There’s a whole theology of carbon these days, which is odd when you consider that it’s just an element. You could create an idol out of it, I suppose, if you’re just another vacant soul wandering the sunny uplands of inanity.
Speaking of idols and inanity, consider the former head of the British Bar Council, Stephen Hockman. This genius is distraught because the Kyoto Protocol hasn’t restored Eden. So, at the ongoing UN confab in Poland on ‘Global Climate Change’, he proposed a uniquely tribunician solution: he wants an international body to defenestrate scoffers at the high altar of carbon. From the op-ed page of Tuesday’s Investor’s Business Daily:
Stephen Hockman, the former head of the British Bar Council and a deputy High Court judge, has an idea why Kyoto failed to reach its emission goals and has proposed a remedy: creating a body similar to the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
The new court would have the ability to sanction and perhaps even punish those who violate or fail to obey climate change treaties such as Kyoto.
It’s tempting to dismiss this as the pipe dream of a barrister who also supports bringing Shariah law to Britain. But the idea of enforcing greenhouse gas reductions through legal means has been voiced by others and could easily snowball into widespread acceptance.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has agreed that the idea of such a court will be taken into account when considering ways to make such international agreements binding on all parties.
“The time is now ripe to set this up and get it going,” said Hockman. “Its remit will be overall climate change and the need for better regulation of carbon emissions but at the same time the implementation and enforcement of international environmental agreements and instruments.”
Many, if not all, warm-mongers consider the Industrial Revolution a crime against humanity, or at least against the Earth goddess, Gaia. Global warming alarmist James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Al Gore’s favorite scientist, has said in the past that heads of major fossil-fuel companies who spread disinformation about global warming should be “tried for high crimes against humanity and nature.”
Only religious fanatics could so twist reality. That’s the point, after all: that the religious impulse programmed into us all never goes away. If you think you’re too sophisticated for the Bible, it doesn’t mean you don’t have a religion. It just means that you’ve found something else to worship. And environmentalism – in all of its protean weirdness – has become the vacant Westerner’s religion of choice. And the carbon acolytes are the truest of the true believers.
But much of environmentalism – and most of the current carbon fetish – has nothing whatever to do with science. The late Michael Crichton was a staunch defender of science – real science. The kind with observation, experimentation and reproducible results. He noticed that much of environmentalism is not based on real science at all – but belief. And it’s a peculiar faith, precisely analogical to the key elements of Genesis:
I studied anthropology in college, and one of the things I learned was that certain human social structures always reappear. They can’t be eliminated from society. One of those structures is religion. Today it is said we live in a secular society in which many people—the best people, the most enlightened people—do not believe in any religion. But I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form. You can not believe in God, but you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious.
Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it’s a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.
There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.
Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday—these are deeply held mythic structures. They are profoundly conservative beliefs. They may even be hard-wired in the brain, for all I know. I certainly don’t want to talk anybody out of them, as I don’t want to talk anybody out of a belief that Jesus Christ is the son of God who rose from the dead. But the reason I don’t want to talk anybody out of these beliefs is that I know that I can’t talk anybody out of them. These are not facts that can be argued. These are issues of faith.
And so it is, sadly, with environmentalism. Increasingly it seems facts aren’t necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief. It’s about whether you are going to be a sinner, or saved. Whether you are going to be one of the people on the side of salvation, or on the side of doom. Whether you are going to be one of us, or one of them.
Read it all – Crichton’s speeches and papers are time well spent.
To me, the most remarkable thing about guys like Hockman is their lack of objectivity and skepticism. Heck, I’m a Christian – the red-hot gospel, Bible-believing kind. I’m supposed to be the credulous one but I’m skeptical about most everything. And I don’t believe in persecuting heretics, either. But Hockman – with his proposed tribunal – does.
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