Bryan Caplan writes
When someone says “There are too many Jews,†we suspect that he wants to kill Jews. Similarly, it turns out that at the root of Hitler’s propensity to kill people was his belief that there are too many people.
And if you’re tempted to say that Hitler proposed a barbaric solution for a real problem, take a look at how Germany actually did feed its population since 1945: increasing agricultural productivity and increasing exports. The two methods that Hitler dismissed out of hand transformed Germany into one of the richest nations in history.
Religions that command human sacrifice are good at providing power to their priesthood. Thus we see the first greenie famine being welcomed with delight by the true believers, much as they previously welcomed the return of malaria.
Environmentalists confidently state with immense confidence all sorts of “factsâ€, most of which are impossible to meaningfully test, some of which can be easily tested, and which test false – which test does not impair the confidence of the environmentalists in the slightest, just as the obviouse falsehood of the Christian doctrine of transubstantiation does not trouble those Christians who believe in it in the slightest.
Two obvious and extreme example are:
- the much repeated “fact†that we are in the middle of a vast mass extinction, that ten thousand species go extinct every year. Ask any greenie to name a species that has recently gone extinct. He will not be able to answer, and will be entirely untroubled by his inability to answer.
- the much repeated “fact†that the ice is melting, even though satellites show that the area of the world under ice has not changed significantly since satellites have been observing.
When environmentalist “scientists†report the disappearance of ice, they are not in fact reporting the disappearance of physical corporeal ice and snow, the stuff that causes your car to slide, and has to be shovelled off the path, the stuff that is apt to sink ships at sea. What they are really reporting is the disappearance of magic ice, the spirit of the ice, Gaia’s infusion of spirituality into a frozen wilderness that they contemplate from the comfort of Starbucks. Hence their total indifference to physical evidence. The holy ice, which is melted merely by man’s unholy gaze is disappearing, even though the merely physical ice continues to endanger shipping in pretty much the same places as it has for the last century or so.
Similarly when environmentalist “scientists†report that the polar bear is endangered, they are entirely indifferent to actual numbers of polar bears. Far from being endangered, polar bears, like deer, a pest and a hazard. Rather, because they raid garbage dumps, because they have become a pest and a hazard, the holy spirit of wild nature of which the holy bear is a manifestation, is in danger of going extinct.