Aw: Communists march for climate justice or whatever in Copenhagen

This is a good time for me to repost my essay on the movement behind the movement of environmentalism:

The most disturbing, and most indictable, of the global cooling deniers arguments of imminent doom, is that they WANT it to be true. There’s the rub. They tell us we are dooming ourselves, but at the same time, they want this doom to be reality. If you suggest a quick solution to global warming, as science would suggest, say by pumping sulfur dioxide into the air, rather than being met with hope that such doom can be averted, it is met with anger. That is not the solution they have in mind. Suggest, similarly, through scientific analysis that global warming is not even happening, and rather than being interested in a new turn of events, they react with anger. Suggest, similarly, through historical perspective, that a warmer planet has actually been beneficial to civilization, as it was during the Medieval warm period, but rather than being met with relief, it is met with anger.

So you see the problem. It’s not that they are at all concerned with global warming. If they were, they would, as humans are apt to do, latch on to any possible promise of salvation, legitimate or not. But they don’t. They do the opposite of what one who was legitimately concerned would do. They react with derision and anger to any scenario that does not mean our imminent doom if that scenario does not include massive taxes and restructuring of our political world and global economy.

What does this tell you? It tells me they hope global warming is not only true, but they hope it is dangerous, and they hope it is not only dangerous, but they hope it is unstoppable short of any scenario that necessitates the most economic and social adjustments possible. In short, they hope a fear of global warming will act as a catalyst for the social change they want the Western world to undergo, change they wish it would have undergone a long time ago for ideological reasons, but hasn’t – a sea change of political and economic priorities – the death of capitalism.

If you remove the threat of global warming from the world, that change will never come for them. And thus the anger. This explains why almost all believers in global warming are from the Left – from famous politicians, to famous writers, famous celebrities, academia, all the way down to the scientists and researchers whose cars sport the bumper stickers right out of Woodstock. Remove the existence of the threat in one fashion or another, and you remove the reason why the world needs to dump capitalism.

Up until about 1990-91, when the narrative for global warming started circling, those on the Left looked to the Soviet Union as a counterbalancing force against the West. For them, there was a balance in the political universe. An equally powerful superpower with very different underlying social and political structure kept capitalism at bay. When the Soviet Union collapsed, however, and the narrative was being written that communism had finally officially failed, that balance was lost. Capitalism was triumphant which meant that those who saw a fundamental threat from that system now had no where to turn to. The great counterbalancing force to western imperialism was lost.

Fortunately, a deus ex machine arrived within months of Francis Fukyama’s seminal, and since debunked, article about the End of History in which he lamented that the world was doomed to peaceful boredom as the great struggles, including that of the cold war, were now over that capitalism and democracy had won.

That salvation, for those on the Left, was the CO2 theory, a theory of global warming due to emissions, a theory that conveniently popped into existence immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union and shortly after the global cooling theory, also due to emissions, died in the ’80s, a theory to which any kid who went to public school, and watched classroom films, in the ’70s can attest.

Now the deceased Soviet Union was replaced as the counterbalancing force with something much more politically correct. Forget Stalin and Lenin and Marx. Championing them was always a hard sell in the prosperous west. Only radicals went that far. And you couldn’t sell it in the schools. Think climate, however. Now, as they new narrative was written, capitalism wasn’t bad for the Worker, but it was bad for the Planet. And since everybody lives on the planet, best we do something about capitalism which is, once again, fortunately, bad for everybody.

Of course capitalism, per se, was not mentioned directly, that’s much too political. Capitalism was replaced by the word “emissions”. Not the pollution that comes out of your tailpipe. That was the global cooling theory due to airborne particulates that the ’70s Left championed. No, this was much more insidious. This was the formally innocuous and ubiquitous gas of carbon dioxide. That way, not only were cars destructive, but anything that uses energy, including your use of electricity in your home. It was a theory that could vilify the entire western world economic and political system as being dangerous due, not just to its size, but its hegemony. And since the western world functions and thrives and expands according to energy use and consumer consumption, CO2 demonization can now serve as the antithesis of that hegemony.

All that one would have to do is find some convoluted way to link CO2 to something bad. That way, one is not fighting for communism, socialism, or wealth redistribution – one is fighting a totally apolitical fight simply for environmental reasons. Claiming that CO2 not only warms the planet, but it is specifically the CO2 coming from man that is doing it, cleverly achieves that objective.

Consequently, any argument, scientific or otherwise, that removes CO2 as being a threat to the planet, will not be received well by those who have a vested ideological leaning, if not a financial stake, in believing, and having others believe, that capitalism, consumerism, and individual freedom, need to be adjusted. There’s a lot of people who want to see that kind of change. Always has been, always will be. Global warming theory, they hope, is the catalyst for that change.

In short, Green will be successful in a way that old Red could never be.

keep the change on December 18, 2009 at 12:51 AM