I recently came across an advertisement with a big picture of a polar bear and a penguin off some paradise shore with a long, nice beach and palm trees in the background. The text said something like "are you afraid of what's happening to the environment? Us too, buy our products and it will all get better." I don't blame companies for trying to sell their products, but all this global warming talk makes me nervous.
No, I'm not nervous because humankind is beating up the environment causing our own destruction. That, I am sure, is not really true. I am nervous because all this talk of nature, and this planet for that matter, means two things: first, that people are ignorant and gullible, and second, that technology-hating progress-wanna-stopper environmentalists will get even more influential.
That people are ignorant and gullible is perhaps no news, but that a lie can so firmly get rooted among people all over the world as this greenhouse effect thing is certainly terrifying. Everybody "knows" something very bad is going on and that it is the market's and the corporations' fault. The newspapers and TV and radio stations are packed with reports of yet another "natural disaster" and journalists never seem to miss the opportunity to make it seem more government is needed to fix it all. The global and domestic markets are way too free of government intervention, they say.
Of course all the ignorants out there eventually will believe this massive propaganda. People in general like to be fed with information rather than get off their butts and try to find it themselves (a single Google search would lead them to the unbiased facts on Marshall.org). It does not really matter what the united media and politics front claims when they do it so persistently and on a global scale; as we know, you just have to repeat one lie over and over again to make people believe it is true. It is the same whether corporations are said to cause a global meltdown of nature or saying the earth is flat and the center of the universe.
Sooner or later someone will, by mistake or not, find the truth and be brave and strong enough to claim everybody's wrong even though he or she will be persecuted. Like Copernicus and Galileo claimed everybody was wrong about the world and the universe. It is impossible to know who will be the one who finally makes the big crack in the wall of lies, but someone will. Sooner or later.
The problem comes with the thing that makes me nervous: the environmentalists. These people seem to have a Rousseauean "noble savage" ideal and want us all to live in the jungle like apes. At least, they are doing whatever they can to stop everything that is civilized and increase everything that is not. They seem to want to abolish technology, science, and everything about the economy, but they really, really want to increase the size of government and they would probably not hesitate to use it to force urban people into body labor at some distant farm or preserve somewhere.
When you combine the two, the gullible and truth-avoiding masses with the increasing influence of anti-civilizationists, you make me real nervous.
It should be no surprise statists in general welcome the judgment day prophesies of the environmentalists. Even if they do not share the same end goal, they do have a common interest in increasing the size of government. And if lying is all it takes to realize that, then why the hell wait?
But I fail to realize how they could ever get this far, even though power seems to be an enormous incentive for people to actually do something. It is easy to understand that they can just continue to play their game now when the ball is already in play. But it takes a lot of skill to get it rolling in the first place. How do they do it? In spite of everything, all the facts show the exact opposite of what these people say.
These guys are real pros. Based on data collected only for the last one hundred years (collection of climate data began in the early 20th century), out of earth's total estimated lifetime of five billion or so years, the environmentalists claim everything we know and hold dear is going down the drain. And they can do it pretty much unquestioned too. They must be doing something right or they have hired the world's very best communication experts to work 24/7 on creating this mass hysteria.
After all, the findings in the old ice buried deep down on the poles show the climate is always changing and that throughout history the temperature has been frequently bouncing up and down. There's a reason the Vikings called that big island northeast of Canada "Greenland" when they discovered it in the 9th century, don't you think?
The truth, it seems, is that we have not screwed nature even though we are not always as loving and caring as we perhaps should be. We've been screwed by environmentalists.
January 25, 2006
