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November 20, 2010

Brave Old World

By Robert Ferguson
The effort to discredit global warming skeptics is warming up globally. Australian blogger Graham Readfearn reports on Naomi Oreskes' speaking tour of Australia:

As a celebrated historian, Professor Naomi Oreskes is interested in the origin of things - where ideas start from, what drives them and ultimately who propagates them.

Oreskes, Professor of History and Science Studies at the University of California San Diego, has just arrived in Australia on a whistle-stop speaking tour promoting her new book, co-authored with Erik Conway, titled Merchants of Doubt - How a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming.

The book, five years in the writing, ultimately concludes that much of the world's scepticism on climate change - whether that be over the validity or certainty of the science of climate change, its causes or the need to act - is chiefly driven by a paranoid ideological fear of socialism and an unbending faith and belief in free-markets.

Put simply, free-market think-tanks such as the George C Marshall Institute, the Heartland Institute, The Science and Public Policy Institute and the Why-Can't-You-Just-Leave-us-Alone-While-We-Make-Oodles-of-Cash Institute (not a real institute) don't like industry to have to be held accountable.

Oreskes spoke to the ABC's Lateline program on this brand of scepticism which also drove shoulder-shrugs over acid rain, tobacco smoke and ozone depletion.

Says Oreskes, "It's part of this whole ideological program of challenging any science that could lead to government regulation, because it's part of an ideological conviction that all regulation is bad, that any time the government steps in to ‘protect' us from harm, that we're on the slippery slope to socialism, and this the ideology that you see underlying a kind of almost paranoid anti-communism. So even after the Cold War is over, these people are seeing reds under the bed." 

Has Oreskes' snarky book indulged what Freud called "projection"? It is certainly demonstrable that her book's "carbon footprint" and "greed" slams on skeptics are so filled with hypocrisy they "stink on ice."

But this has to be the topper:

The book, five years in the writing, ultimately concludes that much of the world's scepticism on climate change - whether that be over the validity or certainty of the science of climate change, its causes or the need to act - is chiefly driven by a paranoid ideological fear of socialism[.]
As an average six-year-old might ask, "Gee, ya think?" (See an in-depth response to Oreskes here.)

Does this sneering sentiment represent a strident admission by Oreskes -- and by extension, her comrades in the real "denial" camp -- that she has no fear of -- nay, embraces socialism? Is she saying, along with Newsweek Magazine, "We are all socialists now!"? Does she believe (and hold in disdain the fact) that the American Founders also gained -- after one of the most thorough, brilliant, and inspired studies in comparative governments and their flaws in "the course of human events" -- a "paranoid ideological fear" of the Leviathan State?

Here are just a few more "paranoid" anti-socialists:

"Today's debate about global warming is essentially a debate about freedom. The environmentalists would like to mastermind each and every possible (and impossible) aspect of our lives." - Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic

"If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, depart from us in peace. We ask not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains rest lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen."- Samuel Adams

"When plunder has become a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it." - Frederic Bastiat

"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men." - Lord Action

Is Oreskes is a Progressive leftist? Does she have no problem with the EU's and the U.N.'s drive for "climate justice," massive wealth destruction -- smiley-faced "wealth redistribution" -- Malthusian-driven population control (reduction), and the turning of every human on the planet into a conscripted, interchangeable brick for the "ruling class's" construction of their utopian tower to heaven?

In SPPI's recent paper, "Dr Rajendra Pachauri and the IPCC - No Fossil Fool," Dennis Ambler reveals:

The UN narrative says that developed countries of the Northern Hemisphere must atone for their "climate sins" of generating wealth and comfortable lifestyles using fossil fuels, by scaling back their economies through a process of "Contraction" and then transferring much of that wealth to developing nations, to bring them up to the new lowered expectations of the developed nations, described as "Convergence. "

Thus will there ensue a just and equitable Global Community of Nations, all having equal shares of the so-called Global Commons of the atmosphere and the oceans and living sustainable low-tech life styles in a state of Climate Justice, guaranteed by the UN World Government. It has been aptly described by Professor Fred Singer as "taking money from the poor in rich countries and giving it to the rich in poor countries."

Under this UN vision, consumption of everything will be controlled and rationed, globally, even to the point of individual allowances for energy use and carbon dioxide emissions.

So, what's really bothering Oreskes? 

Like those of Babylon's tyrants before her, are Oreskes' dreams troubled? Is she alarmed that, like Nebuchadnezzar's three Hebrew civil servants, Americans and their elected representatives are turning a deaf ear to the "consensus" heralds' daily shouting of "Fall down before the golden image! Everybody is doing it!"? As with Belshazzar, has her self-indulgent banquet been hushed by the sudden appearance of wall writings she cannot decipher?

That is to say, is she tormented seeing that the public is wakening to the real-world reality that since its inception, progressive, Radical Environmentalism has been a smooth skin stuffed with a filthy lie -- that the left's concerns are centered not on man's place in or relationship to the modern natural world, but rather on his relationship to the ancient Totalitarian State? 

That is to say, Environmentalism's serially contrived alarms, calamities, and apocalyptic soothsaying are not scientific, but political; its Leviathan-feeding prescriptions are not foundational upon science or data-driven policy, but rather upon policy-driven data: unidirectional fabrications advanced by self-interested propaganda, intense intimidation, and "thirty pieces of silver." 

The fog is clearing, and more are seeing that when confronted with choices between Truth and Falsehood, reality and deception, liberty and captivity, light and darkness, Oreskes' "green" rabble of adherents, agents, and dupes never fail to shout in unison, "Give us Barabbas!" As Chesterton might phrase it, when it comes to individual liberty and personal accountability, the Oreskes crowd reflexively employ a special sieve forged in the fires of Hell that catches and holds fast all the dross and allows the gold to wash away.

Welcome to Oreskes' brave old world.

Robert Ferguson is President of the Science and Public Policy Institute.
on "Brave Old World"