Why We Should be Against “Saving the Planet” By James Reed

US intellectual, Michael Lind, has a provocatively titled article, “Why I am Against Saving the Planet (and Why You Should be, Too),” making the case that I fully agree with, that environmentalism is an anti-Christian, anti-human religious cult, hostile to modern civilisation, and wallowing in romantic primitivism, while the environmentalists enjoy the comforts of the social order that they despise. Thus, the stated goal of environmentalism, to “save the planet,” means to save the planet from humans, in particular, those that the Left despise.

Probing deeper, the idea of the “environment” employed by the environmentalists is that of a self-regulating system, where the mere loss of one species damages the whole. But, that is incoherent, as over evolutionary time, 99 percent of the species that have been on the Earth eventually go extinct. As well, global temperatures have fluctuated over time, from ice age cold, to hotter than now, with carbon dioxide levels being only one factor in the complex equation of global temperature. Thus, environmentalism is simplistic about even its key concept: temperature.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/against-saving-planet

“We are constantly being exhorted to “save the planet.” Indeed, saving the planet has become the de facto religion of politicians, business elites, and intellectuals in the West, replacing Christianity’s earlier mission of saving individual souls. But what does the environmentalist slogan actually mean? On examination, the phrase means saving the planet from us—that is, from human beings and our works.

The term “ecology” was invented in 1873 by the German scientist Ernst Haeckel, and his work owed much to his own environment of 19th-century Romanticism, typified by a bias against society and civilization and a pantheistic awe before an idealized Nature. German romantic culture is the native soil from which our own modern environmentalism has grown, and many pseudoscientific elements of popular environmentalism that are unthinkingly assumed to be rational and progressive are in fact legacies of a passionately reactionary 19th-century Romantic tradition. One is the dubious idea of the web of life—no species of plant or animal can become extinct without harming all the rest. This is nonsense, because species have come and gone for billions of years, without necessarily causing the extinction of great numbers of other species. In some cases the disappearance of some kinds of plant and animal life has opened up opportunities for others, in the way that the extinction of the dinosaurs allowed mammals to expand into new niches.

The notion of a self-regulating ecosystem disturbed by human activity that would automatically restore itself to a “natural” condition if not for human interference is another bit of unscientific nonsense taken on faith by the green lobby. The evidence suggests that greenhouse gasses in the industrial era have warmed the Earth’s atmosphere. But it is also true that global temperatures have fluctuated wildly for billions of years, most recently in the Pleistocene ice ages. Human civilization developed in one of several warm “interglacial” spells following repeated expansions of ice to cover much of the Northern Hemisphere. In addition to fluctuations like these, there are catastrophic events that alter the climate and wipe out many species, like the asteroid or comet thought to have wiped out the dinosaurs and many other animals and plants on Earth. Contrary to what you would assume listening to green propaganda, if the human race vanished tomorrow the climate would not “stabilize” but would continue to fluctuate dramatically over time—at least until the gradual warming of the sun evaporates the oceans and turns the Earth into a steam-shrouded desert world in half a billion years, if the predictions of contemporary astrophysicists are correct. …

According to the peculiar ethics of mainstream environmentalism, practically any modification of “the environment” or “the ecosystem” or “the planet” or “nature” is, by definition, harmful. Developers who cut down woods and build housing subdivisions are evil, because they are displacing the local plants and wildlife. Electricity that powers life-saving hospitals and air conditioners or heaters in buildings is sinful, if it is generated by coal or oil or natural gas that emits carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. Paved roads? Forget it. They turn wild animals into roadkill.

In short—every single modification of nature by humanity is evil by definition, according to the popular conception of environmentalism.”