Vacation

In June we spent several days in Grand Teton and Yellowstone national parks. We had a really good time. The weather, except for one day on the road to Beartooth Pass, was fine.  The scenery was spectacular as always. The hiking was good. The streams and rivers were full, and the animals were plentiful.  The only exception on the scenery was a result of the government’s burn-baby-burn policy on forest fires.  Trees have grown back in the areas damaged by the catastrophic fires of 1988, but several areas remain devastated from more recent fires. The excuse for the policy is that forest fires are natural. Well so are cholera, high infant mortality, smallpox, and recurring famines.  Sensible people realize that natural does not imply desirable.  (To the extent there are valid needs to manage  forests, there are less destructive ways of doing so.)  Yellowstone was created for the “benefit and enjoyment of the people”.  Few people enjoy or benefit from landscapes resembling parts of Flanders in 1917.  This is another example of the green obsession or religion making things worse.

Far less seriously, it also makes things annoying.  In the lodges, stores, and restaurants in both parks we were constantly hit with greeny directives, boasts, suggestions, propaganda, and simple inconveniences. The trash cans in the rooms had three bins – one for recycling, one for rotting stuff nominally to become compost, and a sinister one labelled “landfill” for plain old trash which will be thrown away.  The stores did not sell bottled water because virtuous people bring their own bottles and refill them from water fountains, though of course all sorts of other things were sold in bottles.  The lights in one room where we stayed  were purposely ridiculously dim.  Menus in the restaurants touted how sustainable and/or organic the ingredients in the mediocre, overpriced meals were. The kicker for me was a notice in our room in Yellowstone informing people that water is a precious resource in “dry Yellowstone” and asking them not to run the faucet while shaving.  Our room was a few hundred yards from the second largest alpine lake in the world, just down the road from a massive river, and within view of mountains still covered with the remains of huge winter snowfalls. That one was a hard sell.

It can be easy to laugh off that sort of nagging and posturing.  It would be a mistake to laugh off  the movement behind it. The faithful of the green religion are serious and fanatical. They mean us harm, and they are aided and supported by a lot of opportunistic, power hungry politicians and officials. It is something of a  jihad or crusade, and it is not hard to figure out who the infidels are.

Greens and Evolution

It is commonplace for leftists to accuse conservatives of ignorance of and hostility toward science – of being “anti science” as they often put it. They usually and with good reason cite some conservatives’ attitudes toward evolution as evidence for their charge.  However leftists, at least the green ones, are by no means innocent of mythological thinking  on the same subject.

While some religious conservatives deny that evolution has occurred,  many greens accept that it has but demand that it now stop and claim that they have both the ability and a moral imperative to make it stop. They see the  distribution of species and individuals and the level of human activity of the present day, or of somewhere around 1800, or, for the more fervid, of the Middle Ages or  Neolithic times as an ideal  state which must be preserved or restored and  then shielded from change.  (Amusingly this in a way makes them conservatives or reactionaries in the old fashioned sense of those terms.)

This of course is quite unscientific.  Evolution cannot be stopped. It will continue. Environments will change. Some things will thrive, and others will decline. Species will become extinct, and new species will evolve. Humans participate in some of the processes, but cannot bring  them all to an absolute halt. The notion of an intrinsically ideal state of things ordained by Nature is not science but rather a manifestation of the romantic longings and/or resentments of those embracing it.  It is also another reason for considering the green movement to be a religion.

There is plenty of unscientific thinking going  around in a variety of places, and the leftists have less room than they think for being smug about the situations.   

Disputes - Scientific and Otherwise

Scientific controversies are not uncommon and often are necessary and valuable in areas where conclusions are conjectural and the known information is changing. An obvious example is the question of whether the best guess from the facts and analysis available  is  that the universe will continue expanding indefinitely or eventually contract back into a state leading to another big bang. Each side of the question has seemed the more likely at various times, and the disputes have been lively and useful. However, in this and in other such controversies, those favoring one side or the other -  while they might get excited and even consider their opponents foolish, hidebound, or just not smart enough to get the right answer – would not think of labeling them as  unbelievers, deniers, or embodiments of evil.  That sort of disputation belongs in the areas of politics and religion, not science.  Yet it is precisely what we see from the advocates of global warming as an apocalyptic disaster in the making and something totally and unquestionably due only to people’s burning fuels.

Their  mode of expression thus should serve as a clue to an objective observer that the public discussion on global warming has left the realm of science and entered that of religion and politics. The political aspect is obvious. Politicians and bureaucrats  of the left have  hopes  to use a scare over warming to increase their power. In some ways it is a last refuge for them. The religious is almost as obvious. The green movement posits a former ideal state corrupted by humanity’s sins, offers sinners a path to salvation based on self denial, threatens the world and its unbelievers  with a horrible future fate,  condemns its critics as not merely mistaken but evil, offers believers an assurance of righteousness  and superiority based solely on holding correct beliefs, and is uninterested in facts  which contradict its doctrines  or events which invalidate its prophecies.  By what is commonly called the quacking duck test, it is a religion, and a dogmatic and crusading one at that. The apocalyptic view of global warming is part of its holy writ. 

A very  instructive illustration of how far all this is from science or scientific behavior came in the last couple of days from a US senator from Rhode Island who, representing what one might call the jihadist or Dominican branch  of the green faith, suggested throwing dissenters into prison for their heresies. That should help to show a fair minded person just how much  this  business really has to do with science and how much with faith and power lust. It should also brand that senator as an anti-American authoritarian unworthy of holding any office in a free country ( and also as an opponent of free scientific inquiry).

Of course the behavior of scoundrels and fanatics does not prove there is nothing to  the notion of   burning fuels contributing to warming as some conservatives have claimed.  Burning fuels does have an effect, and it would be useful to have a better understanding of what sort of effect that is and through what sort of feedback  or other mechanisms it occurs.

                                                                                                                           

Contra Earth Day

It is fairly commonplace that environmentalism, particularly the environmentalism of global warming,  serves as a  refuge for many on the authoritarian left. With Marxism’s and fascism’s claims and predictions refuted in theory and repeatedly disproved in practice, many such leftists  now find themselves left with the assertion that if given enough power, they will make the weather nicer. The colloquial term for such a person is watermelon – green on the outside and red on the inside.

Such people are dangerous, to be sure, particularly since conservatives often do such poor jobs of opposing them.  It does no good for conservatives to deny that the much of the earth has gotten warmer in  the last hundred and fifty or so years since the end of the Little Ice Age or to deny that carbon dioxide produced by the combustion of fuels contributes to warming. They should accept the facts and instead focus on the valid question of how much such combustion  has contributed to the warming, on the gross exaggerations or absurdity of many of the apocalyptic screeds, and on the fact that nothing in global warming or any other environmental problem justifies or requires the creation of an authoritarian state.  

However these ordinary leftists are not the most significant  threat. They are acting  mainly opportunistically and likely will move on to the next crisis or attempt at justification as soon as anything looking like a better opportunity comes along. The really serious threat comes from the true believers, the people to whom environmentalism has become a religion with a doctrine immune to fact and refutation and with spreading its faith a holy crusade.  They see the unrestrained and comfortable lives enjoyed by Americans as sinful and hope and plan to reduce Americans to lower standards of living and far lower levels of liberty and opportunity. They may seem comical and hard to take seriously as a threat with their demands that people  do such things as stop raising farm animals,   taking showers,  and  washing their clothes, but there is ample evidence that the absurdity of its doctrine or program of action  is no impediment to the success of a fanatical movement. They should be taken seriously. They have already had their successes,  including wielding a fairly large amount of influence with  the present administration in Washington.

Zealous, crusading fanatics are always dangerous, and people who value freedom, civilization, progress, and lives well lived should be aware of what these people want and are trying to do and take action to stop them.