HT to LB..
Message 29772405
...Modern-day environmentalism is full of talk about data and “settled science.” But science is never settled, because science is the craft of unsettling what we know at any given moment. If science could settle, man would never learn to fly or read by electric light. Meanwhile, inconvenient data is left on the cutting-room floor as an ancient story is retold in modern terms.
“If you look carefully,” Michael Crichton once observed, “you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.”
Preindustrial times are our Edenic past, when man and nature were in balance. Forbidden knowledge leads to disharmony, and our sin invites a looming judgment day.
Similarly, so much that passes for ideological opposition to capitalism is in reality loyalty to a storyline disproved by reality. Indeed, one reason climate change hysteria is so hard to combat is that, unlike previous indictments of capitalism, it is immune to falsification — if temperatures rise or if they fall, it’s evidence of impending calamity. For generations we were told that democratic capitalism was bad for the environment compared with the enlightened rule of socialism. But everywhere this proposition was put to the test, it failed...
— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large ofNational Review Online and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. You can write to him by e-mail at goldbergcolumn@gmail.com or via Twitter @JonahNRO. © 2014 Tribune Content Agency, |
