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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.”
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.”
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.
Irony is never lost when showing the Left in action. They always act as if they are so tolerant of others and promote diversity. ER, well that would be diversity in anything but thought.
US Youth delegates to the Copenhagen Climate Negotiations crash climate denier live webcast in Copenhagen and are called “hitler youth” by Lord Christopher Monckton at an Americans for Prosperity event. American youth attended to demand a safe and sustainable energy future that provides millions of clean energy jobs for Americans. Via Gateway Pundit.
or, here’s another example of the same concept. via Bureaucrash:
Journalist Phelim McAleer (‘Mine Your Own Business’, ‘Not Evil Just Wrong’) asks Prof Stephen Schneider from Stanford University an Inconvenient Question about ‘Climategate’ emails. McAleer is interrupted twice by Prof Schneider’s assistant and UN staff and then told to stop filming by an armed UN security guard.
Climategate has given many conservatives new hope that the mass hysteria might be exposed for the group-think that it is. Of course, the hard part will be what the MSM allows the leak through its filter. But articles like this will reach more scientists because it calls their very credibility into question. Scientists who have nothing to do with global warming, or “climate change.”
Henninger writes:
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.
Liberals and statists have never had a better chance of moving the American economy to more government control by taking another large bite out of our free market private sector. The power grab has been justified based on “facts,” as evidenced by scientists.
Global warming enlisted the collective reputation of science. Because “science” said so, all the world was about to undertake a vast reordering of human behavior at almost unimaginable financial cost. Not every day does the work of scientists lead to galactic events simply called Kyoto or Copenhagen. At least not since the Manhattan Project.
It may be that scientists begin to talk amongst themselves and expand the discussion to a point where the MSM can’t just ignore the supposedly “settled science,” that’s been used to silence any debate.
This has harsh implications for the credibility of science generally. Hard science, alongside medicine, was one of the few things left accorded automatic stature and respect by most untrained lay persons. But the average person reading accounts of the East Anglia emails will conclude that hard science has become just another faction, as politicized and “messy” as, say, gender studies. The New England Journal of Medicine has turned into a weird weekly amalgam of straight medical-research and propaganda for the Obama redesign of U.S. medicine.
Henninger gives a great example of how this isn’t the first time in recorded history that people in power were controlling what people believed.
For three centuries Galileo has symbolized dissent in science. In our time, most scientists outside this circle have kept silent as their climatologist fellows, helped by the cardinals of the press, mocked and ostracized scientists who questioned this grand theory of global doom. Even a doubter as eminent as Princeton’s Freeman Dyson was dismissed as an aging crank.
The picture that emerges of prominent climate-change scientists from the more than 3,000 documents and emails accessed by hackers and put on the Internet this week is one of professional backbiting and questionable scientific practices. It could undermine the idea that the science of man-made global warming is entirely settled just weeks before a crucial climate-change summit.
Researchers at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, England, were victims of a cyberattack by hackers sometime Thursday. A collection of emails dating back to the mid-1990s as well as scientific documents were splashed across the Internet. University officials confirmed the hacker attack, but couldn’t immediately confirm the authenticity of all the documents posted on the Internet.
CO2 — many seek to regulate it, legislate it, tax it, capture it, sequester it, cap it, trade it or otherwise control it. And they who do would have us risk nothing less than worldwide economic destruction based on the theory that not doing so will inevitably lead to catastrophic global warming. But one need only study the past two centuries of climate history to conclude that CO2 simply does not drive global warming.
Let us start from the data. The plot of the mean global temperature anomaly in deg C for the data from the Hadley Centre from year 1850 to 2008 is shown below.
