[On consideration, I have rewritten and expanded this to make it clear]
I’m in the paradoxical position of known that climate denialism is scientifically wrong, but morally right. To see what I mean, please watch the following clip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nI1DoZBohyE
Naomi Klein proposes a radical anti-capitalist agenda, with an egalitarian, redistributionist agenda, relying on strong, centralized government to promote collectivism.
Haven’t we seen this before? The twentieth century is a history of revolutions like this, from the Bolshevik to the Islamic. All committed murder of a scale that is still hard to credit. (Please don’t waste my time arguing about whether the Nazis were ‘left’ or ‘right’ – what you cannot argue with is that they were absolutely anti-capitalist.)
I should like to note further that Naomi Klein was one of the big voices rubbishing golden rice and helping to prevent it being spread. A policy that killed eight million children in East Asia.
So, we have a mainstream spokeswoman advocating the politics of tyranny, who has a record of supporting policies of mass-death. And she is greeted with stormy applause.
This hasn’t exactly come in a vacuum. Here are some Greenpeace ads:
Notice that second one especially. The explicit threat of murder for dissent. This is perfectly in line with, e.g., the calls for ‘Chinese leadership’, democracy to be suspended ‘temporarily, or the recent Australian theatre work ‘Kill the Climate Deniers‘. Or here is Sue Blackmore:
If we decide to put the planet first, then we ourselves are the pathogen. So we should let as many people die as possible, so that other species may live, and accept the destruction of civilisation and of everything we have achieved.
Finally, we might decide that civilisation itself is worth preserving. In that case we have to work out what to save and which people would be needed in a drastically reduced population – weighing the value of scientists and musicians against that of politicians, for example – a prospect that does not look at all easy from here.
Ah, yes. Deciding whom ‘we’ will ‘permit’ to live and whom to die…
Let me also underline that the Klein openly admits that her agenda is ‘reducing consumption’ which, translated, means a campaign for reduced income, i.e., immisseration to use a term from my old red days. That’s hardly a unique position amongst environmentalism. Here is George Monbiot:
It is a campaign not for abundance but for austerity. It is a campaign not for more freedom but for less. Strangest of all, it is a campaign not just against other people, but against ourselves.
Do you think I cannot multiply these examples endlessly? The blocking of food, the sabotage of research facilities, the opposition to energy production?
The actions and the words of the green movement are remarkably consistent. They have always said that they place human life second to a clean environment, and that is how they have acted. I am sorry, but this isn’t a matter of ‘sounds like’. It isn’t a matter of chance similarity. It a deep similarity in matters of ethics, politics and action between this movement and totalitarians of the last century. To review: in ethics, the belief in self-sacrifice, and the belief that human life can be suborned to a higher goal. In politics, the ideal of centralized power and collectivism, and hatred for ‘the worst people in the world’. In action, a complete callousness and the infliction of mass death.
The last thing that needs to be faced is a vague feeling that this isn’t the kind of thing that normal people advocate. There’s this sense that this is the kind of thing that is only jackbooted Nazi thugs with dueling scars, or blood-crazed Hutu killers support.
It was much better to imagine men in some smokey room somewhere, made mad and cynical by privilege and power, plotting over brandy. You had to cling to this sort of image, because if you didn’t then you might have to face the fact that bad things happened because ordinary people, the kind who brushed the dog and told the children bed time stories, were capable of then going out and doing horrible things to other ordinary people. It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone’s fault. If it was Us, then what did that make Me? After all, I’m one of Us. I must be. I’ve certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We’re always one of Us. It’s Them that do the bad things. – Terry Pratchett, Jingo
If you don’t understand that the worst cruelties of in the world can be supported by completely normal people – people like me and you and Naomi Klein, then you will never be able to understand humanity.
But, it is still argued, where’s the revolution? Where’s the tyranny in the developed world? This misses a point. Environmentalists don’t have the power to enforce this agenda on the world’s richest nations. But just look at what they do when they can enforce this agenda, on the world’s poorest.
A great number of thinkers in the developing world point out acidly that it’s very easy to advocate this stuff when you’re well fed, and also that environmentalists tend to be pale and their victims tend to be not. I understand that argument, and there is a lot to it, but it misses something. I think that the reality is actually much worse than either hypocrisy or racism. Listen again to Klein – she is talking in moral terms. This is clearly a matter of moral conviction. In other words, the environmentalists would be just as happy – far more happy, in fact – to inflict this kind of devastation on the developed world. It isn’t a matter of these types being immoral – they are profoundly moral. It is just that the morals they have embraced are evil.
This is why I understand where people like Mark Steyn are coming from. They may not be full up on the science, but they can recognise the grave-stink that such people let off.
And please do not imagine that if Naomi Klein’s authoritarian vision comes to pass that it will lead to an end to climate change. You’ll notice she discusses the dreadful pollution in China, neatly sidestepping the fact that China has the kind of politics she advocates. The Soviet bloc was a sewer of pollution too, far worse than anything ever seen in the capitalist economies.
