Sermonette

 

 

The Green Religion

(h/t JW) Resources of timber, minerals, and wildlife when held in common, create an incentive for individuals to extract or exploit such resources without prudent replanting or preservation. Likewise, air and water grow polluted when no individual industry has the incentive to curtail its pollution, but the cumulative effect degrades the environment. For this reason, communal laws to conserve and preserve commonly owned wilderness reservations, and to clean air and water of pollution, are necessary.

Such was the effect of conservationist movements from the time of Teddy Roosevelt to that of Richard Nixon: The United States was blessed with sufficient wealth to shoulder the burden of antipollution laws without undue loss, as were certain other First World nations.

Likewise, game laws were enacted to enforce prudent maintenance and preservation of game animals and other species useful to man, to minimize the odds of driving a useful animal to extinction by over-hunting or over-fishing, as had happened with the Dodo bird or the Passenger Pigeon.

These are legitimate policy concerns.

Cultural Marxism infiltrated and corrupted conservationist movements and legal institutions charged with antipollution laws, gradually expanding their mandate to the preservation, first, of any and all species, whether useful or not, including subspecies and breeds indistinguishable from the main breed, as when Spotted Owls were declared endangered, but Owls, in general, were not. Second, the mandate was expanded to include the preservation of weeds, bugs, and vermin of no possible use or interest to general humanity.

Likewise, instead of visible and malodorous pollutants obviously offensive to the eye and nose, undetectable and then imaginary threats to public health, or to the environment, were prioritized. Acid Rain, DDT, Alar, depletion of the ozone layer, carcinogenic effects from radio towers, and chlorofluorocarbons, were all said to be deleterious, supported by politicized junk science. All were hoaxes.

Crackpot theories of global cooling and global warming and global climate change, on the other hand, were supported by no sober science whatsoever but grew into a billion-dollar Climate Panic-mongering industry. These were not even hoaxes, because no attempt was made to convince the honest skeptic. Instead, skepticism was likened to Holocaust denial and demonized. All pretense at scientific neutrality was dropped, and the public was commanded to believe the government-sponsored spokesmen in labcoats, oracles of The Science, which to doubt was anathema.

There are dozens and scores of climate regimes in various regions of the globe. To seek a single cause producing a predictable effect is magical thinking, mere witchcraft.

Symbolic acts with no possible ecological impact, or whose impact is negative, such as recycling, green energy, electric cars, and paper straws, were imposed as a regime. This is also magical thinking, mere witchcraft.

The explanation of the difference between the atmospheres of Venus and Earth involves a greenhouse gas theory stating that Venus has a thermal inversion layer in her atmosphere that returns more heat to the surface than escapes into space. No such layer is present in the Earth’s transparent atmosphere, nor can be. The declaration of carbon dioxide to be a greenhouse gas, when it is breathed out by every animal organism in existence, microscopic or otherwise, and breathed in by every plant, microscopic or otherwise, is less dignified than magical thinking: it is mere madness.

Yet on this basis, the sober conservationist movement has degraded into a lunatic ideology, and decreed worldwide goals to be the abolition of all human population growth, all human energy use, human industrial activity, and human consumption of beef.

The scaremongering of overpopulation cultists needs a word of explanation. The concept is incoherent: there is no such thing as overpopulation. Malthus himself, who first raised the specter of this non-issue, retracting his findings before the end of his life.

There is no such thing as overpopulation because population numbers conform to their environment naturally, whenever war, famine, or disaster do not strike.

For example, the density of the industrial-urban population found on the Island of Manhattan could not be maintained were they to live as did the Lenape Indians inhabiting the island before them, as roving bands of hunter-gatherers.

However, absent the industrialization and urbanization which civilized Manhattan, the current population would not have grown to its current numbers in the first place. The idea that Manhattanites will starve if sufficient deer herds are not maintained on hunting grounds in Manhattan wilderness is merely silly. Yet that is the idea of saying Manhattan’s population is too large for its original environment. If the population does not outnumber the food sources maintained and produced by that population in its current environment, the environment is not overpopulated.

The idea famine is inevitable unless population growth is artificially curtailed is stupid.

The scarcity or abundance of any given resource is not directly correlated to population numbers. This includes the resource of acreage of cultivatable land. Each new birth leads to a productive adult, who creates more resources than he uses, by admixing his labor to what was previously unused or underused in the environment. Population growth does not cause starvation. Empirically, the opposite is observed: industrialization introduces rapid population and growth, but also a drop in infant mortality, and a rise in obesity.

Famines can arise from several causes, including plagues, adverse weather, wars, and depressions. The sole cause of famine in the Twentieth Century was Socialism.

The collapse of civilization or the disruption of trade can indeed cause scarcity of certain staple foodstuffs, but this is due to an overabundance of catastrophe, not due to insufficient contraception or insufficient infanticide. Even so, the cause is war, not overpopulation, for it would come about just the same were the population twice or half its numbers.

For example, when the Mohammedans conquered Egypt in the Seventh Century, the Roman Empire was cut off from major croplands. At that time the population of Rome was half that of the current population of Manhattan.

Climate panic ideologues, however, take the atmosphere of Venus and the Fall of Rome to be the likely if not inevitable outcome of population growth and industrial activity: in the name of averting looming global doom, they demand a socialist totalitarianism be immediately imposed on all sectors of the economy, all energy use, all human activity.

Bitcoin — a computerized fiat currency with no physical reality — according to the Panicmongers, contributes millions of metric tons of carbon emissions. Let the absurdity of that sink in for a moment.

To date, the only human activity not expressly condemned as contributing to global climate disaster is the arson of federal buildings and police stations during race riots. Let the stark hypocrisy of that sink in for a moment.

An industrial activity provoking particular enmity from the Panicmongers is the use of petroleum products, which they mistakenly identify as non-renewable. There is not one iota of empirical evidence showing any depletion of known oil reserves, and in fact, the opposite is the case: even without taking into account extraction from shale oil, the amounts of known oil reserves have increased since the Nineteenth Century.

Peak Oil panic is akin to fretting that we will drink up all the potable water in ten years, drain all wells dry, and all perish thereafter of thirst, with only camels alive to stalk the ruins.

Make no mistake: Climate Alarmism is an ideology as well as a global industry, and it has as little to do with the scientific study of the environment as Marx has to do with economics, or Hegel with philosophy.

Panicmongers currently claim that the scientific consensus is unambiguous, the findings beyond dispute, and the discussion is over; when, in fact, no credible scientific study supports the greenhouse gas theory, or any other aspect of any of the several environmental panics visited as boogiemen upon the quaking public in the last five decades. The Global Warming narrative (one cannot dignify it by calling it a hypothesis) was based on a false-to-fact computer model unable to correctly calculate or predict any climactic correlations. The computer model is fake and has been as entirely debunked as Phlogiston Theory or the Geocentric Model.

Climate Panic is also a mythos and a death cult. It is a series of interconnected stories or mythic images appealing to buried Jungian archetypes, all directed toward a global death wish, the depopulation of nations, and the extermination of mankind.

The main image of Mother Nature, oft called Gaia, depicts the pagan mother-goddess as raped and ravaged, plundered and befouled by mankind, here the despoilers, and never the stewards, of nature. The storytelling image of Man is the same as that of the Yahoos of Houyhnhnmland from GULLIVER’S TRAVELS: except that the Greens are in deadly earnest, whereas Swift was a satirist. Like the Houyhnhnms, they contemplate how to castrate or curtail the population of these loathsome creatures or exterminate them altogether.

In interview recent at the time of this writing, a WEF member, Dennis Meadows proposes reducing the world population from eight  billion to one billion, wiping eight out of ten people from the globe. He says this will require a strong but benevolent dictatorship to accomplish, and hopes it can be done peacefully. A cool and rational Houyhnhnm contemplating how to cull Yahoo numbers might also wish it done reasonably, without undue pain or commotion.

Please note that no real conservationist aims for any aim of the Greens, who are, in truth, Reds in drag. Not one advocates for erecting nuclear power plants, nor even for planting trees, to change the carbon emissions into the atmosphere; and from recycling to electric motorcars to windmills to paper straws, all advocate for measures which, even if executed perfectly, would have negligible effect, or none, or be counterproductive. The rare earth components of electric motorcars, for example, entail strip mining of dangerous chemicals, and the production of more coal-powered electricity to feed to charging stations; likewise for components of windmills and solar panels, who ironically contribute more to pollution — when taken as a whole — than clean coal or natural gas.

The measures to correct the imaginary doomsday are always advocated in terms of panic. Each prediction of doomsday is placed ten or twelve years in the future, which is far enough away to make it feasible that no evidence of doom is obvious to the layman, but near enough to excite hysteria.

I am old enough to remember the panic in 1970 that a new Ice Age would descend by 1980, or the 1980 prediction of mass starvation by 1990, or the 1990 prediction of the Ice Cap melting by 2000, and so on. Like crackpots who predict the Second Coming, as each doomsday date passes serenely by, the gullible never once doubt the revised prophecy immediately forthcoming.

I am also old enough to remember that the 1970 Global Cooling panic advocated curtailing Western industries by submission to a socialist government as the only possible solution. The 2000 Global Warming panic, prompted by the exact opposite fear, advocated curtailing Western industries by submission to a socialist government as the only possible solution. The current Climate Change panic — a concept so vague as to be meaningless — advocates curtailing Western industries by submission to a socialist government as the only possible solution. When a man gives you the same solution to opposite problems, it is clear he cares nothing about solving any problems. He is selling snake oil.

The only common thread is that the measures advocated by the Greens, regardless of the problem, require additional overreach by the state, or by the world community.

 

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Ejecting in a Martin-Baker?