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The End of the World

Two years ago, the media had a prolonged belly laugh at a group that predicted the end of the world. Now media outlets from The New York Times to The New Republic to The Economist are wrestling with the question of why their own ideology's doomsday predictions are not coming to pass.

"If scientific models can’t project the last 15 years, what does that mean for their projections of the next 100?," the New Republic asks. It means that the world isn't going to end.

Even as Obama exploits Global Warming to launch a War on Affordable Energy, the doomsday environmentalists look as foolish as any other group that set a date for the end of the world, only for the world to stubbornly go on existing.

True believers in Gore would say that's the difference between science and eschatology. But when bogus science warns us of an apocalypse if we don't follow the tenets of their ideology, then how much difference is there anyway?

Of course no one expects MSNBC to do sneering reports of global warming activists freezing at a protest or Al Gore being forced to watch a count down of a solidly frozen North Pole. Such mockery is only directed at people who believe in more unpopular forms of apocalypses. At least unpopular at the broadcasting studios of Manhattan.

It's fashionable to mock religious leaders for hypocrisy, but there isn't a peep when the Vice President turned Prophet of Gaia lectures on watching our carbon footprint and then flies on jet fueled carbon wings to another concert on behalf of the planet.

Other aspiring prophets like Prince Charles, who admires poverty, but lives in privilege, are no better. Or Obama who told Americans that they couldn't heat their homes as they pleased, while keeping his thermostat up to Hawaiian standards.

If the invariably prosperous believers in Death by Global Warming really believed in the creed, wouldn't they be selling their homes and cars, and going off to live a simpler life in the Himalayan mountains. But it's easier to believe in something than to practice it.

Like all liberal social engineering projects, environmentalism is meant to change everyone's life. And there's no point in its proponents doing more than paying lip service to it, as they make it the law of the land. If Osama bin Laden could preach Islamic morality while stocking up on X rated tapes, surely Al Gore can foretell the doom of the North Pole and still take a private jet around the world.

If liberals have turned to doomsday predictions, it's because they have discovered that religion and the apocalypse can be a marvelously effective way of controlling human behavior. But their religion is materialistic, concerned with the human presence in the natural world. Even its materialism is consumeristic.

The Reds had no truck with environmentalism. To a Communist, the natural world was a mass of raw resources to be used to build socialism. But to the children of the capitalists, concerned more with what they buy, than with what they do, environmentalism restraints and directs their buying habits. As religions goes, environmentalism is the Consumer Reports of theologies.

For all the talk of apocalypse and melting poles, the environmentalists really only care about your economic activity. Buy or don't buy. But preferably buy, so long as you're buying green, or buying carbon credits along with whatever you're buying.

The sinner fills up on paper towels, but the righteous man buys paper towels with a green stamp on the box. The man of little faith may drive an SUV, and the faithful may also drive an SUV, but the faithful man's SUV has a bumper sticker warning everyone to conserve something or other. Such hypocrisies are constant, pervasive and little commented on.

What began as a movement for the responsible stewardship of the earth has been corrupted from the ethical to the fanatical. Conservationism kept humanity in the picture. Environmentalism rages at humanity. Behind its colorful drawings and its dolphin key chains is the vision of a world in which humanity and its fire sticks are the original sin.

That primal rage has been channeled and diluted into a million businesses, into countless regulations and profitable ventures. The new environmentalists are regulatory robber barons like Al Gore, green rent seeking tycoons looking to use cap and trade, and a thousand mandatory revenue streams to fleece both the faithful and the unfaithful. There is no further way to corrupt environmentalism, its existence is already an abiding corruption. For the false prophets, the lab coated peddlers of junk science and the writers dreaming up ever more fanciful depictions of the day when the oceans rise and man finds himself paddling for safety besides the polar bear, there is nothing left but the lie.

The religious apocalypse is the break between a fallen world and a better world. But in the environmental apocalypse, it is only the end. Materialistic eschatology cannot see any way past the end or any purpose for it. Only a Waterworld in which some of us develop gills and others have to learn to kayak.

The threat of their end of days is meant to badger us into bowing our heads and opening our wallets. Buy Green or the North Pole will end in 5 years. Bicycle to work or a polar bear will chew your ear off. Their end of days lacks imagination and proof. It is constantly imminent, yet never arrives. It is held to be proven so thoroughly that it can never be disproven. And who would want to disprove it, except someone who doesn't already have a grant to prove it.

There's hardly a problem in the world that the media doesn't blame on Global Warming. When it's hot, they point to Global Warming. When it's cold, they also point to Global Warming. Earthquakes,civil wars and the end of WiFi are all laid at the door of one single phenomenon. The difference between religion and science is that one is revealed truth and the other is theory. But when men and women in lab coats start predicting the end of days if the heretics don't repent and cast out their incandescent light bulbs and SUV's, then what you have is theory as revealed truth. An experiment in eschatology.

Science requires objectivity. Combine science with ideology and you get a mandatory belief in absurdity. Everyone who self-righteously insists that global warming is science misses the point. The scientific orthodoxy of every generation has embraced ridiculous and wrongheaded theories. Science is not a pure form of revealed truth, it is the trial and error process by which we crawl toward a better understanding. A less flawed picture of the universe. Turn the scientific orthodoxy of any era into a mandatory ideology and you have killed the science and left only another belief system.

Environmentalists parade around the corpse of science on their shoulders, mount it on their walls and proclaim that science is on their side. Once you completely murder a system of using trial and error experimentation to confirm a theory, then you might as well use it as a banner on a flagpole or a trophy in your living room. But the environmentalist' science has as much relation to a living field, as the head of a dead moose mounted over a bed and breakfast's fireplace does to a living creature.

Ideology has killed science and now claims its intellectual credibility for its own. But purging dissenting scientists, burning books and silencing all critics with jeers is not science, no more than what passed for it in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany was science. It is the fanaticism of an ideology, the championing of backwardness, the exploitation of titles and terminology to silence debate and betray the ethical trust of inquiry.

The end of the world? The same people who ridicule religious people waiting for the end, are waiting for their own end of the world without any real faith in it.

Their end of the world is only another consumeristic strategy for convincing people to buy the right brands and donate to the right causes. It is as hollow as everything else

No one will hang around with a count down clock in 2014 and wait for the North Pole to end. Not even if Gore's prediction were better known. Those who believe in Global Warming, paradoxically don't really believe that the world could actually end. They may eat up the cinematic spectacle of oceans rising, cities sinking underwater and whales doing belly flops over the Grand Canyon, but it never really touches them.

To understand why is to understand the purpose of environmentalism. Its harsh criticism of consumerism turns it into a moral activity. The Whole Foods shopper is elevated above the Wal-Mart shopper. The woman who buys sneakers made of recycled tires isn't shopping, she's engaged in an ethical communion with the earth. Environmentalism is the theology of consumerism, uplifting it rather than proscribing it, taking a cut of ordinary economic activities in exchange for its blessing.

Environmentalism is the religion of the comfortable, and the theology of the convenient. It injects a false spirituality into the materialism of the faithless. There is nothing to it but greed. From the false prophets spinning tales of the end, to scientists doing a more elevated version of the same for grant money to scribes envisioning the end for a lucrative book or movie deal. It's not the end of the world they're waiting for, but a commercial break.

Comments

  1. Beginning with the ecology movement – and I wonder how many people remember that introductory term of the hippies – environmentalism has been fundamentally anti-man and anti-existence. It doesn't matter if an environmentalist berates you for buying disposal razors or gas-guzzling cars or non-recyclable cardboard containers and packing materials – and whether or not the environmentalist is a Gore-worshipping, naïve nitwit or a foaming-at-the-mouth psychotic (and there seem to be more of the latter than of the former) – the logical progression of environmentalism leads to a call for man's self-extinction for the sake of an Earth he says man has no right to exist in.

    If there had been environmentalists around in the prehistoric era, they would have thrown water on a cave man's cooking fires and stabbed him in the back for fashioning a hunting spear from a tree branch and a stone for its tip. The environmentalist wishes man to vacate the Earth and leave him behind as a warden to stop man from rising again. The environmentalists not so much "worship" the Earth as some sort of godlike entity, never to be touched or exploited, as detests its occupants. They are malevolent to the bones of their metaphysical and epistemological premises. They are not mere hypocrites. Psychologically, they are driven by self-hatred. If they could think of a way to commit suicide over their guilt for existing, they'd want to take mankind with them.

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  2. 'It's fashionable to mock religious leaders for hypocrisy,...'

    I think it's more than fashionable. It's crucial to the Left to mock anyone who holds any values at all.

    For the subjectivist 'politically correct' multiculturist Left, everything is just a matter of opinion, so anyone who judges anything and anyone else is to be scorned as 'a racist, (fill in the blank)phobic, Red state hick' who is incapable of grasping the deep insights, read nihilism, of the Left.

    If you formally reject values, and so have none, as does the Left, you have nowhere to go but to sneering at those who do.

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  3. Hardly anyone believes in Global Warming any more. I remember arguing with some liberal on a blog maybe 6 years ago and telling him to think of me when it's finally proven false. But that in itself was too optimistic as there is no way to fully prove Global Warming false as long as any delay is explained away as a temporary phenomenon. This thing has become a vehicle for irrationality for those who chose to believe in it no matter what the evidence suggests.

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  4. Conservative Language Institute of America23/6/13

    I was going to say something similar as part of a minor epiphany I once had, but I think Edward Cline expressed it first and far better than I could have. In their heart of hearts, the environmentalists don't really give a flying f*** about green energy or green anything... what they really want is the eradication of mankind down to about 100 million total inhabitants. Their collective wet-dream is to see a few elitists like themselves take over the earth, all thinking alike except that this one over here plays violin while that one over there dabbles in painting. These malignant narcissists despise everyone else as rabble to be conned, controlled, and ultimately eliminated. If the West ever comes to its senses, the only thing that can be done with such people is to lock them away in an asylum for the rest of their lives, and throw away the key.

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  5. To "Conservative Language Institute's" excellent comments about all I can add is that while the Environmental Movement is one of the tips of the spear, there are others as well, all doing their utter best to make living in the world a living hell.

    I'm currently reading "The Creature From Jekyll Island," and it's clear the environmentalists are pikers compared to what the global banksters have pulled off already. It's a good read, but it may cause you to want to jump out a window. Or at least wash your hands.

    But the common thread is the Left just wants power, and will do anything legal or illegal to obtain it.

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  6. Naresh Krishnamoorti24/6/13

    Al Gore is the Jim Bakker of the environmentalist church, who dupes his followers into giving him money in exchange for salving a conscience afflicted with artificial guilt (which itself is a sublimation of guilt felt for the REAL evils that people commit).

    Obama, however, has only one use for environmentalism -- as a weapon to attack the middle classes and small businessmen with higher energy prices. As Alinsky taught him, the middle classes must be destroyed. Obama has set himself to do this through regulations, taxes, Obamacare, and environmentalism.

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  7. The tragedy is that there is a place for sane concern for the environment, and this probably is one of the few genuine jobs which government is best suited to do, but these power- and money-mad control freaks give the whole thing a huge stench which makes anyone normal try to run in the opposite direction.

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  8. Anonymous24/6/13

    Thou dost blaspheme against the The High Church of the Religion of the Latest Fad.

    The Left is master at taking advantage, navigating, tacking and jibing, and exploiting all the Spring zephyrs and social currents to make way to their ultimate destination, that gleaming isle on the horizon of the sea of impossibility, the island of delusion called Dystopia.

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  9. Anonymous24/6/13

    Here's a study someone should do. How many salaries in the scientific and academic world are connected directly or indirectly to proving the earth-warming thesis? That and the collegiality of the con go a long way toward explaining the goose-stepping march of lab-coated and lip-biting hysterics. I have noticed a shift in emphasis lately. Yes, the carbon-capping constables admit now that they have been caught out, air temperatures haven't increased over the past 15 years. But that's only because the oceans have absorbed the heat, and when a certain limit has been reached all that the Prophet AlGore (blessings be upon him) warned us of will be realized. Lamentations will rise from the parched land and we will rend our made-in-China garments.

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  10. Pres. Obama is a Democrat. The MI of Democrats is to find some problem people are complaining about then put themselves forward as the leader in solving it to get elected, even when they have no solution. When it comes to global warming, the real problem is why wouldn't we want the entire planet to be a tropical paradise with shirtsleeve weather year-round? We could green the deserts and feed the teeming billions for a long time. Only I have a plan to do it. Visit my Antarctic Volcanoes Project Blog and read the details.

    http://antarcticvolcanoesproject.blogspot.com/

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  11. The environmental movement was not corrupted; it is like a face, whose defects become more exaggerated with time.

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  12. Anonymous24/6/13

    "...solidly frozen North Pole." Sultan, Are you saying the reports of the North Pole and regions melting, opening up new shipping lanes, etc., are inaccurate? Or just not signs of "Global Warming?"
    Jerry

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  13. Anonymous24/6/13

    well if these environmentalists force everyone to go green it will hit many people in the pocket book; everything green that is quite expensive.

    If they compel us to purchase solar homes etc. it definitely will have an impact on the middle class.

    The North Pole...so in Al Gore's scenario Santa is doomed along with the polar bears.

    OT: There's a billboard in Buffalo which reads, "Our bears belong in Buffalo." Cute little polar bear pic. Donate to the Buffalo Zoo.

    But with all of this global warming and endangered arctic polar bears would keeping them here help? Every winter we here, "due to an arctic cold blast..."

    Warm in the arctic=warm here. Poor bears! They're doomed!

    Gore can write a children's book about how global warming is threatening our bears but more important to the kids, no Santa lol.

    Indoctrinate them when they're young.

    Keliata

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  14. Anonymous24/6/13

    Without the useful idiots going along with the global warming hoax there would be less hunger, more economic development, and life would be more peaceful for many.

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  15. Gorgeously written and brilliant. *Sigh*

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  16. Anonymous30/1/18

    Do it NOW

    ReplyDelete

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