This essay appears today in The Chronicle Review and it makes an interesting claim:
What is the carbon footprint, after all, if not the gaseous equivalent of Original Sin, the stain we inflict on Mother Gaia?
Pascal Bruckner writes:
There are at least two ecologies: one rational, the other nonsensical; one that broadens our outlook while the other narrows it; one democratic, the other totalitarian. The first wants to tell us about the damage done by industrial civilization; the second infers from this the human species’ guilt. For the latter, nature is only a stick to be used to beat human beings. Just as third-worldism was the shame of colonial history, and repentance was contrition with regard to the present, catastrophism constitutes the anticipated remorse of the future: The meaning of history having evaporated, every change is a potential collapse that augurs nothing good.
Catastrophism’s favorite mode of expression is accusation: Revolutionaries wanted to erase the past and start over from zero; now the focus is on condemning past and present wrongs and bringing them before the tribunal of public opinion. No leniency is possible; our crime has been calculated in terms of devastated forests, burned-over lands, and extinct species.
The prevailing anxiety is at once a recognition of real problems and a symptom of the aging of the West, a reflection of its psychic fatigue. Our pathos is that of the end of time. And because no one ever thinks alone, because the spirit of an age is always a collective worker, it is tempting to give oneself up to this gloomy tide. Or, on the contrary, we could wake up from this nightmare and rid ourselves of it.
read the entire essay here: http://chronicle.com/article/Against-Environmental-Panic/139733/
h/t to reader “Jamie”
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Well, he got it half right. Carbon is being used as a guilt tactic to get folks to follow the new religion of Gaia worship. The problem is it is a false religion. So many true believers are going to be so disappointed. We can only hope the recoil can be channeled in a positive direction.
Extreme environmentalist’s logic:
You were born, don’t you feel guilty about that?
I guess every religion needs some type of “original sin” so they can claim to be the salvation for those who do not sin. An interesting comparison.
Re the CO2 Sin: Wearily give ourselves up to it or wake up and rid ourselves of it. Perhaps rgbatduke’s thought (Quote of the week) on what one extreme one might envision after the fraud is realized (climate sensitivity of 1C rather than 2.5C) is synonymous to ridding ourselves of it:
“….climate sensitivity plunges from the totally statistically fraudulent 2.5 C/century to a far more plausible and stillpossibly wrong ~1 C/century, which — surprise — more or less continues the post-LIA warming trend with a small possible anthropogenic contribution. This large a change would bring out pitchforks and torches as people realize just how badly they’ve been used by a small group of scientists and politicians,…”
This brings us back to the article on ‘pathological altruism’ I linked over at BH…
What does it say about a “religious belief” or its god (Gaia) when puny mortal man can purportedly destroy said god?
Apparently poor Gaia has a pronounced “achilles heel”.
A baptism in the AL Gore/IPCC church of AGW will absolve this!
Most notably at odds with reality is the belief in a benign Mother Nature. When one examines the
number of catastrophic weather/climate events events, and the capricious way in which tens of thousands of organisms are allowed to come into existence, only to be killed off thru mass extinction, you’re confronted with a picture that shows Mother Nature to be stupid, hateful and downright evil. In other words, Mother Earth sucks and needs to be controlled by humans, as much as possible.
I know followers. When they talk about the future then always in terms of the inevitable catastrophy. It’s a doomsday cult. I have never seen one of them celebrate any success by environmentalists. It’s negative only.
And what are carbon credits if not today’s equivalent of Medieval indulgences.
This post frames a truly interesting perspective on the AGW movement.
I am reading a book on the anti-Christ concept/myth. The correlation between AGW belief and traditional eschatological (end times) belief is striking. It appears to get stronger around millenial times. Anti-Christ/apocalyptic fanatics cling to their beliefs no matter the evidence for years at a time. Their interepretation of the apocalypse/anti-Christ threat allows them interpret everything through the lens of their ‘revelation’.
Think what that implies about AGW:
When did AGW believers get frenetic in their claims?
Why do AGW beleivers cling so tightly to their belief in climate doom?
Why are they obsessed wtih CO2 ‘solutions’ often at the expense of the environment?
Since we all produce and contribute to CO2 in the atmosphere, why is the need to blame those happen to disagree while producing the same CO2 so high?
This sociological look at AGW is much more productive than arguing with the believers about their failed scientific predictions and the lack of climate cooperation with their prophecies of doom.
One card that Marx kept up his sleeve when he wrote that “religion is the opiate of the masses” is the card which substitutes “any ideology can be an ..” for “religion is …”. Ideology by and large substitutes dogma for critical thought and fixed opinion for “we don’t know,” or a qualified response like “we think…”. The brutal difference between the scientific method and other forms of thought is that it always holds open the option of returning to first principles, or even questioning those and replacing them is necessary. The difference is “brutal” because at any time, an observation can be made that invalidates and entire corpus of knowledge. Centuries of serious thoughtful work can wind up in the bin simply because it cannot explain an observation.
Scientists, in contrast to the method, are human, hate to redo work unnecessarily and ultimately tend to invoke some set of principles as authoritative, rather than simply “good enough.” The latter leaves open the possibility that the principles in fact were actually, really not “good enough.”
Secular guilt felt over the Puritan “waste not, want not” ethic…
Among the non-religious there can be a kind of secular guilt for “violations” of the oldtime Puritan work ethic. It’s the “waste not, want not” dictum that has been inculcated in us since our first days. When we drive around in big SUVs, and seem to be just living the good life for no seeming purpose, this doesn’t jive, and the guilt is felt, with dispensation coming in calling for cutting back these “wasteful” ways. To save the world is now the missing outward purpose. Yes, to “cool” the world. Or to placate the angry gods (as the storm gods [sound familiar?]).
You might find Melanie Phillips book “The World Turned Upside Down” to be interesting as she speaks to this characteristic of the left in terms of guilt, redemption, sin, and millenarianism using many different avenues. She is on youtube with several interviews/reviews of her book as well.
I wonder:
How much CO2 do we humans exhale into the atmosphere every minute?
@Bob Diaz
“You breathe, don’t you feel guilty about that?”
As one who does not intend to quietly leave, I shall continue to liberate carbon from its repositories in the earth and combine it with oxygen to provide a nutrient needed by plants so that they may grow and provide food for the herbivores who will in turn provide sustenance for carnivores and omnivores (which will hopefully include a more enlightened homo sapiens) so that they can in turn feed the myriad of critters which will assist in providing nutrients for plants. It might be interesting to see how the world changes as we replenish the basic building block of life – carbon dioxide. At least it should not be dull.
With every PPM increase in CO2, the ENTIRE plant world rejoices.
The flowers and trees are singing, just like in a Disney movie.
“Save the planet!?!? The planet doesn’t need saving. Some people are {beep}, but the planet’s doing just fine.” George Carlin
Good words these:
“The ecology of disaster is primarily a disaster for ecology … We have to try to push back the boundaries of the possible by encouraging the most fantastic initiatives, the most mind-boggling ideas… Every new invention must strike the heart of human desire, elicit astonishment, and allow people to embark upon an unprecedented voyage … If a generous defense of the environment is to develop in the course of the next century, it will exist only as the servant of humans … The friends of the earth have for too long been enemies of humanity; it is time for an ecology of admiration to replace an ecology of accusation… Above all, we have to save the world from its self-proclaimed saviors … We need trailblazers and stimulators”
Well said, very well said 🙂
I remember reading a theory based on the Gaia hypothesis that humans were placed on this plant to burn fossil fuels to “free up” carbon that had been over-sequestered by nature in coal, oil, methane, etc.
Several interesting things going on here. The Chronicle article brings up one of them. The other is the reemergence of the “noble savage” myth of the 17th and 18th centuries — the notion that life would be better, purer if we got rid of all this artificial technology that depends on fossil fuels. Mystically, people will become nobler if we adopt a “more sustainable” lifestyle.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of us selfish, unenlightened cusses refuse to see what is simply obvious to the 97% of all right-thinking people and must therefore be
bludgeonedguided to the proper path by reasonable and necessarystate coercioncollection action. This tends to be the end result of such Utopian schemes because their proponents simply cannot understand why everyone doesn’t believe likewise and often come to attribute lack of agreement to evil intent.I thought Columbus’ discovery of the New World was the original sin.
Sigh. That was last century, I guess.
Pathological altruism: “altruism in which attempts to promote the welfare of others instead result in unanticipated harm.”
See: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324688404578545523824389986.html
In other words, the anti-carbon cult doesn’t care if their policies do more harm than good. The average person, given the facts, will usually determine the costs of eliminating carbon fuels far outweighs the benefits.
Mr Bruckner’s piece is indeed thought provoking. I particularly liked his closing bit
“If a generous defense of the environment is to develop in the course of the next century, it will exist only as the servant of humans and nature in their mutual interaction and not as an advocate speaking through an entity called “the planet.”
The friends of the earth have for too long been enemies of humanity; it is time for an ecology of admiration to replace an ecology of accusation.
Save the world, we hear everywhere: Save it from capitalism, from science, from consumerism, from materialism. Above all, we have to save the world from its self-proclaimed saviors, who brandish the threat of great chaos in order to impose their lethal impulses. Behind their clamor we must hear the will to demoralize us the better to enslave us. What is at stake is the pleasure of living together on this planet that will survive us, whatever we do to it. We need trailblazers and stimulators, not killjoys disguised as prophets.”
Although I have always been a bit of a misanthrope myself, the overwhelming misanthropy of the CAGW/CACC enterprise would lead me to reject it even if I found its feeble science 100% convincing. The purveyors of climate doom have an abiding hatred for the “developed” world, despite the fact that concerns for the state of the natural world can only manifest themselves when providing for the basic needs required for subsistence doesn’t take up 100% of everyone’s day.
Environmentalism would not exist except for the developed world. The atmosphere in a peasant’s hut is much worse than in almost any industrial complex in the modern developed world, except of course, for those like Russia and China, where the remnants of Communism have left their populations impotent to object to the pollution to which they are subjected. This is a tad ironic, because the system least capable of dealing with the problems of environmental damage i.e. top down command and control economies, are the very models that are demanded by climate alarmists to solve the mostly nonexistent problem of Carbon.
‘Anti-people, anti-development’ environmentalism followers accept the ‘anti’ as an assumed fundamental truth. The ‘anti’ rules out options, rules out analysis as to what is the problem. There is no discussion of pros and cons concerning the ‘anti’, there is no discussion of costs. The leaders provide the message telling the followers what they shall be ‘anti’ against.
The warmist leaders do not care if the warmist policies will lead to the destruction of the Western industrial base. They live in a fairy tale world that is supported by rich donor money.
All effort is to support the message. The analysis and discussion is to push the message.
Anyone of questions the ‘anti’ are heretics, evil.
As the warmists are followers they accepted the extreme AGW message as dogma. Dogma is unquestionable, truth.
The absurd biofuel program is an example of what happens when there is no analysis. The profiteers take advantage of the situation.
If all energy inputs are taken into account the conversion of food to biofuel (corn to ethanol for example) results in almost no reduction in CO2 emissions. If the N02 emission from fertilization to grow the food to convert to biofuel (Nitrous oxide is 300 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2) there is a theoretical increase in warming to convert food to biofuel. As there is a limited amount of agricultural land to grow food for 7 billion people, virgin forest is being cut down to grow food to convert to biofuel which results in an increase in CO2. The amount of land required to provide all transportation fuel from biofuel is slightly more than all current agricultural land to feed 7 billion people. The biofuel mandate will lead to food wars and mass starvation if it is continued and the food to biofuel program will result in increase in CO2 emissions.
Extreme environmentalism is a type of madness, green facism.
Comment:
There is an interesting book “Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility” that expands on the essay, providing specific examples of why ‘fanatical, anti-people, anti-development’ environmentalism fails and the mindset of the leaders and followers.
One of the authors of the book “Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility” Michael Shellenberger is a producer of the new film ‘Pandora’s Promise’ which makes a case for nuclear power as the solution for global warming. Pandora’s promise provides facts that show that soft green energy will not work.
“Environmental insiders Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus triggered a firestorm of controversy with their self-published essay, “The Death of Environmentalism.” In it, they argued that global warming is far more complex than past pollution problems. American values have changed dramatically since the environmental movement’s greatest victories in the 1960s, yet environmentalists keep fighting the same battles without realizing that the battlefield has changed. Noting a connection between the failures of environmentalism and the failures of the entire left-leaning political agenda, the authors point the way toward an aspirational politics that will resonate with modern American values and be capable of tackling our most pressing challenges.”