Global Bullshit.

Now that the UN has proclaimed the debate over Global Cooling Warming Climate Change to be ended, I got the urge to write one of my typically long and heavily link-filled pieces on the topic. Somebody beat me to it. Read J. R. Dunn’s A Necessary Apocalypse at The American Thinker if you have not already done so. A teaser:

That environmentalism is in fact a pseudo-religion goes without saying. Like all such, it possesses every element of contemporary legitimate belief. It has a deity, in this case the goddess Gaia, the personification of the living Earth, (first envisioned by James Lovelock, whom we can slot in as high priest). It has its holy books, most changing with the seasons, and most, as is true of the Bible with many convinced Christians, utterly unread. It has its saints, its prophets, its commandments, religious rituals (be sure to recycle that bottle), a large gallery of sins, mortal and otherwise, and an even larger horde of devils. (Let me pause here to sharpen a horn.)

Another item that a pseudo-religion must have is an apocalypse – and that’s what global warming is all about.

Once you’ve read that, sit back and enjoy Penn & Teller’s Showtime episode of Bullshit! on the topic of environmentalism.

Let me quote from one of the people interviewed for the piece: Patrick Moore, a founding member and former President of Greenpeace:

The environmental movement was basically hijacked by political and social activists who came in and very cleverly learned how to use green rhetoric, or green language, to cloak agendas that actually had more to do with anti-corporatism, anti-globalization, anti-business, and very little to do with science or ecology. And that’s when I left. (The Greenpeace organization.)

I realized that the movement I had started was being taken over by politicoes, basically, and that they were using it for fundrasing purposes.

Most of the environmental movement is composed of white, upper-middle class people who are, I think incorrectly, telling people in the rest of the world what to do, where people don’t live in nice houses and don’t have good drinking water and good health standards. I think the environmental movement is basically elitist.

Nobody’s going to listen to you if you say the world is not gonna come to an end, but if you say the world is coming to an end you get headlines. And so sensationalism, especially when it’s combined with misinformation, leads to a situation where people send gobs of money to these groups for campaigns that are actually totally misguided.

The campaign against forestry is a classic case of absolutely and totally misleading the general public. It’s true that we are losing forests in the tropics of this world, but it’s not because of logging companies, it’s because of poor people – millions of them, who are trying to make a living and grow some food for their families. The fact is, in North America, there is still as much forest as there was a hundred years ago. And the reason there’s so much forest is because we use so much wood. Because we cut trees down to make our houses, But the environmental groups have got people thinking that when you go into a lumberyard and buy wood, you’re causing the forest to be destroyed, when in fact what you’re doing is ordering new trees to be planted. It is something we have to do in order to feed and house the six billion people on this earth.

And it drives me even further crazy to have them say they’re against globalization when their main tools of trade are cell phones and the internet. It just makes no sense at all to be against science and technology, and then to use science and technology, whether its jet planes to get to international environmental meetings, or cell phones or laptop computers. You’re part of globalization. So how can you be against it?

I can’t add much to that, though in a future post I will attempt to.