William Sullivan, "The Left Demands Millions of Human Sacrifices to Appease the Gods of Climate Change," at the American Thinker.com, puts a good case that the now mainstream ideology of climate change alarmism, is a new, dangerous cult, with strong parallels to things of the past such as Aztec ritualistic sacrifice. Wildfires, snow storms and heat waves are seen as Mother Earth, Gaia for the Greens, being angry. While virgins are not yet thrown into volcanoes, worse occurs, where the sacrifices are in the living standards of ordinary people like us, in terms of rising costs of living from the movement away from fossil fuels. There is a distinction between the sacred and profane, with most of the things we ordinary people need to survive being regarded as profane, such as red meat.
And then there are real deaths. The Greens celebrate population limitation and abortion and see 73 million abortions a year as a good start. In America, 1-in-5 women who become pregnant abort their babies, at a rate ranging between 1,500 and 2,500 per day.
The comparison of the present Leftist, culture of death is perhaps unfair to the Aztecs, since while the exact death toll of Aztec sacrifices is unknown, it was thought to be around 20,000 per year, showing them to be rank amateurs in the game of death. The environmentalists aim to depopulate the world by billions.
"At their Monday night poker game in hell," writes Mark Steyn, "I'll bet Stalin, Hitler, and Mao are kicking themselves. 'It's about leaving a better planet for our children?' Why didn't we think of that?"
These three evil socialists of yesteryear would certainly be green with envy at the way today's green socialists have convinced millions of citizens to willingly surrender their liberty to the State.
"The ruling classes of the fading West are determined to save the planet by immiserating their fellow citizens," writes Joel Kotkin. He continues:
Their program calls not only for fewer people and fewer families, but also for lower consumption among the masses. They expect us to live in ever smaller dwelling units, to have less mobility, and to endure more costly home heating and air-conditioning. These priorities are reflected in a regulatory bureaucracy that, if it does not claim justification from God, acts as the right hand of Gaia and of sanctified science.
This apparent religiosity highlights an interesting sort of logical somersault for modern progressives. On the one hand, they believe it to be primitive "Christian Nationalism" to assert, as all documents associated with America's Founding do, that our natural rights were endowed to us by God, rather than some government edict written by a government official somewhere. On the other hand, high priestesses like Nancy Pelosi assure the faithful that hurricanes on the Gulf Coast and wildfires on the West Coast are signs that "Mother Earth is angry," and is visiting her vengeance upon us.
Quite literally, today's party of The Science™ is an apocalyptic doomsday cult which fears the wrath of deities that are personified by nature, complete with the sacrifice of countless children.
"Access to safe abortion is a right, a moral imperative," says Gabby Bess in her article at Vice. This article is wisely silent on the question as to who or what bestows this "right" among women to voluntarily kill their unwanted babies, but we can safely assume it's not the Christian God that was recognized by the Founders as having bestowed upon us a right to life.
On a global scale, 73 million babies are killed in the womb every year, or roughly 200,000 killed per day. In America alone, 1-in-5 women who become pregnant kill their babies, at a rate ranging between 1,500 and 2,500 per day.
But that's not enough to satiate Mother Earth's bloodlust, suggest Robert N. Proctor and Londa Schiebinger at the Yale School of the Environment.
"Voluntary family planning is too often ignored as a means to lower carbon emissions," they offer. The killing of 73 million babies resulting from unintended pregnancies might be a good start, but those are rookie numbers, I guess, given that "as many as 121 million pregnancies each year are unintended." Ostensibly, every "unintended" pregnancy results in a child who should be killed before he or she has the opportunity to add "4.5 tons of carbon into the air annually" by simply living on Earth.
This is all packaged as new and scientific revelation, of course, but political leadership and their propaganda surrogates suggesting that the totemic mass sacrifice of human beings will change the weather isn't exactly new.
The Aztecs, for example, followed a very strict cycle of 52 years which they believed related to their five primary deities. Human sacrifice, performed at a massive scale, helped prevent the end of the world at the end of each cycle, Aztec priests argued.
One particular god, Tlaloc, was the god of rain, water, and earthly fertility. The human sacrifices to this god were, incidentally, children. "The Aztecs believed that if the god didn't get them, he'd wreak havoc — ruining crops, withholding precious rainwater, and sending bouts of diseases throughout the land."
The problem for the Aztecs and other Mesoamerican cultures wasn't that they lacked scientific clout or sophistication in their day. They ran into a more familiar problem — they made defined promises and predictions, only to have unexpected things happen.
One of the reasons that the Mayan civilization collapsed, it is argued, is that the Mayan leaders left themselves accountable for the unpredictable nature of planet Earth. "Several severe — multi-year — droughts struck between [A.D.] 800 and 930," says Lisa Lucero of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. But the fact that the rulers tied themselves to the deities linked to natural events like droughts was their downfall. When the drought came, it didn't just create doubt in the deity, it created doubt in the political leadership.
Though some on the left might be surprised to hear it, longstanding droughts, destructive floods, massive hurricanes, and much else managed to exist prior to the Industrial Revolution which has been, by far, the fastest and greatest improvement to the standard of living for humankind that has ever taken place in history. But those peddling green energy and the sacrifice of children to appease Mother Earth today have found immunity that previous tyrants were unable to find, it seems.
Bad crop season due to drought? That's climate change.
Plenty of rain and a great crop season? Well, climate change is still occurring. The inevitable drought is coming, and when it does, it'll be because of climate change, mark their words.
Heat wave? Climate change. Blizzards? Also climate change. Tornadoes, hurricanes, wildfires? It's climate change all the way down.
In any event, the world's mothers are still meant to sacrifice their babies on the altar of the climate gods, and everyone else must pay their tribute, today in the form of increased energy costs and taxpayer-financed subsidies, to companies favorable to the ruling class.
Returning to Mark Steyn, perhaps it's not that Stalin, Hitler, and Mao are marveling from hell about the brilliance of modern green socialists, after all. Perhaps they're marveling at just how stupid and pliant we human beings have become. As Steyn comments about then-President Obama's proposed cow-flatulence tax:
If you went to an 11th century medieval peasant and said, 'So, peasant, I come from the king. You have to pay a bovine flatulence tax' he would say, ah get out of here. A medieval peasant would know that was nonsense. Now we take it seriously.
What progressives are pitching with the green agenda today is anything but progress, and their prescriptions to maintain political power are sillier and deadlier than ever. But that doesn't stop young people, being tutored in the modern-day temples that we call universities, from offering their absolute devotion to this green doomsday cult.