https://www.city-journal.org/climate-change-madness
During his time in the White House, Barack Obama, along with Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State John Kerry, and other administration officials, asserted that man-made climate change was the greatest threat to humanity’s future—not just one threat among others, or a pretty big one, but the greatest. As recent Pew research makes clear, far more Americans on the political left think that climate change is a big deal than do those on the right, and since the Left is typically more secular and the Right more religious, we see a spiritual paradox: on the environment, those on the left are the true (if pagan) believers, while those on the right are the dogmatic “atheists” (the whole climate thing is just an exaggerated crisis cooked up by liberal elites and the fake media).
Conservative skepticism notwithstanding, though, climate-change ideologues have more or less shaped public debate on the issue—successfully branding their opposition as “climate deniers.” And by now, nearly 50 years after the first Earth Day, a broad-ranging and increasingly draconian ecological consciousness has become pervasive in American life, extending far beyond climate issues. Go to the supermarket, for example, or look inside your pantry. You’ll find that hundreds of items in bags and cans have certifications of “Non-GMO.” That means that they contain no genetically modified organisms. In recent years, more than 27,000 products have been so certified (by the Non-GMO Project), with the purpose of putting our minds at ease that what we’re about to eat is not genetically modified and will not sicken or kill us or make us sprout a third arm. Non-GMO fanatics and millions of consumers call these forbidden fruits “Frankenfood.” Never mind that nobody has been proved to have been harmed or killed by GMOs. (That can’t be said for organic spinach or bean sprouts.) And never mind that for 25 years, almost all corn, cotton, and soybeans grown in the United States have been genetically modified, with nobody sickened or dead or sporting an extra limb. So why the intransigence of the activists and the gullibility of so many consumers?
The issue here is not the inevitable one of managing risk and rewards in modern life. It’s perfectly reasonable to wonder whether plants genetically modified to withstand the herbicide Roundup, say, might cause more of the poison to be used and thus entail some cost or harm. The giveaway term is the reference to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The real issue, that is, is not primarily technical or scientific; it’s moral and spiritual. With genetic engineering, in this view, we’re trying to play God and invariably upsetting the natural order of things. Put differently, and in the terms of the radical ecologist David Graber, we’re the fallen human parasite going after holy Mother Nature.
