Global Warming Continues to Fall From Grace

by Jason Stotts

In yet another heavy blow to the AGW camp, the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) has announced that it is closing it’s doors.  According to the National Review Online:

Global warming-inspired cap and trade has been one of the most stridently debated public policy controversies of the past 15 years. But it is dying a quiet death. In a little reported move, the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) announced on Oct. 21 that it will be ending carbon trading – the only purpose for which it was founded – this year.

That’s a heavy blow to the AGW camp, since the CCX was to be the clearinghouse for the extorted money from people and business who had to buy “carbon credits” in order to offset their “pollution” from existing, err, I mean emitting CO2.

The Telegraph also has a very interesting write-up “What the Green Movement Got Wrong: Greens come to see the error of their ways” where they point out three major errors of the green movement:

Misanthropy. According to a veteran American Green, Stewart Brand, too many Greens believe “Nature good – humans not so good”. This approach is ultimately unpersuasive, since it is human beings you are trying to persuade. A policy focused on preventing human activity is one which defies human nature. Mark Lynas, one of the repenters, was shown in his younger days stuffing a custard pie into the face of the environmental sceptic Bjorn Lomborg. Now, he admits with shame, he was ”motivated by a sense of righteousness” which was self-regarding.

Exaggeration. If you say that the end of the world is nigh all the time, people start to disbelieve you. Paul Ehrlich talked utter rubbish about how the world would starve in the 1970s. A glorious clip showed a young but authoritative Magnus Magnusson explaining against a backdrop of artificial snow that “the new Ice Age” was upon us. Green activists give out the figure of 93,000 for deaths attributable to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986. The figure favoured by the recent UN investigation is 65. The idea that there are only a few months or years left to save the planet is both so discouraging and so untrue that it disables the cause it is supposed to galvanise. “We have got some time,” said Tim Flannery of the Copenhagen Climate Council, with heretical courage.

Damage. The most powerful part of the programme was that arguing that the Green obsession with banning and preventing things has done actual harm. The refusal to contemplate nuclear power has encouraged more use of fossil fuels and therefore – if you believe the warmist theories – more adverse climate change. The banning of pesticides has led to the deaths of millions of Africans from malaria. The obsessive hatred of GM crops led, in 2002, to the Zambian government refusing US supplies of GM food sent to relieve its people’s starvation.

This may be the other ClimateGate shoe dropping on the fanatical green movement and hopefully it will spell the end of the religion of environmentalism.

Look, I’m for having a nice world, but we need to understand the the world/climate/nature is not intrinsically valuable and if environmentalists want to have a greater buy-in, they need to take the approach “let’s make the world nice because we live here and we’d like a nice place to live.”  That’s the kind of thing that even I might buy into.