substantial number of wells,
springs and cisterns as water sources, and outside toilets for
personal use, I am somewhat familiar with the concept.
I remember
well, and with great nostalgia, those starlit nights when I would lay
on my back and see the great expanse of the Milky Way. In the country, away from the lighted up cities, you really can see just how expansive and magnificent the milky way truly is. You felt as if you were looking past
eternity. You would be surprised at how many shooting stars appear on a
clear night.
There is a problem with that though. Life isn’t lived
that way.
Those grand nights weren’t every night, and during the day
those sights can’t be seen at all, and the memory of them doesn’t ease
the burdens of everyday living. Just because these moments are prized
and cherished by those of us who were able to enjoy them doesn’t alter
the fact that the rest of the time was substantially more difficult. In
other words; the farm is nice place to get away and visit, but I have no desire to go back. It's interesting that the people who actually lived what they call a "back to nature" lifestyle didn’t quite see life in the romantic mythology claptrap way the greenies present.
When one of the greatest advances ever for America ever was Rural Electrification, and very few said: "Oh, no, forget it, none of that throwing the switch stuff just to get light for me. I love my kerosene lanterns."
When running water was introduced into these areas, very few said: "Forget that, I would rather haul gallons and gallons of water up from the spring."
I had uncles and an aunt that did that. I want to see these "in love with nature" greenies do that on the first wash day. The lunatic left are on a path to eliminate modern appliances and cheap readily available electricity over the false narrative over global warming. On August 2, 2023 Jeffrey Folks published this piece, 27 Billion People, and Climate Change Not High, saying:
My paternal grandparents were tenant farmers caught in the destruction
of the Dust Bowl. They survived, just barely.......... When, in her sixties, my grandmother
acquired electricity and running water — and a washing machine — she
felt privileged, and she was. Around 60% of the world's population
today goes without indoor plumbing, and 13% lack electricity. The
comforts of modern life depend on fossil fuels, which supply cheap and
reliable power for all our needs. Our goal should be to extend modern
conveniences to more people, not to ban appliances and make electricity
more expensive...........
Does it ever occur to anyone to
ask:
If primitive was so wonderful in the past; why did they ever abandon it?
If primitive is so great today; why do they abandon it so readily when the opportunity presents itself?
I've read about
celebrities who raved about an outdoor experience as if they have had an
epiphany. But these epiphanies don't seem to last, because they quickly return to their highly electrified homes with running water, indoor toilets, central heat, air conditioning, swimming pools, manicured lawns, etc. If primitive was so great, why didn’t they
stay? Forever!
Clearly, there are some who really desire
that life, and they might find contentment with this lifestyle, for those who wish
to abandon modern life and revert back to nature, they have my blessing, but they need to leave the rest of us alone. I think I absolutely assure you, this is something most people would really
hate, and worse yet; I think few would survive.
“Consider,
for example, Thomas Babington Macaulay's description of life in the
17th-century Scottish highlands -- before anything beyond rudimentary
commerce and industry reach there:”
“His lodging would sometimes have been
in a hut of which every nook would have swarmed with vermin. He would
have inhaled an atmosphere thick with peat smoke, and foul with a
hundred noisome exhalations. At supper grain fit only for horses would
have been set before him, accompanied by a cake of blood drawn from
living cows. Some of the company with which he would have feasted would
have been covered with cutaneous eruptions, and others would have been
smeared with tar like sheep. His couch would have been the bare earth,
dry or wet as the weather might be; and from that couch he would have
risen half poisoned with stench, half blind with the reek of turf, and
half mad with the itch.”
I don’t know about you, but this doesn’t
sound like a good time to me. The movies don’t really depict the true
nature of life in ancient times. It was brutal, ugly, backbreaking,
uncomfortable, unhealthy, and most importantly; very short lived. When you abandon modern culture for the primitive life, that's the real embrace of nature.
We may wish to embrace nature in a care taking way, and I think this is a good overall attitude, but let’s not
lose sight of reality. Nature has no loving embrace for us in return.
Nature is unthinking, brutal, unkind, uncaring, unhealthy and will make
life short lived for those who aren’t prepared to change their
environment in order to survive nature's unthinking and uncaring efforts to kill us.
Nature will shine on us one day
and rain on us the next. It doesn’t care, nor is nature able to care.
Nature is an environmental machine that operates under a set of laws,
and those laws have no human concepts of reality or compassion. Let’s
stop being anthropomorphic about nature. Nature has no human qualities,
period.
How many of us really want to go back to those eras? If
we did, how may would survive the first year? How many really know how
to produce the food they would need to survive? If you were able to
produce enough food to survive, how do you preserve meats, fruits and
vegetables without refrigeration or canning processes? If you did grow
enough grain to get through the winter how would you process it and
store it?
It was done in the old days. Do you know how? How many
really do? To some extant I do, but none of that has any appeal for me
at all. I have no desire to embrace primitivism. Furthermore, I don’t seem to see
these environmentalist fools embracing it as a permanent life style either. They
pontificate about the glories of primitive living from the comforts and
well laid tables of the modern world.
The environment has to be
properly cared for, but all things in nature must be used as a means of
survival. I am not talking about abusing nature. Having grown up on a
small farm I know and understand the concepts of conservation
for future
utilization. It is just like a bank account, if you deplete it there is
nothing left. Make no mistake, there is a
difference between conservation and preservation.
But have no doubt in your mind at all, nature does not think and does not care. Nature has no
feelings, no concerns and no desires. Nature is here for our use and our
benefit, not the other way around. We are not imposing on nature.
Nature belongs to us, but it's a war, not a love affair.
Clear analytical thought becomes very difficult when living in an
imaginary world of serendipity. In the Persian fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip, wonderful,
valuable and agreeable things not sought for suddenly would appear. To
embrace nature for its beauty and grandeur is fortifying to the spirit,
but to embrace nature in order to humanize it as if nature was warm, wonderful
and serendipitous; is to place it above mankind.
That's eco-religion. That's eco-terrorism! It isn’t very bright either!
That they hate is us clear. But why do they hate us? And why are they so crazy? It’s their religion. While based on Christianity, what they have is bent and twisted. Let us compare their “version” to the real one. The
Great Commandment of the New Testament, taken from the Old, is “Thou
shalt love God with all thy heart and mind, and thy neighbor as
thyself.” This is a personal command, directed at each individual
person. It should be, because our worth is judged individually, and our
salvation is gained on the basis of individual merit.
What if someone messed with the Great
Commandment, “just a little”? They did. The “Great” Imperative is: “We
shall love God with all our hearts and minds, and our neighbors as
ourselves.” Instead of the individual being the focus, the
operand, of the commandment, now it’s the collective. Worth is now
assessed collectively, and salvation is gained collectively..........
Hide their existence. Quite like what is said of the devil, that his
best trick was to convince many that he did not exist. It was a good
trick the Left had. Mouthing what seemed at first to be consonant with
the American way, they were able to work across decades and to such
effect that we hardly knew what hit us or how this great U.S. of A.
became so changed and nearly lost.
Which is precisely why they abhor Donald J. Trump. For
until the coming of the Donald, they had not only a secret religion,
but a secret state religion. A secret state religion that was and is
against everything America stood for...............To Read More....
y now it is hardly original to point out that environmentalism has become a religion, with the climatistas being a full-fledged cult. Time magazine, which somehow sill exists, thinks we should make Earth Day an official religious holiday:
The Case For Making Earth Day a Religious Holiday. [O]n this 53rd Earth Day we thought it useful to pose what a real Earth Day should represent and how it could form a central time for a new approach to worship. . . Are we proposing a whole new religion? We’re not quite sure. Maybe an old one.
Yes, it was called paganism. But do go on:
In short, we must make nature central to our belief system with Earth Day or any number of earth-focused ceremonial days serving as regular reminders of what we owe our home planet.
Now I am actually all for this. Hear me out: if we start making Earth Day and the theology of this article officially recognized religious holidays, we can go to federal court to invalidate environmentalism as a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. We can’t be mixing up church and state you know.
The expert science bubble has popped. New polling shows 60% of US voters agree that that Climate Change is a religion and has nothing to do with the climate. Even more shocking is that 47% of US voters strongly agree.
It’s an Exocet for the priests of Climate Science. Their power
depends on people believing “they are The Science”, and The Science is
sacred. But word is spreading that the experts are more like
prophets-of-gloom than disciplined researchers. And once the idea is
seeded, it won’t go away. People who didn’t notice before will suddenly
see the failed predictions, the ice age that never came, the droughts
that become floods and the snow that children wouldn’t know. Humans are
excellent at pattern matching, just give them the right pattern to look
for…
This is an idea that has barely been mentioned in mainstream TV yet half the nation are already 100% sold.
Ten days ago Vivek Ramaswamy talked about the climate religion on Fox
News, and so Rasmussen asked the punters. And thus the emperor has no
clothes — fully six out of ten agree that “Climate is a religion”.
Vivek Ramaswamy on FoxNews:…the climate religion actually has nothing to do with the
climate. It is all about power, control, dominion and apologizing for
America’s own success. And the reason why is that this religion
looks the other way when PetroChina picks up the projects that American
companies drop. Last time I checked, it was global climate change, and
also it’s hostile to nuclear energy, which is truly bizarre because
that’s the best form of carbon-free energy production known to mankind.
This Rasmussen question is Kryptonite.
There is no pussy footing around the question, no ambiguity, no caveats:
“Do
you agree or disagree with this statement: Climate change has become a
religion that actually has nothing to do with the climate and is really
about power and control?”
AGREE – by Party
DEM: 45
IND: 59%, GOP: 79%, All Voters: 60%
Even nearly half the democrats agree. Does anything show better that
democracy is not about voters anymore? There are no vote winners for
pushing the climate faith, instead there is a vast untapped sea of
voters who think climate change is a money making scam. They want
someone to vote for, not a politician who says I’ll be less of liar than the other guy.
Strong questions bring out strong answers
In a world of wishy-washy surveys, just saying the flagrant bleeding
truth in full technicolor will bring out a stronger response than
tip-toeing around the point. Sometimes just asking the question
provokes the answer. How many people heard the question and went — oh yeah, now that you mention it…
The last dynamite poll in the world of surveys was in late 2015 when
Donald Trump stepped out and said “climate change is a total hoax”, and
when asked, 31% of US voters agreed, which was astonishing in an era when three quarters of Americans would also say “climate change is happening” and “was a threat” to the US.
Now, half the voters are so cynical they believe the media is actively trying to deceive them.
And the meme is even more dangerous because it’s closer to the truth —
“climate is a religion” not only includes the hoax, but also explains
the blind passion of the teenage throwers of soup and glue. They are not
hoaxers, they’re just deluded kids.
Live by the smear, die by the smear
For 30 years the Climate Crisis Team have talked about the dark
influence of fossil fuel money, like it was Gore’s Law of Physics, and
it worked to inure sleepy people against skeptical points. But now the
tables are turning and the insidious suggestion that “it’s all about
power, control and money” will work every bit as well against those who
never once spoke up to stop the namecalling and demonization of other
scientists.
They could have told the world there are no sacred cows in science, instead they created the cows — “there is a consensus!”.
They could have said that science is not a religion because there is no
bible, but instead they held up the IPCC reports like The Word of
Mother Nature. Instead of debating skeptics, with their overwhelming
evidence, they called them deniers and fled from the room.
97% of climate scientists acted like science was a religion. Karma comes back to get them.
The creed of the global warming craze, Can cause illness like mental malaise, While its arrogant dons, Pose as climate icons, As false mentors fool young proteges.
A prize-winning
science graduate in molecular biology. She has given keynotes about the
medical revolution, gene technology and aging at conferences. She
hosted a children’s TV series on Channel Nine, and has done over 200
radio interviews, many on the Australian ABC. She was formerly an
associate lecturer in Science Communication at the ANU. She’s author of
The Skeptics Handbook which has been translated into 15 languages. Each
day 5,000 people read joannenova.com.au
Dr. Lindzen calls into question the extent to which global temperature
corresponds to atmospheric concentration of CO2. He also calls the
notion of designating CO2 a "pollutant" ridiculous reiterating the
essential role it plays in sustaining life. He points out that, "if we
were to remove a bit more than 60% of current CO2, the consequences
would be dire: namely death by starvation for all animal life."
Dr. Lindzen's conclusions strike at the very core of the global warming narrative:
This
all leaves us with a quasi-religious movement predicated on an absurd "scientific" narrative. The policies invoked on behalf of this
movement have led to the US hobbling its energy system (a process that
has played a prominent role in causing current inflation), while lifting
sanctions for Russia's Nordstream 2 pipeline, which was designed to
bypass the existing pipeline through the Ukraine used to supply Germany.
It has caused much of the European Union to ban exploitation of shale
gas and other sources of fossil fuel, thus leaving it with much higher
energy costs, increased energy poverty, and dependence on Russia, thus
markedly reducing its ability to oppose Mr Putin's aggressions.
Unless
we wake up to the absurdity of the motivating narrative, this is likely
only to be the beginning of the disasters that will follow from the
current irrational demonization of COâ‚‚. Changing course will be far
from a simple task. As President Eisenhower noted in his farewell
address in 1961: The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars
by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is
ever present and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific
research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert
to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become
the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
CFACT has known Dr. Lindzen for decades. His work is first rate. Dr. Lindzen writes with the courage of a man of knowledge and
conviction, but also with the courage of a retired academic who need no
longer fear professional retaliation. Let's hope more academics with the courage to boldly question the dogma afflicting climate science will bravely speak out.
For nature and people too!
MIT Climate scientist:
Climate is an absurd,
quasi-religious scientific narrative
The great Rush Limbaugh used to say that "the modern
environmentalists worship the created, not the creator." I was reminded
of that after listening to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi once President Joe
Biden signed the fiscally unconscionable $750 billion tax-and-spend
Inflation Reduction Act, which gives another $369 billion to the climate
change-industrial complex.
Pelosi
(D-CA) claimed the wind, solar and electric subsidies in the Inflation
Reduction Act would placate an "angry" planet. "Mother Earth gets angry
from time to time, and this legislation will help us address all of
that," the speaker said.
This is a highly revealing statement. Do
Pelosi and her Democratic colleagues really believe that spending $369
billion on Tesla subsidies (with batteries made in China), windmills
(made in China) and solar panels (made in China) is going to save the
planet, stop the rise of the oceans and lower the global temperature?
This
is the same gang in Congress that can't stop the daily drive-by
shootings in our cities, can't secure the U.S.-Mexico border, can't come
anywhere near balancing the budget and can't provide the resources our
military needs for our national security.
Even if this additional
$369 billion were to work as planned, the Wall Street Journal reports
that the impact on global temperatures in the coming decades would be to
lower them by 0.001%. So, instead of the global temperature being an
average of 59 F, it will be 58.999 F. Thank God! We are saved from
Armageddon.
But as Pelosi's quote makes clear, this is about symbolism. It
is about ruining the economy as a sacrifice to Mother Earth. Marc
Morano, the journalist who runs ClimateDepot.com, asks: "Will human
sacrifices be next to appease the 'angry' Earth gods? Actually, this
bill will create human sacrifice by imposing even more suffering from
energy deprivation, supply chain issues, good shortages, inflation,
debt, and bad science."
He's right. The suffering that will occur
from this assault on American energy security and reliability could be
profound -- and it will be the lowest-income people who will be hurt the
most. Inflation will rise as energy prices soar. The shortages of
energy will cause hardship for many consumers, including food shortages.
Europe, which got hooked on the green energy fad, is now rationing
energy. In Spain, there are new restrictions on using air conditioning
to set the temperature of your store or home at less than 80 F -- during
a heat spell. It's one of those sacrifices to Mother Earth.
One
of the great injustices and ironies of the new law is that it purports
to give billions of dollars for "environmental justice" grants to
low-income communities and inner cities when it is this group of people
who will feel the brunt of the anti-fossil fuel policies. The poor spend
much more of their incomes on energy than the rich.
The warmest years in North America are not recent years -- instead,
they occurred during the 1930s amid the Dust Bowl era. This was (SET
ITAL) before (END ITAL) 80% of the carbon dioxide was released into the
atmosphere. Back then, thousands of U.S. residents died from extreme
weather. But now we have, through modern electric power and
technological innovation, major ways to reduce death rates from weather
events. The way to save the Earth is through more growth, more
innovation and a richer planet.
That is what Mother Earth wants.
That is what America wants. Only one out of 20 people rate climate
change as the No. 1 problem facing our country. The public wants lower
inflation and more prosperity. This law delivers neither.
The God
that many of us worship wants us to create peace, prosperity and light.
The god of radical environmentalists will deliver darkness, despair and
decline.
Editor's Note: While this article is almost two years old, it is in point of fact timeless. Definition leads to clarity, and we need to understand all this misery being caused by the Biden administration in the name of global warming is in fact foundationally nature worshiping paganism in origin, thought and intent. Once we understand that, everything else becomes clear.
Many zealous greens are strongly imbued with pagan values.
Paganism is generally defined as polytheism mixed in with nature
worship. Primitive pagans frequently cowered before the forces of
nature, fatalistically resigned to being at nature’s mercy, believing
that progress was not only impossible, but a criminal offense against
nature. So complete was their submission to nature, and so foreign to
them was the idea that individual lives have value, that pagan societies
often practiced human sacrifice to appease the gods of nature,
particularly the sun god (e.g., the Aztecs).
Let’s forget about polytheism for now. What’s more important are the
attitudes toward nature and human life. In the modern scientific era,
many people – whether prompted by theistic or humanistic beliefs and
values – reject the pagan beliefs that humankind should submit to nature
and that individual human lives deserves protection. However, many
other people, particularly hardcore greens, reject those principles and
replicate primitive paganism by exalting nature and devaluing human
life.
Pagan greens insist that we cling to dependence on natural, “clean,
renewable” sources of energy, namely, from the wind and sun. Try as they
might, though, they can’t coax consistency and reliability out of those
fickle natural sources. Nor are wind and solar energy really clean or
renewable, since they depend on massive consumption of many
“nonrenewable” resources, some of them highly polluting. (They also kill
more wildlife than fossil fuels do, but that’s another story.)
Of particular concern are the sometimes rabidly anti-human beliefs of
green pagans. They have variously labelled the human race “a virus,” “a
disease” “vermin,” “a cancer.” The hatred for humanity is palpable.
Here is more: “The extinction of the human species may not only be
inevitable but a good thing”; “Human beings, as a species, have no more
value than slugs”; “Man is no more important than any other species.”
Like some primitive pagan societies, groveling in fear before the
forces of nature, pagan greens believe that some individuals need to be
sacrificed for life to go on. Thus, the founder of the Environmental
Defense Fund, favored banning DDT because the ban would, “get rid of
some of them” (in Ebenezer Scrooge’s words, “decrease the surplus
population”) via insect-borne malaria and insect-caused crop
destruction. Indeed, the human death toll from banning rather than
moderating the use of DDT has exceeded the death toll from communism,
making environmentalism the most lethal leftist ideology in history.
That shouldn’t be surprising, for communists at least paid lip service
(however dishonestly) to “the good of the people,” while pagan greens
regard human life as no better than a pestilential germ.
The anti-human animus of pagan greens even gave rise to a pejorative
term: “speciesism” – i.e., the belief that humans are superior to other
species. Well, in pagan green cosmology, humans may not be superior to
other species, but in the real world, we are. Forget about us being at
the top of the food chain. Think moon-landings, movie magic, Mozart and
McCartney. Humans are unique. Every other species pursues its
self-interest without a thought for the long-term survival of other
species. Only humans have enough foresight to take deliberate steps to
try to conserve other species. Only humans could feel regret and grieve
if a beloved species goes extinct. Only humans are clever enough to
discover or invent 57 different genders. Sorry, animal kingdom, but it’s
no contest – humans are superior.
The contrary belief to speciesism is that all species are equal. That
belief can be harmful to humans. About 30 years ago, the Environmental
Protection Agency blocked the cleanup of sewage in the Tijuana River
Basin on the grounds that the cleanup would endanger the survival of the
life forms that dwelled in that toxic (to humans) brew. Yes, federal
bureaucrats placed the survival of various bacteria above the health of
human beings. That’s pagan!
Another manifestation of anti-human green paganism is their
preference for anti-growth agendas. The deadliest environment for a
human being is poverty, yet greens work to thwart economic development
in developing countries by trying to deny them access to the very fossil
fuels that enabled the people in developed countries to climb out of
poverty and live thriving, healthy lives. You can read details of these
tragic and genocidal policies in Paul Driessen’s superb book, Eco-Imperialism.
We need an environmentalism as if people mattered. (As a counterpoise
to Friends of the Earth, we could use an environmental advocacy group
called “Friends of people who live on Earth.)
Green icon Paul Ehrlich once asserted, “Economic growth is not the
solution it’s the problem.” He is 180 degrees off-target. Growth is the solution. If it
were true that the more economic development there is, the more
polluted our environment would be, then our goose would be cooked. We
could conceivably get so prosperous that we’d pollute ourselves to
death. But the world doesn’t work that way.
Instead, there is a well-known pattern known as the Kuznets curve
(named after the late economist Simon Kuznets who explained the
pattern). What happens is that when societies begin to develop and climb
out of poverty, pollution rises. But once development gets to the point
where basic needs are met and discretionary income rises, people are
willing and able to spend money on both pollution remediation and
pollution prevention. Consequently, affluent (developed) societies are
less polluted than developing societies.
Contemporary green paganism is an atavistic, anti-life fetish.
Cloaked in mystical ignorance and wildly misanthropic, contemporary
green pagans are as much of a threat to their fellow humans as their
primitive forbears ever were.
Junk Science, Regulatory Abuse, Secular Neo-Paganism and Insanity
By Rich Kozlovich
Make no mistake, the nature worshiping Druids of ancient times would have been totally comfortable with the greenies of today. The "modern" green movement has it's roots in the ancient pagan Druidic nature worship originating in the dark forests of ancient Germania. Embraced by 19th century German philosophers and codified into law by Nazi Germany. Irrational, misanthropic and morally defective. Actually, considering the Druidic origins of environmentalism, I should have made it the five pillars of modern environmentalism.Junk science, regulatory abuse, secular neo-paganism, insanity and human sacrifice.
So, when I came upon an old article entitled, Global Warming must be true, Charles Manson believes in it , my first thought was......Manson was a greenie? Whodda thunk it? Well, maybe that's not as strange as it seems since the greenies and Manson have a common bond. Irrational, misanthropic and morally defective.
Here are some of his thoughts:
'Everyone’s God and if we don’t wake up to that there’s going to be no weather because our polar caps are melting because we’re doing bad things to the atmosphere. ‘If we don’t change that as rapidly as I’m speaking to you now, if we don’t put the green back on the planet and put the trees back that we’ve butchered, if we don’t go to war against the problem...'….On the environment, Manson said: 'Sooner or later the will of God will prevail over all of you. And I was condemned as the will of God.' 'We are all martyrs. Love is a martyr... I am a martyr. But I am also a victim. And I'm a performer……I'm both. I am everything. I am nothing.'
Yup…. he’s qualified…..he’s a greenie. Crazy as a loon and vicious as a viper!
Much of what you see being touted by animal rights and green activists was first put into practice on a national level by the first green government, Nazi Germany. Like the Nazi's, the greenies love the world, its people they hate.
When I read comments from “normal” people who "know" that global warming is "real" , even after all that has come out demonstrating all the junk science and political chicanery behind it, I wonder at which Temple of the Church of the Warming Globe do they worship, and is smoking funny cigarettes part of the worship service conducted by the High Priest, Al Gore?
Do I believe in global warming? Yes, and I believe in global cooling also. Why? Because we have more than enough historical data to show that the Earth has warmed and cooled often in its history. That record also shows huge swings in temperature, and mankind didn't have a thing to do with any of it.And that's the issue. Not whether or not it's happening or not happening. It's whether or not mankind is responsible. We're not!
What about the disasters they're predicting for today?
Did any of the disasters they're predicting for our modern times occur when the temperatures during the Medieval Warming period, and the Roman Warming Period, where substantially higher than they are now? There is absolutely nothing in the historical record, or anywhere else, to show the warming doom they're predicting for today ever happened then! Why then should we believe they will occur now?
We shouldn't!
In fact, during those warming periods mankind was better off. It's the cold periods like the Little Ice Age during the 16th to 19th centuries that killed people. And mankind is in no way responsible for those periods either.
So, what's the "normal" temperature for the Earth supposed to be? No one can say. No one has come forward with that temperature because there is no standard, nor is there any science to prove what should be "normal" for the Earth. However, for argument's sake, if we arbitrarily decide to make the Medieval Warming Period the standard for normal, we've yet to recover from the Little Ice Age. And not only has the warming stopped, over 20 years ago now, there's concern we may be heading into another Solar Minimum
, where temperatures will start dropping.
As for
Ocean Acidification
- that's just more horsepucky to push an agenda of global governance. If it isn’t CO2, it will be ocean acidification. If it isn’t that it will be some other high sounding complicated claim that will be as equally un-provable as all the other horsepucky they have spewed out over the decades.
This issue is singular. Does mankind have the ability to control the weather, let alone the climate, in any meaningful way? The answer is no! So why should we believe that the minute amount of CO2 mankind puts into the atmosphere will alter the climate, especially since we know from the data that the amount of CO2 has fluctuated dramatically over the eons. And data also shows that the CO2 increases did not precede the warming periods, it followed them.
But hey! Charles Manson believed in global warming, right along with
Prince Charles
who talks to plants to make them grow better, and his father, Prince Phillip, who hoped after he died, and if he was reincarnated, he "would wish to be returned to earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels."
Well, that sure makes all the difference for me, how about you?
Much
of the European Union's green sustainable development plans are largely
based on government controlled land use planning theories rooted in the
lebensraum tradition. Literally, lebensraum means "living space."
Lebensraum was originally developed by German geographer Friedrich
Ratzel (1844-1904) and then greatly expanded under the banner of
National Socialism (1933-1945).
Ratzel is the father of modern
political geography which is commonly called geopolitics. He believed
history was largely a natural evolutionary development of peoples
looking for geographical living space. Ratzel also held that expanding
borders reflected the biological health of a nation. The National
Socialists adopted Ratzel's mixing of evolutionary theory, biology, and
geopolitics in their own version of lebensraum.
Karl Haushofer
(1869-1946), who was an early advisor to Hitler, was the link between
Ratzel and National Socialism. Karl Haushofer's father was a friend of
Ratzel. Karl was a member of the Thule Society before it was converted
into the Nazi Party in 1920. Haushofer was also the mentor of Rudolf
Hess, who was a green vegetarian mystic. Hess was Hitler's personal
secretary up until 1941. Haushofer and Hess helped Hitler write Mein
Kampf.
There was also a strong connection between lebensraum and
the growing political empire of the Nazi SS under the leadership of
Heinrich Himmler and Walther Darre. Himmler and Darre promoted a "back
to the land" movement under the SS slogan of "blood and soil." In
Darre's racist ideology, the economic catastrophe of the 1920's
confirmed the decadence of the modern cosmopolitan city life. Darre
believed that greedy foreign capitalism coupled with international
Marxist class warfare divided the German race so that it was not allowed
to sustain itself in the soil of its own homeland. ...........To Read More....
My Take - I recommend reading the author's book,Nazi Oaks.
Religion
is a belief system based on a combination of logic and faith, mostly
beyond the realm of what can be proven scientifically. A dictionary definition
is, “Religion is belief in a god or gods and the activities that are
connected with this belief, such as praying or worshiping in a building
such as a church or temple.”
Or in simpler terms, religion can create
order and meaning in a random and chaotic world. Religion is also
strongly held and deeply personal, not something tossed aside based on
the words of a government, politician, or celebrity.
For many,
politics has become a religion and. as a centuries-old etiquette rule
advises, “Never discuss politics or religion in polite company.”
Unfortunately, today, science has now become political and entered the
realm of religion.
For decades, communism was the primary religion
of the left. The fall of the Soviet Union and socio-economic failures
of Cuba, Venezuela, and other communist dictatorships steered the left
toward a new god, mother earth or, simply, the environment. This
religion morphed from global cooling in the 1970s to global warming a
decade later, now to climate change or extreme weather -- normal cyclic
events that have been a part of life on Planet Earth since long before
humans existed..........To Read More.....
Dramatic headlines and images showing a deteriorating environment
exist to demand swift, decisive, and large-scale action. We saw this
approach in the 1960s when the first made-for-TV environmental crises
showed oil-drenched seabirds on the California Coast and more recently
in depressing videos depicting starving polar bears. Dramatic imagery has become the norm when discussing environmental issues.
We also see trends in editorial writing, discussions among political groups, changing business practices, and increasingly scholarly claims
that also use dramatic imagery. At face value, these trends could
indicate that the public demands dramatic governmental action on
environmental issues. Some scholars, however, see this as more than mere
increased public demand for government intervention, and they highlight
similarities between environmentalism and religious movements. For
example, Laurence Siegal states:
In the decades since modern
environmentalism began, the movement has taken on some of the
characteristics of a religion: claims not backed by evidence,
self-denying behavior to assert goodness, (and a) focus on the supposed
end of times.
Scholars have tuned into the general public’s zealous interest in the
environment and more importantly, emphasis on government action, to
push forward their own ideological goals under the guise of scholarship.
Whereas the ultimate goal of scholarship is to mitigate climate change
and improve sustainability, the reality is instead corrupted by thinly
veiled ideology masquerading as scholarship, which is sure to distort
any useful policy recommendations.
This phenomenon is illustrated by a recent study making the rounds in Science Daily and The Climate News Network.
The authors, Vogel et al., claim that the world must decrease energy
use to 27 gigajoules (GJ) per person in order to keep average global
temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius, a recommendation included
in the Paris Agreement. Our current reality illustrates the outlandish
nature of this suggestion. We are a far cry from this goal both in 2012,
the year chosen for this study, as well as in 2019, the most recent
year for available data. Here is a snapshot of current per person energy
consumption (GJ):
2012:
2019:
United States: 285.59
United States: 287.63
China: 84.56
China: 98.83
Canada: 385.67
Canada: 379.94
Denmark: 127.97
Denmark: 120.73
Germany: 165.10
Germany: 157.33
Russia: 201.26
Russia: 204.322
India: 19.84
India: 24.92
Using these data, the authors pair what they view to be excessive
energy use with a failure to meet basic human needs worldwide. In their
own argument, they acknowledge that among the 108 countries studied,
only 29 reach sufficient need satisfaction levels. In each case where
need satisfaction is met, the country uses at least double the 27 GJ/cap
of sustainable energy use, thereby creating a conundrum both for those
concerned about the environment and human well-being.
The authors, however, provide a solution arguing that their research
shows a complete overhaul of “the current political-economic regime,”
would allow countries to meet needs at sustainable energy levels. Some
of their recommendations include: universal basic services, minimum and
maximum income thresholds, and higher taxes on wealth and inheritance.
These policy recommendations are not supported by the research and
directly contradict a body of literature that argues economic growth,
not government redistribution, is our way forward. Vogel et al. argue
against the necessity for economic growth and even go as far as to
support degrowth policies on the grounds that their model finds no link
between economic growth and maximizing human need satisfaction and
minimizing energy use.
In short, their proposed solution would punish affluent countries and
favor a collective misery in which any market driven environmental
improvements are crushed under the promise of equality and sustainable
energy use.
Conversely, Laurence Siegel in Fewer, Richer, Greener: Prospects for Humanity in an Age of Abundance and the 2020 Environmental Performance Index
(EPI) argue that economic prosperity allows countries to invest in new
technologies and policies that improve not only environmental health but
also the well-being of the people. Thus, if we want to continue to
improve our relationship with the environment and human progress, we
should be more supportive of economic growth and the entrepreneurship
that drives it.
If the above relationship between economic prosperity, environmental
health, and human well-being is the case, how can these authors claim
the opposite? The most likely conclusion is that the authors allow an
ideological bias to drive their research, a claim that is supported by
their normative descriptions of affluent countries as examples of
planned obsolescence, overproduction, and overconsumption as well as the
authors’ obvious demonization of profit-making.
As Vogel et al. demonstrates, environmental issues can be exploited
by the drama and religious nature of the movement. Unfortunately,
academics, such as Vogel et al., have learned to use these tools to
stretch their limited findings into a full-blown rallying cry for their
own preferred policies; in this case, socialism on a global scale.
Ryan M. Yonk is Senior Research
Faculty at the American Institute for Economic Research. He holds a PhD
from Georgia State University and a MS and BS from Utah State
University.
Prior to joining AIER he held academic positions at North Dakota
State University, Utah State University, and Southern Utah University,
and was one of the founders of the Strata Policy.
He is the (co) author or editor of numerous books including Green V. Green, Nature Unbound: Bureaucracy vs. the Environment, The Reality of American Energy, and Politics and Quality of Life: The Role of Well-Being in Political Outcomes. He has also (co) authored numerous articles in academic journals including Public Choice, The Independent Review, Applied Research in Quality of Life, and the Journal of Private Enterprise. His research explores how policy can be better crafted to achieve greater individual autonomy and prosperity.
Get notified of new articles from Ryan M. Yonk and AIER.
Jessica Rood is a Research Intern for
AIER. She is in her senior year at Truman State University in
Kirksville, MO where she majors in Economics and minors in Mathematics
and Political Science.
At Truman, she is a teaching assistant for the Economics department,
President of the Student Activities Board and active in Cardinal Key. In
her spare time, she likes to help out at her family’s Christmas tree
farm.
Get notified of new articles from Jessica Rood and AIER.
I have been asked to talk about what I consider the most important challenge facing mankind, and I have a fundamental answer. The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the information age (or as I think of it, the disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and importance.
We must daily decide whether the threats we face are real, whether the solutions we are offered will do any good, whether the problems we’re told exist are in fact real problems, or non-problems.
Every one of us has a sense of the world, and we all know that this sense is in part given to us by what other people and society tell us; in part generated by our emotional state, which we project outward; and in part by our genuine perceptions of reality. In short, our struggle to determine what is true is the struggle to decide which of our perceptions are genuine, and which are false because they are handed down, or sold to us, or generated by our own hopes and fears.
As an example of this challenge, I want to talk today about environmentalism. And in order not to be misunderstood, I want it perfectly clear that I believe it is incumbent on us to conduct our lives in a way that takes into account all the consequences of our actions, including the consequences to other people, and the consequences to the environment. I believe it is important to act in ways that are sympathetic to the environment, and I believe this will always be a need, carrying into the future. I believe the world has genuine problems and I believe it can and should be improved. But I also think that deciding what constitutes responsible action is immensely difficult, and the consequences of our actions are often difficult to know in advance. I think our past record of environmental action is discouraging, to put it mildly, because even our best intended efforts often go awry. But I think we do not recognize our past failures, and face them squarely. And I think I know why.
I studied anthropology in college, and one of the things I learned was that certain human social structures always reappear. They can’t be eliminated from society. One of those structures is religion. Today it is said we live in a secular society in which many people—the best people, the most enlightened people—do not believe in any religion. But I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form. You can not believe in God, but you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious.
Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism.
Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it’s a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.
There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.
Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday—these are deeply held mythic structures. They are profoundly conservative beliefs. They may even be hard-wired in the brain, for all I know. I certainly don’t want to talk anybody out of them, as I don’t want to talk anybody out of a belief that Jesus Christ is the son of God who rose from the dead. But the reason I don’t want to talk anybody out of these beliefs is that I know that I can’t talk anybody out of them. These are not facts that can be argued. These are issues of faith.
And so it is, sadly, with environmentalism. Increasingly it seems facts aren’t necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief. It’s about whether you are going to be a sinner, or saved. Whether you are going to be one of the people on the side of salvation, or on the side of doom. Whether you are going to be one of us, or one of them.
Am I exaggerating to make a point? I am afraid not. Because we know a lot more about the world than we did forty or fifty years ago. And what we know now is not so supportive of certain core environmental myths, yet the myths do not die. Let’s examine some of those beliefs.
There is no Eden. There never was. What was that Eden of the wonderful mythic past? Is it the time when infant mortality was 80%, when four children in five died of disease before the age of five? When one woman in six died in childbirth? When the average lifespan was 40, as it was in America a century ago. When plagues swept across the planet, killing millions in a stroke. Was it when millions starved to death? Is that when it was Eden?
And what about indigenous peoples, living in a state of harmony with the Eden-like environment? Well, they never did. On this continent, the newly arrived people who crossed the land bridge almost immediately set about wiping out hundreds of species of large animals, and they did this several thousand years before the white man showed up, to accelerate the process. And what was the condition of life? Loving, peaceful, harmonious? Hardly: the early peoples of the New World lived in a state of constant warfare. Generations of hatred, tribal hatreds, constant battles. The warlike tribes of this continent are famous: the Comanche, Sioux, Apache, Mohawk, Aztecs, Toltec, Incas. Some of them practiced infanticide, and human sacrifice. And those tribes that were not fiercely warlike were exterminated, or learned to build their villages high in the cliffs to attain some measure of safety.
How about the human condition in the rest of the world? The Maori of New Zealand committed massacres regularly. The dyaks of Borneo were headhunters. The Polynesians, living in an environment as close to paradise as one can imagine, fought constantly, and created a society so hideously restrictive that you could lose your life if you stepped in the footprint of a chief. It was the Polynesians who gave us the very concept of taboo, as well as the word itself. The noble savage is a fantasy, and it was never true. That anyone still believes it, 200 years after Rousseau, shows the tenacity of religious myths, their ability to hang on in the face of centuries of factual contradiction.
There was even an academic movement, during the latter 20th century, that claimed that cannibalism was a white man’s invention to demonize the indigenous peoples. (Only academics could fight such a battle.) It was some thirty years before professors finally agreed that yes, cannibalism does indeed occur among human beings. Meanwhile, all during this time New Guinea highlanders in the 20th century continued to eat the brains of their enemies until they were finally made to understand that they risked kuru, a fatal neurological disease, when they did so.
More recently still the gentle Tasaday of the Philippines turned out to be a publicity stunt, a nonexistent tribe. And African pygmies have one of the highest murder rates on the planet.
In short, the romantic view of the natural world as a blissful Eden is only held by people who have no actual experience of nature. People who live in nature are not romantic about it at all. They may hold spiritual beliefs about the world around them, they may have a sense of the unity of nature or the aliveness of all things, but they still kill the animals and uproot the plants in order to eat, to live. If they don’t, they will die.
And if you, even now, put yourself in nature even for a matter of days, you will quickly be disabused of all your romantic fantasies. Take a trek through the jungles of Borneo, and in short order you will have festering sores on your skin, you’ll have bugs all over your body, biting in your hair, crawling up your nose and into your ears, you’ll have infections and sickness and if you’re not with somebody who knows what they’re doing, you’ll quickly starve to death. But chances are that even in the jungles of Borneo you won’t experience nature so directly, because you will have covered your entire body with DEET and you will be doing everything you can to keep those bugs off you.
The truth is, almost nobody wants to experience real nature. What people want is to spend a week or two in a cabin in the woods, with screens on the windows. They want a simplified life for a while, without all their stuff. Or a nice river rafting trip for a few days, with somebody else doing the cooking. Nobody wants to go back to nature in any real way, and nobody does. It’s all talk-and as the years go on, and the world population grows increasingly urban, it’s uninformed talk. Farmers know what they’re talking about. City people don’t. It’s all fantasy.
One way to measure the prevalence of fantasy is to note the number of people who die because they haven’t the least knowledge of how nature really is. They stand beside wild animals, like buffalo, for a picture and get trampled to death; they climb a mountain in dicey weather without proper gear, and freeze to death. They drown in the surf on holiday because they can’t conceive the real power of what we blithely call “the force of nature.” They have seen the ocean. But they haven’t been in it.
The television generation expects nature to act the way they want it to be. They think all life experiences can be tivo-ed. The notion that the natural world obeys its own rules and doesn’t give a damn about your expectations comes as a massive shock. Well-to-do, educated people in an urban environment experience the ability to fashion their daily lives as they wish. They buy clothes that suit their taste, and decorate their apartments as they wish. Within limits, they can contrive a daily urban world that pleases them.
But the natural world is not so malleable. On the contrary, it will demand that you adapt to it-and if you don’t, you die. It is a harsh, powerful, and unforgiving world, that most urban westerners have never experienced.
Many years ago I was trekking in the Karakorum mountains of northern Pakistan, when my group came to a river that we had to cross. It was a glacial river, freezing cold, and it was running very fast, but it wasn’t deep—maybe three feet at most. My guide set out ropes for people to hold as they crossed the river, and everybody proceeded, one at a time, with extreme care. I asked the guide what was the big deal about crossing a three-foot river. He said, well, supposing you fell and suffered a compound fracture. We were now four days trek from the last big town, where there was a radio. Even if the guide went back double time to get help, it’d still be at least three days before he could return with a helicopter. If a helicopter were available at all. And in three days, I’d probably be dead from my injuries. So that was why everybody was crossing carefully. Because out in nature a little slip could be deadly.
But let’s return to religion. If Eden is a fantasy that never existed, and mankind wasn’t ever noble and kind and loving, if we didn’t fall from grace, then what about the rest of the religious tenets? What about salvation, sustainability, and judgment day? What about the coming environmental doom from fossil fuels and global warming, if we all don’t get down on our knees and conserve every day?
Well, it’s interesting. You may have noticed that something has been left off the doomsday list, lately. Although the preachers of environmentalism have been yelling about population for fifty years, over the last decade world population seems to be taking an unexpected turn. Fertility rates are falling almost everywhere. As a result, over the course of my lifetime the thoughtful predictions for total world population have gone from a high of 20 billion, to 15 billion, to 11 billion (which was the UN estimate around 1990) to now 9 billion, and soon, perhaps less. There are some who think that world population will peak in 2050 and then start to decline. There are some who predict we will have fewer people in 2100 than we do today. Is this a reason to rejoice, to say halleluiah? Certainly not. Without a pause, we now hear about the coming crisis of world economy from a shrinking population. We hear about the impending crisis of an aging population. Nobody anywhere will say that the core fears expressed for most of my life have turned out not to be true. As we have moved into the future, these doomsday visions vanished, like a mirage in the desert. They were never there—though they still appear, in the future. As mirages do.
Okay, so, the preachers made a mistake. They got one prediction wrong; they’re human. So what. Unfortunately, it’s not just one prediction. It’s a whole slew of them. We are running out of oil. We are running out of all natural resources. Paul Ehrlich: 60 million Americans will die of starvation in the 1980s. Forty thousand species become extinct every year. Half of all species on the planet will be extinct by 2000. And on and on and on.
With so many past failures, you might think that environmental predictions would become more cautious. But not if it’s a religion. Remember, the nut on the sidewalk carrying the placard that predicts the end of the world doesn’t quit when the world doesn’t end on the day he expects. He just changes his placard, sets a new doomsday date, and goes back to walking the streets. One of the defining features of religion is that your beliefs are not troubled by facts, because they have nothing to do with facts.
So I can tell you some facts. I know you haven’t read any of what I am about to tell you in the newspaper, because newspapers literally don’t report them. I can tell you that DDT is not a carcinogen and did not cause birds to die and should never have been banned. I can tell you that the people who banned it knew that it wasn’t carcinogenic and banned it anyway. I can tell you that the DDT ban has caused the deaths of tens of millions of poor people, mostly children, whose deaths are directly attributable to a callous, technologically advanced western society that promoted the new cause of environmentalism by pushing a fantasy about a pesticide, and thus irrevocably harmed the third world. Banning DDT is one of the most disgraceful episodes in the twentieth century history of America. We knew better, and we did it anyway, and we let people around the world die and didn’t give a damn.
I can tell you that second hand smoke is not a health hazard to anyone and never was, and the EPA has always known it. I can tell you that the evidence for global warming is far weaker than its proponents would ever admit. I can tell you the percentage the US land area that is taken by urbanization, including cities and roads, is 5%. I can tell you that the Sahara desert is shrinking, and the total ice of Antarctica is increasing. I can tell you that a blue-ribbon panel in Science magazine concluded that there is no known technology that will enable us to halt the rise of carbon dioxide in the 21st century. Not wind, not solar, not even nuclear. The panel concluded a totally new technology-like nuclear fusion-was necessary, otherwise nothing could be done and in the meantime all efforts would be a waste of time. They said that when the UN IPCC reports stated alternative technologies existed that could control greenhouse gases, the UN was wrong.
I can, with a lot of time, give you the factual basis for these views, and I can cite the appropriate journal articles not in whacko magazines, but in the most prestigeous science journals, such as Science and Nature. But such references probably won’t impact more than a handful of you, because the beliefs of a religion are not dependant on facts, but rather are matters of faith. Unshakeable belief.
Most of us have had some experience interacting with religious fundamentalists, and we understand that one of the problems with fundamentalists is that they have no perspective on themselves. They never recognize that their way of thinking is just one of many other possible ways of thinking, which may be equally useful or good. On the contrary, they believe their way is the right way, everyone else is wrong; they are in the business of salvation, and they want to help you to see things the right way. They want to help you be saved. They are totally rigid and totally uninterested in opposing points of view. In our modern complex world, fundamentalism is dangerous because of its rigidity and its imperviousness to other ideas.
I want to argue that it is now time for us to make a major shift in our thinking about the environment, similar to the shift that occurred around the first Earth Day in 1970, when this awareness was first heightened. But this time around, we need to get environmentalism out of the sphere of religion. We need to stop the mythic fantasies, and we need to stop the doomsday predictions. We need to start doing hard science instead.
There are two reasons why I think we all need to get rid of the religion of environmentalism.
First, we need an environmental movement, and such a movement is not very effective if it is conducted as a religion. We know from history that religions tend to kill people, and environmentalism has already killed somewhere between 10-30 million people since the 1970s. It’s not a good record.
Environmentalism needs to be absolutely based in objective and verifiable science, it needs to be rational, and it needs to be flexible. And it needs to be apolitical. To mix environmental concerns with the frantic fantasies that people have about one political party or another is to miss the cold truth—that there is very little difference between the parties, except a difference in pandering rhetoric. The effort to promote effective legislation for the environment is not helped by thinking that the Democrats will save us and the Republicans won’t. Political history is more complicated than that. Never forget which president started the EPA: Richard Nixon. And never forget which president sold federal oil leases, allowing oil drilling in Santa Barbara: Lyndon Johnson. So get politics out of your thinking about the environment.
The second reason to abandon environmental religion is more pressing. Religions think they know it all, but the unhappy truth of the environment is that we are dealing with incredibly complex, evolving systems, and we usually are not certain how best to proceed. Those who are certain are demonstrating their personality type, or their belief system, not the state of their knowledge. Our record in the past, for example managing national parks, is humiliating. Our fifty-year effort at forest-fire suppression is a well-intentioned disaster from which our forests will never recover. We need to be humble, deeply humble, in the face of what we are trying to accomplish. We need to be trying various methods of accomplishing things. We need to be open-minded about assessing results of our efforts, and we need to be flexible about balancing needs. Religions are good at none of these things.
How will we manage to get environmentalism out of the clutches of religion, and back to a scientific discipline? There’s a simple answer: we must institute far more stringent requirements for what constitutes knowledge in the environmental realm. I am thoroughly sick of politicized so-called facts that simply aren’t true. It isn’t that these “facts” are exaggerations of an underlying truth. Nor is it that certain organizations are spinning their case to present it in the strongest way. Not at all—what more and more groups are doing is putting out is lies, pure and simple. Falsehoods that they know to be false.
This trend began with the DDT campaign, and it persists to this day. At this moment, the EPA is hopelessly politicized. In the wake of Carol Browner, it is probably better to shut it down and start over. What we need is a new organization much closer to the FDA. We need an organization that will be ruthless about acquiring verifiable results, that will fund identical research projects to more than one group, and that will make everybody in this field get honest fast.
Because in the end, science offers us the only way out of politics. And if we allow science to become politicized, then we are lost. We will enter the Internet version of the dark ages, an era of shifting fears and wild prejudices, transmitted to people who don’t know any better. That’s not a good future for the human race. That’s our past. So it’s time to abandon the religion of environmentalism, and return to the science of environmentalism, and base our public policy decisions firmly on that.
