SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST: NPR: A new kind of ‘eco-chaplain’ is helping people deal with ‘climate grief’ – ‘Grief, anger and depression’ from ‘feeling that it may be too late to save a planet in deep peril’ – ‘Trump’s election freaked everyone out.’
As Joel Kotkin wrote in Newsweek in September of 2022: Environmentalism Is a Fundamentalist Religion.
Today’s climate activists resemble nothing so much as a religious movement, with carbon the new devil’s spawn. The green movement is increasingly wedded to a kind of carbon fundamentalism that is not only not realistic but will reduce living standards in the West and around the world. And as with other kinds of religious fundamentalism, the climate hysteria is often overwrought and obviously so; a decade ago, the same activists predicted a planetary disaster by 2020 if the U.S. and China did not reduce their emissions by 80 percent—which of course never happened.
This approach is a losing one that reduces the effectiveness of the green lobby. What’s needed to combat climate change is a pragmatic approach based on adapting to real and verifiable dangers. And this starts with environmentalists acknowledging the limits of our ability to curb emissions in the short run.
This is not to cede the fight. The reality is what we do in the West means increasingly little. Today’s biggest emitters comes from China, which already emits more GHG than the U.S. and the EU combined, while the fast growth in emissions comes increasingly from developing countries like India, now the world’s third largest emitter. These countries have developed a habit of blaming climate change on the West, then openly seeking to exempt themselves from net zero and other green goals. And the West’s penchant for hyper-focusing on our own state or national emissions misses the reality of where the future problems are actually concentrated.
Fortunately, the religious true believers know who will save them:
But some true believers are now curiously attacking actual religions: Greta Thunberg arrested at pro-Palestinian protest.
But then, as I wrote earlier this year, plus ça change: the original European environmentalists had a strange coalition with Islamists as well.