The Last Great Heresy Part II

You can’t swing a dead polar bear these days without hitting something related to the global warming/renewable energy/we’re-all-gonna-die parade. What we seem to be fed looks like an amalgamation of the above three themes, hopelessly intertwined. Lacking the skills to craft a better descriptor I’ll refer to it as the Environmental Movement. For some time now the Environmental Movement has bothered me in a way I couldn’t quite put my finger on. The reason finally crept in on me over the past few weeks. It’s the frenzy coupled with righteousness.

A little dissection is in order. The renewable energy portion of this is perfectly legitimate. A five year old can understand that there are finite quantities of energies that we extract from earth. Planning for the day when we’re out of those energy sources is simply thinking ahead. There does seem to be an underlying current (sorry, no pun intended) that we should have been doing this all along. The truth is that technology has just now progressed to the point where we can begin to peer over the mountain top and into the next valley. (For an excellent breakdown consult this roundup by the always stellar Popular Mechanics.) This will probably take a generation or two, so people need to relax a bit and let Mohammed come to the mountain. The infrastructure build out that allowed the automobile to become ubiquitous took almost two generations, culminating with the Eisenhower Interstate System.

This leaves us with the global warming/we’re-all-gonna-die remainder. Frenzies are almost universally unhealthy. P.J. O’Rourke hit on this a little in Give War a Chance. He’s writing during the We Are the World/Live Aid days on the mid-80’s.

"A mob, even an eleemosynary mob, is an ugly thing to see. No good ever came of mass emotion. The audience that’s easily moved to tears is as easily moved to sadistic dementia. People are not thinking under such circumstances. And poor, dreadful Africa is something that surely needs thought. "

These words were echoed over twenty years later by the greatest heretic of the Environmental Movement: Bjorn Lomborg. In an interview with PBS’s Newshour he said “I would argue that it’s very unlikely we make sound decisions if we are scared witless.” It’s an excellent interview and Lomborg raises some great points I have not seen anywhere else. Bjorn is the Martin Luther of the Environmental Movement. His book The Skeptical Environmentalist is the modern equivalent of the 95 Theses. The hard factual analysis offered by the book is the antithesis of frenzy. Letting go of the frenzy doesn’t mean letting go of concern. It can simply mean you’re injecting sound analysis and judgment.

Ares