POOR COUNTRIES TEND TO BE THE MOST POLLUTED.

Another Earth Day is upon us, and we're still here.  Act surprised: we were all supposed to be gone from here by 2000.  A year ago, I was suggesting unfavorable comparisons between the scary prognostications of the doomsday environmentalists and the scary prognostications of the doomsday epidemiologists.  It's still too soon for that Strategic Bombing Survey on the quarantine-and-suppress strategy, but I submit the prognostications were scarier than the reality.

Mark "Carpe Diem" Perry calls the roll of "spectacularly wrong predictions" from that first Earth Day.  His own prediction, "expect more this year" is almost certainly going to stand up.  He noted that one Malthusian trap did activate.  "The prediction of famine in South America is partly true, but only in Venezuela and only because of socialism, not for environmental reasons."  Ironic, isn't it, given that Marx denounced the Malthusian view of unbridled human reproduction as "a libel on the human race?"

Power Line's Steven Hayward also has a good wallow in the past.  "When dealing with a fundamentalist religion it does no good to point out the facts and data about improving environmental conditions, or the reasons behind these happy trends (namely economic growth, open markets, and technological advance), or the sorry record of environmental doomsday predictions ever since the first Earth Day 51 years ago."  Of course it doesn't.  To a true believer, the anomalies serve as a call to believe even more fervently, or to look for the heresies.

I borrowed the title for the post from an Issues and Insights essay.  Authors Henry I. Miller and Jeff Stier continue the fundamentalist belief system frame.

Earth Day has devolved into an occasion for environmental Cassandras to prophesy apocalypse, dish antitechnology dirt, and proselytize for a “woke” agenda. Passion and zeal routinely trump science, and provability takes a back seat to plausibility.

Many of those stumping for Earth Day on April 22 will oppose environment-friendly advances in science and technology, such as agricultural biotechnology, fracking, and nuclear power. A pervasive meta-message will be disdain for the capitalist system that provides the resources available for effective environmental protection and conservation.

All of it seasoned with environmental intersectionality, and the continued immamentization of the eschaton.

One of the United Kingdom’s great contemporary thinkers, Dick Taverne, also known as Lord Taverne of Pimlico, discusses the shortcomings of New Age philosophy in his perspicacious book, The March of Unreason.” Taverne deplores the “new kind of fundamentalism” that has infiltrated many environmentalist campaigns as an undiscriminating back-to-nature movement that views science and technology as the enemy and as a manifestation of an exploitative, rapacious, and reductionist attitude toward nature. It is no coincidence, he believes, that ecofundamentalists are strongly represented in anti-globalization and anti-capitalism movements worldwide.

In this, Taverne echoes the late physician and novelist Michael Crichton, who argued in his much-acclaimed novel “State of Fear” that ecofundamentalists have reinterpreted traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths and made a religion of environmentalism. This religion has its own Eden and paradise, where mankind lived in a state of grace and unity with nature until mankind’s fall, which came not after eating a forbidden fruit, but after partaking of the forbidden tree of knowledge – that is, technology. This religion also has a judgment day to come for us in this polluted world – all of us, that is, except for true environmentalists, who will be saved by achieving “sustainability.”

That takes me too far afield from anything where traditional political economy tools work.  But Charles Krauthammer might have been on to something, years ago, suggesting that contemporary environmentalists and primitive sun-worshippers might have had much in common in seeing bad weather or volcanic eruptions as evidence that humans had displeased the gods.