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Did the rise of environmentalism poison liberals’ historical optimism?
In a recent article in City Journal Fred Siegel writes about a drastic change in how Progressives viewed America.
For the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, American liberals distinguished themselves from conservatives by what Lionel Trilling called “a spiritual orthodoxy of belief in progress.” Liberalism placed its hopes in human perfectibility.
I considered myself a Liberal in my youth and thoroughly embraced the environmental movement at it’s onset. Siegel writes, and I agree:
If one were to pick a point at which liberalism’s extraordinary reversal began, it might be the celebration of the first Earth Day, in April 1970. Some 20 million Americans at 2,000 college campuses and 10,000 elementary and secondary schools took part in what was the largest nationwide demonstration ever held in the United States. The event brought together disparate conservationist, antinuclear, and back-to-the-land groups into what became the church of environmentalism, complete with warnings of hellfire and damnation. Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, the founder of Earth Day, invoked “responsible scientists” to warn that “accelerating rates of air pollution could become so serious by the 1980s that many people may be forced on the worst days to wear breathing helmets to survive outdoors. It has also been predicted that in 20 years man will live in domed cities.”
It’s finally happening. CNN is actually not covering up for the Obama Administration. Of course, the only thing that can make that happen is that the media is itself being restricted.
Barbara Boxers comment that “CO2 would be the leading cause of conflict, putting our troops in harm’s way” ignores the likelihood of serious wars between America and other nations and the inevitability of a WMD attack on America.
Here’s the text:
“I’m going to put in the record, Madam President, a host of quotes from our national security experts who tell us that carbon pollution leading to climate change will be over the next 20 years the leading cause of conflict, putting our troops in harm’s way.”
A detailed computer modeling study released today indicates that oil from the massive spill in the Gulf of Mexico might soon extend along thousands of miles of the Atlantic coast and open ocean as early as this summer. The modeling results are captured in a series of dramatic animations produced by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and collaborators.
Here’s some vintage USSR propaganda showing us how they extinguished a gas leak fire. The same technique could be used for the oil leak in the gulf. The Russians used nukes to put out fires like this a total of 5 times.
If anything, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an environmental lawyer, underestimated the cost of Cape Wind. The project will see the construction of 130 wind-powered turbines off the coast of Cape Cod Massachusetts that will, according to its developers, generate an average of 170 megawatts of electricity for the Bay State. The turbines will cost about $1 billion to build. Let’s assume that the useful life of the wind turbines is twenty years, that the maintenance costs of the windmills is zero, and that nobody has to pay a dime of interest on the $1 billion worth of financing needed to construct these windmills. Even if we accept such wildly inaccurate and charitable assumptions, the cost of energy generated by Cape Wind over those twenty years will be over thirty-three cents per kilowatt. That’s more than six times the typical wholesale price for electrons today, around six cents per kilowatt, depending on the market.
Thanks to government subsidies, Massachusetts’ residents won’t have to pay the full price for Cape Wind power. Instead, they’ll only have to fork over four and a half times the going rate, rather that something over six times that benchmark.
One of the strongest arguments for fighting the War against Islamic Terrorism is looking back at history at how France, Britain and most of Europe ignored Hitler’s actual speeches, his nation’s re-armament and aggression expanding the boundaries of Germany. If they had just listened to what Hitler said he would do, they could have avoided World War II. There are countless books written about it. Thomas Sowell’s latest book Intellectuals & Society has a great chapter detailing that era.
And it’s no different today. Listen and read what Osama bin Laden, or Ayman al-Zawahiri have said, and you’ll know their aim is to defeat our way of life, and create a world dominated by Islam and Sharia Law.
So here’s The Senate’s sole (admitted) Socialist, using the same argument to sell Global Warming. Sanders equates watching Hitler’s rise to power with the supposed “settled science” and the claims of Al Gore and the 2500 scientists, blah blah blah.
This, like so many other examples, clarifies the philosophical divide between how Liberals and Conservatives see the world and their different perceptions of human nature. That subject is also amply described in Sowell’s latest.
That the BBC is beginning to question Climate Change is a very very encouraging sign. It should only take NBC, CBS, ABC, NPR, MSNBC, NY Times, Washington Post, LA Times …. about 5 years to follow suit.
It really is the same thing. Just imagine how Galileo‘s discovery, that the earth revolved around the sun, was feared by the Church in 1610 (a mere 400 years ago).
There are probably a few million people who earn their living promoting AGW. What are they going to do if it turns out to be the biggest hoax in our lifetime? My goodness, Algore could lose tens of millions of his investments if it turned out that any climate change is not caused by the air we all exhale.
As we plough headlong into the ‘ClimateGate’ scandal let’s remind ourselves what is really at stake here:
LET COOLER HEADS PREVAIL
by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley and Paul Maynard
The CII’s latest report, Coping with Climate Change: Risks and Opportunities for Insurers, says we are changing the climate, the science is settled, and there is overwhelming evidence for anthropogenic “global warming” caused by rising atmospheric CO2 concentration (CII, 2009).
The worldwide obsession with CO2 as the chief driver of climate is scientifically unfounded: yet Western governments are outbidding one another to make drastic cuts in carbon emissions, and CO2 is demonized as a dangerous pollutant. James Hansen, an activist who nominally works for NASA, decries railway coal-trucks as “death wagons”, incites civil disobedience against power stations, and predicts – absurdly – that sea level will rise 246 feet (Hansen, 2009).
You gotta wonder how long the MSM will be able to get away with ignoring the fallout from ClimateGate and the ever increasing number of real scientists who will now be emboldened to begin speaking out.
Surely there must have been serious men and women in the hard sciences who at some point worried that their colleagues in the global warming movement were putting at risk the credibility of everyone in science.
I don’t think most scientists appreciate what has hit them. This isn’t only about the credibility of global warming. For years, global warming and its advocates have been the public face of hard science.
In a great summary, Power Line posts 15 bullet points of simple to understand facts:
In the wake of Climategate, common sense deniers like to say that there is lots of other evidence for global warming, in addition to that which has been debunked by the East Anglia whistleblower. Actually, however, the scientific evidence for AGW is remarkably weak. At Icecap, Lee Gerhard, geologist and reviewer for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, sums up the key scientific evidence with admirable brevity:
Lord Monckton‘s credibility seems to be on the rise aa more and more knowledgeable people are speaking out against the mass hysteria.
I remember quite well being really concerned that humans were destroying the earth in 1975. Oh my god, the media was full of articles about “The Population Explosion,” disappearing animal species, global cooling and of course other end of the world scenarios – all caused by us terrible humans.
Now, over 35 years later … I believe it’s all faith based. Here’s an example of my earlier indoctrination.
“The Cooling World” – by Peter Gwynne
April 28, 1975 Newsweek
There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production – with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now. The regions destined to feel its impact are the great wheat-producing lands of Canada and the U.S.S.R. in the North, along with a number of marginally self-sufficient tropical areas – parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indochina and Indonesia – where the growing season is dependent upon the rains brought by the monsoon.
There is “no real scientific proof” that the current warming is caused by the rise of greenhouse gases from man’s activity.
Man-made carbon dioxide emissions throughout human history constitute less than 0.00022 percent of the total naturally emitted from the mantle of the earth during geological history.
Warmer periods of the Earth’s history came around 800 years before rises in CO2 levels.
After World War II, there was a huge surge in recorded CO2 emissions but global temperatures fell for four decades after 1940.
Throughout the Earth’s history, temperatures have often been warmer than now and CO2 levels have often been higher – more than ten times as high.
There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production – with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now. The regions destined to feel its impact are the great wheat-producing lands of Canada and the U.S.S.R. in the North, along with a number of marginally self-sufficient tropical areas – parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indochina and Indonesia – where the growing season is dependent upon the rains brought by the monsoon.