At Rio+20 next month, the world’s elites will meet in Brazil with the aim of holding back human progress.

Ben Pile - Thursday 17 May 2012

Forty years ago, two ideas about humanity’s relationship with the natural world caught the imagination of the richest and most influential people. The first was that the demands of a growing population were taking more from the planet than could be replaced by natural processes. The second, related idea was that there exist natural ‘limits to growth’. These two reinventions of Malthusianism became the basis of a new form of global politics, which has sought to contain human industrial and economic development ever since.

Fears about the possibility of global environmental catastrophe and its human consequences, as depicted by neo-Malthusians like Paul Ehrlich - author of the 1968 prophecy, The Population Bomb - and the Club of Rome - a talking shop for high-level politicians, diplomats and researchers - became the ground on which a number of organisations established under the United Nations were formed. In 1972, the UN held its Conference on the Human Environment, and began its environment programme, UNEP. In 1983, the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED, aka The Brundtland Commission, after its chair, Norwegian politician Gro Harlem Brundtland) was formed, leading to the publication of its findings in 1987 in Our Common Future. Also known as the Brundtland Report, it became the bible of ‘sustainable development’.

Having established sustainable development as an imperative of global politics, more organisations and programmes under the UN were formed to deliver it. In 1992, the UN Conference on Environment and Development, the first ‘Earth Summit’, was held in Rio, leading to the Agenda 21 ‘blueprint for a sustainable planet’, UN conventions on climate change and biodiversity, and the creation of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development (UNSCD). Since then, an entire ecosystem of global, national, governmental and non-governmental organisations has emerged, to advocate and implement the closer integration of human productive life with knowledge about the environment: to observe the ‘limits to growth’. The most notable of these is the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), under which a global agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions is being sought.

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Part 1: Love and Power

Part 2: The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts

Part 3: The Monkey In The Machine and the Machine in the Monkey

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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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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A well-researched article on climate-change-hysteria collusion between the Club of Rome and Bren School of Environmental Science and Management.

Fluctuation in oil prices over the years due to supply and demand market mechanisms is a common phenomenon; however there were instances whereby the oil prices changed rapidly due to reasons beyond supply and demand principles. One major noticeable price hike was experienced in the early 1970’s. The reason behind this rapid increase was the Club of Rome Report. The report, entitled ‘Limits to Growth’, examined the predicament of mankind. Its conclusions were stunning. It was published in 30 languages and sold over 30 million copies. According to the report the world would eventually run out of many key resources. The depletion of resources would be the ultimate predicament of mankind. In the 1970’s the Club of Rome wrote that the world would run out of oil during the next 3-4 decades.

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Ben Johnson
FrontPageMagazine.com
Friday, February 27, 2009

When Barack Obama nominated John P. Holdren as his Science Adviser last December 20, the president-elect stated “promoting science isn’t just about providing resources” but “ensuring that facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology.” In nominating John Holdren, his words could scarcely have taken a more Orwellian ring.

Some critics have noted Holdren’s penchant for making apocalyptic predictions that never come to pass, and categorizing all criticism of his alarmist views as not only wrong but dangerous. What none has yet noted is that Holdren is a globalist who has endorsed “surrender of sovereignty” to “a comprehensive Planetary Regime” that would control all the world’s resources, direct global redistribution of wealth, oversee the “de-development” of the West, control a World Army and taxation regime, and enforce world population limits. He has castigated the United States as “the meanest of wealthy countries,” written a justification of compulsory abortion for American women, advocated drastically lowering the U.S. standard of living, and left the door open to trying global warming “deniers” for crimes against humanity. Such is Barack Obama’s idea of a clear-headed adviser on matters of scientific policy.

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Peter Joseph is naive, and has been swayed by one after another “teacher.” In the first Zeitgeist - a Hegelian concept coined by Johann Gottfried Herder of the Bavarian Illuminati - he was obviously enamored with ‘Acharya S’ and her occult Theosophical “secret tradition” interpretation of ancient history. In ‘Addendum,’ he has found a few new (solution-oriented) gurus of the same ilk.

The one-time New Age Theosophical Christ-Maitreya, J. Krishnamurti — thrust upon the occult, Utopian socialist underground at the beginning of the 20th century by Theosophy head, Fabian socialist Annie Besant and pederast-Freemason, C.W. Leadbeater — begins and ends the film. For something that purports to espouse “a modern, non-superstitious based understanding” of the world, well, let’s just say that it is hypocritical and deceitful not to even identify the theosophical current throughout both films, or the outright socialism of the latest. Though Peter Joseph hasn’t admitted his Theosophical debt, at 1:35:37 he tips his hand by the obscure mention of “intellectual materialism” - a term used by Blavatsky herself in Lucifer magazine (also, see here for another theosophic source) - and touts the “true divinity” of Man (1:48:25). New Ager aka “economic hitman”-Perkins has experienced the seething energies of Lucifer as well. At 1:43:07 he talks of the bliss of connectedness and our “God spirit,” while an “Illumined” man makes a gesture with his hands of a triangle in front of the sun.

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Susan Yoshihara, Ph.D. - September 18, 2008

(NEW YORK – C-FAM)  At United Nations headquarters last week, UN Population Fund (UNFPA) executive director Thoraya Obaid called for more funding for population programs, including reducing fertility, promoting “reproductive health services,” and “de-stigmatizing” sodomy.

Obaid began her remarks by commemorating the 40th anniversary of Paul Erlich’s book, The Population Bomb, which alarmed readers about the threat of “overpopulation” and justified the establishment of UNFPA. While she admitted the book’s prediction of “massive starvation on a large scale has not come to pass,” she nonetheless called for renewed commitment to boilerplate population control policies such as promoting smaller families, warning nations that world population had grown from 3.5 billion to 6.7 billion since 1968.

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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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