Mark Steyn has posted a delightfully snarky piece on what really motivates so many to push for turning the clock back on technology and progress under the guise of “environmentalism.” In it he quotes Charles the Prince of Wales, some American friends, and various Greenpeace activists as they bemoan the economic exuberance of the great unwashed and lament our departure from the good old days where peasants died at 40, lived in meager disease-ridden hovels, and knew their place.

As a century’s worth of international progress out of poverty and tyranny slowly grinds to a halt, there are many, it seems, who now see poverty and repression as the new wealth and democracy. Well, not for themselves, of course; for the hoi polloi. Prince Charles is far from alone: he’s joined by Lady Nancy Pelosi, Sir Albert Gore, His Gloriousness King of Light and All that Lives and Moves Barack Obama, and their various minions in Greenpeace. There always have to be minions; some are monkeys with wings, others are hairy hippies with lice and ringworm and other means of getting themselves into the stratosphere, but they do about the same job. The mindless minions and their heady leaders of course demand that you the lowly citizen genuflect to the new Wizard of Oz (and pay no attention to the shiny-shoed crowd pushing and shoving behind the curtain): Mother Earth, who will then tell you where you may go and when and how often, how many times you may flush, where you may live, what you may do, eat, and say, and how long you may live upon her lovely face will be your all-consuming reason to obsecrate for your daily moldy, environmentally-friendly piece of bread.

As I seem to recall, that type of thinking led to a revolution somewhere in the Western hemisphere around say, 234 years ago. Actually, as Mark Steyn points out, today’s intrusively revanchist elitism is far worse than anything mankind has seen prior to the 20^th Century, but then I suppose there is much to be undone; human rights to appeal, technology, healthcare, and political power to concentrate only into the hands of a few and so very little time to do it. Indeed, many of the Earth scammers and self-exempters claim the world will come to an end in 10 years, if we, the ratty consumers continue to selfishly – you know – live. Never mind they said this ten years ago and ten years before that and ten years before that, ad nauseam. The reason they always say ten years is that they hope to be around and relatively young when they finally win all this power and the ability to look down on you and chortle; you know, so they can properly enjoy it. After all, what’s the point in being a tyrant with absolute rule over die Untermensch if you’re not young enough to experience the un-spoiled splendor of its restoration after such a long period of shameless democracy, liberty, and other annoyances.  

Of course the Prince has no clothes, nor do the congressmen, the president, and their simian flying hippies. Science is at best out on the matter and there are literally thousands of world-renowned scientists who contest the meme of anthropogenic global warming. In fact, such scientists do not contend that climate change doesn’t exist – if we glance at history we can see that the climate has radically changed over the course of just the past two millennia alone. For instance, Great Britain during the time of the Romans was considerably warmer and was known for its wine. When the climate changed, grapes went out and barley was in. As a result, beer became the favorite beverage of the English. In fact, some of the strongest critics of manmade global warming are meteorologists themselves, who specialize in matters of climate and other atmospheric conditions as their profession. Meteorologists suggest that the sun is the real culprit; that unusually strong solar cycles ejecting massive amounts of solar wind prevent interstellar cosmic rays from encouraging cloud development, which in turn affects global climate. This hypothesis has been around since about 2002 and is one example of how serious scientists question the role of man in changing a climate that has and will continue to vacillate wildly throughout the earth’s history.  Such a scenario suggests the best tactic in mitigating the effects of global climate change, which is inevitable, is through increasing consumerism, which then lowers the cost of and increases the amount of commercial research – the biggest and most effective cash cow in the R&D herd. But never mind rational discourse and examination of data; the era of histrionics is upon us.

Steyn relays a recent article about Prince C. Little,

Capitalism and consumerism have brought the world to the brink of economic and environmental collapse, the Prince of Wales has warned. . . . And in a searing indictment on capitalist society, Charles said we can no longer afford consumerism and that the ‘age of convenience’ was over.

Steyn follows up, “He then got in his limo and was driven to his other palace.” Steyn continues later on, “I always enjoy it when the masks slip and the warm-mongers explicitly demand we adopt a massive Poverty Expansion Program to save the planet.” For that is exactly what this global warming scam is: a “Poverty Expansion Program” The fact is there are some who seem to have a strong dislike for ordinary people; who think that human beings of one cast should remain in it – and should suffer every indignity as their punishment for it. This is the troubled ethos of statism and concentrated power.

It is the mentality that says that millions of Africans are better off dead than protected by the proven effective use of DDT that stops malaria in its tracks by killing off all the mosquitoes. It says that, as Steyn quotes Gar Smith of the Earth Island Institute, Africans almost have a duty to live in poverty, dance and sing happy music for us, and then to die young. As Steyn rightly says, “Capitalism is liberating: You’re born a peasant but you don’t have to die one.” Telenvironmentalists such as Al Gore et al preach otherwise. But history shows that this must be sugar-coated a bit, so as one cartoon put it, "let's change 'let them eat cake' to 'pie in the sky'". To move you to action before you have a moment’s time to think, they claim the end of the world is already upon us because in a sense it will be if we don’t act fast: The global trend for some time has been towards greater democracy and diffuse power, which quite frankly scares the lot of them to death. Steyn continues: “[T]he environment is an all-purpose umbrella for regulating everything you do. It’s the most convenient and romantic justification for what the title of Paul Rahe’s new book rightly identifies as ‘soft despotism.’”

If given my pick between an age of romance and an age of enlightenment, I think I would prefer the latter.