The ‘Anthropocene’ and Hatred of Man

A vigorous debate has been going on inside the world of geology science. The question is, are we in a new geologic age marked by human influence on the planet? The answer—No. According to a New York Times report, 

The highest governing body in geology has upheld a contested vote by scientists against adding the Anthropocene, or human age, to the official timeline of Earth’s history.

The vote, which a committee of around two dozen scholars held in February, brought an end to nearly 15 years of debate about whether to declare that our species had transformed the natural world so thoroughly since the 1950s as to have sent the planet into a new epoch of geologic time.

On the face of it, this seems like a rather ho-hum subject for most people outside the scientific community. But an article applauding the decision drew my interest because it highlighted something I’ve long believed and said—the Environmentalist movement is fundamentally anti-human. In Scientists Just Gave Humanity an Overdue Reality Check. The World Will Be Better for It, NYT guest essayist Stephen Lezak is quite blunt: 

The world’s leading institution on geology declined a proposal on Wednesday to confirm that the planet has entered a new geologic epoch, doubling down on its bombshell announcement earlier this month. The notion that we’re in the “Anthropocene” — the proposed name for a geologic period defined by extensive human disturbance — has become a common theme in environmental circles for the last 15 years. To many proponents, the term is an essential vindication, the planetary equivalent of a long-sought diagnosis of a mysterious illness. But geologists weren’t convinced.

The international geology commission’s decision this week to uphold its vote of 12 to 4 may seem confusing, since by some measures humans have already become the dominant geologic force on the earth’s surface. But setting the science aside for a moment, there’s a reason to celebrate, because the politics behind the Anthropocene label were rotten to begin with.

For starters, the word Anthropocene problematically implies that humans as a species are responsible for the sorry state of the earth’s environments. While technically true, only a fraction of humanity, driven by greed and rapacious capitalism, is responsible for burning through the planet’s resources at an unsustainable rate. Billions of humans still lead lives with relatively modest environmental footprints, yet the terminology of the Anthropocene wrongly lays blame at their feet. Responding to the vote, a group of outside scientists wisely noted in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution that “our impacts have less to do with being human and more to do with ways of being human.”

[My emphasis.]

"A mysterious illness," “the [rotten] politics behind the Anthropocene label,” "the sorry state of the earth’s environments," and "greed and rapacious capitalism" is how the author refers to the “fraction of humanity [that] is responsible for burning through the planet’s resources.”  

But what did that guilty fraction of humanity give us? The Great Enrichment is how historian Deirdre McCloskey describes the explosive, almost miraculous improvements in the living standards, over the past 250 years, of the fraction of humanity that Lezak blames for the “mysterious illness” that gave us “the sorry state of Earth’s environment.” But that “mysterious illness” was Capitalism, which McCloskey believes is more accurately labeled Innovism. And that political system, which Lezak labels “rotten,” is the system of rightful liberty that unchained ideas, individual productiveness, and commercialism to bless the large portion of the world with vastly enriched lives. "Lives with relatively modest environmental footprints" is how Lezak approvingly thinks of the large portion of the planet that still lives in devastating poverty—and the near stone-age state to which the author apparently dreams of reducing the rest of us. 

The rate of economic growth of The Great Enrichment, McCloskey argues, will “in a few generations—if the virus, pollution, war, and tyranny do not intervene—bring everyone on the planet to a level of prosperity well above that enjoyed now in Western Europe.” Lezak does not cheer that potential glorious development. He wants to prevent it—and roll it back. He wants to keep those “Billions of humans [who] still lead lives with relatively modest environmental footprints” in their current state of poverty and misery.

This is the definitive cold-blooded Environmentalist view of human progress, and all you need to know about the motives of anyone who speaks of "saving the planet.” It is from a flourishing human life that the planet-savers aim to save the planet. Lezak is not an aberration or outlier. Humans live, survive, and flourish by impacting the planet. The Great Enrichment could not have happened, and can never expand, on an ideology of modest environmental impact. It could not exist by limiting the “burning through the planet’s resources” to what Environmentalists call a sustainable rate.* Humans can’t live “in harmony with nature,” as animals do. Man’s primary means of survival is his reasoning mind. Man needs to apply his reason to his labor in order to vastly improve the planet to live and flourish. We either sustain the planet in its wild, dangerous, unimpacted state, or we sustain humanity and human progress. It’s either/or. The Environmentalists choose planet sustainability. Humanitarians choose human life.

Scientists Just Gave Humanity an Overdue Reality Check. The World Will Be Better for It goes well beyond the powerlust that politicians who use Environmentalism to gain power over our lives. At least they retain some respect for human progress, even though their policies would ultimately make progress impossible. What I sense when I read cold rubbish like Lezak’s article is pure hatred, and the resentment and envy of productive achievement that leads to it. 

* [Earth doesn’t actually give us resources. It gives us raw materials with potential. Turning those raw materials into actual resources comes from human thought and ingenuity.]

Related Reading:

Earth Day: a Pro-Human Perspective vs. the Anti-Industrial Revolutionaries

Greta Thunberg's Hatred of Man

Related Listening:

The Anti-Industrial Revolution, by Ayn Rand

The 'Climate Crisis' Dictatorship Storms Toward Us

 After reading J.D. Tuccille's Reason.com piece Your Favorite Crisis Doesn't Justify a Dictatorship: Authoritarianism grows increasingly popular, with environmentalists among the greatest enthusiasts, All I can say is, I TOLD YOU SO! Here are some excerpts:

"In the Q&A session after every talk I give on climate change, someone will typically raise a rather uncomfortable question: are democracies, given the short-termist nature of electoral politics, fundamentally incapable of tackling the climate crisis?" writes Mark Lynas, author of Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency, at Persuasion. "Nor is this idea limited to a political fringe. Environmentalist academics with impeccable liberal credentials also occasionally raise the question of whether classic Western liberal democracy isn't up to the job."

Lynas goes on to cite recent books, essays, and scholarly papers by environmental advocates suggesting that climate change is such a pressing concern that it justifies government officials steamrolling over limitations on state power and protections for individual rights.

"While, under normal conditions, maintaining democracy and rights is typically compatible with guaranteeing safety, in emergency situations, conflicts between these two aspects of legitimacy can and often do arise," wrote Ross Mittiga, a political scientist at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, in a paper published in December 2021 by the American Political Science Review. "A salient example of this is the COVID-19 pandemic, during which severe limitations on free movement and association have become legitimate techniques of government. Climate change poses an even graver threat to public safety. Consequently, I argue, legitimacy may require a similarly authoritarian approach."

The most recent example may have come too late for Lynas to include. On Tuesday, Elected Officials to Protect America (EOPA) held a virtual press conference calling on President Joe Biden to invoke the Defense Production Act (DPA) "to accelerate a clean energy transition for energy security" and, incidentally, "to help Ukraine." The Ukraine mention, one suspects, was thrown in because the DPA lets the federal government centrally direct the economy for national defense purposes. Then-President Donald Trump stretched "national defense" in 2020 to cover COVID-19, but the EOPA seem to recognize that climate change may be a step too far on its own, hence "Ukraine."

You can read the whole thing here. 

Here's what I've written:

October 15, 2018—New U.N. 'Study' Shows Climate Catastrophists Getting More Open About their Totalitarian Designs

March 7, 2019—‘Climate Crisis’: The Dem’s Path to Totalitarian Socialism

March 31, 2020, just as the COVID-19 pandemic was getting going—Did Trump’s Defense Production Act Invocation Clear the Way for the Democrats’ ‘Climate Crisis’ Authoritarianism?

April 30, 2020—As We Endure Through COVID-19 Lockdowns, Dems Gear Up for ‘Climate Crisis’ Authoritarianism

I TOLD YOU SO!

Related Reading:

The ‘Crisis’ Dictatorship

The Collectivist Left Media Launches Major ‘Climate Crisis’ Propaganda Campaign

Earth Day: a Pro-Human Perspective

As I've said in past years, Earth Day grew out of the New Left's anti-industrial revolution. It's still true that Earth Day carries a bias against industrialization, man's great achievement at turning a hostile natural environment brimming with potential into a great place to live.

Here is my post from last year:

Earth Day: The Anti-Industrial Revolution

Here are four articles celebrating man's great industrial achievement:

Forget “Earth Day”…Celebrate Life On Earth Day!--Michael Hurd 

THIS EARTH DAY, SHRUG OFF ENVIRONMENTALIST FEAR AND GUILT—Amanda Maxham for The Ayn Rand Institute 

An Unnatural Amount of Happiness — Why I Celebrate Transforming the Earth--Alex Epstein 

5 Environmental and Human Trends Worth Celebrating This Earth Day--Ronald Bailey
Peak population, expanding forests, more abundant resources, falling air pollution, and plenty of farmland.

The Anti-human Tyrade of an Ungrateful 16-Year-old

The recent United Nations gathering focussed, among other things, on climate. And look who it put up as the face of the climate crusade, a 16-year-old “climate activist.” In World leaders promise to do more at the U.N. climate summit after Greta Thunberg’s appeal, Seth Borenstein reported for the Associated Press:

Leader after leader told the United Nations on Monday that they will do more to prevent a warming world from reaching even more dangerous levels. But as they made their pledges at the Climate Action Summit after an emotional appeal from 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg, they and others conceded it was not enough.

“This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here,” said Greta, who began a lone protest outside the Swedish parliament more than a year ago that culminated in Friday’s global climate strikes. “I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you have come to us young people for hope. How dare you. You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.”

“People are suffering, people are dying,” Greta said as she sat on the dais with panelists who included a young clean-energy entrepreneur from India and a Brazilian lawyer representing youth climate activists. “Entire ecosystem are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you?” 

“For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear,” Greta added. “How dare you continue to look away and come here and say you’re doing enough when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight?” [sic]

In the last 30 years, life expectancies have risen, world poverty has plummeted, and by 2018 the middle class has soared to encompass more than half the world’s population. People’s lives are getting better around the globe. This is no fairy tale. That is called economic growth. Money is the miracle lubricant that enables that growth. Money makes possible the division of labor by facilitating the ability of people to get better together through the shared prosperity of trade, thus enhancing the liberty of the individual to use his reason to advance his own life.

That economic growth means people are suffering less. Fewer and fewer people are dying prematurely from climate-related danger as steady economic growth dramatically improves climate and environmental safety. Still, many of the world’s people are still living in deprivation, lacking even electricity. There’s much more to do. “Eternal economic growth” is a vital necessity; vital, that is, if improving human well-being is your goal. 

Yet, Greta Thunberg wants to roll back the clock to a time when the climate really was a crisis for humans--a chronic crisis, a constant battle for bare survival against famine and disease and pestilence and weather. For what? She wants to save the ecosystems from “collapsing”—which means, to save the planet from human alteration. Life without technology and industry, the energy and freedom that powers it, and the economic growth that results, is wholesale suffering and shorter lives. She damns money and economic growth outright, thus regressing mankind back to the hellhole of life in raw nature, in the process stealing the dreams and destroying the futures of the very young people she arrogantly claims to speak for. 

And what kind of life do today’s young people have to look forward to? 300 years ago, at the dawn of the Enlightenment, the odds were that a youngster like Thunberg wouldn’t have lived to 16 years old. And if she did, she could count on a brutish life of extreme poverty and drudgery in a hostile natural environment--the same stagnant life of her parents, grandparents, and generations past. Instead, a young person today faces a long, prosperous, much safer life full of opportunity. What brought that magnificent progress? Freedom, money, and economic growth. Today is the best time in the history of humanity in which to be a teenager. That’s the future that her elders bequeathed to today’s young people. And for that gift, all she has to say to her elders is, “how dare you?” How ungrateful.

But that’s not the worst of it. What of her claim that “the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight?” Nonsense. We’ve had decades full of hundreds of $billions in subsidies and regulations to encourage “clean energy” imposed by governments. It hasn’t worked. People want their reliable fossil fuels because economic growth needs reliable, cheap, plentiful energy, and economic growth is the only means of improving human life. But political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. To date, not enough political power has been brought to bear. The limited political solutions of subsidies and regulations have not made the impossible possible. Some controls have been tried, and have failed. So Thunberg demands what every utopian who thinks she has a right to force her values on everyone else. Though she doesn’t come right out and say it, she demands the total politics of socialist totalitarianism, plainly laid out by Leftists politicians. She’s addressing a government body. She demands that they force aside economic well-being. That means freedom must go.

How dare her! Hers is the voice of a monstrous evil. Thunberg’s message goes beyond the fairy tale of some prosperous “clean energy” future. It goes beyond windmills and solar panels. She proclaims the true heart and soul of Environmentalism, the moral supremacy of nature over human life. Give her credit for honesty. She doesn’t cloak her agenda in promises of jobs and economic growth, the way climate fear mongers do in pushing to outlaw fossil fuels and nuclear in the name of renewable energy. She flat out attacks freedom, money, and economic growth. “Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth, ” Thunberg bellows. We need “politics” (force) to impose “solutions” like: “Everyone and everything has to change so why waste precious time arguing about what and who needs to change first?” Sounds a lot like “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society,” as the UN puts it, that only totalitarian powers can bring about, as every utopian thug who ever sought to shape society to his liking has shown. She demands we “make the best available science the heart of politics and democracy.” That’s not a new sentiment. Karl Marx’s “scientific socialism” resulted in 100 million deaths by government trying to implement just that. The science of eugenics justified the German National Socialists’ examination policies. That’s what you get when you make science rather than protecting individual rights “the heart of politics.”

I don’t know how much of the 16 year old Thunberg’s vision is indoctrinated ignorance and how much is her actual conviction. Perhaps she is an innocent child victim of extreme exploitation “to advance a political agenda” or “vicariously living out her parents’ own dreams of global fame via their daughter,” as Emma Freire argues. Perhaps Thunberg is a victim of “betrayal,” having “been misled by the hysterics of doomsayers to spend their formative years trembling with dread” in order to make her a mouthpiece for those who aim to “massively increase government power” and “go from capitalism to socialism,” as Jon Hersey argues. Or perhaps she’s not so innocent. I do know one thing. Her utopian vision would be disastrous for human life on Earth. Such utopian disasters are never innocent. Whatever the case with Thunberg, that is the vision that the United Nations, the institution whose members claim to represent all the people of the planet, gave its platform to. How dare they!

Related Reading:

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress—Steven Pinker

New U.N. Study Shows Climate Catastrophists Getting More Open About their Totalitarian Designs

Paris Climate Agreement Adopted: New Central Plan for the World’s Economy and Climate—Ronald Bailey for Reason.com

The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels—Alex Epstein

The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the 21st Century—Ronald Bailey

The sustainability myth—Alex Epstein

Trump Provides the Right Kind of Leadership in Withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord

The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution—Ayn Rand and Peter Schwartz

The Formula for a Richer World? Equality, Liberty, Justice—Deirdre N. McCloskey

Extreme poverty has been reduced by 1 billion people in the last 25 years

Maternal Mortality Rates Are Plummeting in the World’s Poorest Regions

We Owe Our Children a More Technologically Advanced Society, Not 'Preserved' Nature

Fossil Fuels and Climate Change: Remember Life Before Them

Our Alleged 'Climate Crisis' is No Longer, Thanks to Fossil Fuels

Think Globally, Shame Constantly: The Rise of Greta Thunberg Environmentalism--NICK GILLESPIE

The Collectivist Left Media Launches Major ‘Climate Crisis’ Propaganda Campaign

Big Media has officially dropped all pretense at objectivity in reporting. It's the "Covering Climate Now" initiative. The NJ Star-Ledger, my newspaper, has not surprisingly joined the project, so I’m getting a daily dose of Leftist climate change “news”. Here’s the New Jersey Star-Ledger announcing its participation in the project:

On September 23, world leaders will gather at the United Nations in New York to decide how global society will deal with one of the most far-reaching problems we face today: Climate Change.

That meeting is the United Nations Climate Action Summit, and it is set to be a landmark event in which the nations of the world will submit their plans to meet the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement.

NJ Advance Media, the journalistic engine behind NJ.com and The Star-Ledger, is joining more than 170 other media outlets across the globe for an initiative called Covering Climate Now. 

The goal of the project — which is led by The Guardian, The Nation and Columbia Journalism Review — is to have a week’s worth of climate coverage leading up to the international summit. Stories will run online, in newspapers, on television and on radio. 

At least the Star-Ledger managed to avoid the term “climate crisis” and its ilk in its report, even though such apocalyptic phraseology is common on its editorial pages. It does, however, blame every perceived squiggle on climate change, such as “climate change threatens our lungs and raises wildfire risk in the Garden State, how hotter summers threaten New Jersey’s lakes and how changing oceans affect the sharks off the Jersey Shore. 

CNN/Business is more in keeping with the catastrophist agenda. It reported:

More than 250 news outlets around the world have committed to Covering Climate Now. 

What is it? An initiative to provide focused coverage of the climate crisis in print, on air and online. 

Participating news outlets are running stories in the run-up to the UN Climate Action Summit on September 23. The organizers hope to keep it going well past this month. [emphasis added]

Propaganda? You Bet.  Here's more proof, from the horse's mouth, the Columbia Journalism Review:

MORE THAN 170 NEWS OUTLETS from around the world with a combined audience of hundreds of millions of people have now signed up for Covering Climate Now, a project co-founded by CJR and The Nation aimed at strengthening the media’s focus on the climate crisis. [emphasis added]

How do I know it's a propaganda campaign? The tip-off is the term "climate crisis"--which is not a fact but a power-seeking political tactic of statist interests from Environmentalists to socialists. The climate crisis scenario is dishonestly being run as news, not editorial opinion, and will likely continue with increasing intensity and panic-mongering hysteria up to the 2020 United States presidential election.

The fact is, the tying of climate/weather extremes to climate change is a deliberate political strategy. As Roger Pielke Jr. reported in March of 2024:

However, what I find really interesting about Nordhaus’ essay [ Did Exxon Make it Rain Today?] is his discussion of how we got to a point where leading journalists and scientists are seeking to deny these rather obvious conditions and instead, to focus obsessively on human-caused climate change, and specifically on the fossil fuel industry as bearing responsibility for increasing disaster costs, contrary to an overwhelming scientific consensus.

Nordhaus explains that climate advocates have a long history of trying to tie disasters to climate change, dating back decades:

Those efforts intensified after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005, with Al Gore using it as a centerpiece in An Inconvenient Truth.3 A few years later, in 2012, the Union of Concerned Scientists convened a gathering of environmental advocates, litigators, climate scientists, and opinion researchers in La Jolla, California. Their explicit purpose was to develop a public narrative connecting extreme weather events that were already happening, and the damages they were causing, with climate change and the fossil fuel industry.

This campaign to condition (brainwash?) the public is to make it easier to convince the public to swallow the increasingly authoritarian policies allegedly designed to “fight climate change.”

Related Reading:

New U.N. Study Shows Climate Catastrophists Getting More Open About their Totalitarian Designs

‘Climate Crisis’: The Dem’s Path to Totalitarian Socialism

The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-first Century--Ronald Bailey

The Crisis of Socialism: Chapter 5 of Explaining Postmodernism -- Stephen Hicks

The Anti-human Tyrade of an Ungrateful 16-Year-old

The recent United Nations gathering focused, among other things, on climate. And look who it put up as the face of the climate crusade, a 16-year-old “climate activist.” In World leaders promise to do more at the U.N. climate summit after Greta Thunberg’s appeal, Seth Borenstein reported for the Associated Press:

Leader after leader told the United Nations on Monday that they will do more to prevent a warming world from reaching even more dangerous levels. But as they made their pledges at the Climate Action Summit after an emotional appeal from 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg, they and others conceded it was not enough.

“This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here,” said Greta, who began a lone protest outside the Swedish parliament more than a year ago that culminated in Friday’s global climate strikes. “I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you have come to us young people for hope. How dare you. You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.”

“People are suffering, people are dying,” Greta said as she sat on the dais with panelists who included a young clean-energy entrepreneur from India and a Brazilian lawyer representing youth climate activists. “Entire ecosystem are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you?” 

“For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear,” Greta added. “How dare you continue to look away and come here and say you’re doing enough when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight?” [sic]

In the last 30 years, life expectancies have risen, world poverty has plummeted, and by 2018 the middle class has soared to encompass more than half the world’s population. People’s lives are getting better around the globe. This is no fairy tale. That is called economic growth. Money is the miracle lubricant that enables that growth. Money makes possible the division of labor by facilitating the ability of people to get better together through the shared prosperity of trade, thus enhancing the liberty of the individual to use his reason to advance his own life.

That economic growth means people are suffering less. Fewer and fewer people are dying prematurely from climate-related danger as steady economic growth dramatically improves climate and environmental safety. Still, many of the world’s people are still living in deprivation, lacking even electricity. There’s much more to do. “Eternal economic growth” is a vital necessity; vital, that is, if improving human well-being is your goal. 

Yet, Greta Thunberg wants to roll back the clock to a time when the climate really was a crisis for humans--a chronic crisis, a constant battle for bare survival against famine and disease and pestilence and weather. For what? She wants to save the ecosystems from “collapsing”—which means, to save the planet from human alteration. Life without technology and industry, the energy and freedom that powers it, and the economic growth that results, is wholesale suffering and shorter lives. She damns money and economic growth outright, thus regressing mankind back to the hellhole of life in raw nature, in the process stealing the dreams and destroying the futures of the very young people she arrogantly claims to speak for. 

And what kind of life do today’s young people have to look forward to? 300 years ago, at the dawn of the Enlightenment, the odds were that a youngster like Thunberg wouldn’t have lived to 16 years old. And if she did, she could count on a brutish life of extreme poverty and drudgery

in a hostile natural environment--the same stagnant life of her parents, grandparents, and generations past. Instead, a young person today faces a long, prosperous, much safer life full of opportunity. What brought that magnificent progress? Freedom, money, and economic growth. That’s the future that her elders bequeathed to today’s young people. And for that gift, all she has to say to her elders is, “how dare you?” What an ungrateful little snot.

But that’s not the worst of it. What of her claim that “the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight?” Nonsense. We’ve had decades full of hundreds of $billions in subsidies and regulations to encourage “clean energy” imposed by governments. It hasn’t worked. People want their reliable fossil fuels because economic growth needs reliable, cheap, plentiful energy, and economic growth is the only means of improving human life. But political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. To date, not enough political power has been brought to bear. The limited political solutions of subsidies and regulations have not made the impossible possible. Some controls have been tried, and have failed. So Thunberg demands what every utopian who thinks she has a right to force her values on everyone else. Though she doesn’t come right out and say it, she demands the total politics of socialist totalitarianism, plainly laid out by Leftists politicians. She’s addressing a government body. She demands that they force aside economic well-being. That means freedom must go.

How dare her! Hers is the voice of a monstrous evil. Thunberg’s message goes beyond the fairy tale of some prosperous “clean energy” future. It goes beyond windmills and solar panels. She proclaims the true heart and soul of Environmentalism, the moral supremacy of nature over human life. Give her credit for honesty. She doesn’t cloak her agenda in promises of jobs and economic growth, the way climate fear mongers do in pushing to outlaw fossil fuels and nuclear in the name of renewable energy. She flat out attacks freedom, money, and economic growth. “Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth, ” Thunberg bellows. We need “politics” (force) to impose “solutions” (“rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society,” as the UN puts it) that only totalitarian powers can bring about, as every utopian thug who ever sought to shape society to his liking has shown. 

I don’t know how much of the 16 year old Thunberg’s vision is indoctrinated ignorance and how much is her actual conviction. I do know one thing. Her utopian vision would be disastrous for human life on Earth. Such utopian disasters are never innocent. Whatever the case with Thunberg, that is the vision that the United Nations, the institution whose members claim to represent all the people of the planet, gave its platform to. How dare they!

Related Reading:

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress—Steven Pinker

New U.N. Study Shows Climate Catastrophists Getting More Open About their Totalitarian Designs

Paris Climate Agreement Adopted: New Central Plan for the World’s Economy and Climate—Ronald Bailey for Reason.com

The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels—Alex Epstein

The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the 21st Century—Ronald Bailey

The sustainability myth—Alex Epstein

Trump Provides the Right Kind of Leadership in Withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord

The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution—Ayn Rand and Peter Schwartz

The Formula for a Richer World? Equality, Liberty, Justice—Deirdre N. McCloskey

Extreme poverty has been reduced by 1 billion people in the last 25 years

Maternal Mortality Rates Are Plummeting in the World’s Poorest Regions

We Owe Our Children a More Technologically Advanced Society, Not 'Preserved' Nature

Fossil Fuels and Climate Change: Remember Life Before Them

Our Alleged 'Climate Crisis' is No Longer, Thanks to Fossil Fuels