Fossil Fuel as Forbidden Fruit

Many people liken global warming catastrophism to religion, and the two sound more and more alike as time goes on. Consider how some greens have spoken about the pandemic, as Brendan O'Neill of Sp!ked recently reported. It sounds no less fire-and-brimstone-y (or cynical) than any time some preacher gratuitously injects his idea of a moral message into any other calamity:

And carbon offsets are the modern version of papal indulgences... (Image by Nick-philly, via Wikimedia Commons, license.)

For the past 21 months of infection and lockdown, greens have been mashing together Covid with climate change. They've argued that the Covid pandemic is a deathly illustration of what happens when humankind constructs so many global, intimate connections -- trade, travel, flying, etc. And they have insisted that Covid is a stern rebuke to mankind, a call on us to rein in our energy-consuming excesses.

As Inger Andersen of the UN Environment Programme put it early on in the pandemic, 'Nature is sending us a message'. This supposed 'message' doesn't even have to be spelled out anymore. The misanthropic prejudice against modernity is now so ingrained in the elites that they all instinctively know what this 'message' is -- nature telling us to 'Just stop'. [link in original, bold added]

The rest of the article, in a similar vein, is worth a read.

And, for anyone who hasn't noticed the similarity, or who believes that appeals to "the science" by catastrophists aren't tantamount to pleading divine revelation, let's consider a similar "lesson" drawn from another catastrophe:

Reverend Franklin Graham, son of Reverend Billy Graham, suggests the city was targeted because of the city's sinful reputation.

At a speech in Virginia, he said, "This is one wicked city, OK? It's known for Mardi Gras, for Satan worship. It's known for sex perversion. It's known for every type of drugs and alcohol and the orgies and all of these things that go on down there in New Orleans. Reverend Graham continued, "There's been a black spiritual cloud over New Orleans for years. They believe God is going to use that storm to bring revival. [bold added]

And those universal, indefinite home detentions "proved" that "we" can limit our emissions. Blank out the fact that the cold chain those vaccines needed wouldn't have existed without fossil fuels: Earth's cleansing is at hand!

In every case, the activities of men-on-the-street are to be caricatured as short-range and "unimportant" in the grand scheme of things -- and painted as offenses to an ineffable quasi-entity. In the meantime, the de facto high priests run the show and enjoy the actual excesses, as judged by their professed standards.

Whatever your stand on whether climate catastrophism is a religion, it at least does an outstanding job of imitating one, as far as I'm concerned.

-- CAV