Not PC: Greens are seeing the error of their ways

Thursday 11 November 2010

Greens are seeing the error of their ways

The floodgates are opening. Authoritarian environmentalists are beginning to realise they’ve scaremongered in haste, and are now repenting at leisure.

On Britain’s Channel 4 recently, a whole parade of greens showed up to pour their hearts out and tell viewers What the Green Movement Got Wrong.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this programme is that it was made at all [says Charles Moore]. It shows how the Green monolith has cracked. For many years, Channel 4 would not have dared devote an hour to the errors of environmentalism; or, if it had done so, it would have wrapped it in the cordon sanitaire always put round anything considered Right-wing, stating that this was a "provocative" and "personal" view.
This was no such programme. Instead, it was a platform for every sinner that repenteth. Former hippy Greens, directors of Greenpeace, the chairmen of the Copenhagen Climate Council and the like, queued up to admit error. Their reasons for doing so were interesting. None of them repudiated all their previous ideas. All continue to believe that there are serious environmental threats to the welfare of life on earth and most seem to be devoting their lives to addressing them. But, as one put it, environmentalists over the past 40 years have "failed to achieve Job One, which was to protect the planet."
At least three central reasons were identified.
Misanthropy. According to a veteran American Green, Stewart Brand, too many Greens believe "Nature good – humans not so good"…
Exaggeration. If you say that the end of the world is nigh all the time, people start to disbelieve you…
Damage. The most powerful part of the programme was that arguing that the Green obsession with banning and preventing things has done actual harm…

All points we’ve made often here at NOT PC .

Out of all this breast-beating came hope. The rueful campaigners of yesteryear now see science and technology as their friend.

More so even than the author of the article, Charles Moore, whose “conservatism” leads him to believe there’s necessarily “a conflict between economic growth and the environment which will never go away.” Not so. Especially once one realises that the whole point of economic activity is improving the human environment—which at this stage of history has never been better. Nonetheless,

If the drift of this programme is correct, the consequences for politics will be large. All the main political parties have chosen to put their eggs in the frail, Fairtrade, hand-weaved basket of Greenery, imposing rising levies to develop "renewable" sources of power which cannot do the job demanded of them. The basket is starting to break.

Ben Pile argues in "What the greens really got wrong" that the greens on the show proffered only a half-recantation, that they still take for granted the limits set by Malthus (“the Malthusians’ focus on finiteness explains firstly why they are always wrong about everything; secondly why they are so misanthropic; and thirdly why they put forward such illiberal proposals, dressed up, of course, in [PC] language”) but that their reasons for repenting—even partially—are profound nonetheless.

Although it is interesting to see one-time activists reflecting in this way, the reformulation of environmentalism doesn’t really address the problems with its initial perspective. The arguments in the film don’t form a criticism of environmentalism as an instance of the politics of fear, but merely moderate some of its excesses. There is an interesting discussion about the shortcomings of the precautionary principle, and the film’s participants are far more circumspect about risk from certain technologies than they have been in the past.
But these risks are merely seen in contrast to the ultimate catastrophe: climate change. Technologies are not considered in terms of their potential for humans, but are embraced reluctantly as solutions to climate change. Genetically modified (GM) food is sold seemingly only on the basis that it is a means to begrudgingly feed the poor. The limitations of the catastrophic narrative still are such that they constrain discussion about progress beyond subsistence…
What [thinking environmentalists have] realised, and [the moonbats have] not, is that ‘sceptics’ did not undermine the environmentalists’ cause. Environmentalists were their own worst enemy. They have alienated the rest of society by their own uncompromising and misanthropic outlook. The challenge for the new environmentalists is to emerge from this crisis of their own making into an era of growing scepticism, while keeping an eye on the consequences of their arguments. But without the precautionary principle, alarmism, doom and catastrophe, and premature claims to scientific certainty, what is environmentalism?

That’s a good question for you.

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Thursday 11 November 2010

Greens are seeing the error of their ways

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