Latest Eco-Hoax Over; Next One Coming
This is from the pen of Stephen F Hayward at the Wall Street Journal:
Climate change is over. No, I’m not saying the climate will not change in the future, or that human influence on the climate is negligible. I mean simply that climate change is no longer a pre-eminent policy issue. All that remains is boilerplate rhetoric from the political class, frivolous nuisance lawsuits, and bureaucratic mandates on behalf of special-interest renewable-energy rent seekers.
[…]
President Trump’s ostentatious withdrawal from the Paris Agreement merely ratified a trend long becoming evident.
A good indicator of why climate change as an issue is over can be found early in the text of the Paris Agreement.
The “nonbinding” pact declares that climate action must include concern for “gender equality, empowerment of women, and intergenerational equity” as well as “the importance for some of the concept of ‘climate justice.’ ”
Another is Sarah Myhre’s address at the most recent meeting of the American Geophysical Union, in which she proclaimed that climate change cannot fully be addressed without also grappling with the misogyny and social injustice that have perpetuated the problem for decades.
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My Comment:
Pause for a moment to dwell on the sheer hubris of politicians telling the public that efforts to halt manmade global warming must include a concern for “gender equality, empowerment of women, and intergenerational equity.” Ponder also that Leftist practically cannot utter a sentence without uttering once of their make-believe bafflgab lingo. (Gender is a part of speech, not a part of man.)
I, for one, will be glad when the last gasp is heard from this fraud. It will be the next entry on an ever-growing list of ecological scare stories maintained as an ongoing con-game for fiscal gain, or as part of the sacrament of a secular form of religion to which atheists are unfortunately prone.
It will be helpful to the memories if we list the notorious frauds of the last few decades:
- DDT — Rachel Carson penned a famous book telling us DDT caused bird eggs to have thin shells. As it turned out, the chemical is not dangerous, but banning the chemical has led to countless deaths in Africa, since no other effective way was found to fight pestilential insects.
- Alar.
- Global Cooling.
- Overpopulation. This one is particularly noticeable to me, a SF fan, since all the scientifiction of my youth starred worlds crammed with overpopulated hordes. At the moment, in real life, we are suffering from underpopulation: birth rates in Russia, Spain, and Japan, for example, are below replacement rates. The Overpop Gurus predicted mass starvation in India in the 1980s.
- Shortages of Tin, Iron, Zinc, Coal, Oil, etc.–Julian Simon made a famous wager with enviro-scaremonger Paul Erlich about the decrease of certain unreplaceable natural resources. Simon won the bet.
- SST threat to ozone layer.
- Three Mile Island. The most famous disaster in history where no one died and no one got sick.
- Cellphones or powerlines causing cancer. A fraud.
- Irradiated foods. This method of preserving food, from all evidence, would have improved food safety, but it was scared off the market.
- Mercury in swordfish and tuna.
- Cyclamates banned for causing bladder cancer.
- Red dye #2.
- Pesticides aldrin and dieldrin, suspended in 1974. Chlordane and heptachlor. All banned in the 1970s because of belief that they cause tumors in mouse livers.
- Acid rain.
- Agent Orange (dioxin).
- Asbestos in schools and other buildings.
- Ethyl dibromide (EDB).
- Ozone hole.
- Nuclear Winter.
The question of the day is, since all these eco-scares and more turned out to be hoaxes, why does the Left continue to go to this well?
The answer is simple: it is a well not likely to run dry. It gives them everything they want and nothing they do not.
It is a sad matter of fact that there are such things as pollution which create a public nuisance and must be abated by state action.
The state does not act outside its bounds by passing laws to preserve certain beasts for game or decoration, or preserve forests and fields in a wild state for the use and delight of future generations. Antipollution laws are much the same as laws about sewage or burning trash, and are justified if they meet minimum standards of fairness and neutrality.
So, no matter how often the Boy Cries Wolf in this case, there are in fact real wolves lurking in the woods, which the community as a whole must face.
So the first thing the Leftist gets is a problem that cannot be ignored.
Second, the wilderness is beautiful and majestic, and the discontent all men at some point feel with the straitjacket of civilization makes such things seem Edenic in our eyes. To the secular atheist, Mother Nature is the closest thing they have to a goddess. There is an immediate visceral appeal to conservation issues that make them good material for propaganda, regardless of truth.
Third, the issue is larger than any one man’s self interest, larger than any one nation’s national interest. To the secular atheist, protecting the holy Earth from desecration is the closest thing they have to a transcendental cause, a crusade, a fight worth fighting. Men living only for their own happiness are unhappy: we need crusades. We need sword in hand, red cross on breast, and infidels to face, and the joy found when one can hate a foe with perfect hatred, and hatred is righteousness, is perhaps the most intoxicating drug in human existence.
Fourth, the issue is cost free, as far as the environmentalist is concerned. He is rarely a Boy Scout or a hunter or a hiker, or anyone else who actually uses publicly maintained wilderness. Walking through a park picking up trash and litter actually takes work, and is thankless. Running a multimillion dollar NGO tasked with stopping global climate stagnation, or whatever, is risk free, cost free, and allows for easy virtue signalling.
Fifth, hysteria over the mass starvation of the workingman is difficult to drum up now that the poor and working classes in the First World suffer more from obesity than from starvation.
The Marxist idea that world wide monopolies would inevitably arise, and inevitably lead to the progressive impoverishment of the masses is an idea so stupid that first year economics students can laugh it to scorn.
But hysteria over the prospect that Global Cooling will usher in the next Ice Age within ten years has the tinge of Millenarian lunacy which is to Leftists like catnip to cats.
Sixth and related to this is the convenient idea that the emergency is so vast and so immediate, that all rational debate on the matter must cease immediately: any skeptic is painted as being the dangerous crackpot on the Titanic who tells people the ship is unsinkable, even while icewater laps at his feet.
Seventh, the matter is usually scientific and technical, and a consistent effort over the years to lower teaching standards have left the general public, even those with degrees of higher learning, with only foggy notions of scientific methods, scientific fact, and the limitations of scientific conclusions. The proles are remarkably easy to fool.
Schools regularly turn out techno-peasants, that is, men who understand nothing of the technological underpinnings of their civilization, but who worship and adore science as an idol, and take the word of lab-coated pseudo-experts as its oracles.
This is not necessarily because Leftist are stupid. It is because the Leftist intellectuals are required by the moral demand of their worldview to act stupid. Their warped moral code requires them to be as deliberately gullible as subhumanly possible whenever topics like this arise.
Eighth, no-talent ignoramuses with merely the skills of used car salesmen can grow rich as Croesus off the scam. A chucklehead like Al Gore can win a Nobel Prize for a slideshow, and an Oscar for a propaganda film.
Ninth, it is a cost-free way to pretend to be saintly. Sacrifice the freedoms and tax-money of your neighbors to Green Energy boondoggles and scams, and you win the palm of martyrdom without the pain of martyrdom. You will be subjected to the universal applause of the Left for the allegedly brave act of taking a stand that subjects you to the universal applause of the Left. The modern day Pharisee adores being seen praying in public by men.
Finally and most of all, now that the argument that communism is more moral that selfish capitalism has been smothered in the sea of blood let loose by multiple communist genocides over of the last hundred years, an argument claiming that capitalism is deleterious to all life on earth is much more persuasive, even to skeptical minds, to convince the unwary to turn over ever more aspects of life and freedom to centralized bureaucratic control.
Environmentalism is a call for centralized and totalitarian government, disguised as compassion. It is a ravening wolf in sheep’s clothing. It is, in fact, a perfect fit for Leftist ideology.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
