Environmentalist religion explained

Freeman Dyson:

There is a worldwide secular religion which we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth, that despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible. [From, "The Question of Global Warming."]

Freeman Dyson is one of the most highly-regarded physicists in the world. Wikipedia introduces its entry on him thus:

Freeman John Dyson FRS (born December 15, 1923) is an English-born American theoretical physicist and mathematician, famous for his work in quantum mechanics, solid-state physics, and nuclear engineering. He is a lifelong opponent of nationalism and a proponent of nuclear disarmament and international cooperation. Dyson is a member of the Board of Sponsors of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

A true intellectual heavyweight, his essay in the New York Review of Books this month is a very important analysis that I urge you to read in full.

Dyson is not the first to point out that environmentalism has morphed into an actual religion in its own right. In Global Cooling Ain't so Hot, Either, I pointed out:

Michael Crichton and J.R. Dunn have written highly insightful essays about how environmentalism is a religion in its own right. See “Environmentalism as Religion” by Crichton and Dunn’s piece, “A Necessary Apocalypse,” in which he shows how gobal-warming environmentalism is not merely a religion, it is an apocalyptic religion. Its deity is Mother Earth (Gaia), for whom human beings are mortal enemies. NBC’s Matt Lauer inadvertantly gave away Gaiaism’s central article of faith thus:

Earth’s intricate web of ecosystems thrived for millions of years as natural paradises, until we came along, paved paradise, and put up a parking lot. Our assault on nature is killing off the very things we depend on for our own lives … The stark reality is that there are simply too many of us, and we consume way too much, especially here at home.

My second son was required to take ecology his junior year in high school; he related to me that the curriculum basically said there was nothing wrong with earth that the disappearance of humanity wouldn’t cure.

Jonah Goldberg wrote recently of the "Church of Green."

"At its core, environmentalism is a kind of nature worship. It’s a holistic ideology, shot through with religious sentiment. ...

Environmentalism’s most renewable resources are fear, guilt, and moral bullying. Its worldview casts man as a sinful creature who, through the pursuit of forbidden knowledge, abandoned our Edenic past. John Muir, who laid the philosophical foundations of modern environmentalism, described humans as “selfish, conceited creatures.” Salvation comes from shedding our sins, rejecting our addictions (to oil, consumerism, etc.) and demonstrating an all-encompassing love of Mother Earth. Quoth Al Gore: “The climate crisis is not a political issue; it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity.”

I heard Gore on NPR recently. He was asked about evangelical pastor Joseph Hagee’s absurd comment that Hurricane Katrina was God’s wrath for New Orleans’s sexual depravity. Naturally, Gore chuckled at such backwardness. But then the Nobel laureate went on to blame Katrina on man’s energy sinfulness. It struck me that the two men are not so different.

As Crichton pointed out, "environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths." Let me elucidate.

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There are other religions than Judaism and Christianity, of course, but modern environmentalism was born in the West, whose cultural heritage and common languages are steeped through and through in Christian tradition, which was itself a daughter of Judaism.

The common themes of both scriptural Judaism and Christianity deal with deity, the natural world (existing first in a purity state), a corruption of the purity state (Augustine: "fall from grace,"), redemption and liberation/salvation. Then follows paradise. A prominent, though not universal, strain in both Judaism and Christianity is a looming apocalypse that in potential or in fact destroys enormous swaths of humanity.

Modern environmentalism has all these elements, with an emphasis on apocalypticism. I'll examine these religious elements in turn.

Deity: That would be the earth itself. "Mother Earth" is a term tossed about among the religion's adherents, thus personalizing what is really only a gazillion-ton hunk of rock. Personalization of the planet is necessary to deify it. Adherents often call this new deity, “Gaia,” the name of an ancient Greek earth goddess. The Gaia hypothesis was first proposed by NASA scientist James Lovelock, who introduced it thus:

What is the hypothesis of Gaia ? Stated simply, the idea is that we may have discovered a living being bigger, more ancient, and more complex than anything from our wildest dreams. That being, called Gaia, is the Earth.

The most important tenet of Gaiaism is that the earth is itself alive and is a being in its own right.

Creation: Environmentalism offerns no real theory of how the earth came to be, it focuses on the biosphere. In that manner it does echo the Jewish Scriptures, once removed. The Scriptures do inquire how the earth came to be, but not how God came to be.

As for the appearance of life, environmentalism drops the Bible's creation stories and substitutes evolution. Now, I am not arguing here against the theory of evolution. I am simply pointing out that evolution theory is environmentalism's explanation of life on earth and its diversity. The earth's biodiversity is extremely important for environmentalism, since evolution-driven biodiversity undergirds the apocalypticism of religious environmentalism. The apocalypse of "climate change" is predicted to destroy the evolutionary niches of various species. They won't be able to adapt.

The Purity State: Take your pick:

• Gaia before the appearance of human beings or,
• Gaia after we showed up, but before we invented civilization. (The anti-civilization theme is present in the Hebrew Scriptures, too.) This aspect romanticizes pre-civilizational peoples, often portraying them as gentle souls "living in harmony" with nature and imagining that they worshiped the earth, too, which in fact some did. (However, this notion is rebutted by contemporary researchers.)

The Corruption of (or Fall from) Purity: This is easily defined. It was the invention of the internal-combustion engine and the use of fossil fuels that followed. Burning coal also. More broadly, though, the Fall is consumerism and international industry, especially chemical industries.

Redemption: There is no savior per se in environmentalism. We have to save ourselves. Barack Obama sings the same song; one of his stump themes is, "We are the change we have been waiting for." And just as one wonders whether Obama is running for office or creating a cultic following, environmentalism relies on its own cultic leaders to guide the masses and give enlightenment to them. Like the Law of Moses, their commandments are to be obeyed from faith rather than inquiry: recycle, drive less, eat organics, drive hybrids, etc.

Paradise: Sorry, environmentalism offers not. There is no longing for "life more abundant," since abundancy is exactly what environmentalism uses for original sin. Instead of paradise, environmentalism promotes stasis:

Folks my age and maybe a little younger can remember when the Environmental Apocaplypse was not global warming but global cooling. So let us suppose two things: first that global warming really is occurring and human attention to it can reverse it, and second, that we do reverse it. Are we then to agree that a cooler earth really is in our best interests? Why?

I’ve always kind of suspected that underlying much of environmentalism is a desire for the impossible: stasis.

Moreover, environmental stasis can be accomplished only by human austerity. Environmentalism's New Jerusalem is not prosperity, but decline, presented as a return to humanity's purity state: the simple life arranged around a village-type lifestyle where everything is within walking distance of everything else. Who else but George Monbiot to explain?

Everything we thought was good turns out also to be bad. It is an act of kindness to travel to your cousin's wedding. Now it is also an act of cruelty. It is a good thing to light the streets at night. Climate change tells us it kills more people than it saves. We are killing people by the most innocent means: turning on the lights, taking a bath, driving to work, going on holiday. Climate change demands a reversal of our moral compass, for which we are plainly unprepared.

Apocalypticism: Like religious apocalypticism, environmental apocalypticism - in fact, the whole movement - is predicated on the imminent, substantial destruction of the natural world and its inhabitants. This from no less a personage than United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who just five months ago said that "humanity faces oblivion if it fails to confront global warming." Oblivion, he said. Rising seas, expanding droughts, melting sea ice, increased desertification, scorched crops, mass human suffering and death - all inhabit the same enviro-religious space as Revelation's horsemen of the apocalypse.

Important in Jewish and Christian apocalypticism was the concept of "children of light" versus the "children of darkness." The children of darkness were those who rebelled against God, who turned away from righteousness and embodied evil. Children of light were those who apprehended the truth of God and cleaved toward spiritual purity. This notion has been adopted wholesale by environmentalism. Dyson again:

Scientists and economists can agree with Buddhist monks and Christian activists that ruthless destruction of natural habitats is evil and careful preservation of birds and butterflies is good. The worldwide community of environmentalists—most of whom are not scientists—holds the moral high ground, and is guiding human societies toward a hopeful future.

Catch that? This is a clear delineation of the realm of light and of darkness, and whom inhabits each. "The worldwide community of environmentalists ... holds the moral high ground," and thus are the children of light. Who are the children of darkness? They are the "evil" ones who conduct or permit the "ruthless destruction of natural habitats." Dyson continues,

Unfortunately, some members of the environmental movement have also adopted as an article of faith the belief that global warming is the greatest threat to the ecology of our planet. ... Much of the public has come to believe that anyone who is skeptical about the dangers of global warming is an enemy of the environment.

(Italics added.) "Enemy of the environment" = child of darkness. (Dyson does not himself promote such a belief, but certainly it is out there.)

Another tenet of religious apocalypticism is that things will get worse before they get better. And so it is with environmentalist apocalypticism. No matter what we do now, greenhouse gases, and therefore climate change, will intensify until at least mid-century, and only then might be abated.

Still skeptical that environmentalism is a religion in its own right? Then peruse, "Nature is not your friend."

Then Scott Lancaster, 18, was killed and eaten by a mountain lion.

Scott’s friends and family consoled themselves that his death, sad and untimely though it was, had somehow been kind of fitting for him. As James Valdez put it, "He was a real outdoorsy guy."

"It felt natural," said Abby Heller. "It felt like it was part of nature, and part of the way the cycle happens. It seemed kind of pure."

It was "natural," part of the pure cycle of life for a young man to suffer a gruesome, horrifying, massively painful death by means of the "red in tooth and claw" of one of Gaia's creatures. And so the case that environmentalism is a religion in its own right is hereby closed.

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But there is more than mere religiousity at work in religious environmentalism. H.L. Mencken observed, "The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule it." And that is the true foundation of environmentalism today: the desire of its gurus to regulate the way others live. Monbiot again:

We can deal with climate change only with the help of governments, restraining the exertions of our natural liberties.

Dyson wrote that, "Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion." I demur. Environmentalism has not replaced socialism at all. Instead, the old-line socialists, faced with decades of the failure of political socialism, have jumped on the environmentalist bandwagon to keep socialism alive. Environmentalism has become a much better vehicle to achieve a rigid regulation of people's lives than political socialism ever was. After all, the fate of the entire planet is at stake! Environmentalism has already led some British members of Parliament to propose that the government regulate almost every aspect of buying and selling by private individuals. If this is not socialism, it is a distinction without a difference.

So there you are. At bottom, modern environmentalism has discarded scientific rigor to embrace something not much different than Leninism, the desire to control the major components of the way individuals live. From there it is a short step for environmentalism to Leninism's successor: Stalinism, the desire to control every aspect of the way we live. That's our future, minus the gulags. We hope.

This seems an apt time to quote the old liberals' bumper sticker: "If you're not outraged, you are not paying attention."

Updates:

The originator of the Gaia theory, which pretty much kicked off the environmentalist movement, now says it's a load of crock and that environmentalism is a totally unscientific religion.

Arthur Chrenkoff elaborates more on Environmentalism as a religion. Excellent essay!

March 2020: Now the Judeo-Christian template Crichton spoke of is being abandoned for full-up paganism and the practice of child sacrifice to achieve religious goals: "Bernie Sanders: Abortion And Population Control Are Important Parts Of Addressing Climate Change."

Gimme that Old New- Time Religion

Noted Physicist Says Multiverse Theory Of Creation Is Religion, Not Science

The very existence of the universe is so vexing to comprehend (see "anthropic principle") unless one posits a creator thereof, that determined atheists have come up with many ways to avoid a deity. That there are countless billions of universes, all existing apart from one another, is one proposition. Our universe only appears inexplicable without a creator because it is the only universe we apprehend. But universes are actually common and ours is just one of them; the rest are different and not anthropic at all. So they say.

But there is zero scientific evidence for the existence of any other universes. I remember reading an article some time ago by a physics professor of the University of Toronto, who said she believes that multiverses are real, but said it was time for scientists to state plainly that there was no evidence of them.

But wait! It's all unreal anyway! New Technology Makes It Plausible the World Is a Simulation. But that means the technology is only simulated, too, amirite?

But let's move on to The Most Post-Christian Cities in America: 2019

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds, who commented,

Six of America’s 10 most “post-Christian cities” are in New England, once the “City on a Hill” of the Puritans, and all 10 are in deep blue states, according to The Barna Group’s latest annual survey results for the top 100.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, seven of the 10 least post-Christian are in the states of the old Confederacy or border states that were culturally attached to the South. All of those, of course, are today either mostly or deeply red.

Which leads me to politics as religion, and who best to explain that (unintentionally) but Piers Morgan?

Piers, being from across the pond, might want to explain just what it is about Europeans that makes them so, well, enduringly European: Europe Considers The Nazi Idea Of Requiring Jewish Businesses To Identify Themselves On Labels. I only slightly paraphrase Goerthe: Inside the breast of every European beats the heart of a barbarian.

Speaking of new-time religion and Europeans, let's turn to environmentalism, the hip religion for people who want other people to make huge sacrifices in the way they live, but not themselves because hypocrisy, it turns out, is a status symbol among the environmentally woke.

And who knew that religious environmentalism (there is no other kind, though) is a religion of human sacrifice? Well, thousands and thousands of sacrificed Europeans did, and some may have figured out right before they died what altar they were being sacrificed on, because Environmentalists Killed More Europeans Than Islamic Terrorists Did.

A 2003 heat wave killed 15,000 people in France. And, in response, the authorities have deployed Chalex, a database of vulnerable people who will get a call offering them cooling advice.

The advice consists of taking cold showers and sticking their feet in saucepans of cold water.

Desperate Frenchmen trying to get into any body of water they can have led to a 30% rise in drownings. The dozens of people dead are casualties of the environmentalist hatred of air conditioners.

Only 5% of French households have air conditioning. Even in response to the crisis, the authorities are only deploying temporary air conditioning to kindergartens.

The 2003 heat wave killed 7,000 people in Germany. And, today, only 3% of German households have air conditioning. Germany’s Ministry of the Environment refused to back air conditioning as a response to global warming. 

Ending air conditioning in America has long been a goal of the American environmentalist Left, to which I say, Stop using air conditioning? Washington first! But that'll never happen.

Global warming religion

Australian geologist Ian Plimer says that global warming is the new religion of First World urban elites.

It is, of course, not new to have a highly qualified scientist saying that global warming is an entirely natural phenomenon with many precedents in history. ...

But most of these scientific and academic voices have fallen silent in the face of environmental Jacobinism. Purging humankind of its supposed sins of environmental degradation has become a religion with a fanatical and often intolerant priesthood, especially among the First World urban elites. ...

Plimer presents the proposition that anthropogenic global warming is little more than a con trick on the public perpetrated by fundamentalist environmentalists and callously adopted by politicians and government officials who love nothing more than an issue that causes public anxiety.

While environmentalists for the most part draw their conclusions based on climate information gathered in the last few hundred years, geologists, Plimer says, have a time frame stretching back many thousands of millions of years.

The dynamic and changing character of the Earth's climate has always been known by geologists. These changes are cyclical and random, he says. They are not caused or significantly affected by human behaviour.

Plimer is not the first to observe that environmentalism is a religion rather than a science, nor even the first scientist to say so. No less a physicist than Freeman Dyson says so, too.

There is a worldwide secular religion which we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth, that despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible. [from, "The Question of Global Warming."]

Although, if you read the article, Dyson somewhat approves of the religiosity of environmentalism. Plimer's other point, that "global warming" conveniently provides governments with an "issue that causes public anxiety" is also well taken. As I wrote in March ("Crisis is the health of the state") and July ("Emergency driven central planning"), the most common feature of Western governments today, especially that of the United States, is the invention of crises or the exploitation of real ones to solidify government's control and regimentation of the lives of the people.

This is what is really behind religious environmentalism. H.L. Mencken observed, "The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule it." And that is the true foundation of environmentalism today: the desire of its gurus to regulate the way others live. British editorialist George Monbiot wrote:

We can deal with climate change only with the help of governments, restraining the exertions of our natural liberties.

Dyson wrote that, "Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion." I demur. Environmentalism has not replaced socialism at all. Instead, the old-line socialists, faced with decades of the failure of political socialism, have jumped on the environmentalist bandwagon to keep socialism alive. Environmentalism has become a much better vehicle to achieve a rigid regulation of people's lives than political socialism ever was. After all, the fate of the entire planet is at stake! Environmentalism has already led some British members of Parliament to propose that the government regulate almost every aspect of buying and selling by private individuals. If this is not socialism, it is a distinction without a difference.

So there you are. At bottom, modern environmentalism has discarded scientific rigor to embrace something not much different than Leninism, the desire to control the major components of the way individuals live. From there it is a short step for environmentalism to Leninism's successor: Stalinism, the desire to control every aspect of the way we live. That's our future, minus the gulags. We hope.

This seems an apt time to quote the old liberals' bumper sticker: "If you're not outraged, you are not paying attention."

Update: Don Blankenship writes, "... 'global warming' is neither a reality nor a religion. It is instead a "superstition." ... A "superstition" is a fear founded on irrational feelings and marked by credulity -- i.e. a willingness to believe in the improbable or the marvelous. "

Also, see, "British Judge Sees Belief in Global Warming as Religion."

Because it's religion for the Left and mere science for the Right

Study: Global warming skeptics know more about climate science

Are global warming skeptics simply ignorant about climate science?

Not so, says a forthcoming paper in the journal Advances in Political Psychology by Yale Professor Dan Kahan. He finds that skeptics score about the same (in fact slightly better) on climate science questions.

The study asked 2,000 respondents nine questions about where they thought scientists stand on climate science.

On average, skeptics got about 4.5 questions correct, whereas manmade warming believers got about 4 questions right. ...

 The study’s author, Kahan, also says that the global warming debate has become so politically polarized that people pick their side based on politics rather than what they know about science.   

And all this, especially that last excerpted paragraph,  will make a lot more sense once you read my 2008 essay, "Environmentalist religion explained," in which I pointed out that,

[Physicist Freeman] Dyson wrote that, "Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion." I demur. Environmentalism has not replaced socialism at all. Instead, the old-line socialists, faced with decades of the failure of political socialism, have jumped on the environmentalist bandwagon to keep socialism alive. 

Environmentalism has become a much better vehicle to achieve a rigid regulation of people's lives than political socialism ever was. After all, the fate of the entire planet is at stake! Environmentalism has already led some British members of Parliament to propose that the government regulate almost every aspect of buying and selling by private individuals. If this is not socialism, it is a distinction without a difference.

And now, just this week, voila! "U.N. Official Reveals Real Reason Behind Warming Scare"

The alarmists keep telling us their concern about global warming is all about man's stewardship of the environment. But we know that's not true. A United Nations official has now confirmed this.

At a news conference last week in Brussels, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of U.N.'s Framework Convention on Climate Change, admitted that the goal of environmental activists is not to save the world from ecological calamity but to destroy capitalism. 

"This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution," she said.

This seems an apt time to quote the old liberals' bumper sticker: "If you're not outraged, you are not paying attention."

Update: Thomas Sowell, "Global Warming Hysteria Has Problem: It Doesn't Fit With Facts"

And here is a prime example of such hysteria: "Animated map of what Earth would look like if all the ice melted." "Gloom! Depair! And agony on me! Deep dark depression! Excessive misery!"

Understand that absolutely no one of the global-warming hysteria movement, nay not even them, has ever said that all the ice on the earth will melt. There is not one climatology study that makes such a prediction, even at their funding-grubbing alarmist worst.

Why not, "What the earth would look like if all the liquid water froze?" After all, only 40 years ago were were supposed to be headed for a new ice age.

 

What happened to mainline Protestantism?

By 1950, the Protestant Mainline held among its membership half (maybe more) of the American population. Today, it's less than 10 percent. What happened? First Things offers a long, socio-political explanation. A key excerpt:

The Episcopal Church used to be “larger percentagewise,” the current presiding bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, admitted to the New York Times at the end of 2006. “But Episcopalians tend to be better educated and tend to reproduce at lower rates than some other denominations. Roman Catholics and Mormons both have theological reasons for producing lots of children.” Episcopalians, she said, aren’t interested in replenishing their ranks by having children—indeed, “it’s probably the opposite. We encourage ­people to pay attention to the stewardship of the earth and not use more than their portion.” Applauding her parents’ decision to leave the Catholic Church and become Episcopalians when she was nine, Bishop Schori added, “I think my parents were looking for a place where wrestling with questions was encouraged rather than discouraged.”

Schori is by no means a radical, as such things are counted these days in the Episcopal Church—the home, after all, of V. Gene Robinson, the openly homosexual bishop of New Hampshire, and John Shelby Spong, the retired bishop of Newark, who has denied even the possibility of meaningful prayer. She seems, rather, a fairly typical liberal Protestant: a rentier, really, living off the income from the property her predecessors purchased, strolling at sunset along the strand as the great tide of the Mainline ebbs further out to sea.

To be saved, we need only to realize that God already loves us, just the way we are, Schori wrote in her 2006 book, A Wing and a Prayer. She’s not exactly wrong about God’s love, but, in Schori’s happy soteriology, such love demands from us no personal ­reformation, no individual guilt, no particular penance, and no precise dogma. All we have to do, to prove the redemption we already have, is support the political causes she approves. The mission of the church is to show forth God’s love by demanding inclusion and social justice. She often points to the United Nations as an example of God’s work in the world, and when she talks about the mission of the Episcopal Church, she typically identifies it with the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals.

Her Yahweh, in other words, is a blend of Norman Vincent Peale and Dag Hammarskjöld

And this:

Look at the fury, for instance, with which environmentalists now attack any disputing of global warming. Such movements seek converts, not supporters, and they respond to objections the way religions respond to heretics and heathens. Each of them wants to be the great vocabulary by which the nation understands itself. Each of them wants to be the new American religion, standing as the third great prop of the nation: the moral vocabulary by which we know ourselves.

Just as religion is damaged when the churches see themselves as political movements, so politics is damaged when political platforms act as though they were religions. And perhaps more than merely damaged. Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, the killing fields of Cambodia, the cultural revolution in China: We had terrible experiences in the twentieth century when political and economic theories succeeded in posing themselves as religions.

See my essay, Environmentalist religion explained.

The morphing of Marxism

Click on image for fullsize view.
The chart is from Dr. Sanity's blog, where an excellent essay accompanies it (link).

It has long been observed that Marxism is in fact a religion, not at all the "science" that Karl Marx claimed it was. Keeping that in mind explains why Marxism's true beievers have been undismayed by the provable failure of every Marxist experiment established: Absolute Truth cannot be nullified by empiricism.

The chart also helps explain why modern environmentalism is also a religion in its own right, which I explained in detail in, "Environmentalist religion explained."

Finally, in addition to Dr. Sanity's essay, go read, "The Intellectual Origins of America-Bashing," by Lee Harris in Policy Review. Anti-Americanism across the globe is rooted in Marxist belief in warp and woof:

America-bashing is anti-Americanism at its most radical and totalizing. Its goal is not to advise, but to condemn; not to fix, but to destroy. It repudiates every thought of reform in any normal sense; it sees no difference between American liberals and American conservatives; it views every American action, both present and past, as an act of deliberate oppression and systemic exploitation. It is not that America went wrong here or there; it is that it is wrong root and branch. The conviction at the heart of those who engage in it is really quite simple: that America is an unmitigated evil, an irredeemable enormity.

This is the specter that is haunting the world today. Indeed, one may even go so far as to argue that this America is the fundamental organizing principle of the left as it exists today: To be against America is to be on the right side of history; to be for it is to be on the wrong side.

Harris explains just how this came to be and exactly traces its roots from Marx's work.

Freeman Dyson blows up global warming alarmism

Freeman Dyson is one of the most highly-regarded physicists in the world. Wikipedia introduces its entry on him thus:

Freeman John Dyson FRS (born December 15, 1923) is an English-born American theoretical physicist and mathematician, famous for his work in quantum mechanics, solid-state physics, and nuclear engineering. He is a lifelong opponent of nationalism and a proponent of nuclear disarmament and international cooperation. Dyson is a member of the Board of Sponsors of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

He was one of the first scientific figures to recognize that environmentalism had become a religion in its own right:

There is a worldwide secular religion which we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth, that despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible. [From, "The Question of Global Warming."]

From "Environmentalist religion explained."

In 2011, The Independent published, "Letters to a heretic: An email conversation with climate change sceptic Professor Freeman Dyson."

World-renowned physicist Professor Freeman Dyson has been described as a 'force-of-nature intellect'. He's also one of the world's foremost climate change sceptics. In this email exchange, our science editor, Steve Connor, asks the Princeton scholar why he's one of the few true intellectuals to be so dismissive of the global-warming consensus.

In the interview, after concise explanation of why climate modeling is useful but not determinative:

My impression is that the experts are deluded because they have been studying the details of climate models for 30 years and they come to believe the models are real. After 30 years they lose the ability to think outside the models. 

Read the whole thing.

All bow to Mother Gaia

On Earth Day 2009, I invite everyone to read my long essay about how environmentalism long ago became a religion in its own right and what is its religious template: "Environmentalist religion explained."

Who says so? Well, not just me. Freeman Dyson says so, too.

There is a worldwide secular religion which we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth, that despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible. [From, "The Question of Global Warming."]

A teaser from my essay:

Modern environmentalism was born in the West, whose cultural heritage and common languages are steeped through and through in Christian tradition, which was itself a daughter of Judaism.

The common themes of both scriptural Judaism and Christianity deal with deity, the natural world (existing first in a purity state), a corruption of the purity state (Augustine: "fall from grace,"), redemption and liberation/salvation. Then follows paradise. A prominent, though not universal, strain in both Judaism and Christianity is a looming apocalypse that in potential or in fact destroys enormous swaths of humanity.

Modern environmentalism has all these elements, with an emphasis on apocalypticism. I'll examine these religious elements in turn.

So, go read!

The Overpopulation Myth, Part 1

Myth: We can't produce enough food to feed the people in the world today, much less in years to come.

Fact: The world today produces enough food to provide every person alive with an adequate daily diet, and there is more land still available for agriculture than is being used now.

Remember Paul Ehrich's prediction in his 1968 book, The Population Bomb?

The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate...

Ehrlich’s book was influential far beyond the credentials of its author - he was a butterfly specialist (really!) - or the phony science he used. The present world view that overpopulation is a ticking time bomb threatening to end in mass death derives directly from Ehrlich’s apocalyptic fairy tale.

The planet’s population is now six billion and climbing. Across the world, people are better nourished than ever before in all history. Chronic hunger in the world today is caused by politics, not lack of food production. GlobalIssues.org lists the following causes of hunger in the world. I have asterisked (**) those that are purely or predominantly political:

• ** Land rights and ownership
• ** Diversion of land use to non-productive use
• ** Increasing emphasis on export-oriented agriculture
• ** Inefficient agricultural practices [there are also cultural, economic and educational issues with this one]
• ** War
• ** Famine
• Drought
• ** Over-fishing
• Poor crop yield
• ** Lack of democracy and rights

Note that famine is actually not a root cause of chronic hunger, it is just the name of local, enduring shortages of food, shortages which have antecedent causes. The result is famine; famine is not a cause. But famine's relief is not an arcane art. Shipments of food stocks from other countries to the famine area take care of the problem. But whether that humanitarian deed is done is a political decision.

Famine can also result from intentional political decision. The people of North Korea are the most enduringly malnourished people on earth. The reason is simple: North Korean communism cannot organize resources and labor to produce and distribute enough food to feed the people on the one hand, and on the other the ruling classes divert the country's resources to their own use, to arming the country and to cement their iron grip on the masses. If the people finally resort to cannibalism, well then, so be it.

The International Food Policy Institute says that even so about 20 percent of the world's population,

... are chronically undernourished ... [S]ince the mid-1970s the world has produced enough food to provide everyone with a minimally adequate diet. Hunger is one piece of a complex of interrelated social ills. It is linked intricately to global economic, political, and social power structures; modes of development and consumption; population dynamics; and social biases based on race, ethnicity, gender, and age. The world community has both the knowledge and the resources to eliminate hunger [emphasis added].

According to a report published this year by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), there are 1.4 billion hectares of land under farm production in the world today. "Some 1.6 billion hectares could be added" and most of that in Africa and South America (OECD-FAO Agricultural Outlook 2009-2018, PDF). I have read some estimates that the amount of arable land in Africa alone could feed produce enough food to feed the whole world, although as a matter of practicality, that will obviously never be the case.

The point is that the amount of arable land used today can be more than doubled. Lack of food production is not the cause of hunger today and there is no reason it should be the cause in the many years to come.

Update: There is a new twist on Ehrlichean apocalypticism that goes like this from "the world is about to end" bunch:

1. Okay, we admit that we can produce enough food for all six billion of us, plus many billions more.

2. That doesn't matter because human beings are poisonous to the earth. They produce carbon dioxide!

The worst thing that you or I can do for the planet is to have children. If they behave as the average person in the rich world does now, they will emit some 11 tonnes of CO² every year of their lives. In their turn, they are likely to have more carbon-emitting children who will make an even bigger mess. If Britain is to meet the government's target of an 80% reduction in our emissions by 2050, we need to start reversing our rising rate of population growth immediately.

That from the UK's Guardian newspaper. The piece ends,

Some scientists, the German chancellor's adviser, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber among them, say that if the cuts are not achieved, we will end up with a planet with a "carrying capacity" of just 1bn humans. If so, we need to start cutting back population now with methods that offer a humane choice – before it happens the hard way.

To which University of Wisconsin law Professor Ann Althouse responds, "Oh, great. Thanks for the warning about cutting back 'population' the hard way, Germany."

A few months ago, Dr. Freeman Dyson, one of the most respected physicists in the world, had a long essay in the New York Times Book Review in which he explained why environmentalism is now an actual religion in its own right. 

There is a worldwide secular religion which we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth, that despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible.

Mind you, in his mind this "perfect po-mo religion," as Michael Crichton once termed it, is a good thing. Dyson wasn't the first to make that claim. I took the ball and ran with it in my post, "Environmentalist religion explained."

Enuff with the doomsdaying, already

The Guardian, UK: 'Apocalyptic climate predictions' mislead the public, say experts.

Experts at Britain's top climate research centre have launched a blistering attack on scientific colleagues and journalists who exaggerate the effects of global warming.

The Met Office Hadley Centre, one of the most prestigious research facilities in the world, says recent "apocalyptic predictions" about Arctic ice melt and soaring temperatures are as bad as claims that global warming does not exist. Such statements, however well-intentioned, distort the science and could undermine efforts to tackle carbon emissions, it says.

A welcome call, but one I do not think will be heeded. There is too much money to be made by the most strident voices. Moderated commentary is mostly ignored by the media and scientists or research centers who say that things are not really all that bad, no matter the soundness of their science, don't get big grants and awards. Why? Because the money, hence the agenda, is controlled not by scientists but by politicians. The article points out,

The criticism reflects mounting concern at the Met Office that the global warming debate risks being hijacked by people on both sides who push their own agendas and interests. It comes ahead of a key year of political discussions on climate, which climax in December with high-level political negotiations in Copenhagen, when officials will try to hammer out a successor to the Kyoto protocol.

So the Met Office's call for sanity and sound, non-politicized science is welcome, but won't be heeded. Whole careers, both scientific and political, have been made and depend upon climate alarmism.

I again commend to you my essay, "Environmentalist religion explained," which explains how environmentalism long ago became, as Michael Crichton wrote, "a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths." Environmentalism emphasizes apocalypticism, which has in fact become central to its entire belief system. So it won't be surrendered easily (or, say I, at all).

The apocalyptic nature of climate alarmism forms a perfect confluence between science and politics. has there ever been a time in all history when scientists (not, mind you, actual science) have been hailed by politicians as so essential to forming policy for the future of the world? The permanent interest of politicians is to retain their power and then increase it. Environmentalism is the best vehicle going to do that.

No less a personage than physicist Freeman Dyson pointed out (cited in my essay) that, "Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion." I demur. Environmentalism has not replaced socialism at all. Instead, the old-line socialists, faced with decades of the failure of political socialism, have jumped on the environmentalist bandwagon to keep socialism alive. Environmentalism has become a much better vehicle to achieve a rigid regulation of people's lives than political socialism ever was. After all, the fate of the entire planet is at stake!

Environmentalism has already led some British members of Parliament to propose that the government regulate almost every aspect of buying and selling by private individuals. If this is not socialism, it is a distinction without a difference.

So there you are. At bottom, modern environmentalism has discarded scientific rigor to embrace something not much different than Leninism, the desire to control the major components of the way individuals live. From there it is a short step for environmentalism to Leninism's successor: Stalinism, the desire to control every aspect of the way we live. That's our future, minus the gulags. We hope.

The invention of global warming

A peer-reviewed Study Finds Temperature Adjustments Account For ‘Nearly All Of The Warming’ In Climate Data.

A new study found adjustments made to global surface temperature readings by scientists in recent years “are totally inconsistent with published and credible U.S. and other temperature data.”

“Thus, it is impossible to conclude from the three published GAST data sets that recent years have been the warmest ever – despite current claims of record setting warming,” according to a study published June 27 by two scientists and a veteran statistician.

The peer-reviewed study tried to validate current surface temperature datasets managed by NASA, NOAA and the UK’s Met Office, all of which make adjustments to raw thermometer readings. Skeptics of man-made global warming have criticized the adjustments.

Climate scientists often apply adjustments to surface temperature thermometers to account for “biases” in the data. The new study doesn’t question the adjustments themselves but notes nearly all of them increase the warming trend.

Basically, “cyclical pattern in the earlier reported data has very nearly been ‘adjusted’ out” of temperature readings taken from weather stations, buoys, ships and other sources.

The text of the full study may be read here. Its conclusion  is,

In this research report, the most important surface data adjustment issues are identified and past changes in the previously reported historical GAST data are quantified. While the notion that some “adjustments” to historical data might need to be made is not challenged, logically it would be expected that such historical temperature data adjustments would sometimes raise these temperatures, and sometimes lower them. This situation would mean that the impact of such adjustments on the temperature trend line slope is uncertain. However, each new version of GAST has nearly always exhibited a steeper warming linear trend over its entire history.

That was accomplished by systematically removing the previously existing cyclical temperature pattern. This was true for all three entities providing GAST data measurement, NOAA, NASA and Hadley CRU.

As a result, this research sought to validate the current estimates of GAST using the best available relevant data. This included the best documented and understood data sets from the U.S. and elsewhere as well as global data from satellites that provide far more extensive global coverage and are not contaminated by bad siting and urbanization impacts. Satellite data integrity also benefits from having cross checks between UAH and RSS as well as with Balloon data.

The conclusive findings of this research are that the three GAST data sets are not a valid representation of reality. In fact, the magnitude of their historical data adjustments, that removed their cyclical temperature patterns, are totally inconsistent with published and credible U.S. and other temperature data. Thus, it is impossible to conclude from the three published GAST data sets that recent years
have been the warmest ever –despite current claims of record setting warming.

Finally, since GAST data set validity is a necessary condition for EPA’s GHG/CO2 Endangerment Finding, it too is invalidated by these research findings.

Remember that an IPCC Former Chair Admits It's All About the Money.

"One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with the environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole," said Edenhofer, who co-chaired the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change working group on Mitigation of Climate Change from 2008 to 2015.

So what is the goal of environmental policy?

"We redistribute de facto the world's wealth by climate policy," said Edenhofer.

But I wrote that years ago in, "Environmentalist religion explained:"

But there is more than mere religiousity at work in religious environmentalism. H.L. Mencken observed, "The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule it." And that is the true foundation of environmentalism today: the desire of its gurus to regulate the way others live. Monbiot again:

We can deal with climate change only with the help of governments, restraining the exertions of our natural liberties.

Freeman Dyson wrote, "Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion." I demur. Environmentalism has not replaced socialism at all. Instead, the old-line socialists, faced with decades of the failure of political socialism, have jumped on the environmentalist bandwagon to keep socialism alive. Environmentalism has become a much better vehicle to achieve a rigid regulation of people's lives than political socialism ever was. After all, the fate of the entire planet is at stake! Environmentalism has already led some British members of Parliament to propose that the government regulate almost every aspect of buying and selling by private individuals. If this is not socialism, it is a distinction without a difference.

So there you are. At bottom, modern environmentalism has discarded scientific rigor to embrace something not much different than Leninism, the desire to control the major components of the way individuals live. From there it is a short step from environmentalism to Leninism's successor: Stalinism, the desire to control every aspect of the way we live. That's our future, minus the gulags. We hope.

This seems an apt time to quote the old liberals' bumper sticker: "If you're not outraged, you are not paying attention."

Were Oklahoma tornadoes caused by global cooling?

Back in 1975, scientists blamed the previous year's huge tornado outbreak on global cooling.

The entire scanned article is at the link, but here is the key part:

Fortunately, in our more enlightened age, we know that the problem today is neither global cooling nor global warming, but the fact the the climate is not granite stable. Yes, "climate change" is what messes up our world. 

As I posted in 2007, 

I've always kind of suspected that underlying much of environmentalism is a desire for the impossible: stasis. For the earth will either get warmer or cooler, but it definitely won't stay the same. 

A commenter on the FB page where I found the scans, above, said,

It's interesting that "Climate Change" has become for the left just what the "enlightened" use to accuse theists for having - a "God of the gaps" ... no matter the empirical data, it is caused by "climate change".

Which caused me to comment there a link to my 2008 post, "Environmentalist religion explained," in which I picked up and ran with renowned physicist Freeman Dyson's observation:

There is a worldwide secular religion which we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth, that despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible. [From, "The Question of Global Warming."] ...

My pickup theme was this:

The common themes of both scriptural Judaism and Christianity deal with deity, the natural world (existing first in a purity state), a corruption of the purity state (Augustine: "fall from grace,"), redemption and liberation/salvation. Then follows paradise. A prominent, though not universal, strain in both Judaism and Christianity is a looming apocalypse that in potential or in fact destroys enormous swaths of humanity.

Modern environmentalism has all these elements, with an emphasis on apocalypticism. I'll examine these religious elements in turn. 

Read the whole thing!

Torture still endorsed by US government

Geologist Professor Ian Plimer, describing the computer models used by global warming alarmists:

‘I’m a natural scientist ... collecting raw data. And that’s why I’m so sceptical of these models, which have nothing to do with science or empiricism but are about torturing the data till it finally confesses. None of them predicted this current period we’re in of global cooling. There is no problem with global warming. It stopped in 1998. The last two years of global cooling have erased nearly 30 years of temperature increase.’

Meanwhile, two US scientists have explained the severe shortcomings of computer climate models.

Gary Strand, a software engineer at the federally funded National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), admitted climate model software “doesn't meet the best standards available” in a comment he posted on the website Climate Audit.

“As a software engineer, I know that climate model software doesn't meet the best standards available. We've made quite a lot of progress, but we've still quite a ways to go,” Strand wrote on July 5, 2009, according to the website WattsUpWithThat.com.

Strand's candid admission promoted WattsUpWithThat's skeptical Meteorologist Anthony Watts to ask the following question:

“Do we really want Congress to make trillion dollar tax decisions today based on 'software [that] doesn't meet the best standards available?'”

Meteorologist Watts also critiqued the current climate models, noting, “NASA GISS model E written on some of the worst FORTRAN coding ever seen is a challenge to even get running. NASA GISTEMP is even worse.

Another Plimer quote:

Eco-guilt is a first-world luxury. It’s the new religion for urban populations which have lost their faith in Christianity. The IPCC report is their Bible. Al Gore and Lord Stern are their prophets.

See my own post, "Environmentalist religion explained." As I wrote then, it's appropriate to quote the old liberals' bumper sticker: "If you're not outraged, you are not paying attention."

Update: What about 55 million years ago?

A runaway spurt of global warming 55 million years ago turned Earth into a hothouse but how this happened remains worryingly unclear, scientists said on Monday.
Previous research into this period, called the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM, estimates the planet's surface temperature blasted upwards by between five and nine degrees Celsius (nine and 16.2 degrees Fahrenheit) in just a few thousand years.

The Arctic Ocean warmed to 23 C (73 F), or about the temperature of a lukewarm bath.

How PETM happened is unclear but climatologists are eager to find out, as this could shed light on aspects of global warming today.

I blame the cave men. Don't try to object that there were no cave men 55 million years ago. Doesn't matter. It's still humans' fault.

Oh, and did you know that the earth has had polar ice caps for only about 20 percent of its age? "Normal" temps, on geological scale, are those too warm to support polar ice.

Religious environmentalism & California's decline

In a wide-ranging essay at newgeography.com, Joel Kotkin writes in, "Death of the California Dream,"

Green politics came early to California and for understandable reasons: protecting the resources and beauty of the nation's loveliest landscapes. Yet in recent years, the green agenda has expanded well beyond that of the old conservationists like Theodore Roosevelt, who battled to preserve wilderness but also cared deeply about boosting productivity and living standards for the working classes. In contrast, the modern environmental movement often adopts a largely misanthropic view of humans as a "cancer" that needs to be contained. By their very nature, the greens tend to regard growth as an unalloyed evil, gobbling up resources and spewing planet-heating greenhouse gases.

You can see the effects of the gentry's green politics up close in places like the Salinas Valley, a lovely agricultural region south of San Jose. As community leaders there have tried to construct policies to create new higher-wage jobs in the area (a project on which I've worked as a consultant), local progressives — largely wealthy people living on the Monterey coast — have opposed, for example, the expansion of wineries that might bring new jobs to a predominantly Latino area with persistent double-digit unemployment. As one winegrower told me last year: "They don't want a facility that interferes with their viewshed." For such people, the crusade against global warming makes a convenient foil in arguing against anything that might bring industrial or any other kind of middle-wage growth to the state. Greens here often speak movingly about the earth — but also about their personal redemption. They have engaged a legal and regulatory process that provides the wealthy and their progeny an opportunity to act out their desire to "make a difference" — often without real concern for the outcome. Environmentalism becomes a theater in which the privileged act out their narcissism.

I long ago explained how environmentalism morphed into an actual religion in its own right (not an original idea with me, but I did explain the template better than anyone else, I think); see "Environmentalist religion explained."

What Kotkin's essay illustrates is the idolatrous nature of environmentalism. In the California fringe of the movement, the ultimate end of idolatry has matured. The earth itself, Gaia, has been replaced as idol-in-chief with that which all idols are finally replaced: the self. All idolatry is projection of self worship onto another object, but it never lasts. The self demands an unmasking. Hence, as Kotkin inadvertently explains, environmentalism is simply the latest way by which self worship is carried out. However, God is not mocked.

Thus says the Lord, the King of Israel, and his Redeemer, the Lord of hosts: I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no god. Who is like me? Let them proclaim it, let them declare and set it forth before me. Who has announced from of old the things to come? Let them tell us what is yet to be. Do not fear, or be afraid; have I not told you from of old and declared it? You are my witnesses! Is there any god besides me? There is no other rock; I know not one.

All who make idols are nothing, and the things they delight in do not profit; their witnesses neither see nor know. And so they will be put to shame. Who would fashion a god or cast an image that can do no good? Look, all its devotees shall be put to shame; the artisans too are merely human. Let them all assemble, let them stand up; they shall be terrified, they shall all be put to shame. ...

They do not know, nor do they comprehend; for their eyes are shut, so that they cannot see, and their minds as well, so that they cannot understand. No one considers, nor is there knowledge or discernment... .

Is it any coincidence that the decline of California coincides with, among other trends, the idolatrous narcissism of California elites? I think not.

Bowing to Mother Gaia

On Earth Day, I invite everyone to read my long essay about how environmentalism long ago became a religion in its own right and what is its religious template: "Environmentalist religion explained."

Also, Happy Lenin's birthday! Is it mere coincidence that Lenin's birthday was selected as Earth Day? Nope.

Why Greenland welcomes warming

"How global warming is good news for Greenland's economic climate:"

RARELY a month goes by without another scientific survey proclaiming that Greenland's ice sheet is melting faster than previously thought. But for the 56,000 people who live on the giant Arctic island, climate change is now being seen as an opportunity rather than a threat: a passport to prosperity, perhaps even independence.

I posted in Feb. 2007 the question, “What if global warming is a good thing?” A return to the higher temps of the Little Climate Optimum would be a good thing, perhaps? After all, the LCO, stretching roughly from the 10th to the 13th centuries, in which the average temperature was anything from 1 to 3 degrees centigrade higher than it is today, actually impelled the formation of modern civilization.

Of course, that’s a bad thing to the global warming alarmists.

See also my essay this week on just how, exactly, environmentalism has become an actual religion in its own right, and what are the implications are for personal liberty. Hint: not good. Environmentalist religion explained.

The Theology of Climate Change - Taki's Magazine

"Climate change" is the pagan god of the worldwide Left, as this detailed examination of an article in the British Journal of Psychiatry demonstrates.

That such drivel can be published in a learned journal with a respectable history only goes to show how far the theology of the great climate god has taken hold of minds, like a virus in a cell.

The Theology of Climate Change - Taki's Magazine

See also my 2008 piece, "Environmentalist religion explained."

This, too: "The Age Of Disinformation."

Anglican bishop: Climate change deniers are like kidnapper rapists

Yes, the "Bishop of Stafford, Gordon Mursell, wrote in a parish letter that not confronting global warming meant people were "as guilty as" Josef Fritzl."

Fritzl is an Austrian man who locked his daughter in a cellar for 24 years, mentally, physcially and sexually abusing her all the while. As Gateway Pundit points out, "Comparing global warming agnostics to Hitler" just doesn't hit hard enough anymore.

In Environmentalist religion explained, I showed how environmentalism categorizes people as children of light or children of darkness, a classic habit of religious apocalypticism.

Bishop Stafford is fully aboard.

Global-Warming Alarmists and their god of the Gaps

Global-Warming Alarmists, You're Doing It Wrong - Bloomberg View: 

The arguments about global warming too often sound more like theology than science. Oh, the word “science” gets thrown around a great deal, but it's cited as a sacred authority, not a fallible process that staggers only awkwardly and unevenly toward the truth, with frequent lurches in the wrong direction. I cannot count the number of times someone has told me that they believe in “the science,” as if that were the name of some omniscient god who had delivered us final answers written in stone. For those people, there can be only two categories in the debate: believers and unbelievers. Apostles and heretics.

It's nice to see people are finally awakening to what I pointed out (and I admit I was not the first) in my 2008 post, "Environmentalist religion explained." 

And there is this comment (not mine) I found elsewhere: 

It's interesting that "Climate Change" has become for the left just what the "enlightened" use to accuse theists for having - a "God of the gaps" ... no matter the empirical data, it is caused by "climate change".

Friday Stuff Going Down

If you get it wrong predicting the end of the world, just predict it again. Doomsdays that didn’t happen: Think tank compiles decades’ worth of dire climate predictions. But this ain't all, because Environmental apocalypse predictions have failed for half a century and get a good dose of schadenfreude:

Al Gore predicted in 2009 that the North Pole would be completely ice free in five years. A U.S. Navy scientist in 2013 concluded that the Arctic’s summer sea ice cover would all be melted by 2016.

Bogus predictions confidently made are not always harmless. The Maritime Bulletin reported that on Sept. 3, 16 “climate change warriors” making a documentary film on the melting polar icecap had to be rescued by helicopter from their ship because it was stuck in the ice halfway between Norway and the North Pole.

And Time Mag has been on it from the beginning!

If you sin against the climate - and who doesn't? - you can now confess for all to see at NBC News. But who will there be to give you absolution?

Environmentalism is religion with sin but no salvation and now it wants confession with no pardon. In other words, it has become a cult.

Noted scientist Freeman Dyson wrote that, "Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion." I demur. Environmentalism has not replaced socialism at all. Instead, the old-line socialists, faced with decades of the failure of political socialism, have jumped on the environmentalist bandwagon to keep socialism alive.

I wrote that 11 years ago. Today, observe the Democrat candidates and discern how socialism and environmentalism have merged so that they are now the one and the same.

Because the Ruling Party there is really just a Destructor: Why California Keeps Making Homelessness Worse. In fact, half of all America's homeless people are in California.

No matter who wins next November, people will be killed in the civil unrest to follow.

Should Donald Trump prevail in his bid for a second term, the left will go insane, deploying every “insurance policy” weapon at their disposal to negate four more years of the Orange Man.  What Obama, Comey, and Brennan et al. did to Trump in his first term will seem mild in comparison to what the left is planning should he win.

If the Democrat wins,

Eventually, the president will overreach, signing an order for gun confiscation ... .

And for the right, that will be the last straw (plastic or paper). 

The left doesn’t understand that every gun owner is a single-issue-voter; millions will refuse to give up their guns.  And, many gun owners in this country will not go “meekly into the night,” there will be “rage” against what they will see as a usurpation of their constitutional rights. 

But as I explained in November 2016, we entered that month a low-intensity civil war in the true meaning of the term. After next November, it will not be low intensity any more.

Beto O'Rourke tore down the curtain concealing what Democrats really want ("First, let's shoot all the gun owners"), and now Senator Elizabeth Warren rips it to shreds: Sen. Warren Reveals Democratic Socialists' Hidden Agenda.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat, made this quite clear on Wednesday when she introduced the "Accountable Capitalism Act." A more accurate name would have been the "First Step to Overthrowing Capitalism Act," because a long-term objective of the Democratic Socialists of America is crushing capitalism. They want an economy that isn't free and open but subject to their boot on its throat.

Under what we'll call Warren's Decree, "American corporations with more than $1 billion in annual revenue must obtain a federal charter from a newly formed Office of United States Corporations ... . The new federal charter obligates company directors to consider the interests of all corporate stakeholders — including employees, customers, shareholders, and the communities in which the company operates."

Read the whole thing. And when a Harvard economics professor characterizes the bill "as a means for destroying capitalism," then even a blind person can see what the Democrats really have in mind.

Are you retired or nearing retirement? If you vote for a Democrat next year, enjoy eating your Campbell's condensed soup for breakfast after Jan. 20, 2021. And for lunch. And for dinner. Because your retirement accounts will be drained by the socialists. Remember, Warren excitedly exclaims she is not going to tax mere income. She is going to tax every dollar you have, no matter how long you have had it and no matter what taxes you have already paid on it.

Her “Accountable Capitalism Act” would wipe out the single greatest legal protection retirees currently enjoy—the requirement that corporate executives and fund managers act as fiduciaries on investors’ behalf. ...
 
Under this new Warren charter, companies currently dedicated to their shareholders’ interest would be reordered to serve the interests of numerous new “stakeholders,” including “the workforce,” “the community,” “customers,” “the local and global environment” and “community and societal factors.”

Eliminating corporations’ duty to serve investors exclusively and forcing them to serve political interests would represent the greatest government taking in American history. Sen. Warren’s so-called accountable capitalism raids the return that wealth provides to its owners, the vast majority of whom are present or near retirees.

Oh, you say, she is only going to tax "the rich." But in their minds, if you have a job, you're rich.

You won't be able to afford a car, but Andrew Yang is going to take them all away anyway.

Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang said the United States may have to eliminate private car ownership to combat climate change during MSNBC's climate forum at Georgetown University Thursday morning.

Instead, he wants a "constant roving fleet of electric cars" for everyone to use - as common property, like all proper socialists.

And finally, the Democrat debate: