https://www.frontpagemag.com/from-science-to-a-suicidal-cult/
The death in prison last week of ecoterrorist Theodore Kaczynski, the notorious Unabomber who in the Nineties killed three people and wounded 23 with package-bombs. The occasion of his death reminds us how an environmental movement that started by focusing on improving human well-being––providing clean air and water, and practicing prudent resource management–– has devolved into an irrational cult replete with terrorist fanatics and Disneyesque fantasies about humanity’s relationship with the natural world.
More dangerous is the transformation of global public energy policies into “net-zero carbon” and “green renewable” energy despite being based on incomplete, if not dubious, science. Worse, their trillions in cost are currently endangering the economies of the rich West, and the economic development of poorer underdeveloped Rest, by proscribing the cheap, abundant fossil-fuel energy that powered the West’s creation of the richest, freest, most well-fed human beings who ever existed.
The Nineties were when the “global warming” crisis ramped-up the justifications for these dangerous policies––a few years after the brief apocalyptic fad of an impending new ice age. From well-heeled professors and celebrities, to politicians and disaffected suburbanites, romantic environmentalism began colonizing academic research, school curricula, and government policy, while propagating numerous corporate grifters exploiting government mandates on recycling refuse and developing “alternative energy” to replace icky energy from cheap fossil fuels.
The Unabomber was the most visible expression of this new, dangerous sensibility, by dint of his murders and blackmailing the New York Times and Washington Post into publishing in September, 1995, his 30,000-word manifesto. A rambling, incoherent, cliché-ridden screed typical of autodidactic cranks, the manifesto encapsulates the mashup of romantic nature-myths, Marxism’s hatred of free-market economies, and the utopianism and antihumanism of totalitarian technocrats––all of which define our current environmental received wisdom.
