Monday, May 21, 2018

Jeff Tittel’s Dishonest Package Dealing

Leading up to Earth Day 2017 New Jersey Sierra Club director Jeff Tittel opined in the Star-Ledger to Stand up to Trump's war on the environment this Earth Day. It’s full of hollow climate religionist sloganeering, such as condemning “climate deniers” in the name of science and accusing “Trump and EPA chief Scott Pruitt [of] siding with corporate polluters instead of our health and climate.”

Embedded in Tittel’s rage against Trump’s energy and Environmental Protection Agency policies is a simultaneous lauding of efforts to clean up polluted rivers and calls to stop construction of future energy infrastructure projects.

I left these comments:

Don’t fall for Tittel’s dishonest package-dealing.

It’s one thing to clean up actual harmful pollution by, for example, banning dumping of raw, untreated waste into rivers. It’s quite another to wage war on industrial development, like seeking to ban reliable, increasingly clean fossil fuel energy by stopping drilling and pipelines. The first is cleaner industrialization intended to benefit man. That’s good. The second is anti-industrialism that harms man. That’s bad. They are two entirely different things lumped together into one package deal, so that if you oppose Tittlel’s war on reliable fossil fuel energy, you automatically favor pollution. It is utterly dishonest.

Earth Day is the symbol of anti-industrial anti-humanism. They hate fossil fuels not because it’s “dirty.” They hate it because it provides cheap, reliable, clean energy. Fossil fuels keep us safe from the climate and other dangers that plagued mankind through all of preindustrial history. And if wind and solar can ever become as reliable as fossil fuels, environmentalists would find a reason to ban them, too. After all, reliable nuclear and hydro power emit no CO2, yet are also opposed by environmentalists. Earth Day anti-humanists oppose reliable, economical energy of any kind, because energy is the industry that drives every other industry—the very industrialization human beings need to live on Earth.

It’s important to understand that environmentalism [that is, ideological Environmentalism, upper case “E”] is driven by non-impact on nature, not human well-being, as the moral standard of value. Hence, environmentalists will never be satisfied. They will always seek more and more restrictions on productive human activity. Yet humans can only survive and thrive by impacting nature. Earth Day should celebrate the human ingenuity and the enabling individual freedom of capitalism, which together unleashed entrepreneurs to transform the planet from the danger-filled environment nature imposed on us to the safe, prosperous, clean industrial environment that allows each of us the opportunity to pursue flourishing and happiness. The Earth that the Earth Day environmentalists seek is no place for man.


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There’s an interesting twist to this year’s [2017] Earth Day—the inclusion of a March for Science on Earth Day. What’s interesting is that scientific progress is the prerequisite to the Industrial Revolution that environmentalists and their Earth Day is fundamentally, on principle, opposed to.

What are they up too?

There is no doubt that science is indispensable to human progress, including progress toward the development of technologies to alleviate and minimize negative side effects from industrialization, such as cleaner burning fossil fuels.

What I believe is the environmentalist movement seek to use science in the same way that Marxian communism uses to promote socialism and Nazisim and Progressivism used to promote eugenics. Following in the footsteps of the communists and the Nazis, the environmentalists peddle climate catastrophism to promote a statist agenda—all in the name of and under cover of science. Science ceases to be a source of knowledge in service to human progress, and is instead converted into a tool against human flourishing. As Tittel concludes:

We need to stand up for science at the March for Science on Saturday in Trenton and Washington. We need to protest against climate-deniers in Washington D.C. on April 29 at the People's Climate March. We need to stand together for clean air, clean water, and to protect our planet from climate change.

What we need is to protect humans from Environmentalism. Environmentalism invokes science the way religionists invoke God—as an infallible authority that people who claim to speak for the authority say must be unquestioningly obeyed. I for one won’t ever let them get away with this quasi-religious gimmick.

Related Reading:

Earth Day: The Anti-Industrial Revolution

Reflections on “Earth Day” 2012: Americans Begin to Wake Up—Ari Armstrong for The Objective Standard

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