Today is Earth Day, and since I haven’t written about this foolishness for a while, let me do so now.
You have been trained to think — although conditioned to think would be a more accurate way to say it — that the debate over environmentalism is a debate between those who want to take care of the planet and those who do not. But this is, as Lao Tsu might have put it once, “not it.”
C.S. Lewis once explained, in The Abolition of Man, that when we speak of man’s conquest of nature, we are often speaking of man’s conquest of other men, with nature as the instrument. So it is here.
If there were ten of us in a room, and some of us thought the room too hot and others thought it was too cold, if one person took it upon himself to station himself by the thermostat with a revolver in order to settle and control the debate, it would not be accurate to say that he had simply “seized control of the temperature,” although he had. If we wanted to understand the complete picture, we would have to acknowledge that he had seized control of the people in the room, using the temperature as his stated “cause,” the issue that finally forced him to take action.
Think it through. What is the revolver for? It is not so that he can shoot the temperature.
Environmentalists do not want to control the environment. They want to control you, with the environment as their instrument. Ah, no, not at all, you say, they don’t want to run anybody’s life . . . Hold on a sec — I have go sort out my garbage.
They are the ones wielding fines and jail time, and they use the weather as their instrument.
Of course, if the debate were between advocates of good stewardship and bad stewardship, the Christian wants to be on the side of good stewardship. But stewardship only applies where you have authority, which you would have if talking about your own property. But when a man from the government shows up and threatens you because you were collecting rain water or something, he is not showing good stewardship over the earth, he is showing bad stewardship over you.
Environmentalists are stewards all right, but of a particular kind.
“But if that servant says to himself, ‘My master is delayed in coming,’ and begins to beat the male and female servants, and to eat and drink and get drunk, the master of that servant will come on a day when he does not expect him and at an hour he does not know, and will cut him in pieces and put him with the unfaithful” (Luke 12:45-46).
Well said! Happy Earth Day. ;)
The guy in the parable used the gun to control the people to the end that the temperature would change according to his desires.
In the evenronmentalism situation, don’t the activists/legislators use the fines/jail time to control the people (making them sort trash) to the end that the temperature would change according to their desires.
Isn’t that more parallel than the climate being the gun/instrument? Or do you not believe they really believe in the climate problem?
no one really believes the climate is a problem we have any ability to change, manipulate, or effect at this time. Anyone with half a brain cell to rub together knows the climate of the planet has varied extremely over the eons, and also knows there are so many different factors we literally cannot comprehend them all at this point.
So since we cannot change the earth, the only thing these people could want is to enslave us all.
“no one really believes the climate is a problem we have any ability to change”. You’re wrong! Unfortunately, far too many (mostly publicly educated young people) believe that humans are responsible for climate change even if the climate has not appreciably changed since the last mini ice age…and that was short lived in its self. This author has nailed it. Leftists began their assault on the public education system in earnest during and after WWII. They now have seized control of the educational “thermostat” and are filling the US will young people who cannot think rationally, have no common sense,… Read more »
You won’t know a tenth of this story until you work somewhere in the production economy. If your entire job consists of talking on the phone, attending meetings, and writing e-mail, you may be unaware of just how far reaching and destructive the environmentalists have become. But if your job involves actually producing things, then chances are the enviros are all up in your business, telling you what may and may not be done, what new doodads have to be stuck on your machinery — or even if you must destroy your perfectly good machinery and buy new and inferior… Read more »
I’m not sure if you were addressing me or responding to the piece in general, but, if you were, I’m saying the behavior control is a means (with the penalties being a secondary means to enforce the primary) to what they believe is a real environmental end or outcome.
I was addressing the article in general. I work in the electric power generation industry where the enviros have been particularly bad. But I know people who work in other production industries from petrochem to trucking. In general, if your job involves goods and not just soft services (like teaching, lawyering, accounting, etc.), then the EPA is a source of never-ending evil. And this explains in part how the EPA has become such a malevolent force. Many voters, perhaps most, don’t work in production industry. They are teachers, lawyers, bureaucrats, cops, soldiers, retailers, and so on. So they are unaware… Read more »
I’m in trucking. :)
Hope your DPF works better than my son’s does.
Well I’m in the safety department, so I don’t have one. We have 67 in the fleet, though, and, while one clogs every now and again, the main problem they give us higher purchase prices when we buy a new truck.
My son drives in the far north. He had to improvise a heater on his DPF tank just to keep driving.
They’re the same ones who assured us a generation ago that we can’t stop progress. That factory ruining your neighborhood? Better move because YCSP.
As socialist liberals “steward” the economy,
So socialist liberals will “steward” the environment.
Google their economic and environmental “stewardship” of the Aral Sea , now almost non existent.
????
Ahhhh, and now we begin to brush up against the underlying root, the very “nub” of liberalism–and that is that liberalism hates people.<–underline, italic, bold. In it's very essence, liberalism seeks to control, crush, and eliminate people. It believes we have too much freedom. (Oh, how they hate that word in their most secret of hearts.) It believes people are a disease on the skin of their beloved Gaia. And THAT is why liberalism holds as its most sacred of sacraments the rite of abortion. Modern progressive liberalism is merely a fresh repackaging of the worship of Moloch and/or Baal.… Read more »
Timmmmmberrrrrrrrrrr!????
I kinda wish people still subscribed to “humanism”, even if it’s the militant atheism of T. H. Huxley. That way, they might remember that even in their nihlism, man is still worthwhile (even if they don’t recognize the image of God that makes this so). :)
Pretty sure they don’t really like Gaia either. She sure hates them.
As “mothers” go, I can’t think of one with more issues than Gaia.
You haven’t truly lived until you have had a militant atheist threatening you with eternal damnation in the fires of global warming hell. It messes with your head. There are people were I live who have actually developed mental health disorders over this kind of behavior. They will have genuine anxiety disorders and panic attacks should a plastic bag enter their home and the horrendous shame they feel would be downright comical if it wasn’t so tragic. I kid you not, people feel compelled to wash their garbage out by hand, to carefully sort it, and there are cameras all… Read more »
And thus, we come to understand the mass apoplexy caused by shooting a lion.
This has actually become a new kind of eating disorder, orthorexia, where people’s rules about eating only locally produced, untrucked, properly packaged food begin to take over their lives.
Sounds like the new, non-Levitical “kosher”.
No doubt without the benefits of real kosher.
“But stewardship only applies where you have authority, which you would have if talking about your own property.”
When it comes to your own property you can do almost anything, provided you don’t do something extreme like turn it into a toxic waste dump. But who owns the air? Who owns the Ohio river or the Pacific ocean? Who owns the climate for that matter? Your model is too limited and needs revision.
The example he used seems legit to me? | http://www.ncsl.org/research/environment-and-natural-resources/rainwater-harvesting.aspx
I looked at the link but I don’t see anything outrageous.
The collected precipitation is required to be used on the property where it is collected, and may only be applied to outdoor purposes such as lawn irrigation and gardening.
So you can’t drink the water that lands on your property?
Your law makers are nuts
Didn’t at least Jezebel, if not Ahab, have a final act as Ordained dog snacks?
That’s almost like being recycled isn’t it?
Bad stewards should take note!
Environmentalists do not want to control the environment. They want to control you, with the environment as their instrument. I think that this is the end result: in that they are controlling others, however I am not certain that is the goal. One can use the temperature (or the children) to control men because he wants to control men—and those men certainly exist—and one can control men because that is the only way he can control the temperature which he truly cares about. Now regardless of the motive, we need to limit such men because whether they seek power for… Read more »
“One can seek authority rightly, or be placed in a position of power—and we need authority—but the pursuit of power is often done in the methods of the world which has such a bad track record.”
I think it was Frank Herbert who said something like ‘It’s not that power corrupts, but that power attracts the corruptable’.
It probably does both. Success after all is a temptation.
Is like to point out that theirs isn’t the first gun in the room. I’m referring to the fossil fuel industries and their aggressiveness toward renewable energy. Unfortunately, the environmentalists are pointing their guns at the same people.
The following is an op-ed from John Coleman (founder of the Weather Channel) published today in USA Today: On this Earth Day 2016, there is a great deal of frenzy about how our Earth is going to become uninhabitable, as the civilized activities of man allegedly trigger unstoppable global warming and climate change. With the Obama administration set to commit the U.S. to the Paris climate agreement by signing our nation onto the document Friday, it is obvious that science has taken a back seat at the United Nations. The environmentalists, bureaucrats and politicians who make up the U.N.’s climate… Read more »
This is quite good. Where did you find this quote?
I used think the EPA was evil too then I visited Guatemala and came back thanking God for the clean exhaust of 20 idling American cars on the street outside the airport in Atlanta compared to the deisel smog of the streets in Guatemala it was like fresh air.
Air cleared throughout the Western world over time without the EPA. I would be surprised if the improved situation in the US was due to them.
You actually mean that seriously?
I really highly recommend you look up the history of pollution regulation in the USA, and in other Western countries as well. Then report back how air actually cleared in the Western world.
I am not opposed to having clean air, clean water and a litter free environment. Nor am I opposed to some legislation surrounding these things. Yet I am sceptical of the claims from the left of how effective their proposals are. Coal caused a mess in the UK a couple centuries ago though the improvements came long before the EPA in the US. The decrease in the number of children working came before the unions made their demands about age (then claimed victory). Some improvements may be aided by regulation, many improvements come from within industry because waste costs money.… Read more »
Where does your idea come from that the US has excessive regulation on environmental issues in comparison to other countries? Do you have any evidence to support that assumption? Improvements in the UK came before the EPA in the USA because the UK passed its Clean Air Act 10-20 years before the USA did. In fact, there had been multiple attempts to address the issue in Britain prior to that, but they failed because they were too vague and only imposed light penalties on violators. The smog problem in Britain’s major cities was horrific in the 1950s. The 1952 smog… Read more »
Jonathan, my first paragraph covers much of this. But these are relatively simple things. And air became clean. Some of it may be in part due to legislation, and some was due to efficiencies. It is more efficient (creates more energy) to burn particulates than to pump them into the air. And no one wants tons of toxic waste pumped into the drinking water. But you don’t need a leviathan agency to do this. Environmental policy (probably inside and outside the men in the EPA) now has its eyes on non issues and are opposed to good things. Such as… Read more »
Again, where do you get these ideas other than your desire to believe them? * Acid rain was certainly an event. The 1989 amendments to the Clean Air Act that added in regulation of sulfer dioxide and nitrogen oxides dramatically reduced the level of both in the atmosphere, and acid rain notably declined as a result. * There hasn’t been research showing “they were wrong about CFCs” or “the replacement chemicals are far worse”. Total column ozone went from measurably decreasing from 1980 to 1996 to remaining basically constant since then. While the bleeding was stopped, it takes far longer… Read more »
We are not going to get very far here. I don’t deny that preventing sulphur dioxide getting into the atmosphere will alter the production of acids, I mean that acid rain was a non event in the sense that it was not harmful. An intervention that was costly to no effect. There is much debate about the ozone layer. I don’t buy that CFCs were ever harmful. And there are environmental consequences. Refrigreation units cannot easily be topped up, they need to be emptied and refilled, unlike CFCs. I never said I was pro-oil spill, I am saying that people… Read more »
Would this be the EPA you’re talking about?
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/08/20/before-colorado-mine-disaster-epa-project-caused-spill-in-georgia.html
A stalwart sail boat must have shrouds from the left and the right so it can tack across the shifting winds to make head way. We need both sides and can’t get up wind with only one perspective of a shroud lest our mast fall free away and us dead in irons drifting at the mercy of _________________
“at the mercy of ” …….Luddites?
I’m all for shrouds, stays, fore stays and back stays. I love balance. I love sailing!
However, power boats, like good ideas, supercede previous ideas and achieve balance in new ways.
The absence of shrouds does not have to mean anyone is adrift.
I think the best way to take care of the environment is for my wife and I to both travel to London in separate planes–each plane being for our use alone. Nothing says “I love the environment” like burning an extra 20,000 gallons of jet fuel, I tell you. Or buying a 100′ houseboat, or living in a 20k square foot home. As they said in The Quiet Man, a man would have to be a sprinter to find his wife in a house/boat/bed that big. Actually, I rode my bike to work. Lousy environmentalist I am, that’s for sure.… Read more »
A famer who does not care for his animals welfare and a workman who does not take care of his tools will soon see their good diminished. Yet the farmer who makes his animals happiness the ultimate end or workman the maintenance of his tools will likewise find himself impoverished. I fear environmentalism either presents itself or once was concerned with keeping the earth going so it could function the best for we humans. Yet slowly the earth has become an end in itself, worth sacrificing humanity for. But bring it up and they will automatically assume you want to… Read more »
(comeuppance)