The Global Warming Religion
Written by Roger Graves
The Heartland Institute recently held a conference in New York entitled: Global Warming: Was it ever really a crisis?". As you may expect, it was largely a gathering of global warming sceptics, among whom (full disclosure) is yours truly. One young man turned up at the conference to declare that he had never witnessed such hypocrisy, and how could the participants sleep at night? However, when one of the panelists asked him which parts of their presentations he disagreed with, he replied "Oh, I didn't come here to listen to them".
That young man was obviously a devout global warming believer. Indeed, such is the depth of belief that global warming engenders that it is more akin to religious fervour than rational belief. But it isn't surprising that such believers exist, considering the billions of dollars that governments have been pouring into propaganda about it."
Global warming seems to have become the new established religion. I want to draw a clear distinction here between religion as practised by any group of like-minded people who come together to worship their God in their own way, and a religion set up by and controlled by an established power, which is what I mean by an established religion. The Church in the Middle Ages was an established religion, as was communism under Stalin (an established religion doesn't have to be about God).
Established religions have a number of similar characteristics. For a start, because so many resources are poured into spreading their beliefs, you can expect blind faith on the part of a lot of people exposed to them. If the Church in the Middle Ages said that the world was awash in invisible angels and demons, then that's what most people believed. If Stalin's communists said their system would lead to paradise on Earth, that's what most people believed. And if the global warming establishment says that CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere are going to make your toenails explode, an awful lot of people will believe it.
Another characteristic of established religions is that they deal very harshly with dissent. Anyone who questioned the teachings of the Church in the Middle Ages was labelled a heretic and burnt at the stake. Anyone questioning communism under Stalin could expect either imprisonment or a bullet in the head. Of course, this wouldn't happen under global warming - or would it? Robert Kennedy, Jr. called coal companies "criminal enterprises" and demanded their CEOs be jailed "for all eternity." Michael Tobis, a climate modeller at the University of Texas labelled as "palpably evil" anyone who questioned the wisdom of Al Gore and suggested that doubting Mr. Gore was "morally comparable to killing 1,000 people." "So far, the global warming establishment doesn't have the power to punish sceptics, but with an apparent believer in the White House, who knows what might happen.
Yet another characteristic of an established religion is that there is an extensive priestly class who control it, are rewarded well by it, and have a vested interest in keeping it going. The priests and monks who ran the Church in the Middle Ages were among the best fed and best housed people of the age. (By the year 1500, the Church owned one sixth of all the land in England.) The bureaucrats and uniforms who ran Stalin's Russia were the aristocracy of that unhappy land. And have you ever stopped to think where all the billions of dollars that are funnelled into the "fight against global warming" end up? Global warming has its own priestly class of bureaucrats building little (and not so little) empires, NGO's awash in money, academics with huge research budgets, and so on.
Finally, a common feature of all established religions is that their real purpose is social control. The Church in the Middle Ages sent out a simple message - your place on earth is set by God, so do as you're told or you'll burn in hell. This attitude lasted well into modern times. Many people are familiar with the hymn, "All things bright and beautiful", but one verse that has been edited out in recent times went "The rich man in his castle/The poor man at his gate/God made them each and every one/And ordered their estate.
Communism is pretty good at social control, too. It's central tenet "from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs" translates more or less to "do as you're told, and we'll decide how much you get".
And so to the religion of global warming. We are all told by its priests that unless we stop producing carbon dioxide the whole world will warm up so that life will become extinct. The fact that global temperatures haven’t changed since 1998, and are projected to decrease somewhat for the next thirty years or so doesn't seem to worry them. After all, nobody said religions had to be logical.
The global warming scare is really all about political control of the economy. If the government has the power to tell you how much CO2 you are allowed to produce, then it can regulate industry, farming and commerce, and ultimately where you live and work. Can't have any of this oil sands business in Alberta, it produces too much CO2, so we'll shut that down. Under Ontario's Green Energy Act, the province can put up windmills pretty well anywhere it likes, without your permission. So you live outside the city and commute to work every day? It probably won't be long before the government tells you that commuting produces too much CO2, so you'll have to live in a little apartment downtown. And so on, and so on.
As a society we have seen our fundamental freedoms eroded bit by bit over the last few decades. The high priests of global warming are doing their very best to remove what little we have left. Just remember this, the next time the government tells you of the sacrifices we are all going to have to make to combat "global warming".