The Climate Change Religious Cult

Of course, Joel Kotkin is right. Climate change activists and green environmentalists belong to a fundamentalist religious cult. They are up in arms to save the Goddess of the Planet and do not care about the human cost of their policies. If they destroy the world economy to save the planet, then, so be it. 

Obviously, not everyone is on board with this fundamentalist pagan folly. India and China, two of the world’s most significant polluters, are forging ahead with coal powered plants and even with nuclear plants. They are more than happy to stand aside and watch the ever-more decadent West commit economic suicide. 

As Kotkin explains, the fundamentalist preachers of the climate movement have been predicting imminent apocalyptic catastrophe for decades  now:

Today's climate activists resemble nothing so much as a religious movement, with carbon the new devil's spawn. The green movement is increasingly wedded to a kind of carbon fundamentalism that is not only not realistic but will reduce living standards in the West and around the world. And as with other kinds of religious fundamentalism, the climate hysteria is often overwrought and obviously so; a decade ago, the same activists predicted a planetary disaster by 2020 if the U.S. and China did not reduce their emissions by 80 percent—which of course never happened.

And no one seems to care about the direct consequences of climate change hysteria. Like all extremists, these activist do not care about the practical effects of their policies. They are maniacal about the dire necessity of doing something to repeal the Industrial Revolution. I would add my suspicion that most of them are not smart enough or well enough educated to asses possible outcomes of their policy proposals. Better to be like that ignorant little twit, AOC, and rant about the Green New Deal:

Under the green lobby's current policies, our "war" against climate change is doomed to make things worse for most people, creating what economist Isabel Schnabel calls "greenflation." 

Higher prices for energy and food, worsened further by the war in Ukraine, are already are forcing countries to adopt massive subsidies for food and gas. In the developing world, billions now face immiseration, malnutrition or starvation. And green targets of zero emissions only make this situation worse.

The cost of energy in today's Europe should have been a warning shot. It should have told us that green energy sources were not capable of making up the shortfall when Russia turns off the gas. Strangely, some climate change hysterics have concluded from Europe’s problems with Russia that they need to build more windmills.

And, of course, considering how bad they think things are, these same climate change hysterics are happy to suspend democracy:

A regime run by the climatistas is likely to be very authoritarian, with many seeing in the COVID-19 lockdowns a "test run" for top-down edicts over how people live. In a sign of things to come, Switzerland is considering jail terms for those who try to stay too warm this winter.

In a sense Kotkin also buys into the climate change hysteria, or perhaps he is throwing a few bones to the activists. Yet, he is certainly correct to say that we need more nuclear energy, but he should also notice that you cannot just wave a magic wand and see a nuclear power plant rise from the ashes.

In truth, as China, in particular, seems to know, it is a lot easier to build coal power plants. These plants produce electricity, and the electric cars that the administration is touting, need vast quantities of electricity to run-- as of now the grid is not even close to being able to provide it.

Instead of placing all bets on fundamentally intermittent, unreliable and economically problematic solar and wind energy, we should focus more on other options, from nuclear power to hydroelectric generation to continuing to replace coal with abundant, cleaner natural gas.

One gets the distinct impression, from reading Kotkin, that the climate change movement is a remnant of the anti-capitalist socialist revolutionary ideology. You know, the one that failed so miserably in the twentieth century.

Where climate hysteria promises only gloom, class conflict and ever-increasing repression, an adaptation scenario allows humans to adjust to a warming world, even as we work to bring down emissions. Adaptation gives us a way of addressing climate change while retaining prosperity, creating opportunities, and showing that, rather than wage a scorched earth policy to save Gaia, we can learn instead to work within its limits.

It is a fundamentalist and pagan religious cult. And it is also a radical leftist attack on the Industrial Revolution, on free enterprise and free trade. It is certainly ironic that the West failed to draw the right lessons from the collapse of Communism, leaving it to other countries, ones that do not hold democratic elections, to ensure that their citizens to not undergo California style or Texas-sized blackouts in the midst of winter.