I came across something rather interesting online the other day, and I’ve now had some time to dwell on it. It’s a video of Australian Professor Ian Plimer discussing what he calls a new religion in radical Environmentalism. For those interested, here’s the video (about 5 minutes long).
Now, professor Pilmer has made some very interesting points here. Regardless of how you feel about global warming or any other environmental subjects, its hard to argue that the paralells between the formation of major religions and environmental fundamentalism. For those who didn’t feel like watching the video, here are some of the main points.
Religion doesn’t have to be part of a church
Religions gather support by fear, that if we don’t change our ways we are in trouble
Religion must make sacrifices in order to save ourselves
Religion tries to make sense of what is currently going on in the world
New Religions come through during the decline of old ones
Religions label non-believers as heretics and refuse to accept their arguments as valid
Modern environmentalism fits all of these and more. Desipte the fact that there have been thousands of global warmings and coolings over time (and at least four threats either way in the past hundred years), we are being told that this time, we have something to fear, that we have comitted great sins (co2 releases, pollution) and if we don’t repent immediately (pay the government to “fight” global warming), we are going to hell (the world will burn with all of us on it). It’s not hard to see where things line up. Despite science disproving global warming, the environmentalists only listen to the science that wants to prove it. Many of the followers are fundamental and very radical in nature, outright demanding that man act NOW or you are seriously part of the problem.
In short, the professor is right: anyone who blindly believes something without examing all sides is no better than the other. The Environmentalists are no better than the Creationists. Those who attempt to shove global warming down our throats are no better than those who tell us that man lived at the same time as dinosaurs.
However, where I differen from Professor Pilmer is on the accusation that this is, in fact, a new age religion. Something that just came out of nowhere, has caught fire like some sort of fashion fad or the latest Hilary Duff. When in fact, environmentalism is not new, the people who believe in this have been around since pre-christianity, they are just flying under a new banner.
The modern environmental movement is nothing more than a revitalization of the wiccan paganism that thrived before Christianity. As Christianity spread (after it came about of course), it had ripped through the big cities, saying that they had seen the truth from a savior and were willing to spread this messgage at all costs. Those in the cities took larely to these new ideals (eventually) and those who didn’t get the message quick enough were the rural farmers and people who had for many years, simply worshipped the land. They were labeled as heretics and ignorant non-believers who were merely clinling to ways of the past, as there was no “proof” for what they believed in worshipping something just because they always had, and that the proof lied in what the Christians had seen in Christ.
Well ladies and gentlemen, it’s the exact same thing today. One thing has remained constant is that religous history tends to repeat itself over time, be it from similar themes in different faiths to the destruction of the old religion to make way for the new one.
And it’s happening again.
Global warming theory spreaded quickly through the liberal cities of the world, and if you look around today, where are the most die-hard Bible-thumping Christians? They don’t live in the city. They don’t live in the suburbs. They live in the rural areas. They’re the people who have “Christ is Lord” written on the roof of their barn, which you can see plain as day while driving down the interstate. And just as Christianity converted the city dwellers and moved outward, environmentalist pagans are started from the inside and are working their way out towards the forestral frontier (which may be the final frontier) of Christians.
Except this time the tables have turned.
This is the old Pagan forest druids, the native American tribes, and Wiccans, and the countryfolk of old reborn into a modern, liberal, focused machine. And they are having their revenge on those who persecuted them in the past, only instead of being a religion with a church, they are calling themselves lightened to science. This all despite the fact that the average Buddhist has a better understanding of enlightenment and the average Scientologist has a better understanding of science (its ironic, but in a sad way).
Due to the nature of this beast, being political and not theological, they have adopted a political mantra as well. Each religion needs a Hero and a Villain, be it Zeus and Hades, God and Satan, or The Flying Spagetti Monster and a giant fork.
The hero of Environmentalism is the Earth, but if that is indeed the case, who is the villain?
There are essentially two villains in the environmentalist religion. The first is a carry over from the ancient pagan days, where it is simply man that is the cause of the problems, and that we must in a sense hate ourselves and what we are in order to save things.
This is equally as ridiculous as the episode of The Boondocks were Uncle Ruckus formed a church telling african-americans that God “hates darkies” and you must reject yourselves to be saved and enter white heaven. Video to illustrate point:
The second villian is a new one. The claim is that we are not just problems in ourselves, but we have created an industry that nurtures and promotes the destruction of the Earth (or in this case, God, however you want to look at it). That industry is production of goods and services. It is a system that encoruages us to make as much as we can, get as good at is as we can, and profit as much as we can. The environmentalists have a devil in the form of Capitalism. This is why they are looking at the government to save them from the horrors of “global warming” and the system that they are saying caused it.
Hence, we can gather two points of conclusion:
Anyone who is a radical environemntalist cannot rightly identify with any other faith.
You cannot call yourself a Christian, a Muslim, a Jew, or anything else if your time of worship is spend worshiping the earth and little to nothing else. Your God is the planet, nothing else.
Anyone who is a radical environmentalist is a socialist and/or a communist. Anyone who attacks the free market and competition in favor of strong government controls to preserve nature is a socialist. Rightly so, the more extreme position of everybody working together to achieve a positive society in so there is no competition, is a communist.
Nature has it’s ups and downs in temperature, just as the stock market does in it’s own nature of working. These entities regulate themselves and always have, government interference will not make things any easier and will only be used to strengthen the power of those already in power to opress the people in to doing what they want. Except this time, it isn’t the King of England demanding that his country be Catholic, it is people like Al Gore demanding that we all give ourselves to the Earth. Either way, Capitalism is wounded with every stride this new religion makes.
And if history continues to repeat itself, we are in serious trouble.
So I’ve decided to starting posting my papers for college as blog entries (brilliant idea since I graduate in June, right?). But hey, content is content. So here’s a 2600 word paper on the media attention given to Global Warming done for my Environmental Science Class.
You can download the PDF here if you would prefer to read it that way as opposed to online. That’s also the method I would recommend for printing. I’ll be turning this in next Monday. Enjoy.
In society today, there is a panic that is steadily gaining momentum among environmentalists, politicians, businesses and the general public in the United States as well as all over the world. This phenomenon is climate change, commonly referred to as “Global Warming”, or an “increase in the average temperature of the earth’s surface” (11).There is little, to any middle ground on the issue where both sides could come together and come up with a solution that satisfies both sides to some extent. Both sides feel very passionately about the subject, and neither will be bending any time soon. The debate lays in between first and foremost, those who believe that the earth’s temperature is increasing and those who do not believe so. On the next level among those who believe it is, the debate is what is causing the increase. After that, there is the question among those who believe it is the fault of man, what can we do about it?
Global Warming is receiving a lot of attention as of late, but is it truly worthy of the attention? On order to answer that question we have to examine all sides of the climate change debate, only then can we determine the actual worth of the argument and go from there. Former Vice President Al Gore claimed hurricane Katrina proved “that we have entered a period of consequences” (12) for what we have done, but is that really the case or is he merely exploiting those who suffered during the hurricane in order to further his cause?
Only one of the two sides can prove to be correct, and so we examine the question: is Global Warming a damsel in distress or merely an attention whore?
CLIMATE CHANGE: PAST AND PRESENT
This is not the first time that an argument of climate change has been brought before the public. It is not every other day that we are seeing new evidence supporting the idea that the climate is moving one way or another (such as the seemingly age old “Are eggs good for you?” debate), but it is instead every few decades where we can say that “over time” new evidence is now being supported scientifically. As a matter of fact, this is at least the 4th time in the last 100 years that the climate change debate has come up (10), each time the media using their most powerful tactics of fear to persuade the public to listen to their solutions for the problem.
The last such occurrence of this was during the 1970s, when we were presented with the arguments of a new ice age taking center stage. With many scientists convinced that we were headed towards frozen tundra and long winters, how could they have gotten it so wrong? (Remember that scientists also widely endorsed the publicly accepted theory of Eugenics starting in the 1900s, which we now view as racist and absurd) It hit the point just where it is today: that the ideas on climate change are going to happen, and with nobody doing anything about it, we are going to be in a lot of trouble. The following is from a Newsweek article from 1975, showing the general feelings regarding the public’s views on climate change at the time:
Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers, might create problems far greater than those they solve. But the scientists see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of stockpiling food… The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.(9)
Looking back, this seems completely ridiculous on numerous levels but ultimately, we are in the same place today. It is almost ironic looking back and seeing that one of the suggested solutions, melting the arctic ice cap is one of the things that we now fear with global warming.
There is an interesting trend here. If we look at quotes from the New York Times on the matter, we see a direct pattern. “MacMillian Reports Signs of New Ice Age” in 1924; “American in Longest Warm Spell since 1976; Temperature Line Records at 25-year Rise” in 1933; “…A Major Cooling Widely Considered to Be Inevitable” in 1975. And of course “Past Hot Times Hold Few Reasons to Relax about New Warming” in 2005 (10). So while it may feel like we are doing the right thing to save the earth by supporting the global warming solutions today, it would appear that this is a song that every generation hears at least once.
THE CASE FOR GLOBAL WARMING
Among those who support the theory of climate change, it is unclear as to what the cause is. The central mainstream consensus rests on humans being the cause, and as such, we can do something about it. So for those who have much invested in this idea, it is crucial for them to believe that not only are humans the sole cause of climate change, but that we can and will stop it.
We have already seen how the media has presented us with hard scientific evidence regarding the ups and downs of climate, and the funny thing about all of this is that it is supported by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. They claim the following:
“The Earth’s atmosphere-ocean dynamics is chaotic: its evolution is sensitive to small perturbations in initial conditions. This sensitivity limits our ability to predict the detailed evolution of weather; inevitable errors and uncertainties in the starting conditions of a weather forecast amplify through the forecast. As well as uncertainty in initial conditions, such predictions are also degraded by errors and uncertainties in our ability to represent accurately the significant climate processes.”(3)
So this group, that everyone looks to as the “ones” that are claiming that climate change is real and should be atop our priority list, is saying that we are not even sure if the earth is going crazy or if we as a species are at fault at all. Also interesting is that it is only land-based temperature readings that cover a specific area are the only ones that show a warming trend, not the satellite temperature readings which are scientifically proven accurate (3).
In addition, over 17,000 scientists have signed a petition from Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine saying that there is no convincing scientific evidence that humans are causing a disruption in the earth’s climate (3). But the fact that there are many thousands of scientists that support this theory is just something that the news does not want the public to hear, which is reflected by the 71% of people who support global warming believe that human activity is a significant cause of climate change (1).We are also told simply that if we cut down on electricity we can cut down on global warming (4), without any hard evidence on C02 emissions or anything else.
CHAMPIONING CHANGE
Attention is best given to any issue when there are familiar faces that the public will pay attention to. It’s typically a win-win situation, as celebrities bring attention that will get people to pay attention to the issue at hand, and the celebrities get the press of being associated with a cause. And while numerous musicians, actors, politicians and more have championed the cause of fighting Global Warming, one man has made himself the face of the modern Global Warming Movement: former Vice President Al Gore.
After losing the 2000 presidential election, Gore turned his attention to the fight against Global Warming, going as far as to lobby at the United Nations, produce a documentary titled “An Inconvenient Truth”, and be awarded a Nobel Prize for his efforts. It is no secret that the reason public awareness of Global Warming is so high is because of Al Gore.
But as credible as Gore seems, we have to wonder if the man who can be quoted as saying “A zebra does not change its spots” and once called the Washington Post’s executive editor to inform him that a picture of the earth was printed “upside down” (13) has something else on his agenda.
While it is a terrible stereotype that Democrats are all “tax and spend”, people like Al Gore are where these stereotypes come from. His solution to the problem of Global Warming is none other than taxes. And while his speeches and message talks of hope as how we can band together to save our planet, the real thing he is after is a tax. He has sparked different proposals on a worldwide scale for taxes that would use money to fund (allegedly) “green” government incentives and punish people who are doing things that will contribute to Global Warming. His proposal for the United States is a carbon tax that would raise the price of gasoline as well as heating and cooling (7). This is typically something that is used to try to get people off of bad habits, such as smoking (although currently the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is running a campaign to stop Global Warming by taxing meat).
The last time that the senate raised the tax on gasoline was 1993, where Vice President Gore cast the deciding vote on the issue (7), when Global Warming was not on the table (not surprisingly, the Democrats did not win the mid-term elections next year). As someone who is already on record as voting for a gas tax, it seems suspicious (at best) that this is Gore’s solution to the problem. Granted he has also advocated the use of alternative energy sources and the like, but when it comes down to it, the tax is what he is after.
Gore’s environmentalist position came into question as well. As someone so concerned with our planet’s health, you would think that any organization that he is involved in would be the example for others to follow when it comes to the way they conduct business. However in 2007, Greenpeace named Apple Computer (a company where Gore is on the Board of Directors) the worst company among electronics firms in terms of eliminating toxic substances and recycling, among other things (8). It turns out that the man who markets himself as the planets best friend can’t even have a good recycling policy within his own company.
CLIMATE EFFECTS
Most of the negative attention brought to the Global Warming debate has been how devastating the climate change is going to be from our planet. From Gore’s dramatic videos of Florida becoming the new Atlantis to the fears of penguins becoming extinct (2), we are being lead to believe that this can and will result in the next Armageddon. If in fact the planet’s temperature is increasing either by the fault of natural phenomenon or man, is it drastic cause for panic?
Noted author and Economist Lew Rockwell claims in his Anti-Environmentalist Manifesto (using other sources for his argument of course) that “There is no evidence of global warming, but even if it were to take place, many scientists say the effect would be good: it would lengthen growing seasons, make the earth more livable, and forestall any future ice age. (5)”. An interesting argument indeed, as this is something that is not brought up very often, if at all. Here in Michigan in particular, it doesn’t take a scientific study to show that during the summer months people are happier, farmers have longer growing seasons, and the trees that help contribute to clean oxygen are green for longer. Tourism would be stronger year round, people would not be so pressed to all be taking vacations during the same 3 summer months, and the warmer weather would allow for more outside leisure.
During the best of times historically, all of the prosperous and fruitful times have occurred in warm climates or during warmth. History does not write of ages of enlightenment and reason coming from the frozen parts of the world, nor of any great advancement to society during the Ice Age. Simply put, warm times give people the chance to invent, flourish and advance while colder times force people into struggles of survival (6).
Engineer Simon Que has addressed the good points of Global Warming in his work “The Bright Side of Global Warming” (6). Que claims that there are many reasons to rejoice and not fear the world warming up, as humans we are able to adapt and will do so in using this to our advantage. Reasons he lists includes better health, better agricultural growth, more natural resources in the arctic region, better economic conditions, and more. And while he agrees that there may be drawbacks, we must weigh the advantages against them and use this as an asset to human society. He claims that “If it turns out to be true, global warming may change the world in many ways. But as long as people are capable of acting and adjusting, they can compensate for the negative effects of warming while enjoying its positive fruits. (6)”
CONCLUSIONS
When you look at the arguments for and against Global Warming, it is very easy to see how people can get caught up in the fear of it all. The scientists and politicians make a convincing argument, but when it comes down to it, there is not a single aspect of the Global Warming argument that is not highly suspect. Unfortunately, most people are going to be completely taken in by this, not only supporting their cause but becoming zealots of it, attacking those who disagree with them and holding their pious attitudes high.
After examining the Global Warming debate from many sides, it has become very apparent to me that Global Warming does not, in any way, shape or form deserve the attention that the media, our politicians, or anyone else has given it. Sources:
Global Warming Controversy – Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_controversy
Accessed Feb 13, 2008
Climate Change could wipe out king penguins – Cosmos Magazine, Agence Frence-Presse http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/1846
Published Feb 12 2008 Accessed Feb 13 2008
The Great Global Warm Up – The American Policy Roundtable
http://www.aproundtable.org/tps30info/globalwarmup.html
Published 2007 Accessed Feb 13, 2008
Global Warming and climate change: Are Mass Media Reporting the Truth?
Robin Good – Master New Media
http://www.masternewmedia.org/news/2006/11/20/global_warming_and_climate_change.htm
Published Nov 20 2006 Accessed Feb 13 2008
Rockwell’s Anti-Environmentalist Manifesto – LewRockwell.com Llewellen H. Rockwell, JR
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/anti-enviro.html
Published May 1, 2000 Accessed Feb 13 2008
The Bright Side of Global Warming – LewRockwell.com Simon Que
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig7/que2.html
Published Jun 29, 2006 Accessed Feb 13 2008
Al Gore’s InconvenientTax – The Christian Science Monitor
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0705/p08s01-comv.html
Published Jul 5, 2007 Accessed Feb 13 2008
Apple goes bad on Greenpeace’s computer list – The New Zeland Herald Michael McCarthy
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/story.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=10432679
Published April 5 2007 Accessed Feb 13 2008
The Cooling World – Newsweek Dennis Dutton
http://www.denisdutton.com/cooling_world.htm
Published Apr 28 1975 Accessed Feb 13 2008
Fire and Ice – Business and Media Institute R. Warren Anderson Research Analyst
http://www.businessandmedia.org/specialreports/2006/fireandice/fireandice.asp
Accessed Feb 13 2008
Glossary of Environmental Terms – The Natural Resources Defense Counsil
http://www.nrdc.org/reference/glossary/g.asp
Accessed Feb 13 2008
Global Warming Quotes – Woopidoo! Quotations
http://www.woopidoo.com/business_quotes/global-warming.htm
Accessed Feb 13 2008
Al Gore’s Global Warming Lies – The Conservative Voice Mark W. Lowry
http://www.theconservativevoice.com/article/28629.html
Published Oct 16 2007 Accessed Feb 18 2008
