Mark Lynas has converted from being an eco-alarmist to a pro-growth rationalist. But he still doesn’t get the problem with green thinking.

by Ben Pile - Friday 29 July 2011

Since becoming an advocate of genetic modification (GM) and nuclear power, Mark Lynas has drawn increasingly hostile criticism from his erstwhile comrades in the green movement. In turn, he has sharpened his criticism of environmentalists for their hostility to technological and economic development. In his new book, The God Species: How the Planet Can Survive the Age of Humans, he attempts to reformulate environmentalism to overcome the excesses that have so far prevented it from saving the planet. This book will no doubt provoke debate, but what is this transformation really about, and is it really based on new ideas or merely the revision of old ones?

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Malcolm King - 21 May 2012

The population lobby’s ‘we’re all doomed’ diatribes against modern capitalism and the environment are a gold mine of sociological perversity but they may also attract a protest vote at the next federal election.

An Adelaide-based political party called Stop Population Growth Now (SPGN) is attempting to field a Senator at the next election if they can get the party registration numbers.

The executive of the SPGN is comprised of former members of the Australian Democrats, scientists, accountants and IT professionals. With the demise of the Democrats, they have morphed in to a millennial ‘save the earth’ party.

The SPNG is supported by the Sustainable Population Australia (SPA) whose president, Sandra Kanck, was a former South Australian upper house member. Ms Kanck has called on the Australian Government to implement a one-child policy in Australia while the SPGN wants to stop all immigration.

The SPNG’s aim is to “Reduce Australia’s rate of population growthto zero as rapidly as possible. If the resulting stable population is still environmentally unsustainable then work to reduce the size of the population until we achieve environmental sustainability.”

This astonishing statement means they want to use individual consumption data to determine one’s sustainability on the earth. So if you have an open fire, drive a six-cylinder car and have a high power bill, you’re in line for a visit from the eco-fascist police. The SPNG are hit men for Mother Nature.

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The latest pseudoscience from the former vice president

David Harsanyi - June 29, 2011

For years, the Sierra Club and other environmentalist groups have warned us that too many babies will destroy the Earth.

“We are experiencing an accelerated obliteration of the planet’s life-forms—an estimated 8,760 species die off per year—because, simply put,” explained environmentalist Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, “there are too many people.” (Well, not exactly that simple when one considers that millions of species had disappeared long before humans selfishly began drinking from plastic bottles.)

In one of his recent works of speculative fiction, The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman asked: “How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we’d crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once?” Dunno. Maybe we value reality? Perhaps we believe in the ability of humans to adapt and to innovate. Perhaps we’ve learned that Malthusian Chicken Littles slinging stories about the impending end of water or oil or natural resources are proved wrong so often that we ignore them.

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Last week Breakthrough co-founders Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus returned to Yale University for a retrospective on their seminal 2004 essay, “The Death of Environmentalism.” In their speech they argued that the critical work of rethinking green politics was cut short by fantasies about green jobs and “An Inconvenient Truth.” The latter backfired — more Americans started to believe news of global warming was being exaggerated after the movie came out — the former made false promises that could not be realized by cap and trade. What is an earnest green who cares about global warming to do now? In this speech, Nordhaus and Shellenberger reflect on what went so badly awry, and offer 12 Theses for a post-environmental approach to climate change.

Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger

It is a great pleasure to be here at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies for this retrospective on “The Death of Environmentalism.” In early 2005 Yale invited us to debate that essay, and since then the School has continued to demonstrate a genuine interest in what our friend and colleague Peter Teague has taken to calling ecological innovation. You train your students to ask hard questions — we saw this first hand in 2010 Breakthrough Fellow and Yale School Masters candidate David Mitchell — and your flagship publication, Yale360, is publishing some of the most interesting green thinkers today. We are grateful once again for this opportunity to reflect on the nearly seven years since we wrote our essay, and make some new arguments about what the green movement must do now.

Seven years ago the two of us started interviewing America’s environmental leaders with the intention of writing a report on the politics of global warming for the October 2004 meeting of the Environmental Grantmakers Association. We came away from the experience deeply disappointed. Not one of the environmental leaders we interviewed articulated a compelling vision or strategy for dealing with the challenge. None expressed much interest in rethinking their assumptions about the problem or the solutions. What we heard again and again during our interviews were the same old riffs that green leaders had been repeating since the late 1980’s. Global warming would be solved through the same kinds of policies that we had used to address past pollution problems such as acid rain. Most were confident that John Kerry was, with their help, about to be elected president, and the biggest funders in the movement told us they were just a few steps away from passing cap and trade legislation.

That October we delivered our paper, “The Death of Environmentalism,” at the Environmental Grantmakers Association conference. While leaders at environmental philanthropies and national green groups hoped that the debate the essay started would just go away, “The Death of Environmentalism” struck a cord with many others and sparked a spirited debate. Many took the paper’s arguments personally and, without question, the most common reaction to our essay was “I’m not dead.” Our friend Adam Werbach gave a speech called “Is Environmentalism Dead,” wherein he suggested that environmentalists make common cause with a broader coalition of progressive interests in hopes of building a broader and more diverse movement. And Yale’s own Gus Speth questioned whether capitalism itself was compatible with ecological sustainability and suggested a radical shift in values was required to deal with the problem.

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Joel Garreau - Summer Issue of the New Atlantis

Traditional religion is having a tough time in parts of the world. Majorities in most European countries have told Gallup pollsters in the last few years that religion does not “occupy an important place” in their lives. Across Europe, Judeo-Christian church attendance is down, as is adherence to religious prohibitions such as those against out-of-wedlock births. And while Americans remain, on average, much more devout than Europeans, there are demographic and regional pockets in this country that resemble Europe in their religious beliefs and practices.

The rejection of traditional religion in these quarters has created a vacuum unlikely to go unfilled; human nature seems to demand a search for order and meaning, and nowadays there is no shortage of options on the menu of belief. Some searchers syncretize Judeo-Christian theology with Eastern or New Age spiritualism. Others seek through science the ultimate answers of our origins, or dream of high-tech transcendence by merging with machines — either approach depending not on rationalism alone but on a faith in the goodness of what rationalism can offer.

For some individuals and societies, the role of religion seems increasingly to be filled by environmentalism.

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Paul Joseph Watson & Alex Jones
Friday, February 4, 2011

Fury is building over rolling nationwide blackouts triggered by the Obama administration’s deliberate agenda to block the construction of new coal-fired plants, as local energy companies struggle to meet Americans’ power demands amidst some of the coldest weather seen in decades.

- As we reported yesterday, four hospitals in Texas reacted furiously after they were hit with planned outages despite being promised they would be spared even as power to Super Bowl venues remains uninterrupted.

- Thousands in New Mexico have been left without natural gas as Gov. Susana Martinez on Thursday declared a state of emergency. “Due to statewide natural gas shortages, I have ordered all government agencies that do not provide essential services to shut down and all nonessential employees to stay home” on Friday, Martinez said after meeting with public safety personnel in Albuquerque,” reports the Associated Press.

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William N. Grigg - Oct 3, 2010

Suetonious records that while attending the Circensian Games the Emperor Caligula was so offended by a public display of support for one of his critics that he exclaimed: “I wish the Roman people had but one neck!”

It’s possible that “Little Boots” intended that outburst as a joke. If so, the depraved tyrant had a sense of humor quite similar to the one displayed by the 10:10 Campaign, an English environmentalist group that seeks to hector the public into reducing its collective “carbon footprint.”

On October 1, 10:10 rolled out a four-minute film — written by the immensely talented Richard Curtis — entitled “No Pressure.” The film is a series of vignettes involving an updated riff on Caligula’s depraved daydream. Each of the short scenes features an environmentally enlightened authority figure — a teacher, a middle manager at a corporation, and a soccer coach — extolling the virtues of those who are willing to take part in the grand campaign of collective self-sacrifice on behalf of Gaia.

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Finnish philosopher says oppressive and brutal government should exert “tireless control of citizens” in shocking insight into threat of eco-fascism movement – Linkola openly calls for Nazi-style mass extermination policies to “kill defectives”

Paul Joseph Watson - September 20, 2010

A Finnish environmentalist guru has gone further than any other global warming alarmist in openly calling for fascism as a necessary step to save the planet from ecological destruction, demanding that climate change deniers be “re-educated” in eco-gulags and that the vast majority of humans be killed with the rest enslaved and controlled by a green police state, with people forcibly sterilized, cars confiscated and travel restricted to members of the elite.

Philosopher Pentti Linkola has built an enthusiastic following of self-described “eco-fascists” receptive to his message that the state should enact draconian measures of “discipline, prohibition, enforcement and oppression” in order to make people comply with environmental dictates.

Linkola’s barbaric and dictatorial philosophy has remained relatively obscure but is now gaining traction as the mask of environmentalism is lifted to unveil its true nature – a justification for 21st century tyranny on a grand scale, characterized by eugenics, sterilization, gulags, police states, and total government control over every aspect of our existence.

Linkola’s doctrine is more extreme, repulsive, and threatening to liberty than anything carried out by history’s worst dictators, Hitler, Stalin and Mao – combined. Indeed, Linkola laments that such monsters didn’t go far enough in wiping out many more millions of people.

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See also: THIS is the Alternative to “Eco-Fascism”? and pentti linkola at Disinfo

Steven Mosher - September 3, 2010

On Wednesday at the Discovery Channel offices in Maryland, environmental activist James Jay Lee took company employees hostage, threatening to kill them unless the media outlet agreed to turn itself into a propaganda channel for population control. The standoff ended when the gun-toting and bomb-laden eco-terrorist was shot dead by a SWAT team.

Lee had earlier outlined his demands on his website, savetheplanetprotest.com, where he posted a 1,100 word manifesto aimed at the Discovery Channel. In it, he demanded that Discovery change its programming and focus on getting rid of people who are “polluting” the planet.

“All programs on Discovery Health-TLC must stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants…” Lee wrote, “…programs encouraging human sterilization and infertility must be pushed. … That means stopping the human race from breeding any more disgusting human babies!”

It is because there are too many people, he exclaims elsewhere on the site, that “Global Warming is a reality. The massive extinction of animals is happening all over the world.”

Where did he get such wacko ideas?

From the mainstream environmental movement, that’s where, which early embraced the idea that the best kind of environmental protection was population control.

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Conceived in counter-culture hysteria, Earth Day has evolved as a focal point for ideological opposition to industrialized society

Peter Foster, April 20, 2010

If one believed in cosmic irony, then the ongoing eruption of that unpronounceable Icelandic volcano might be taken as a message from Earth to those who will tomorrow celebrate the fortieth “Earth Day.” Although humans may stand in awe of the home planet, the home planet has absolutely zero concern for them. Meanwhile the disruptions in travel and trade caused by the vast cloud of volcanic ash give a tiny glimpse of the kind of world that environmental radicals praise: clear, blue, air traffic-free skies above, frustrated and deprived people below.

Earth Day, while masquerading as all about positive ecological values, was conceived in hysteria and has evolved as a focal point for ideological opposition to industrial society and the benefits it brings to ordinary people.

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Helen Grady, Analysis, BBC Radio 4

If the case for tackling climate change is backed by science, why do so many green campaigners rely on the language of religion?

I am looking at a clock that is counting down the months, days, hours and minutes until planet Earth reaches “the point of no return”.

As I type, we have 83 months to go. The end of the world, if not exactly nigh, certainly seems to be on its way.

But this doomsday countdown has not been devised by a religious cult or millenarian seer. It is on the website of the New Economics Foundation (Nef), designed to raise awareness about climate change.

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See also: “Eco-spirituality: Perhaps the Vatican should be worried about nature worship“; and “Losing Old Gods, Finding Nature,” an interview with the author of Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future.

(Thanks to Justin Russell and Stephen Hand for the tips)

Michael Barker - January 11, 2010

“Capital is more than happy to enlist the mainstream [environmental] movement as a partner in the management of nature. Big environmental groups offer capital a threefold convenience: as legitimation, reminding the world that the system works; as control over popular dissent, a kind of sponge that sucks up and constrains the ecological anxiety in the general population; and as rationalization, a useful governor to introduce some control and protect the system from its own worst tendencies, while ensuring the orderly flow of profits.”
—Joel Kovel, 2002. (1)

(Swans - January 11, 2010) Global capitalist elites have long been masters of the exploitation of labour to manage sustained destruction of life. With utmost concern for shareholders, the principles of scientific management have been used to shackle workers to corporate priorities to efficiently harvest planet earth. In this way, humane citizens are socialized to accept absurd capitalist growth imperatives as natural, which enables the wealth of human energy to be channelled into the eradication of nature. Moreover, in this world of inverted realities, radical alternatives to this toxic state of affairs are regularly considered to contradict true human nature; so we are told it is natural to submit to arbitrary authority and let a tiny elite profit from the corporate management of life. This, however, does not prevent ordinary people from resisting such brutality. Indeed, throughout history ruling elites have been kept busy devising more effective ways of containing such dissent, and so this article will review some of the most significant elite-driven environmental initiatives that have served such purposes (from the 1960s onwards).

By highlighting the way by which elites, working hand in glove with the United Nations, have sought to manage the environmental terrain to disable radical movements seeking to eradicate capitalism, it is hoped that individual readers will recognize the futility of putting their hope in the hands of such illegitimate environmental managers. Only then, when such false illusions have been shattered, will mass movements driven by radical analyses be able to begin to work to sustain life in a just and equitable fashion.

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Paul and Phillip D. Collins continue their examination of radical environmentalism, this time focusing on the enigmatic character of Maurice Strong. [Listen here]

Charles Krauthammer (December 14, 2009)

In the 1970s and early ’80s, having seized control of the UN apparatus, Third World countries decided to cash in. OPEC was pulling off the greatest wealth transfer from rich to poor in history. Why not them? So in grand UN declarations, they began calling for a “New International Economic Order” (NIEO). The NIEO’s essential demand was simple: to transfer fantastic chunks of wealth from the industrialized West to the Third World.

On what grounds? In the name of equality — wealth redistribution via global socialism — with a dose of post-colonial reparations thrown in.

The idea of essentially taxing hard-working citizens of the democracies in order to fill the treasuries of Third World kleptocracies went nowhere, thanks mainly to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. They put a stake through the enterprise.

But such dreams never die. The raid on the Western treasuries is on again, but today with a new rationale to fit current ideological fashion. With socialism dead, the gigantic heist is now proposed as a sacred service to the newest religion: environmentalism.

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Terry Melanson (4/12/2009)

According to Mr. Henderson, the great psycho-wave of the past 35 years is “global salvationism.” This quasi-religious belief has two ill-fitting articles of faith: environmental alarmism, and the assertion that Third World poverty is in some way due to the West taking more than its fair share of global resources. Both problems are alleged to require top-down global political solutions, including giant corporations accepting more “social responsibility.”

The focus of this global master-plan is the bland but subversive notion of “sustainable development,” that without extensive UN-administered government controls the world is going to Hades in a handbasket …

- Peter Foster, “The Prince of Power [Maurice Strong],” Financial Post (May 19, 2005)

I can’t think of a better way to put Climategate into proper perspective than to revisit a 1998 Financial Post editorial titled “Global Warming: The Real Agenda.” Its author, Terence Corcoran, quoted from statements given to the Calgary Herald by the former Environment Minister, Christine Stewart.

As “minister of the environment, I am very worried about global warming,” Stewart said, “no matter if the science is phony, there are collateral environmental benefits.”

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