Barry Napier - November 10, 2009

I’m not very good at being hustled and rushed into insane situations. I like to think for myself. Which is why I originally began to investigate the fast-rising green movement. Only a while ago, greenies were people with woollen hats, gumboots and long hair. They hugged trees, drooled over flowers, and generally messed about on the very edge of polite society. They were on the fringe, like weird cults and folks who love to be frightened by conspiracies.

Now, in the space of less than a decade, these same weird people have become the major, if not only, force driving society in every country in the West, though what they say is really insane and off the wall! Why is this? Why have the inmates taken over the asylum? And why do people follow?

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Paul Chesser
OpEd Contributor
September 18, 2009

Scientists see no temperature increase (on average) in the oceans or on the surface of the Earth over the last decade. That hasn’t stopped an activist group from infiltrating high schools with the panicky message that we are on the verge of a “planetary emergency” due to global warming.

These alarmists are the recently formed Alliance for Climate Education, an Oakland, Calif., nonprofit created by wealthy wind energy entrepreneur Michael Haas. The organization has targeted five metropolitan areas and now is opening a Washington office.

Haas, who donated $24,600 to President Obama’s campaign and victory funds last year, stands to reap millions of dollars in government subsidies that climate change-driven energy policies would bring.

Meanwhile the teenagers targeted by ACE are treated to hip presentations with slick animation to propagate the idea that they and everyone in their spheres of influence must modify their behaviors so as to stop global warming. This is achieved by cutbacks in their energy use, which ACE believes produces too many greenhouse gases (from fossil fuel combustion like coal and oil) that warm the planet.

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In seeking to use religion to force people to change their eco-unfriendly behaviour, greens are debasing both religious belief and scientific truth.

Frank Furedi - 15 September 2009

We live in world where the cynical manipulation of people’s fears and anxieties often overrides informed public debate. Principles and beliefs seem to have become negotiable commodities, and all too often the search for truth gives way to doing ‘whatever works’. In recent decades religious figures have, at various times, embraced the authority of science, therapy and the environment as a way of communicating their messages. Indeed, the old statement ‘our faith demands…’ has increasingly given way to the claim that ‘the research shows…’. If Christian fundamentalists can reinvent their dogma in the language of ‘creationist science’, how long before atheist scientists seek to justify their moral crusade in the language of religion?

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Radical greens who encourage Prince Charles to butt into politics are setting history back hundreds of years.

Neil Davenport - 15 July 2009

The real scandal to emerge from the MPs expenses debacle is the demand for even less representative democracy. For certain commentators it seems the best way to restore the British state’s integrity is to reinstate the divine rule of those who ‘know best’ – the aristocracy and the House of Windsor.

Monarchists have leapt upon the expenses scandal in an attempt to rehabilitate the power of the undemocratic sovereign of Britain. For instance, in the Daily Telegraph Simon Heffer argued that the Queen should have a ‘role to play in steadying the ship’ of a battered parliament and that she ‘has the authority to act’ if the legitimacy crisis deepens (1).

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In the fields around this giant chemicals factory in Gujarat, the barren soil smells of paint stripper and the water from the well makes you gag. So why has it been given tens of millions of pounds of taxpayer-funded UN ‘green reward points’, which are traded hungrily on the financial markets at huge profit?

Nadene Ghouri - 01st June 2009

The farmers, faces wizened and browned from hours in the harsh Gujarati sun, lower a bucket into a well. It’s a solid-brick cylinder 100ft deep. The sun is high in the sky, beating down on the scorched earth. In the baked fields, maize and cotton have been planted. But none of the crops look very healthy. Leaves are wilted and tinged brown. Nothing has been watered for months.

Radha, a tough, sinewy widow and the only female farmer here, says that the well, which draws from deep groundwater, used to adequately supply the village and surrounding farms.

‘We have plenty of water – but water is the problem,’ she says.

As the bucket returns to the top, we can make out a white, almost oily-looking film on the surface of the liquid, which has formed little snowflake shapes.

She scoops up some water and asks us to smell it. It has an odour so acrid it catches in the back of our throats, making us cough.

‘We can’t irrigate our crops with it,’ she says. ‘It’s the water of death. It kills most crops we put it on.’

‘Gone bad,’ says the man who brought up the pail.

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Today, Maurice Strong sits atop the global environmental movement headed by the United Nations and its interlocking NGO’s and tax-exempt foundations.

Strong is considered to be the person behind the globalization of the foundation-funded environmental movement, and was the Secretary-General of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment held in 1972, in Stockholm, Sweden.

He co-authored the ‘Earth Charter’ with Mikhail Gorbachev in 1992. It was Gorbachev who stated in 1996 that the “threat of environmental crisis will be the ‘international disaster key’ that will unlock the New World Order.”

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Wesley Smith - Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Deep Ecology is a neo earth religion, the ideology of which holds that nature should be given equal consideration with people–a concept sometimes called ecological egalitarianism. The explicit rejection of human exceptionalism led adherents into a profound nihilism and anti-humanism in which deep ecologists yearn for a radical human depopulation to under 1 billion.

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Brendan O’Neill - 4 March 2009

Ahead of a conference on the psychology of climate change denial, Brendan O’Neill says green authoritarians are treating debate as a disorder.

A few months ago, for a joke, I set up a Facebook group called ‘Climate change denial is a mental disorder’. It’s a satirical campaigning hub for people who think that climate change denial should be recognised as a mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association, and that its sufferers – who probably engage in ‘regular chanting and intensive brainwashing sessions in cult-like surroundings’ – should be offered ‘eco-lobotomies’ to remove ‘the denying part of their brain’. The group now has 42 members. Yes, some have signed up because they get the joke, but others are serious subscribers to the denial-as-insanity idea. ‘Thank God I’ve found this group’, says one new member, who is sick of other Facebook groups being ‘hijacked’ by unhinged eco-sceptics.

The idea that ‘climate change denial’ is a psychological disorder – the product of a spiteful, wilful or simply in-built neural inability to face up to the catastrophe of global warming – is becoming more and more popular amongst green-leaning activists and academics. And nothing better sums up the elitism and authoritarianism of the environmentalist lobby than its psychologisation of dissent. The labelling of any criticism of the politics of global warming, first as ‘denial’, and now as evidence of mass psychological instability, is an attempt to write off all critics and sceptics as deranged, and to lay the ground for inevitable authoritarian solutions to the problem of climate change. Historically, only the most illiberal and misanthropic regimes have treated disagreement and debate as signs of mental ill-health.

This weekend, the University of West England is hosting a major conference on climate change denial. Strikingly, it’s being organised by the university’s Centre for Psycho-Social Studies. It will be a gathering of those from the top of society – ‘psychotherapists, social researchers, climate change activists, eco-psychologists’ – who will analyse those at the bottom of society, as if we were so many flitting, irrational amoeba under an eco-microscope. The organisers say the conference will explore how ‘denial’ is a product of both ‘addiction and consumption’ and is the ‘consequence of living in a perverse culture which encourages collusion, complacency and irresponsibility’ (1). It is a testament to the dumbed-down, debate-phobic nature of the modern academy that a conference is being held not to explore ideas – to interrogate, analyse and fight over them – but to tag them as perverse.

Leading green writers have welcomed the West England get-together to study the denying masses. One eco-columnist says the conference might generate ideas for dealing with those who are ‘pathologically’ opposed to the environmental movement (pathology, according to my OED, is the study of ‘morbid or abnormal mental or moral conditions’) (2). Environmentalists recognise the inherent elitism of saying that, while they brave few can see things clearly, the rest of us are somehow disordered (greens are the ‘watchful ones amongst the slaves’, according to one environmentalist writer); yet they seem unashamed. The eco-columnist says this weekend’s conference will be useful because where ‘mainstream politics now largely “gets” environmentalism’, there is still a sceptical mass, ‘a baying and growing crowd, largely consisting of people resistant to the prospect of ever having to alter their lifestyles’. Apparently this crowd ‘gathers to hurl invective’ at environmentalist ideas, such as recycling and low-energy lightbulbs (3).

In a sense, this vision of elite, brainy environmentalists on one side and a baying, insult-hurling crowd on the other speaks, however accidentally and however crudely, to an underlying truth: environmentalism remains a largely elitist project, beloved of politicians, priests and prudes keen to control people’s behaviour and curb our excessive lifestyles, and it rubs many ‘ordinary people’ up the wrong way. Of course much of the public goes along with the environmentalist ethos, bowing to the central idea that mankind is destructive and observing such rituals as sorting their rubbish, but they do so half-heartedly, recognising that, fundamentally, greens’ anti-consumerist, anti-reproduction, anti-travel arguments run counter to their own personal aspirations. Yet rather than recognise this frequently hidden divide between the green elite and the ‘baying crowd’ as one built on differences of opinion, on clashing aspirations, even on rational assessments by sections of the public that recycling is a waste of time, increasingly environmentalists pathologise it, turning it into evidence of their wisdom in contrast to the public’s mental instability.

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Terry Melanson | Conspiracy Archive (2009/01/10)

Paul Joseph Watson wrote a story yesterday about the discovery that Carol Browner, Obama’s Energy Czar, is involved with Socialist International.

Browner, reports The Baltimore Examiner, “is a member of the Commission for a Sustainable World Society (CSWS), which is a formal organ of the Socialist International. Oddly enough, the group’s web site was recently scrubbed to remove Browner’s picture and biography, but her name is still listed next to the photo-biographies of her 14 colleagues on the commission. The Socialist International is no group of woolly-headed idealists. It is an influential assembly of officials from across the international community whose official Statement of Principles describes an agenda of gaining and exercising government power based on socialist concepts.”

Here’s the relevant (socialistinternational.org) webpage as it looks now; and here, as it looked only a few days ago.

The Heritage Foundation blogged about it on Jan. 7th. They compared the Browner scrubbing to similar “Commissar Vanishings” by Stalin in Communist Russia.

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David Gordon - 1/8/2009

[Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud, and Deception to Keep You Misinformed By Christopher C. Horner. Regnery, 2008. Viii + 407 pages. An audio version of this review, read by Dr. Floy Lilley, is available as a free MP3 download.]

Those of us who refuse to accept calls from proponents of global warming for drastic restrictions on production often confront objections like this:

You skeptics, blinded by fanatical devotion to the free market, ignore evidence. True enough, you can trot out a few scientists who agree with you. But the overwhelming majority of climate scientists view man-made global warming as a great threat to the world. The course of inaction you urge on us threatens the earth with disaster.

Christopher Horner’s excellent book provides a convincing response to this all-too-frequent complaint.

But how can it do so? Will not an “anti-global-warming” book of necessity consist of an account of scientists who dissent from the consensus? If so, will it not fall victim to the difficulty raised in our imagined objection? The book will pick a few favored experts to back up a preconceived political agenda.

Horner strikes at the root of this objection: it rests on a false premise. Contrary to what our objection assumes, there is in fact no consensus of scientists behind global-warming alarmism…

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William L. Anderson - November 7, 2008

The voters have spoken, and so has Al Gore. It seems that the United States has no choice but to outlaw the burning of all coal and pretty much lay a chain saw to most of the energy industries and embrace something akin to the Great Leap Forward.

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Our right to own property is at the core of freedom and liberty. Simply put, if you can’t own property, you become property! Is the environmental movement really concerned with protecting nature or is there a hidden agenda to control and eliminate private property? Who is behind this movement? Are the constitutional rights of ordinary citizens being systematically violated? Behind The Green Curtain blows back the green veil hiding the environmental movement. It reveals a dark, cynical reality of the movement unconcerned about nature and the environment. It focuses on the mega-foundations and the financial elite behind them. Learn about their hidden agenda of power, control and the goal of eliminating private property altogether.

Ron Ewart - October 3, 2008

A while back, one of our rural neighbors was hauled off to jail for a trumped-up land use violation by an out-of-control, zealous prosecuting attorney and an insane district court judge, taken with his own judicial power and consumed with making an example out of this landowner, in order to “scare” other landowners into strict compliance with environmental law.

These rural victims of alleged environmental protection law violations are everywhere in America, because rural Americans went to sleep and allowed their government and the city folk to usurp almost every single right they had under our constitution, in the name of socialism, but mostly radical environmentalism.

Based on an irrational premise to protect the environment at any cost and implementing radical environmental policies, federal, state and local legislators are and have passed laws to force people into a mold that goes against the very biological grain of human existence.  This irrational premise is so-called “smart growth” and “sustainable development”, hatched in the United Nations under Agenda 21 and codified into law by an executive order, issued by President Clinton, without a treaty being debated and ratified in the U. S. Congress.  This pack-’em-in-like-sardines UN agenda is therefore unconstitutional, but that hasn’t stopped all levels of our government from implementing it.

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Wesley J. Smith - October 03, 2008

One of the most radical alterations in the self definition of humankind has just occurred in Ecuador and the world snoozes. But the radical environmental movement sees what is happening and is cheering. From a Global Exchange press release …

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Václav Klaus - 8.9.2008

(1) I think I have to start with expressing my deep and ever-deeper conviction that the recently created panic as regards dramatic, in the past allegedly unknown global climate changes and their supposedly catastrophic consequences for the future of human civilization must not remain without a resolute answer of the – until now – more or less silent majority of rationally thinking people, especially classical liberals, libertarians and other freedom loving men and women. Not everyone is silent but the current dominance of climate alarmism practically in the whole world can’t be disputed.

Many of us know (or at least should know) that this panic doesn’t have a solid ground, that it has not been set off by rational arguments, that it demonstrates an apparent disregard of the past experience of mankind, and that its substance is not science. It is based, on the contrary, on the abuse of science by a non-liberal, extremely authoritarian, freedom and prosperity despising (and destroying) ideology which I, together with many others, call environmentalism. (2)

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