Krauthammer on the "Church of the Environment"
Posted by: McQ on Saturday, May 31, 2008
QANDO BLOG
How did this happen?
Well, as Charles Krauthammer explains, after the collapse of communism, those who still are true believers in central planning had to have somewhere to go. Krauthammer, in my estimation, has correctly pointed out where they've landed (as has Vaclav Klaus):
For a century, an ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous knowledge class — social planners, scientists, intellectuals, experts and their left-wing political allies — arrogated to themselves the right to rule either in the name of the oppressed working class (communism) or, in its more benign form, by virtue of their superior expertise in achieving the highest social progress by means of state planning (socialism).
Two decades ago, however, socialism and communism died rudely, then were buried forever by the empirical demonstration of the superiority of market capitalism everywhere from Thatcher's England to Deng's China, where just the partial abolition of socialism lifted more people out of poverty more rapidly than ever in human history.
Just as the ash heap of history beckoned, the intellectual left was handed the ultimate salvation: environmentalism. Now the experts will regulate your life not in the name of the proletariat or Fabian socialism but — even better — in the name of Earth itself.
Environmentalists are Gaia's priests, instructing us in her proper service and casting out those who refuse to genuflect. (See Newsweek above.) And having proclaimed the ultimate commandment — carbon chastity — they are preparing the supporting canonical legislation that will tell you how much you can travel, what kind of light you will read by, and at what temperature you may set your bedroom thermostat.
So here we are. With a thin veneer of science supporting the facade of the "First Church of the Environment", its apostles are moving quickly to consolidate the necessary power and to impose that first commandment Krauthammer talks about - carbon chastity.
For instance, proposed in England:
Only Monday, a British parliamentary committee proposed that every citizen be required to carry a carbon card that must be presented, under penalty of law, when buying gasoline, taking an airplane or using electricity. The card contains your yearly carbon ration to be drawn down with every purchase, every trip, every swipe.
And, of course, if you need more, you'll have to buy more credits through some sort of exchange - and you can guess what entity will be running it and you can bank on that entity taking its cut of the proceeds.
As Krauthammer points out, and this is something people have a tendency to miss in all of this, what we're talking about is a huge increase in the power of government:
There's no greater social power than the power to ration. And, other than rationing food, there is no greater instrument of social control than rationing energy, the currency of just about everything one does and uses in an advanced society.
And through pending legislation we're just about to hand the beginnings of that sort of "social power" to government.
Krauthammer calls himself a "global warming agnostic" and characterizes that as someone "who believes instinctively that it can't be very good to pump lots of CO2 into the atmosphere but is equally convinced that those who presume to know exactly where that leads are talking through their hats."
Fair enough. I go a step further and find it almost impossible to believe that global warming has a single source and that man's contribution of this gas is the primary reason for the ongoing warming. So while we differ there, I find his "agnostic solutions" to be acceptable:
So what does the global warming agnostic propose as an alternative? First, more research — untainted and reliable — to determine (a) whether the carbon footprint of man is or is not lost among the massive natural forces (from sunspot activity to ocean currents) that affect climate, and (b) if the human effect is indeed significant, whether the planetary climate system has the homeostatic mechanisms (like the feedback loops in the human body, for example) with which to compensate.
Or said another way - the science isn't at all settled and before we go rushing off to jump into hare-brained ideas like the carbon card and hand over more heaping helpings of power to government, we need to see a lot more scientific work (and evidence) before doing anything.
Second, reduce our carbon footprint in the interim by doing the doable, rather than the economically ruinous and socially destructive. The most obvious step is a major move to nuclear power, which to the atmosphere is the cleanest of the clean.
Again, rational and pro-active - and mostly ignored or condemned by the Church of the Environment, because, you know, nukes are bad, or so sayeth Gaia's priests and priestesses.
But your would-be masters have foreseen this contingency. The Church of the Environment promulgates secondary dogmas as well. One of these is a strict nuclear taboo.
Rather convenient, is it not? Take this major coal-substituting fix off the table, and we will be rationing all the more. Guess who does the rationing.
The answer?
Thee.
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