Doomsday Cult? Yes. But Also Murder-Suicide.

Over at Sp!ked, Brendan O'Neill has written an insightful column about global warming hysteria -- recently warmed over once again on the occasion of an updated climate report. His subtitle is The green movement is a doomsday cult. Progressives should have nothing to do with it.

I especially appreciate O'Neill's indication that so many of the doomsday images circulating on the internet or among leftist social circles often have little to do with their alleged cause:

Predicting doomsday by one means, they will cause it by another. (Image by Eric Mclean, via Unsplash, license.)

For example, if the Greek fires are down to the hubristic excesses of modern man, then we don't need to talk about EU austerity and how it impacted on the Greek public sector, including its capacity to fight fires. It's not Brussels' fault -- it's your fault for driving to Sainsbury's in a diesel car twice a week. Likewise, Erdogan's failure to prepare for the wildfires in Turkey gets buried by the global media's obsessive belief that every fire is a warning from Gaia. And the fact that the floods in Europe seem to have been exacerbated by poor planning is just casually pushed aside, buried under the guff about Poseidon's wrath and End Times. No wonder German ministers are happy to talk up the eco-apocalypse -- it takes attention away from their own failures of vision and infrastructure. [links omitted, bold added]

Yes. Not only do altruists get to bathe in the familiar emotion of guilt, or better yet, inflict it on others; but the central planners -- who stand to gain great power from climate-excused legislation -- also very conveniently (to themselves) get whitewashed.

Shouldn't we -- on the cusp of handing over what's left of our freedom to government bureaucrats -- be examining their track record with a fine-toothed comb right now, at the very least? (I oppose all government that isn't concerned with the protection of individual rights, but still...)

There is more, too, along the lines of how much like a religious revival the whole thing is:

There is a strange glee, too, in these warnings of End Times. Like all scolds, the eco-apocalypstas seem to take pleasure in telling the rest of us that we're doomed, that the planet will be consumed by heat death if we don't alter our habits. 'With raging wildfires, floods and pandemics, it seems like End Times -- and it's our own damned fault', says a writer for the Hill. 'Immediate repentance' is required, says the Guardian, sticking with the frankly mad religious view of floods and fires as violent rebukes for humankind's eco-sins. And of course, the 'immediate repentance' that is required is not saying the rosary a couple of times -- it's 'immediate and deep emissions cuts'. What about the people of China, India and Brazil who still haven't achieved our standard of living and who must emit a great deal more carbon in order to do so, I hear you ask? Don't be silly. They don't matter. The world's on fire. [link omitted, bold added]

I recommend reading the whole thing, and I completely agree with O'Neill's contention that climate hysteria resembles a doomsday cult.

O'Neill could have and should have gone further, though. He rightly indicates how use of fossil fuels has caused drastic reductions in climate-related deaths with their adoption, despite the world's increasing population: It stands to reason, then, that absent fossil fuels, such deaths would increase for starters. And not only would the people in the developing world fail to enjoy a better standard of living, ours would drop.

Indeed, scarcely a logical step further, one would consider the dependence of billions of human lives as such on fossil fuel-enabled agriculture, food transport, and food preservation. Couple that with the movement's cavalier attitude towards replacing the fuels they're in such a hurry to outlaw, and one may justly conclude that this cult is not just a doomsday cult, but a murder-suicide cult as well.

-- CAV