Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Naomi Klein has claimed that the reason Americans, British, Australians and Canadians are the world’s leading “climate deniers”, is that we share a “frontier mentality”.
According to Klein;
Klein said the denial of climate science was prevalent in English-speaking countries such as Australia, Canada, the US and the UK because of a “colonial settler mentality”.
“Countries founded on a powerful frontier mentality have this idea of limitless nature than can be endlessly extracted,” she said.
“Climate change is threatening to that because there are limits and you have to respect those limits. Where that frontier narrative is strongest is where denialism is strongest.
“The rest of Europe has a keener sense of boundaries – they’ve lived against the limits of nature for longer.”
For once Naomi has a point. People who reject climate alarmism, in my experience, tend to be people who think for themselves.
“The rest of Europe has a keener sense of boundaries – they’ve lived against the limits of nature for longer.”
The truth is that what has happened in the English-speaking countries does not support this historic paradigm at all.
The combination of hard work, equality before the law, private property, and literacy have resulted in a grand experiment. The story is not one of “used up resources,” but of increasing the uses and productivity with what we already have.
To illustrate:
1. Cattle are fed now with the remainder of the corn stalk. The stalks and leaves are ground up and stored in cement bins. The aged silage feeds cattle during the winter months when pasture is limited or lost under the snow. (Not to mention that cattle also eat unsalable apples, potatoes, etc.. turning them into superior proteins, medication, leather, and fertilizers.)
2. The cotton plant through most of history was difficult to use because of the seeds. Once the seeds were easily mechanically removed, cotton became more plentiful. But yields increased enormously with chemical inputs and the use of tractors. Not only that, innovative entrepreneurs in the US found a use for the tiny cotton seed, and now cottonseed oil is another product created from the same cotton plant.
3. The excess water flow in cities is now used to also flush away sewer and waste through the simple use of gravity and careful drainage engineering.
Without the millions of tiny innovative steps – which were mainly developed in free, open, Protestant countries by men and women whose names have practically been forgotten – almost everything would be a luxury item. This lady is speaking in English, but she is attempting to frame history to suit her belief in a superior caste that must direct culture, education, and production. It’s a really really bad paradigm. No one should listen to that. Americans and Brits should know John Smeaton, Bazalgette, Goodyear, and Wright Brothers (and hundreds more like them) as geniuses, rather than Darwin and Einstein.
I think Naomi Klein suffers from cultural isolation. She is English speaking and hangs around with rich folk and religious extremists like Pope Francisco. I read and watch other media, and I noticed they focus mostly on government corruption, football, illegal immigrants, football, unemployment, and football.
Countries which were founded on a frontier experience have developed a very strong ability to smell bullshit. They have experienced it daily and can detect it immediately. This is why they know that ‘Global Warming/CAGW/Climate change is not threatening them.
tesdorf: I can’t help myself after your comment –
“What’s the difference between a cowboy and a CAGW alarmist?”
“A cowboy has the BS on the outside of his boots. “
Naomi Klein is sooooo late 19th century and early 20th century socialist leftovers.
Capitalism vs. Collectivism in history has been written.
Capitalism ignored collectivism which caused collectivism to go bankrupt economically, morally and intellectually. Socialism is based on collectivism.
John
“Klein said the denial of climate science was prevalent in English-speaking countries such as Australia, Canada, the US and the UK because of a “colonial settler mentality.”
One might also add that climate alarmism is prevalent among urban postmodern politically correct educated populations who subscribe to a romanticized notion of the natural world as existing in a benign state of “delicate” “fragile” “balance” with any evidence of detriment or unusual change as prima facie evidence of human “impact”. While they profess a love of nature their own chosen environment is the tiny fraction of the world where nature has been virtually annihilated. Although they express deep concern about “threats” to nature they have no hopeful interest in any evidence that a threat might not be as bad as they claim to fear. Rather, they angrily reject it. It is apparent their real emotional commitment is more to the threats than to nature.
They produce nothing useful but condemn those whose production supports them. Their horizon is limited to the narrow zone between the shop and the rubbish bin with little awareness of what comes before or after. If they achieve what they wish to impose on the productive sector their own most valuable contribution to nature may well be as compost.
This woman is deranged!….
Worse, she’s a Cadillac communist. Global warming is just a fringe concern for her. She’s a far-left socialist who has repeatedly expressed her admiration and support for Hugo Chavez over the years. She’s married to Avi Lewis. Lewis used to be a mouthpiece for the CBC (that’s the state media Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for you foreigners).
Lewis was sacked from the CBC after a particularly egregious interview he conducted with Ayaan Ali Hirsi in which among other things he accused Hirsi of exaggerating what she had been subjected to in her native Somalia. Lewis promptly fled to Al-Jazeera, where he was shortly after joined by former CBC News head Tony Burman.
So, both Klein and her spouse Lewis are cardinal examples of a particularly self-righteous Canadian left.
A friend on Facebook posted this article yesterday (I had never heard of Naomi Klein, so I did some searching) this one on Youtube was interesting:
Here is a reflection: We got out of the country after the Vietnamese invasion with the photographs of what Pol Pot had done. The UN decided to let Pol Pot to be an “observer” and China took him in as a kindred spirit. No US publications would print the photos which are now “noble prize winning” art of the most radical genocide in modern times. It is disgraceful!
Makes perfect sense. The Khmer Vert (modern AGW-environmentalist movement) is the direct descendant of the Khmer Rouge.
Khmer Pasteque anyone?
Klein is right – sadly it is true that the imbecilic denial of continual natural climate change lies at the heart of the AGW movement and its Mann-made narrative that climate never changed until humans came onto the scene and carbon-sinned. And the English speaking countries have played a leading role in this AGW scam/power grab.
Dissipative nonlinear-fractal oscillation is the most fundamental physical characteristic of the ocean-atmosphere climate system. While it exists it will continuously exhibit “climate change” over a fractal range of amplitudes and timescales. Understanding of this fact undermines climate alarmism. Klein is herself on the side of the true deniers of climate change.
I see that we here at the bottom of the world, the edge of the Empire and the dawn of each day have been mentioned in three comments, but would still like to record that I was deeply offended by Naomi’s failure to include New Zealanders on her list. – Russell McMahon.
Hey Naomi,
I have a better idea for you. Maybe critical thinking is a survival skill that lets frontier types survive as frontier types. You don’t need it living in your urban metropolis. You don’t need to plan for 6 months of winter with no food except what you stored the previous seasons. So maybe the grasshopper should quit telling the ant that the weather will be warmer, so quit storing food for the winter.
If the photo is a true representation of Ms Klein, then she definitely has to work on the concerned-feminist-liberal-greenie head-tilt. The shoulders need to be kept straight with just the noggin tilted. And there’s something amiss with the eyes, too.
You mean Sam Eagle’s eyebrows?
Background reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier_Thesis#Closed_frontier
Arguments advanced by historian Frederick Jackson Turner regarding
that American democracy was formed by the American frontier (paper in 1893)
“Climate change is threatening to that because there are limits and you have to respect those limits”
Actually, the climate change agenda is not the Club of Rome agenda. It has to do only with a need to reduce CO2 emissions although it has to be said that there is no real evidence that reduction in human emissions would have any impact on changes in atmospheric CO2. Pls see: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2642639
Nice attempt by N. Klein to ostracise “dissenters”.
But this attempt is going to fail, because it’s the “dissenters” who are right.
And attacking fact checkers only works in a short-term hit and run “frontier tactic” of ambush warfare.
Yes, there’s nothing like millennia of theocratic rule and constant religious and territorial wars to give one a sense of acceptance.
People who unquestioningly believe government propaganda and slavishly follow orders are less likely to be climate deniers.
It is sometimes called Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming. It was previously believed that a smog-induced Ice Age would result from human activity. Now, it’s more fashionably referred to as Climate Change, so no matter which way the thermometer goes, it can be blamed upon mankind. It is the Earth Goddess Gaia’s Divine Retribution for the evils of capitalism and the Original Sin of private property. [Any pollution caused by government or naturally occurring factors are exempt from concern, which is why the Greens don’t mention it.]
The proof that it is akin to religion is exemplified by the reaction to any evidence to the contrary, no matter how dispassionately it is presented and no matter how exhaustive and objective the research. Such heresy is typically greeted by foaming-at-the-mouth hysteria, just as is the case with any religious zealot. Doubters are regarded and treated like the Infidel. Scientists who question the the data or reasoning behind Anthropogenic Climate Change are persecuted.
What is their end game?
The concern over Climate Change will end when government owns or at least controls everything. Pollution likely will increase under that paradigm, because an all-controlling government is less accountable. But the sin of private property will be removed, so Gaia will be propitiated. Further, the economy will inevitably decline under such medievalism, so fewer people will own things like cars and furnaces or be able to afford electricity. It is no coincidence that Climate Change activists are also advocates of One World Government. They want people to have no escape from their policies.
Technology will deteriorate, so the number of people who can survive under such conditions will be reduced dramatically. If we reverted to a pre-Industrial lifestyle, the world would only be able to support a single-digit percentage of the present human population. That is a good thing to those who consider homo sapiens to fundamentally be a vermin on this Earth.
Such is the Utopia that gladdens the hearts of the Greens as they look forward — by working to bring mankind backward and downward.
It will die down with a whimper, as it simply becomes irrelevant what gullt-ridden white Westerners think, in an Asian-dominated world.
…..Well it is probably true, that it is the peoples of Africa, the second largest real continent, who best live in harmony with nature; …..
No it is very much not true. The intensive burning of wood has resulted in terrific erosion and desert creep.
They have no idea of how to maintain land without fertilisers using organic means but fail to use non organic ones for lack of money. They habitually over graze land to make the problems they have even worse. All in all they are an ecological disaster.
Her front tier is missing making her mentality?
“Where that frontier narrative is strongest is where denialism is strongest.”
“The rest of Europe has a keener sense of boundaries – they’ve lived against the limits of nature for longer.”
====
Two “world” wars were fought during the last century, they weren’t fought so nature could linger longer.
Wake up.
Yes, Naomi, nothing so becomes the English Speaking world as its contempt for intellectuals.
I’m a climate realist and I find the rough and ready, gun-loving culture of the frontier repulsive.
The thing that climate realists have in common is that we have looked at the facts and thought about them for ourselves. Most of us used to take it for granted that the so-called consensus wasn’t a great big lie, but the reality is that it is.
I have never heard anyone who denies man made global warming or global warming in general say anything that remotely implies “nature than can be endlessly extracted”. All denials or skepticism I have heard is based on the fact that measurements and what they have experienced do not match what the “climate science” says is happening.
She is implying that a denialist thinks “We can put all the crap we want into the air and nothing will ever happen, there is just too much air!” That is an argument I have NEVER heard. Until now.
What I can’t figure out is why anyone would give a rats ass about what Naomi Klein “thinks” or writes. And yet this comment is number 323 on the subject.