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COMMENTARY
December 16, 2009
Scare tacticians
And then there was acid rain, and then there was the ozone hole and ... I hardly had space in my column for Saturday to recount the whole history of "environmentalist" frauds and impostures. It would be interesting to see some attempt to estimate the total direct cost to the world's taxpayers of all the scare-mongering since Rachel Carson's Silent Spring first started appearing in the New Yorker magazine in June 1962.Each scare, in turn, is packaged and marketed with more skill than the previous; each enjoys its run in the world's headlines, and the frenetic political attention we are watching in Copenhagen in its most advanced form. Each in turn is gradually forgotten as more facts come to light, as the apocalyptic predictions fail, as the story line bores through repetition. And then a new scare needs to be invented. "Anthropogenic global warming" will go the way of its predecessors, having achieved what was meant for it, in its season: the extortion of huge amounts of money by the parasites clustered around all the existing environmentalist spigots; the sinking of new bungholes into the public accounts; the creation of new big-brotherly bureaucracies to feed new vested interests; and, untold riches and prestige for the "settled scientists" who work the system for patronage. But then it will be replaced with a new environmental scare narrative. The parties are already working on "acidification of the oceans"; there were loose ends from Rio '92 on "biological diversity"; and there will always be fresh water supply issues to play with. The threat from asteroids was briefly considered, then dismissed: too hard to blame that on the free market. But the activists will come up with something, for their livelihoods depend upon it. And as the world's climate is constantly changing, and has been doing for the past 4.54 billion years, "climate change" itself will provide new opportunities. For this reason, I think we need, after thorough public inquiries, to bring criminal prosecutions against some of the major scientific players exposed by the recent release of e-mails and papers at the centre of the "global warming" scam. The more any percipient reader pours through those "hacked" documents, the clearer he will see the criminal intent behind the massaging of the numbers; for the masseuses in question stood to benefit directly and personally from getting "the right results." This is by its nature an issue for the criminal courts. My reasoning here is that "environmentalism" at large has -- like all other "progressive" movements -- exploited public gullibility about motivations. The leading lights have accumulated wealth and power, while presenting themselves as men of goodwill. They have projected themselves through sympathetic media as unselfish and pure, and have demonized their opponents as selfish and impure, while themselves being on the take. While I do not personally enjoy a mudfight, it is necessary to disarm these people, by taking away this public benefit of the doubt. Even before examining, objectively, details of the claims environmentalists are making, the public needs to be put on its guard. A successful representative democracy requires an electorate armed against politicians of any stripe or kind (elected or otherwise) who make claims to personal sanctity: for this is an infallible mark of grave hypocrisy. Genuinely good people do not advertise their goodness; genuinely humble people do not advertise their humility; genuinely truthful people do not claim to be messengers of "settled science," when there is no such thing. There are real cultural failures here -- running right through our postmodern societies -- that allow the scare tacticians to flourish. In a sense it is an environmental catastrophe, although the environment in question is a psychic, rather than a physical, landscape. People have become unattuned to the most basic warning signals our ancestors used, to protect themselves against human predators. We are anyway removed by modern technology from the possibility of looking them straight in the eye. (What comes through a television screen is in no way intimate; it is instead a form of "virtual reality.") We, the people, must find ways to recover the pre-bureaucratic order of things. The great, and very real problems of society -- including those of pollution, and conservation of resources -- are not amenable to "activist" cures. The world simply does not work that way. The real environmental problems are solved by inculcating supple cultural traits in the people themselves -- which the State cannot do. It can only be done from parents to children. Individual human beings must be raised to eschew waste, luxury, and personal display. They must be raised to prefer good to evil, truth to falsehood, beauty to ugliness. There are no quick fixes. The solution to environmental problems is civilizational, and thus organic. The solutions environmentalists propose are the extreme opposite of this: they are "the end justifies the means." David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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