Goldberg: The church of green

Jonah Goldberg, a religious conservative with a somewhat libertarian bent, has written an interesting commentary on environmentalism published in the Los Angeles Times. In "The church of green" he discusses the substantial parallels between the environmental movement as nature worship and religion. It is a well-written and interesting commentary.

Goldberg says "Whether it's adopted the trappings of religion or not, my biggest beef with environmentalism is how comfortably irrational it is. It touts ritual over reality, symbolism over substance, while claiming to be so much more rational and scientific than those silly sky-God worshipers and deranged oil addicts."

There is mention of the polar bears, whose numbers have quadrupled in the last 50 years. Strangely, the U. S. government just put polar bears on the endangered species list because possible future shrinking of polar ice might cause a decrease in their numbers. In reality, which does not matter to the Mother Nature worshipers, the number of polar bears is far and away primarily a function of their being hunted by humans, not one of weather change. It would be much cheaper to buy off Canadian hunters than to wreck the U. S. economy to save future polar bears. Besides, Bjorn Lomborg in his 2007 book Cool It estimates that the full implementation of the Kyoto Protocols on greenhouse gases would save one polar bear! Besides which, it is not clear that the polar bears would cast a vote for struggling human economies. They seem to love and thrive on well-stocked human waste dumps!

Thanks to Robert Bidinotto for pointing this article out to me in an entry in his web log on 20 May 2008.