I've been debunking experts and intellectuals for a long time, noting that they lack expertise and intellect. Apparently, I'm not unusual.

The previous generations had been in love with big projects: Woodie Guthrie even wrote a famous folksong about the Grand Coulee Dam, hailing the power of grand engineering projects to tame the ‘wild and wasted’ Columbia River, and celebrating the mines and the factories that the dam’s power made possible. Mid-twentieth-century America was intoxicated with social and environmental engineering of all kinds. As the costs of those projects became more clear, and as a generation that had never known, say, what life had been like in rural Alabama before the Tennessee Valley Authority, focused on the drawbacks rather than the advantages of big engineering projects, the public fell out of love with Big Science and Big Engineering. . .

Experts lost their mystique. The guys in the white coats were no longer deemed all-knowing and all-wise. A better educated and more skeptical public opinion was no longer prepared to defer to technocrats, experts and government bureaucrats who said they knew best. The experts said nuclear power was safe; environmentalists doubted it. The experts said genetically modified food was safe; environmentalists thought that was hooey. The experts said bovine growth hormone and pesticides posed no dangers; environmentalists thought that was stark raving bonkers and built the organic food industry in opposition. . .

More, on issues the public follows closely, the scientific consensus keeps changing. Margarine was introduced as the healthy alternative to butter; now experts tell us that the transfats in many types of margarine are the worst things you can eat. Should you eat no fat or the right fat? All carbs, no carbs or good carbs? How much vitamin E should you take? How much sun should you get? How much fish oil should you swallow? How should you divide your time between aerobic and non-aerobic exercise? On these and many other subjects, expert opinion keeps changing. Perhaps the current consensus will last; quite possibly, it won’t — but the experts can’t tell you what will happen.

The rise of the environmental movement reflected the increasing independence of thought and judgment of a public that was becoming less and less impressed with credentials and degrees. The public wanted to take power back from experts and appointed government agencies and put up new obstacles in the way of technocratic engineers with big projects in mind.

But when it comes to global warming, the shoe is on the other foot. Now it is suddenly the environmentalists — who’ve often spent lifetimes raging against experts and scientists who debunk organic food and insist that GMOs and nuclear power plants are safe — who are the pious advocates of science and experts. Suddenly, it’s a sin to question the wisdom of the Scientific Consensus. Scientists are, after all, experts; their work is peer-reviewed and we uneducated rubes must sit back and shut up when the experts tell us what’s right.

The rise of the environmental movement reflected the increasing independence of thought and judgment of a public that was becoming less and less impressed with credentials and degrees. The public wanted to take power back from experts and appointed government agencies and put up new obstacles in the way of technocratic engineers with big projects in mind.

This is a misreading of history, a false narrative constructed by selective use of evidence. Environmentalists - and the political groups in which they were embedded - didn't lose faith in experts or authority, they believed and obeyed one of the many expert and authoritarian narratives on offer and rejected others. It's more like a religious conversion than a loss of religion. The were born again and had the zeal of converts.

But when it comes to global warming, the shoe is on the other foot. Now it is suddenly the environmentalists — who’ve often spent lifetimes raging against experts and scientists who debunk organic food and insist that GMOs and nuclear power plants are safe — who are the pious advocates of science and experts. Suddenly, it’s a sin to question the wisdom of the Scientific Consensus. Scientists are, after all, experts; their work is peer-reviewed and we uneducated rubes must sit back and shut up when the experts tell us what’s right. . .

More, environmentalists have found a big and simple fix for all that ails us: a global carbon cap. One big problem, one big fix. It is not just wrong to doubt that a fix is needed, it is wrong to doubt that the Chosen Fix will work. Never mind that the leading green political strategy (to stop global warming by a treaty that gains unanimous consent among 190 plus countries and is then ratified by 67 votes in a Senate that rejected Kyoto 95-0) is and always has been so cluelessly unrealistic as to be clinically insane. The experts decree; we rubes are not to think but to honor and obey.

Precisely.

Essentially, the core environmentalist argument against big projects and big development is the same argument that libertarians use against economic regulations and state planning. The ‘economic ecology’ of a healthy free market system is so complex, libertarians argue, that bureaucratic interventions, however well intentioned and however thoroughly supported by peer reviewed science of various kinds, will produce unintended consequences — and in any case the interventions and regulations are too crude and too simple to provide an adequate substitute for the marvelously complex economic order that develops from free competition. Environmentalists turned this logic against Big Science projects like dams and more generally built a case that humanity should work to have a light footprint in the world. Natural systems are so complicated, so interlinked in non-obvious ways, that any human intervention in nature has unanticipated costs. The less we intervene, the better.

This is deeply confused. There was a libertarian minority among those who marched against what was then the dominant narrative, but the majority favored different bureaucratic interventions and even tighter authoritarian control rather than any sort of invisible hand of mother nature.

Ridley demonstrates the confusion.

Walter Russell Mead has a powerful essay in the American Interest online about how the environmental movement suddenly turned into the establishment. Have you noticed the irony of being told to shut up and trust the experts by the likes of Greenpeace? Nothing is quite so amusing about the modern environmental movement as its sudden volte-face on the argument from authority: from `don’t believe the experts' to `do as you are told'. . .

Back in the 1970s, I hugely enjoyed the novel The Monkey Wrench Gang by the eco-activist Edward Abbey. In that book, four unlikely comrades come together in a common cause – to blow up billboards, sabotage bulldozers and destroy dams to save nature. If you were to rewrite that book today (and I have to admit I am tempted) the comrades will be blowing up wind turbines, sabotaging biofuel plants and putting up placards at organic farms about their wasteful use of land.

In my book I argue that expertise, innovation and intelligence are bottom-up phenomena, dispersed through society and shared among many brains. The `cloud’ is only the latest and strongest example of this. The top-down environmental establishment is on the wrong side of history.

The environemntal movement has always been an argument from authority. It's a movement after all, a bunch of thoughtless people marching around with their fists in the air, intent on hijacking the machinery of authority to enforce their narrow preferences. That's why it was so easy for Gaylord Nelson to hitch them to the wagon of his political party and ride them to power.

Nothing has changed. It is still useful to argue against authoritarian systems by explaining the nature of complex systems and the function of distributed expertise and intelligence in those systems. It doesn't matter which authority seizes power. Any authority will degrade the system. The idea that is worth supporting is that humanity can improve itself by maturing and practicing restraint. It is a natural tendency for a group of humans to morph into a mob when they feel threatened and excited but it is that tendency to dispense with critical thought and give into the dark side of consensus that leads to ruin. It may have had some evolutionary advantage in the past when smaller groups literally fought for survival and the ability to turn into a savage and mindless mob both felt good and served the needs of war or other extreme threats, but it's time for childhood's end.