we cater to their idiocy

If the central tenet of environmentalism is that it's better to live somewhere clean than somewhere dirty, that it's better to breathe clean air and drink clean water than to breathe dirty air and dirty water, I'm completely on board with that philosophy. Who on earth wouldn't be? If we could create modes of transportation that inflict minimal harm on the environment while allowing us to enjoy our current, first-world quality of life, why would I ever say no to that? If we could find an energy-efficient, environmentally safe way to deal with litter and other forms of ground and water pollution, not to mention air pollution, what's there to debate? All of these are good ideas, at least in principle. Although I don't believe for a moment that nature is some la-la hippie fantasy in which "plucking one strand of the web affects everything" or "all things exist in exquisite balance," I have enough common sense to know clean from dirty, environmentally harmful from environmentally benign.

So when I reflect on my own attitudes about things like the environment and global climate, I don't consider myself an enemy of environmentalists. If their agenda is to clean up the parts of the planet that human civilization has turned into trash heaps, I'm all for that. My only caveat, regarding any sort of "green" measure, is that it has to be economically viable. This is why, as much as I'm charmed by the notion of solar energy, I look at its current expensiveness and unreliability and come away skeptical. I do, however, share in the optimism that our prowess on the road to efficient capture, storage, and use of solar energy is improving, as is true for other forms of renewable, sustainable, alternative energy. We're just not there yet, is all; we need a few more decades. I have high hopes for other potentially green technologies, like fusion, so I encourage the eggheads to keep trying to build their tokamaks and their stellarators. I'm for continued development in these areas! When electric cars become more energy-efficient and affordable, I'll have no trouble ditching combustion engines for good!

Environmentalists: I am not your enemy!

But then certain environmentalists—the wild-eyed fundamentalists who ironically fail to see the connection between their absolutism and Christian-fundie dogmatism—have to undermine their own cause by showing off their ignorance of things like climate science by making dire, apocalyptic, and risibly false predictions about the destruction of our planet. These idiots have taken over the media, and they're dangerous even if they're only a fringe minority. The problem, too, is that we regular folks passively and stupidly cater to their insanity, allowing them to have a platform long after their predictions have proven wrong. This Spectator article is a partial exploration of why these lunatics are allowed to retain their hold on the levers of power despite being repeatedly shown to be false prophets. I don't think much can be done to de-crazy the crazies, but the rest of the sane public needs to be educated about the doomsayers. We the People need to learn that, when the crazies appear and are proven wrong, they should be aggressively deplatformed: tarred, feathered, and then ignored, consigned to the trash bin of history.

ADDENDUM: the Spectator article is apparently hidden behind a paywall. I somehow read the whole thing off my cell phone, but when I switched over to my laptop, the paywall slammed into place. Sorry about that. I might write an "ADDENDUM 2" via my phone in which I quote several key paragraphs from the article. (Assuming my phone allows me to slip past the paywall a second time.) Sorry!

ADDENDUM 2: I registered for free at the magazine's site, which gives me limited access to Spectator articles. Here's an excerpt from the above-linked piece, "Climate doomsayers keep putting sell-by dates on their credibility" by Toby Young:

I was slightly surprised when Greta Thunberg announced at Davos that we had eight years left to save the planet. As long as that? Admittedly, that’s four years less than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who put it at 12, although, come to think of it, that was last January, so presumably she now thinks we’ve got 11 years left. But some doomsayers have been much less optimistic. According to Peter Wadhams, a Cambridge professor interviewed in the Guardian in 2013, Arctic ice would disappear by 2015 if we didn’t mend our ways, while Gordon Brown announced in 2009 that we had just 50 days to save the Earth. Then again, playing the long game can also catch up with you. In 2004, Observer readers were told Britain would have a ‘Siberian’ climate in 16 years’ time. We’re supposed to be in the midst of that now.

On the face of it, we should be grateful that these gloomsters make such oddly precise predictions. It’s like putting a sell-by date on their credibility. After all, when the soothsayer in question is proved wrong, they just shuffle off with their tail between their legs, never to be heard from again, right? In eight years’ time, when the planet hasn’t disappeared in a cloud of toxic gas, presumably Greta will throw up her arms and say: ‘Sorry guys. Looked like I was wrong about you ruining my childhood. I’m now going to become a flight attendant.’

But, weirdly, that never happens. No matter how often these ‘experts’ are shown to be no better at forecasting than Paul the Octopus — worse, actually — they just carry on as if nothing has happened. Take Paul Ehrlich, author of the 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb. ‘We must realize that unless we are extremely lucky, everybody will disappear in a cloud of blue steam in 20 years,’ he told the New York Times in 1969. Ehrlich also predicted America would be subject to water rationing by 1974 and food rationing by 1980. Ehrlich’s ‘bomb’ failed to explode, but his career didn’t. On the contrary, he’s now the Bing Professor of Population Studies at Stanford and the president of Stanford’s Center for Conservation Biology. All I can say is, it’s lucky he didn’t become a bookmaker.

The fact that Ehrlich is still an eminent environmentalist — and Prince Charles can pose alongside Greta Thunberg in Davos in spite of claiming we had eight years left to save the planet 11 years ago — helps explain why these Mystic Megs have no hesitation about making these forecasts. It’s a great way of drawing attention to their cause and there’s literally no cost to getting it wrong. The panjandrums of the mainstream media forgive them for spinning these yarns because they know they’re doing it ‘for the right reasons’. They’re not peddling alarmist nonsense — no, they’re just exaggerating the risk. In any case, they might be right and doesn’t the ‘precautionary principle’ dictate that we should change our behavior just in case? Oddly, these same secular humanists don’t apply the logic of Pascal’s Wager to believing in God. That would be unscientific.