by Jerome a Paris
Tue Jan 9th, 2007 at 08:02:42 AM EST
to be read with its twin diary (Ideology trumping facts)...
Green lobby must be treated as a religion
Anthropologists have established how different cultures independently evolve similar myths - familiar stories, such as the myth of the Fall and the myth of the Apocalypse, which meet deep-seated human needs. The Christian tradition describes the temptation of Adam and Eve and warns of the Last Judgment.
In Europe, these stories no longer have the impact they did. Environmentalism now fulfils for many people the widespread longing for simple, all-encompassing narratives. Environmentalism offers an alternative account of the natural world to the religious and an alternative anti-capitalist account of the political world to the Marxist. The rise of environmentalism parallels in time and place the decline of religion and of socialism.
If the title itself of thiat piece of opinion did not make your blood boil, I expect that the comparison to religion and socialism, and the idea that envrionmentalism is about "simple narratives" did the trick... But it's not over.
Environmentalism embraces a myth of the Fall: the loss of harmony between man and nature caused by our materialistic society. Al Gore recounted the words of Chief Seattle, as his tribe relinquished their ancient lands: "Will you teach your children what we have taught our children? That the earth is our mother?"
This lost Eden never existed. Humans have burned and eaten the environment since time immemorial.
Ahhh. It's always been done, so it can keep on being done. One of the nicest, most explicit expressions of the economists' belief in infinite growth.
We need to start posting that old joke again, of a man faling from a plane (5,000m - I'm ok.... 4,000m - I'm okay, .... 1,000m - hey, all's fine and dandy ... 100m - still fine .... 20m - still okay ... 10m, 9m, 8m, 7m, 6m, 5m - hey, I should be able to jump safely from 5 meters).
The Apocalypse myth is equally familiar. Our wickedness has damaged our inheritance and, although it is almost too late, immediate reform can transform our future. Christians look to the Second Coming, Marxists to the collapse of capitalism, with the same mixture of fear and longing.
Environmentalism at first lacked a persuasive Apocalypse myth. The litany of environmental degradation had to confront the manifest fact that many aspects of the environment were steadily improving, with cleaner air, rivers and seashores. The discovery of global warming filled a gap in the canon. That is why environmentalists attach so much importance to the assertion not just that the world is warming up, which is plainly true, but that this warming is our fault, which is less plainly true. The connection between rising carbon concentrations and the growth of modern industrial society provides justification for the link between the sins of our past and the catastrophe of our future.
This man is not reading the Financial Times, is he? Where his own colleague Martin Wolf wrote:
Repent, for the end of the world is nigh. That is a warning one would expect to come from an evangelical preacher or an environmental doomsayer, not from a sober economist. Yet that is, in essence, what Sir Nicholas Stern, author of the British government's new report on climate change, is saying. The tone may be sober, but the conclusion - act now before it is too late - is not.
Hitherto many economists, business-people and politicians, particularly in the US, have argued that, given both the uncertainties and the high costs of taking possibly unnecessary action, the best policy is to wait, see and, if necessary, adapt. The contribution of this report is to reverse that logic. It argues that, given these very same uncertainties and the relatively low costs of acting now, the best policy is action.
How and how convincingly does the review make this case? The answer, I suggest, is: "Sufficiently so."
He's gone religious too. Wolf crying wolf, haha.
Environmental evangelists are therefore not interested in pragmatic solutions to climate change or technological fixes for it. They are even less interested in evidence that if we were really serious about reducing carbon emissions we could do so by large amounts without significantly affecting our economies or our lives. Windmills on roofs and cycling to work are insignificant in practical consequence, but that is to miss their point. Every ideology needs rituals of observance which demonstrate the commitment of adherents.
Business should treat the environmental movement as it treats other forms of religious belief.
What fucking condescending bullshit. Who's against pragmatic solutions? who's agaisnt technological fixes? Those that acknowledge that there is a problem or those that deny it?
Business leaders do not themselves have to believe its doctrines. Indeed we should be wary if they do: business linked to faiths and ideologies is a sinister and unaccountable power. But companies must respect the belief systems of the countries in which they operate, and acknowledge both the constraints these structures impose and the commercial opportunities that arise.
That paragraph is spot on - of coruse there's this slight disagreement on who's spouting ideology andblindly following their faith and who's not. I know that one side is istening to the other, all the time. The reverse is harder to discern, which suggests where the ideology lies, in my mind...
