forest, while evocative, lacked the immediacy, not to say proximity, to muster serious adherence and garner significant donations for an expanding community of interlocking businesses and NGOs. The movement needed a new cause. This decline in interest roughly coincided with the disputed, though ultimately failed, 2000 presidential campaign of Al Gore. The former vice-president had been deprived of a lifetime ambition he thought he deserved and had won. For a while he acted like a wounded and rather disappointed animal, but then he found his mojo again. For some years a self-styled environmentalist, he seized on the opportunity to put forward the momentary imminence of global climate catastrophe. Almost certainly he did not exaggerate this deliberately, at least consciously, but if he had merely mentioned the problem as potentially one among many, as yet not fully scientifically determined, nothing much would have happened in the short run, if at all, particularly for him. Obviously, it did. Soon enough he was the most famous environmentalist on the planet, a shared Nobel Prizewinner and a nascent billionaire through green investments and carbon exchanges, the selling of so-called “carbon offsets” between businesses. That most of these investments failed and that the exchanges disappeared after being scrutinized for fraud was beside the point. Gore had already more than filled that void created by those relatively clear skies. These two factors, Gore’s desire to remake his mark with a new opportunity and the void in the environmental movement, united to create a climate crisis with moral narcissism as the glue that brought and held them together, that made it possible, and made people want to believe. A bourgeoisie, already identifying with the defense of mother earth, was ready to take that step. Controlling the weather was humanity’s most important cause.
Rachel Carson and how “environmentalism” came to replace Christianity, Judaism, and even Hare Krishna (well, not so much) as our new religion.
But to understand how this development evolved, to know the process, we must go back further, over fifty years, to the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962. This marked the beginning of environmentalism as we know it—the replacement of conservationism with a form of nature worship. This coincided too with the questioning and ultimately the restructuring of traditional religion. I remember the time well because I was one of Carson’s readers as a college student, a typical undergraduate agnostic or even atheist of the period in search of a belief system. We of the Least Great Generation were at the start of the sixties and just beginning to differentiate ourselves from the previous generation. Soon we would be working overtime on that separation. Silent Spring—an attack on the use of pesticides as detrimental to the environment, especially to birds, or what the author called “the silencing of birds”—was the seminal text in this demarcation. That thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of Africans ultimately died of malaria due to the DDT ban associated with the book’s publication was to be largely ignored.1
A movement had been born. Not long after, Greenpeace was formed—its existence celebrated by a 1970 Joan Baez concert in Vancouver. Earth Day was established in the same year, igniting a brushfire. It wasn’t long before there were more ecologically oriented groups than you could count, filling supermarket parking lots with card tables laden with petitions and knocking on doors for donations like Seventh Day Adventists. Environmentalism was well on its way to replacing organized religion as the premiere faith of the American and global elites and their myriad fellow travelers and acolytes. What a relief not to have to defend the ancient mythologies of Jesus and Moses anymore, all those scientifically troubling miracles. Nature had suddenly become human-centered again, just as it was in the Middle Ages, although then it was man and God—now it was just man all by his lonesome. Humanity was now the cause of every problem in the world, maybe even in the cosmos, and it would be up to humanity to solve them. Forget the sun and all those other countless stars, nebulae, galaxies, asteroids, black holes, and the rest of the so-called missing baryons, invisible objects, in an ever-expanding universe. They didn’t count for anything or mean anything in the grand scheme of things. They weren’t driving gas-guzzling SUVs or leaving the thermostat at seventy-two when it was sixty-nine outside. It was all about us—back to square one before Galileo and Copernicus said all that subversive stuff about the earth revolving around the sun. What could be more narcissistic than that?
Ironically, almost all off this occurred after Richard Nixon, of all seemingly unlikely people, signed the National Environmental Policy Act on January 1, 1970. This act did more than any legislation ever had to clean up the air and water in our country—clearly a good thing. Nixon also created the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, which must have seemed good at the time, but only at the time. It was a bureaucracy and like almost all bureaucracies an entity whose own survival became its primary goal, no matter what its members said or thought. Cheered on by that growing claque for whom the environment had become the new religion, the EPA did its best to extend its power under many administrations. It was soon to be out of control, regulating with less and less oversight. In today’s world it behaves like a kingdom unto itself, almost no one knowing what it is doing or why until it makes its decrees, upending industries to avert catastrophes real or imaginary in the name of biodiversity or, worse, the latest ecological fad. Like so many idealistic movements, environmentalism was beginning to recapitulate the French Revolution, starting as a positive force and then never putting a brake on itself, continuing on almost entropically until it began to destroy the very things it was intended to save.
I’m not suggesting that Al Gore or anybody else connected with environmentalism is the living embodiment of Robespierre. The only beheadings going on these days are Islamist in nature. We should all be concerned about being good stewards of the planet we live on, at least that should be our intention. But when our moral narcissism runs away with itself, we go blind. The pattern of idealism gone sour, writ so large in the French Revolution, reappears in many—one is tempted to say all—situations on multiple fronts and issues. That is because the thing itself—the idealistic goal—is almost always ultimately subsumed to the needs and projected self-image of the people having those goals. Thus it frequently provides an excuse for outrageous behavior in complete contradistinction to the pronounced intention, like Leonardo DiCaprio circling the globe on a private jet while telling the hoi polloi to restrict their carbon usage, or “working class spokesman” Michael Moore living in nine homes. Slate reported several hundred of the delegates to 2015’s World Economic Forum arrived in Davos for climate change day in private jets.2 The examples of wretched excess are endless in a veritable “Lifestyles of the Rich and Environmental.” It’s as if saying you’re Green gives you permission to litter on an exponential scale.
You could say this hypocrisy is finally irrelevant—that it doesn’t matter if Al Gore has the biggest houseboat in Tennessee as long as he’s on the right side, if his “intentions are good.” But excuse me if I’m a little suspicious. What if those intentions really were primarily money and power and the liberal idealism was just a masquerade? Or if it started off innocently enough, with at least the pretense of idealism, and became more sinister? After all, at one point Robespierre was on the right side of things too—or we think he was. Further to the French Revolution analogy, those symbolic (for now, anyway) beheadings were and are used to read people out of the discussion permanently on a subject like global warming/climate change, to smear them in news reports, deprive them of academic appointments and research grants and, most of all, keep them away from the levers of control. That is being done now without the guillotine. You are, in Huey Newton’s words, either part of the solution or part of the problem. If you’re part of the problem, you are a denier and shouldn’t be heard. That this is inherently antiscience is clear, but it is also equally evidently totalitarian in its essence.
What I discovered to be the true motivations behind the snowbound UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.
What