media—an ever-willing and in many ways dominant force among the elites because of its permanence—was crucial in this endeavor. A critical mass started to occur as the warming theory approached its apotheosis with the publication of Al Gore’s book An Inconvenient Truth. This became the documentary for which Gore’s producer was awarded an Oscar. (Gore himself was a D student in geology at Harvard, speaking of makeup grades.) When the promised cataclysms never occurred, the rapid warming in the form of Michael Mann’s highly publicized “hockey stick” graph not replicated in reality, the elites informed the masses they were confusing weather with climate. Taking a page from Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, “global warming” was removed from the lexicon and the new phrase “climate change” promulgated. It was a catchall for everything. Cooling meant climate change, just as warming had meant climate change. Frequent hurricanes, cold snaps, heat waves, and random tornadoes were climate change. And when it was pointed out that there were actually fewer hurricanes rather than the predicted increase, that was climate change too. How this new phraseology differed from the ever-variable weather that the public had seen in front of them all their lives was explained theoretically in various ways, but not in a way that could be easily comprehensible to the public or even to many of the politicians and pundits who were themselves trying to explain it. Theories such as the deep ocean water mitigating warming were proffered and then mysteriously withdrawn or bickered about. Others complained of excessive acidification of the oceans while still others worried about marine ecosystems. In January 2015, more scientists in the Oxford Journal BioScience were insisting this was all “group think.”
Before that, and more importantly, there had been the familiar email problems. In 2009, years of private communications from scientists at East Anglia University—the hub of climate research in the United Kingdom—had been leaked with indications that data had been fudged to “hide the decline” in warming. (This happened again as recently as 2015, in this case by America’s own National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.)6 The motivations for this fudging were all too obvious—professional reputations and cold hard cash were at play. Many rose to defend the scientists involved but the damage was done. So the politicians’ opinions were open to mockery, but those opinions, motivated as they were by moral narcissism and by donations from exceptionally wealthy backers like hedge fund manager Tom Steyer, themselves similarly motivated, rarely varied or even were revised an iota to account for the embarrassment.
Views based on moral narcissism are most often written in stone. Changing them can create an unbearable wound to the self, personality disintegration. Even when Patrick Moore—the cofounder of environmental giant Greenpeace—admitted there was “no actual proof” of man-made global warming, it made little lasting impression in the high-level global zeitgeist.7 The elites—Western leaders—were unmoved by the apostasy of one of their own. They couldn’t allow it. They just pretended he never existed. Similarly, when so-called “father of global warming” and mentor of Al Gore former UC San Diego professor Roger Revelle allowed near the end of his life that his original opinions on warming might have been “drastic,” Gore accused the multiple award-winning scientist of being dotty. Then, upon his death, Revelle’s daughter stepped in quickly to assure the world that her father had privately told her at the end of his life that he had never changed his mind. Global warming was a serious matter. Dissenting opinions could not be countenanced. By early 2014, one Rochester Institute of Technology professor even called for the political prosecution of “denialists.”8
After all, that void had been filled. There was no going back. At the end of the last century the ever-expanding environmental movement was stalling. Smog had significantly diminished as a major blight on American cities, leaving them without the most palpable evidence of looming environmental disaster. The skies even over Los Angeles were mostly clear. Substitute causes like endangered species and the disappearance of the Amazonian rain forest, while evocative, lacked the immediacy, not to say proximity, to muster serious adherence and garner significant donations for an expanding community of interlocking businesses and NGOs. The movement needed a new cause. This decline in interest roughly coincided with the disputed, though ultimately failed, 2000 presidential campaign of Al Gore. The former vice-president had been deprived of a lifetime ambition he thought he deserved and had won. For a while he acted like a wounded and rather disappointed animal, but then he found his mojo again. For some years a self-styled environmentalist, he seized on the opportunity to put forward the momentary imminence of global climate catastrophe. Almost certainly he did not exaggerate this deliberately, at least consciously, but if he had merely mentioned the problem as potentially one among many, as yet not fully scientifically determined, nothing much would have happened in the short run, if at all, particularly for him. Obviously, it did. Soon enough he was the most famous environmentalist on the planet, a shared Nobel Prizewinner and a nascent billionaire through green investments and carbon exchanges, the selling of so-called “carbon offsets” between businesses. That most of these investments failed and that the exchanges disappeared after being scrutinized for fraud was beside the point. Gore had already more than filled that void created by those relatively clear skies. These two factors, Gore’s desire to remake his mark with a new opportunity and the void in the environmental movement, united to create a climate crisis with moral narcissism as the glue that brought and held them together, that made it possible, and made people want to believe. A bourgeoisie, already identifying with the defense of mother earth, was ready to take that step. Controlling the weather was humanity’s most important cause.
Rachel Carson and how “environmentalism” came to replace Christianity, Judaism, and even Hare Krishna (well, not so much) as our new religion.
But to understand how this development evolved, to know the process, we must go back further, over fifty years, to the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962. This marked the beginning of environmentalism as we know it—the replacement of conservationism with a form of nature worship. This coincided too with the questioning and ultimately the restructuring of traditional religion. I remember the time well because I was one of Carson’s readers as a college student, a typical undergraduate agnostic or even atheist of the period in search of a belief system. We of the Least Great Generation were at the start of the sixties and just beginning to differentiate ourselves from the previous generation. Soon we would be working overtime on that separation. Silent Spring—an attack on the use of pesticides as detrimental to the environment, especially to birds, or what the author called “the silencing of birds”—was the seminal text in this demarcation. That thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of Africans ultimately died of malaria due to the DDT ban associated with the book’s publication was to be largely ignored.1
A movement had been born. Not long after, Greenpeace was formed—its existence celebrated by a 1970 Joan Baez concert in Vancouver. Earth Day was established in the same year, igniting a brushfire. It wasn’t long before there were more ecologically oriented groups than you could count, filling supermarket parking lots with card tables laden with petitions and knocking on doors for donations like Seventh Day Adventists. Environmentalism was well on its way to replacing organized religion as the premiere faith of the American and global elites and their myriad fellow travelers and acolytes. What a relief not to have to defend the ancient mythologies of Jesus and Moses anymore, all those scientifically troubling miracles. Nature had suddenly become human-centered again, just as it was in the Middle Ages, although then it was man and God—now it was just man all by his lonesome. Humanity was now the cause of every problem in the world, maybe even in the cosmos, and it would be up to humanity to solve them. Forget the sun and all those other countless stars, nebulae, galaxies, asteroids, black holes, and the rest of the so-called missing baryons, invisible objects, in an ever-expanding universe. They didn’t count for anything or mean anything in the grand scheme of things. They weren’t driving gas-guzzling SUVs or leaving the thermostat at
