“All our fashionable worries and all our prevailing dogmas will probably be obsolete in 50 years” -- Freeman Dyson

Marcelino Fuentes takes issue with the quasi-religious nature of the environmental movement.

David W. Orr writes in Conservation Biology:

All over the Earth a great turning in the evolution of humankind has begun. [...] Our capacities to learn, reason, and even empathize are growing quickly. We now know ourselves to be a part of a larger story of life in the universe and are beginning to understand what that will require of us. All over the Earth humans are engaged in a momentous conversation about the terms and conditions that must be met to sustain life [...]

Is the battle for decency won? No, but in time, I submit that it will be. [...]

The angels of our better nature are growing more powerful in human affairs. There is now a global movement to protect species, stabilize the climate, preserve habitats [...], to reign in our excesses, and reduce consumption.

The "angels of our better nature" are growing more powerful relative to that part of humankind that Orr calls destructive, capricious, violent, wantonly cruel, derelict stewards, unworthy of the appellation Homo sapiens, destroyers, killers, rapacious, sinful, fallen, deserving of death, inept at seeing patterns and systems and acting accordingly, vicious, having no foresight, and - hold your breath - not courteous. According to Orr, this battle is not between intellectual camps but between good and evil, between angels and sinners.

Those who argue that modern environmentalism is a religion have scored a point.

Orr is an extreme case though not alone in his simple minded dichotomies of good and evil. Most in the environmental movement have more balanced and nuanced views though they tolerate or even encourage the extremists, and so share some of that stench.

Many of those camped near the extremists can be more usefully seen as fashion victims than religious extremists. They are mesmerized by a sort of Renaissance Faire vision.

Climate change will be one of the main drivers for change in the workplace over the next decade, restricting the freedom to travel and raising the cost of transporting goods. . .

People will move to places that offer the facilities they need or aspire to. Having a good range of schools, shops and healthcare facilities within affordable range will become vital, leading to the resurgence of the old market towns as hubs for the local physical economy.

Each market town will have a specialisation to attract residents, such as a top theatre, a world-class sporting venue or an artists’ colony. This process is already emerging, with towns such as Ludlow becoming famous for its food, or Brighton for its night life. . .

But market towns will only appear to be local economic centres in the physical world. Most of the global economy will by then be operating in the virtual world, with practically all commerce taking place online and most workers logging on to join teams in cyberspace to create the software, games, information and entertainment that will be the real moneymakers in the future economy.

There are people who live like this now. There always have been. But they are deluded by the echoes from the walls of their ghettos into thinking that their odd aesthetics are not a tiny minority. They are not just local, they are provincial.

These dysfunctional views didn't spring full blown from the minds of madmen, they evolved. One false step after another they have backed themselves into an intellectual cul de sac.

The one seeming certainty in environmental policy these days is that climate change is the most serious issue facing the world. The major policy mechanism for addressing it is also established: reduce emissions of carbon dioxide by reducing fossil fuel use. That this is an unlikely path for the world as a whole has only increased expressions of concern, even hysteria. Climate change has become the existential challenge of the environmental era.

Climate change isn't that important an issue, and reducing emissions of carbon dioxide by reducing fossil fuel use won't help. A sensible person might well be pleased to learn that we can manage climate change, even while continuing to use fossil fuels. But that assumes that climate change was the true concern of the extremists and their fellow travelers.

. . . climate change has never been an inevitability, but a matter of values and political choice, a pricepoint issue. As Josh notes (at 4), "without air capture, CO2 levels in the atmosphere would take centuries to approach pre-industrial levels, but with air capture society can choose the desired level of atmospheric CO2 and, balanced against willingness to pay, how quickly to achieve it." There will be no global warming unless we choose to let it happen. Moreover, use of fossil fuels can continue into the indefinite future, subject to other environmental and social considerations.

But for many environmentalists and climate change scientists, this fundamental shift in the climate change debate is highly problematic, for it has long been the case that an important agenda behind climate change negotiations and the Kyoto Treaty is not responding to climate change (if it were, the world would be investing far more in technologies such as air capture, or carbon sequestration for fossil fuel plants). Rather, it is the need to socially engineer consumption patterns, especially in the United States, that are viewed as immoral, even evil.

There's something truly repellent to me about these priggish busy bodies. They've always been with us, hectoring us about one thing or another that was sinful, an outrage against nature, likely to make us go blind or whatever. A truly valuable technological advancement would be to develop a method to remove all those sticks from their butts so that they could be less grumpy, though we'd still have the hustlers and grifters to contend with, the folks who are in it for the money.

More subtly, Kuhn pointed out that "paradigm shifts" like this are not smooth transitions; those whose careers and reputations are dependent on climate change as crisis will tend to reject any challenge to their worldview. This would be unfortunate, for the end of global climate change as existential crisis leads not to complacency, but in fact opens up the much more difficult terrain of the anthropogenic Earth.

The transition from "simply stop doing what you're doing" to “what kind of world do you want” is not driven by fantasy, but technology and the actual state of the world. And it is not simply the climate system that is at issue, but, indeed, the interrelated networks of natural, human and built systems that define the world as it is today.

Some things never change. This is a conflict as old as civilization, perhaps older. Neither side ever wins lasting victory. The net result is that we lurch through time without actually making choices about what kind of world we want. We don't all want the same world, and never will. The question is mistaken in that it assumes that it is possible to settle on some set of policies that would have near universal support. With hindsight we can construct a narrative that divines some strategy in what seemed like a drunken stagger to those on site, but this is an unhelpful delusion that perpetuates the false idea of choice. We each choose, but there's no grand inclusive We that makes coordinated decisions. It's more useful to see it as emergent than planned, evolved rather than designed.

Perhaps it will help to ask if it is possible for some grand inclusive We to make such decisions? Is there any individual or group capable of making good decisions? I think not. Why work to establish such a controlling entity if it would effectively be an imbecile? The prigs in existential crisis about immoral, even evil consumption patterns might find insight looking in the mirror, where they could gaze into the abyss.

Update:

See this muddled, rambling article for a clear example of brain-freeze.

Energy efficiency can help slow the pace at which the risk from global warming risk increases, but it cannot reverse the trend alone. In the very long term, environmental experts say, the world’s economy needs a technological transformation, from deriving 90 percent of its energy from fossil fuels today to being largely free of emissions from fossil fuels by 2100, through cleanup steps or alternative energy sources. . .

Yet without coordinated international action, even if the United States — the largest source of carbon emissions — reined them in, this would have only limited effect on global warming. China is on track to surpass the United States as the leading emitter of carbon dioxide by 2009, according to a recent report by the International Energy Agency.

“Unless China and India are brought in, it won’t matter much what the developed world does,”

These folks are stuck on stupid. Their dogma is that climate change is the most serious issue facing the world and that the major policy mechanism for addressing it is to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide by reducing fossil fuel use. But that would be little if any help, even in the unlikely event that the urge to self flagellate spread from Europe and the coasts of America to the other 90% of the world. The amazing bit is that they press on with various political wheezes to regulate current emissions even though they admit that it won't help and that technological progress in generation and clean up is required.

It makes far more sense to focus on technological progress than to doggedly pursue failed and failing political approaches. But, but . . . what then would activists, advocates and politicians do with themselves? The course is clear. We will also need retraining and reeducation programs for these obsolete workers made redundant by an outbreak of rationality.

Update:

Lars Smith at Conservation Finance examines some of the characteristics of various green denominations.

The Dark Greens are the Prophets of Doom, telling us to repent our wasteful ways because the End is Nigh. . .

The Light Greens think we have to change, but not too much. We must improve our individual behavior, pay tithe to environmental organizations (Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth), and possibly buy indulgences (also known as “carbon offsets”). Buying carbon offsets from an organization that charges transaction fees of 40% makes even less sense than buying indulgences from the Church. At least the Church used to issue handsome parchment certificates, suitable for framing.

The Bright Greens are the techno-optimistic readers of Wired magazine and the WorldChanging blog. They are the modern Benedictines. . .

Unfortunately, the Bright Greens are not in the same class as the Benedictines. Some of their ideas are truly harebrained . . .

Taking a clear eyed look at humanity Smith notes that we are pretty strange, stranger than fiction even when it is speculative fiction with few constraints. That exposes a central defect in all of the green denominations and their various prescriptions for salvation - impoverished imagination leading to nonsense policy prescriptions. Smith prescribes a dose of reality to spark the imagination.

If I want to visit a weird, parallel universe, I read the editorial pages in the Wall Street Journal.

And that's just one of a multitude of alternative universes.