The Green Paradigm is Shifting Fast We no longer can afford our Disneyfied ideals about nature. by Bruce Thornton
https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-green-paradigm-is-shifting-fast/
In just a few weeks, Donald Trump has started shifting a number of establishment paradigms, including the idealistic “rules-based” foreign policy, and the ghoulish transgender treatments and surgeries. However, the most dangerous for our economy and its future is the so-called “green energy” policies based on “climate change” ideology.
On November 5, voters sent the message that they’re sick of high gas prices, government diktats about what kind of cars they have to drive, billions in subsidies to “green renewable” energy industries, and EVs, and hectoring virtue-signaling from snooty elites about “settled science” and climate change “deniers.” The winds of change have set the “green” paradigm tottering.
What happened? Recently the Wall Street Journal’s Barton Swaim wrote, “The possibility that an entire academic discipline, climate science, could have gone badly amiss by groupthink and self-flattery wasn’t thought possible. In many quarters this orthodoxy still reigns unquestioned.” But this statement begs the question that the more accurate name for “climate change,” ––Anthropogenic Catastrophic Global Warming (ACGW)–– reflects true science, which has “gone wildly amiss” because of “groupthink and “self-flattery” and other human frailties.
In fact, the real problem is the claim that, as the honest name above says, CO2 emissions from humans will eventually heat the atmosphere to the point that it becomes uninhabitable. But this is not a scientific fact established by the empirically based scientific method, but a dicey hypothesis. We simply do not have a thorough enough understanding of the complexity of global climate over time and space. For example, we don’t know precisely how water vapor in the atmosphere, the biggest greenhouse gas, interacts with CO2, or how it contributes to cyclic cooling and warming.
These gaps in our models and computer simulations have been exposed by many physicists, to whom we should listen rather than “climate scientists.” For example, MIT professor of atmospheric science Richard Lindzen, and Princeton emeritus professor of physics William Happer, wrote in 2021, “We are both scientists who can attest that the research literature does not support the claim of a climate emergency. Nor will there be one. None of the lurid predictions — dangerously accelerating sea-level rise, increasingly extreme weather, more deadly forest fires, unprecedented warming, etc. — are any more accurate than the fire-and-brimstone sermons used to stoke fanaticism in medieval crusaders.”
The weakness of the “science,” then, makes not just “groupthink” and “self-flattery” possible, but also politicization, the fear-mongering of apocalyptic scenarios, and old-fashioned greed fed by government subsidies, tax breaks, and grants. Worse are the mandates to eliminate carbon-based energy and replace it with intermittent energy from windmills and solar panels, even though the infrastructure needed to store and deliver electricity to cover down times, is many decades from becoming a reality. This is a huge problem for the warmists, since those “clean, renewable” but intermittent energy sources require back-up reserves of electricity generated by natural gas and coal.
So how did ACGW gain such traction given its lack of any scientific bona fides? As with any issue that relies on claims of science, the lack of familiarity with how science works has increased among our students over the postwar decades, who leave K-12 schooling with globally pathetic levels of proficiency in science and mathematics.
Take the popular claim that ACGW is “settled science.” Such a statement violates the protocols of the scientific method, which physicist Richard Feynman defines as “a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty—a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid—not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked—to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.”
Or as the theorist of the scientific method Karl Popper put it more bluntly, “The method of science is the method of bold conjectures and ingenious and severe attempts to refute them.” Yet those doing just that regarding the claims of ACGW are met with epithets like “denier,” a sly slur borrowed from “holocaust denier,” and professional ostracizing and “cancellation.” There’s nothing “scientific” about such responses to challenges.
But it’s not just bad science or scientism that explains the “green” energy cult, itself an offshoot of romantic environmentalism. Ancient myths that have been part of Western culture for millennia also have influenced the way we think about the natural world and our place in it. One, the myth of the Golden Age, has been especially pervasive. This explanation of the human condition posits a simpler time in the past during which humans lived in harmony with nature, which like a benevolent mother provided us all we need to survive and flourish. People lived communally, without law, class distinctions, rulers, technology, wealth, or private property, which are all the seeds of war, slavery, conquest, greed, and suffering.
Related to this myth is the Noble Savage––peoples over the millennia who seemed to live lives redolent of the Golden Age. This myth became popular in the West during the Age of Discovery, when Europeans encountered the simpler tribal peoples of the New World. The journals and other writings of early explorers like Christopher Columbus are filled with tropes and references to both the Golden Age and the Noble Savage.
Today these mythic motifs and ideals saturate modern environmentalism, including hypotheses like ACGW, and policies like the protection of animal species threatened with extinction, even at the expense of human well-being. Popular culture has been filled with these ideas, from Disney cartoons to movies that feature American Indians as Noble Savages and peaceful environmentalists, contrary to their actual history. Other exotic ethnicities likewise are labeled by this same Western cliché.
Moreover, as historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin writes, these mythic residues like the Noble Savage have political uses: “The notion that somewhere whether in a real or imagined sociey, man dwells in his natural state, is at the heart of primitivist theories; it is found in various guises in every anarchist and popramme of the last hundred years, and has deeply affected Marxism and the vast variety of youth movements with radical or revolutionary goals.”
Modern environmentalism, especially ACGW, is a good example of this malign dynamic. Al Gore, has been one of the most famous activist lobbyists for the “green new deal” and its feckless assault on fossil fuels. In 1992 he published his influential bestseller Earth in the Balance. Like today’s “woke” left, Gore puts a “dysfunctional” Western civilization on trial for severing humanity’s ties to nature, while it indulges “wasteful consumption” to avoid the psychic pain, or alienation that follows losing our natural home. He continually decries our “technological hubris” and “technological alchemy” for their “increasingly aggressive encroachment into the natural world” and the resulting “froth and frenzy of industrial civilization.”
Whatever validity inheres in these complaints about “Satanic mills,” very few people, including Al Gore, would want to live in the world of our ancestors, a world of disease, scarcity, short life-spans, and famine. But should the “green” war on cheap, abundant carbon-based energy–– which has created the modern civilization that has mitigated those evils–– ultimately prevail, that dystopia could be our future.
Finally, the fundamental principle of our interactions with nature is simple: human well-being trumps nature’s. That doesn’t mean we can pollute and destroy resources. We avoid unnecessary waste or pollution because humanity need the resources that provide sustenance and comfort to as many people as possible both now and in the future. But much of environmental policy––from willfully making energy less efficient and more expensive, to protecting nature and endangered species of no practical use to people––threatens our economies and our ability to flourish.
We recently saw a particularly graphic example of environmentalism damaging human well-being in California during the massive wildfires. Poor forest management allows fuel to accumulate, making the natural fires that have occurred for millennia more destructive. That’s why American Indians long before Europeans arrived made sure forests didn’t grow too thick and big. But our romantic idealization of nature, and concerns for endangered species disinclines people to disturb and mar nature’s pristine beauty with unnatural technologies.
More handwork of romantic environmentalism includes California’s refusal to build more dams and reservoirs in order to protect a useless bait-fish alleged to be going extinct. So, millions of acre-feet are just dumped into the Pacific Ocean, instead of being collected and stored so people can grow food, and cities can provide water to drink and put our wildfires. In addition, California’s governor recently destroyed four dams so the rivers could be restored. Meanwhile, the recent fires in Southern California destroyed as many as 12,000 homes and businesses while fire-fighters had to watch because fire hydrants were dry and the nearby reservoir was empty.
We no longer can afford our Disneyfied ideals about nature, or old myths about a fantasy world of a beneficent, maternal nature upon which our happiness and meaning depend. Nature is literally inhuman, a “fierce, eternal destructive,” as Keats said, indifferent to whether we live or die. Our concerns should be with our fellow human beings and their well-being, which depends on a nature we alter and control with the products of our unnatural minds.
And energy is the key for our ability to survive and flourish rather than living in Hobbes’ primitive world of those who came before us––“solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Cheap, abundant, fossil fuels have made that improvement possible. We can no longer risk losing that better world because of “green” fantasies about impossible utopias and “harmony” with nature.
That feckless paradigm must be discarded, and human well-being restored as our purpose and guide.
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