Climate authoritarians and the lessons of history

American Thinker ^ | 13 Jan, 2022 | H. Sterling Burnett

[MtnClimber]

History shows revolutions resulting in dictatorships typically eat their children and those who they overthrew alike.

To their own peril as well as everyone else, climate alarmists are increasingly embracing authoritarianism.

A rump group of the environmental movement has always been wedded to authoritarianism. Going back to the beginnings of the environmental movement, Progressive-era politicians such as President Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, the first head of the newly created U.S. Forest Service, believed democracy and markets were both ill-suited to manage natural resources. Progressives believed natural resources should be controlled, developed, and conserved by elite scientific managers and bureaucrats unbeholden to the wishes of the public.

Later, as detailed by Alston Chase in his powerful book In a Dark Wood, many Nazis were at least in part inspired by an expansive vision of environmental purity.

Although few if any progressives were full-on misanthropes, there have always been some of these within the environmental movement, pushing for increasingly extreme actions in defense of the environment and against human use of natural resources. The misanthropic wing of the movement has referred to humanity as “a cancer,” “a virus,” and “a parasite,” with some openly hoping for a killer virus to come along and wipe out most of humanity. Eco-philosopher Arne Naess, who coined the term deep ecology, said the ideal human population on Earth is 200 million, and he called for policies and personal actions to achieve that goal as soon as possible. Others have estimated the “optimal” human population as 1.5 to two billion people and claimed this justifies population engineering, including both “active” and “passive” means to get there.

Now even the academic literature is embracing climate authoritarianism as the world’s allegedly last best hope to avert supposedly apocalyptic climate change.

[MtnClimber]

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