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Sunday, July 20, 2008
Civilizational Anorexia
The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry recently reported what they hyped as the first known case of “Climate Change Delusion.” A seventeen year-old Melbourne teenager was placed under care after attempting to stop drinking water in an effort to combat global warming. However, I’d say that while this case is interesting and carried to a new extreme it is hardly unique. Indeed, I would argue that the whole of the modern environmentalist movement is rooted in a mental disorder – let’s call it Civilizational Anorexia – whose sufferers intend to starve Western civilization in a delusional attempt to make it conform to an impossible image.
Radical environmentalists believe, without reference to any outside requirements, that Western Civilization consumes “too much”. Like the teenage girl gazing into the mirror convinced, regardless of all outside input, that she’s too fat and must therefore consume less, environmentalists are seized of a similar delusion. As the heart of it, they have no sound basis upon which to rest their irrational belief that Western consumption is excessive. But, because they are fixated upon that deranged thought to the exclusion of all other things, they are fully prepared to let civilization starve to death.
Let’s get real here – civilization needs oil like people need food. Convincing yourself that it may be otherwise, as many climate change fanatics have done, requires one to believe in a set of interlocking conspiracy theories and magical conjuring tricks so complicated that, were they to be promoted in something other than a popular progressive cause, they would be dismissed as the ravings of a paranoid schizophrenic.
To believe that we can get by without oil – or with substantially less of it – is a delusional belief without any basis in fact. To believe that you have to believe that every major corporation in the world that could make money off of the alternative – including many which make little money directly from the status quo – have engaged in a conspiracy-so-vast to suppress it. You have to believe that companies which could make more money than God by producing a viable electric vehicle have chosen not to do so in the service of some grand master conspiracy (whether it is organized by the Masons of the Illuminati depends upon the teller).
Indeed, in order to believe in modern climate change theory you have to hold a fixed belief in “fact” that is demonstrably false – that, absent human intervention, the world’s climate would be static.
In other words, in order to buy into modern environmentalism you have to believe three facts that are either verifiably false or, at a very minimum, are unsupported by the facts:
a) That modern civilization consumes “too much” and is “unsustainable.”
b) That it is possible to sustain Western Civilization and our standard of living while reducing our consumption.
c) That any changes in the Earth’s climate are, ipso facto, proof of the posit that climate change is human-caused.
Now, to be clear, I’m not actually saying that most people who believe in Global Warming are delusional in a psychiatric sense – the vast majority of them aren’t. Instead, what I’m saying is that they haven’t examined the assumptions that are implicit in their thinking and matched them up with the facts. This is a flaw in our culture – and one promoted by our schools. For all of their talk about “critical thinking”, the left-wing ideologues who control education systems throughout the Western world have a notable lack of interest in looking closely at liberal shibboleths.
Indeed, what are the facts? For all of the talk that we hear about “thinking out of the box” and so forth, the left hasn’t done much of that at all in this area. That, in my view, can be attributed to the two broad groups who make up the high command of the environmental left.
First, many people are now on the environmental bandwagon because they’re profiting from it. There’s a joke on The Simpsons where Bart tells Lisa that all that recycling does is, “ensure that we’ll spend our last days using inferior products.” There’s something to that – entrepreneurs are moving a lot of garbage by mounting the global warming bandwagon.
Indeed, on that subject, I can already see at least one traffic ticket in my future. The Vancouver Province reported on Sunday that the city of Oak Bay, on Vancouver Island, is set to become the first municipality to permit onto its streets pitiful electric cars with a maximum speed of 40KPH, even in areas where the normal speed limit is 50KPH. Let’s all think about what this would mean, in practice. The speed limits on our roads are already too low – locally we have plenty of arterial roads with a speed limit of 50KPH where it ought to be (and, as a practical matter, people already travel at) 70-80KPH. And, of course, the kind of people who buy cars with a maximum speed of 40KPH are the very sort of people unlikely to ever push any vehicle up to its maximum speed, just out of their very nature. Personally, if I ever find my path blocked by some moron driving his $20,000 golf cart down the road, I’m going to do my damndest to run the son of a bitch off the road. The fact that people might plausibly spend that much money on those pieces of crap is proof that there really is a sucker born every minute.
Second, there’s a hard core of environmentalists whose interest in the movement derives from their hatred of Western Civilization and their desire to hobble it. It is, as others have pointed out, no coincidence that Global Warming took off as an issue with the fall of the Soviet Union – many radical environmentalists were (or would have been, had they been old enough) communists or fellow travelers in another world.
Both of these groups of people want to guide this debate in a particular direction for their own peculiar reasons. In the first case, because there’s billions to be made off of this craze and in the second, because they want us all to be sweating (or freezing) and starving in the dark because, at their core, they hold communistic beliefs and want to equalize global living standards through the traditional socialistic expedient of dragging everyone down.
Modern civilization consumes “too much”? Compared to what standard? What is our frame of reference here? The implicit thinking behind this, in the case of the latter group, is that we consume “too much” with regard to the rest of the world (IE – “more than our fair share.”). But, in practical terms, that’s a communist belief that I doubt would be shared by most self-described environmentalists. And, if a self-described environmentalist shares in that belief without accepting those underlying assumptions (as I suspect most of them do), than the belief has no rational support and is therefore delusional.
If you think that we consume “too much” because you believe that the Earth’s resources should be distributed equally, then you have a rational –however despicable I might find it – basis for that belief. But, if you believe that, then we need to be having a very different argument than the one that we are presently having.
If, on the other hand, you believe that we consume ‘too much” simply because you believe that we consume too much, than you owe it to yourself to attempt to ascertain whether that belief is rational. As I said above if, upon examining that belief, you are willing to support it by asserting that the world’s resources ought to be shared equally, than we’re in another area of debate entirely. But if, on the other hand, your belief is simply that we are consuming “too much” without any reference as to what the correct amount would be and why, then your belief isn’t rational.
If you believe that we’re consuming “too much” with reference to the world’s stocks of various resources, then I put it to you that your opinion rests upon insufficient information. Altogether, we have in North America energy stocks to last for several centuries at present rates of consumption – an outcome which is unlikely in any case (if we’re still using mainly oil as transportation fuel in the year 2300, we deserve to die starving in the dark).
Civilization needs to be fed with energy. Those who would tell you otherwise are every bit as deluded as those nuts out there who tell Anorexics that people out to help them are really out to get them.
Posted by Adam T. Yoshida on July 20, 2008 in Current Affairs | Permalink
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Comments
Adam: Well, I sure hope we all have enough food to eat for the next couple of days. And enough fuel to provide transport for groceries. I hate to think what would happen to civilization as we know it if we all had not enough food and fuel for the next couple of days. I agree with you. Big changes would happen very quickly if people did not have food and energy right there right now!
Posted by: Agha Ali Arkahn | 2008-07-20 11:46:15 PM
Hey, Adam. I live in Oak Bay, at least temporarily while my new home mid-Vancouver Island gets built. Forty KPH electric vehicles would make no difference here. There are so many cross-walks and older people that forty Ks would be about all one could go. And Oak Bay is not large: it's a tiny community but a great place to live. Heck, it's part of the best place in the world.
Posted by: dewp | 2008-07-20 11:55:25 PM
REAL electric cars are likely coming in the next few years anyway, so I don't see what we gain by making this compromise. Whether the electric cars remain for the long term or whether they wither again as they did in the 1980s when the price of oil crashed is an interesting question. The "oil panic" of today still doesn't come close to that of the 1970s, with the curse of stagflation and insurance rates at 20 percent.
Posted by: Shane Matthews | 2008-07-21 7:55:46 AM
Sorry, that should read: "INTEREST RATES at 20 percent."
Posted by: Shane Matthews | 2008-07-21 7:56:42 AM
Well, let's encourage more of these envirowhackos to starve themselves to death or die of thirst or freeze to death.
The rest of us can get on without the hysteria and continue to grow and thrive unhindered.
Epsi
Posted by: Epsilon | 2008-07-21 12:18:44 PM
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