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September 14 - September 14, 2022
What about the polar bears? “The climate denialists” were right: devastating declines in the number of polar bears have indeed failed to materialize, which was something the creators of the starving polar bear footage were forced to admit.
Documenting [the effects of climate change] on wildlife hasn’t been easy,” she added.11 But the reason it wasn’t easy is that there was no evidence for polar bear famine. Of the nineteen subpopulations, two increased, four decreased, five are stable, and eight have never been counted. There is no discernible overall trend.
other factors may be having a larger impact. Hunting, for one, killed 53,500 polar bears between 1963 and 2016, an amount twice as large as today’s estimated total population of 26,000.
As for fossil fuel–funded climate denialists misleading people about polar bears, we couldn’t find any. The main critic of polar bear exaggerations is a zoologist in Canada named Susan Crockford, who told me that she neither accepts money from fossil fuel interests nor denies that the planet is warming due to human activities.
In response to the IPCC’s decision to let the exaggerators write the Summary for Policymakers, Tol resigned. “I simply thought it was incredible,” he said. “I told Chris Field, the chairman, about this, and I quietly withdrew.”
the scientific consensus, as reflected in IPCC reports, supports Tol’s view that, “Many of the more worrying impacts of climate change are really symptoms of mismanagement and underdevelopment.”
while the IPCC’s science is broadly sound, its Summary for Policymakers, press releases, and authors’ statements betray ideological motivations, a tendency toward exaggeration, and an absence of important context.
It can be partly explained by the financial interests of CAP’s donors. As we saw, renewable energy and natural gas interests funded CAP during the period when CAP was overseeing both Obama’s green stimulus program and the administration’s effort to pass cap-and-trade climate legislation in Congress, between 2009 and 2010.
In the early twentieth century, the American scholar William James defined religion as the belief in “an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in adjusting ourselves thereto.”47 The scholar Paul Tillich defined religion more broadly to include belief systems and moral frameworks. For environmentalists, the unseen order we need to adjust ourselves to is nature.
The appeal-to-nature fallacy holds that “natural” things, e.g., tortoiseshell, ivory, wild fish, organic fertilizer, wood fuel, and solar farms, are better for people and the environment than “artificial” things, e.g., plastics from fossil fuels, farmed fish, chemical fertilizer, and nuclear plants. It is fallacious for two reasons. First, the artificial things are as natural as the natural things. They are simply newer. Second, the older, “natural” things are “bad,” not good, if “good” is defined as protecting sea turtles, elephants, and wild fish.
Some ecological scientists recognized that they had inadvertently and unconsciously imposed a fundamentally religious idea onto science. “I am convinced that modern ecological theory, so important in our attitudes towards nature and man’s interference with it,” admitted one, “owes its origin to the [Judeo-Christian intelligent] design argument.
Environmentalism today is the dominant secular religion of the educated, upper-middle-class elite in most developed and many developing nations.
Most environmentalists are unaware that they are repeating Judeo-Christian myths, concludes a scholar who studied the phenomenon closely. Because Judeo-Christian myths and morals are prevalent in our culture, environmentalists know them subconsciously and repeat them unintentionally, albeit in the ostensibly secular language of science and nature.
I believe that secular people are attracted to apocalyptic environmentalism because it meets some of the same psychological and spiritual needs as Judeo-Christianity and other religions. Apocalyptic environmentalism gives people a purpose: to save the world from climate change, or some other environmental disaster. It provides people with a story that casts them as heroes, which some scholars, as we will see, believe we need in order to find meaning in our lives. At the same time, apocalyptic environmentalism does all of this while retaining the illusion among its adherents that they are
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“Whether or not God exists (and as an atheist I personally doubt it),” noted psychologist Jonathan Haidt, “. . . religious believers in the United States are happier, healthier, longer-lived, and more generous to charity and to each other than are secular people.”
But it quickly became clear there was no “objective” basis for morality. In the 1800s, philosophers pointed out all the ways in which what we believe to be “good” is based on our own selfish needs and changing historical and social contexts. Morality, it turned out, was relative to your time, place, and social position. By the 1920s, European philosophers argued that moral judgements could not be justified empirically and were simply expressions of emotion, which have no specific content and are thus meaningless. We couldn’t start deciding what was right or wrong based on what made particular
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After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, people in the West no longer had an external enemy against which to direct their negative energy and define themselves.
What we really fear when we obsess over our death is that we aren’t making the most of our lives. We feel stuck in bad relationships, unsupportive communities, or oppressive careers.
After two weeks of Extinction Rebellion parading coffins through the street, blocking traffic, and stopping Tube trains, many Britons had had enough. “Let us no longer beat around the bush about these people,” wrote one British columnist. “This is an upper-middle-class death cult.”
Lauren Jeffrey, the seventeen-year-old in Britain, noticed heightened anxiety among her peers after Extinction Rebellion’s protests. “In October I was hearing people my age saying things I found quite disturbing,” says Jeffrey. “ ‘It’s too late to do anything.’ ‘There is no future anymore.’ ‘We’re basically doomed.’ ‘We should give up.’
Thunberg and her mother say that watching videos about plastic waste, polar bears, and climate change contributed to her depression and eating disorder.
Conventional air pollution peaked fifty years ago in developed nations and carbon emissions have peaked or will soon peak in most others.
The amount of land we use for meat production is declining. Forests in rich nations are growing back and wildlife are returning.
The answer from many rational environmentalists, including myself, who are alarmed by the religious fanaticism of apocalyptic environmentalism, has been that we need to better maintain the divide between science and religion, just as scientists need to maintain the divide between their personal values and the facts they study.
As such, we need to go beyond rationalism and re-embrace humanism, which affirms humankind’s specialness, against Malthusian and apocalyptic environmentalists who condemn human civilization and humanity itself. As environmental humanists, whether scientists, journalists, or activists, we must ground ourselves first in our commitment to the transcendent moral purpose of universal human flourishing and environmental progress, and then in rationality.
The “corrective spice” to science, said Bacon, was “charity (or love).”
A core ethic of environmental humanism is that rich nations must support, not deny, development to poor nations. Specifically, rich nations should lift the various restrictions on development aid for energy production in poor and developing nations. It is hypocritical and unethical to demand that poor nations follow a more expensive and thus slower path to prosperity than the West followed. As the last nations to develop, it is already going to be harder for them to industrialize.
News media, editors, and journalists might consider whether their constant sensationalizing of environmental problems is consistent with their professional commitment to fairness and accuracy, and their personal commitment to being a positive force in the world.
Experiments inspired by Ernest Becker’s work suggest that doing so could help with our angst. When psychologists encourage people to think of their eventual deaths, they tend to feel anxious about how they are living their lives. But when they encourage people to imagine they are dying, and to look back on their lives, they tend to do so with gratitude, appreciation, and greater love toward those around them.
