A Short Political History of Climate Change
14 hours ago Guest Blogger
Bill Ponton, Princeton Venture Advisory (Sept ’24)
We often attribute the longevity of communist states in the 20th century to the repression practiced by those regimes. This is undeniably true, but we grossly underestimate the fact that many people living under those repressive regimes derived meaning from being part of those socialist experiments. To just say that those people were brainwashed too easily dismisses why people might feel the need to be part of something bigger than themselves. Darryl Cooper does a good job trying to explain the mindset of those wedded to a socialist ideology in his recent Martyr Made podcast series, God’s Socialist: The Rise and Fall Of People’s Temple.
Towards the end of the 20th century, passion for environmental causes displaced much of the socialist fervor of an earlier period. Environmental poisoning has been the overarching theme of the environmental movement, but the targets chosen for demonization changed over the years. The list of targets includes DDT, asbestos, nuclear power, CFCs, acid rain and more. In retrospect, the struggle against these things may not have satisfied fully the quest by movement members for self-meaning in the way that socialism had for a previous generation. The movement craved for an existential environmental threat that would infuse more passion and meaning to their fight. However, there was already an existential threat of global annihilation from nuclear war that hung over mankind. The environmental movement was going to find it hard to come up with an existential threat that topped nuclear armageddon, but with the introduction of climate catastrophism they were on their way to success.
Starting in the 1970s, there emerged two competing versions of climate catastrophism. One was man-made global-warming and the other was man-made global-cooling. According to the theories, the world was to be consumed either by fire or ice. For the environmental movement, it was important to emphasize the man-made nature of the threat. If it had not been man-made, it would not have fit their preferred narrative that man is evil and poisoning the environment by his greedy capitalist endeavors. They were not interested in being in the vanguard of movement that would spread fear about the end of Holocene period and the advent of an ice age if it were just a natural happening.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/09/15/a-short-political-history-of-climate-change/
