Eco Crowd Growing Desperate—and Dangerous

The climate scaremongers are losing the public relations battle on global warming—and it’s driving them absolutely batty.

Take eco-warrior Steve Zwick. Writing for FORBES Zwick calls on so-called “climate deniers” to be treated like war criminals:

Let’s take a page from those Tennessee firemen we heard about a few times last year—the ones who stood idly by as houses burned to the ground because their owners had refused to pay a measly $75 fee. We can apply this same logic to climate change. We know who the active denialists are—not the people who buy the lies, mind you, but the people who create the lies. Let’s start keeping track of them now, and when the famines come, let’s make them pay. Let’s let their houses burn until the innocent are rescued. Let’s swap their safe land for submerged islands. Let’s force them to bear the cost of rising food prices. They broke the climate. Why should the rest of us have to pay for it?

Notice that arguments contrary to what Zwick believes are not honest differences of opinion—they are “lies.” Those who disagree with him are not merely mistaken, they are malevolent. They are not worthy of being converted to his point of view via honest debate; they deserve only to have their homes razed.

This is fascism, pure and simple, and it is more and more a feature of environmentalist rhetoric.

The violent imagery has even seeped into the pronouncements of the eco-priests at the Environmental Protection Agency. Recently a video surfaced of EPA Region VI Administrator Al Armendariz admitting that his agency’s philosophy is to “crucify” oil a gas companies:

I was in a meeting once and I gave an analogy to my staff about my philosophy of enforcement, and I think it was probably a little crude and maybe not appropriate for the meeting, but I’ll go ahead and tell you what I said: It was kind of like how the Romans used to, you know, conquer villages in the Mediterranean. They’d go in to a little Turkish town somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they saw and they’d crucify them. Then, you know, that town was really easy to manage for the next few years.

How can anyone, whether on the Left or the Right, not be chilled to the bone to hear a government official talk in such a manner about private companies and individuals?

The desperation the eco-crowd feels is driven by a simple fact—the Earth is not melting. The disastrous consequences of carbon emissions we were warned about have simply not come to pass, as even some environmentalists are at last admitting. James Lovelock, for example, influential author of the “Gaia” theory that the whole planet is a single, living organism, has recently recanted some of his most egregious climate doomsaying. Lovelock, who once claimed that, “before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable,” now concedes that things may be OK after all.

“[W] don’t know what the climate is doing,” Lovelock recently told MSNBC. “We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books—mine included—because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn’t happened.” Specifically, the warming Lovelock and others warned about hasn’t happened. “The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time,” he admitted, though the global temperature “has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising—carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that.”

Kudos to Lovelock for having the guts to admit the truth, and for changing his mind in the face of new facts. It is an admirable quality so little found on the political Left, a cesspool of hate and ignorance where hack journalists and bureaucrats can openly fantasize about violently punishing their political and intellectual adversaries.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, global warming was the Left’s last, best chance to institute a world-wide redistributive regime. What happens when global warming, too, collapses?

I fear they will not go gently into that good night.