The Regressive Green Agenda & A History Lesson

At Oh What Now, the blogger, a retired marine engineer, has reposted a brilliant "comment" that he left at the radical green site, DeSmog Blog. In the comment - an essay, really - Nick discusses man's history of innovation in response to climate change and then challenges the modern greenie agenda as highly regressive:

Green thinking - more harm than good?

When the climate took a turn for the worse during the so-called Younger Dryas period some 12,000 years ago, our ancestors didn’t don a hair shirt and hope for the best. They innovated. A sharp return to ice age like conditions helped precipitate the development of agriculture in the Levant, a hugely successful innovation that soon diffused to other settled regions. So if contemporary climate change is to be taken as seriously as many Greens urge, our response should also be innovation driven. Why then does much of our current Green thinking focus on environmentally and socially regressive ideas?

While the development of agriculture during the Neolithic revolution was to change the world for the better, the real awakening from millennia of Malthusian stagnation was the industrial revolution. Whether through the far-reaching ideas of the Scottish enlightenment or the innovations of James Watt, it was realised that the future could be radically different from the past.

For example, in the late 19th century the growing use of steam power enabled energy and labour costs to decouple for the first time in human history. Energy became cheap while prosperity soared, not through crass consumerism, but through badly needed economic growth that provided an escape from agrarian poverty. It is the surplus from that innovation driven growth that now enables the provision of public services such as health and education. Nurses nurse and teachers teach only because someone else is providing their Joules, Calories and other material needs.

While innovation has undeniably delivered immense improvements in the human condition, innovation is also the principal route through which human needs can gradually be decoupled from the environment. . . .

Do read it all. It is simply a superb essay that I recommend to everyone.

I would add two things. One, Nick does his analysis assuming that green agenda is predicated on protecting Gaia. I don't. It appears to me that the green agenda and the acts taken to further it are, in large measure, a vehicle for gaining political power with a mandate to control man's activities. When you add that as an additional rubric for analysis, I think many of the green's acts and positions make musch more sense.

Further, Nick notes that his comment on DeSmog blog only lasted two days before it was deleted. Lefties, particularly the more radical ones, are not willing to tolerate any opinion that conflicts with their dogma. They don't debate facts, they just want to impose their beliefs. Such fanatics are, in equal measure, insecure, totalitarian and dangerous.

Tweet