Old Testament fire and brimstone prophets of existential catastrophe requiring totalitarian enforced sacrifice.

Its from seven years ago but I did not see it at the time.

Compared to the environmental movement of my youth, which seemed idealistic, scientific and focused on the individual, the green movement of recent decades has taken an alarmingly dark, totalitarian, hysterical turn.

Anthropogenic Global Climate Warming is one aspect of this new dark vision. And perhaps my impression is incorrect. Perhaps it has been totalitarian all along and I just did not see that as an environmental naif.

But at its heart, the establishment environmental movement has gone off the rails and is proposing future outcomes that no sensible person would wish to endorse. Strip away all the hand-waving and delusions of deus ex machina unicorn solutions that will give us too-cheap-to meter energy with zero emissions, the current message of most mainstream environmental groups is crystal clear.

There is a solution.

It has to be done coercively by government.

It involves a reduction in population.

It forces abandonment of development for the global poor.

It entails impoverishment for the denizens of the developed world.

It will be planned and executed by remote all-knowing experts with no accountability.

No warm and cuddly soft-pedaling there. This is old-style Calvinist patriarchal prophet fire-and-brimstone stuff. If you are not a member of the new religion of destroying other people's lives, it is remarkably unappealing. As evidenced by the views and voting patterns of the electorate worldwide. They want nothing to do with Old Testament Environmentalism.

For grass-roots, environmentalists such as myself who believe in science and think it is a matter of helping the electorate to live cleaner easier lives, the Old Testament Environmentalists thundering existential doom and destruction have completely queered the pitch.

It is exceptionally difficult to have an evidence-based scientific discussion about environmental problems and trade-offs, when the mainstream Old Testament Environmentalists have conditioned everyone to anticipate faith-based passion and hysteria.

The article which I came across from seven years ago speaks to exactly this disappointment and recognition that Old Testament Environmentalists are asking people to immiserate themselves for a faith-based hysteria. Astonishingly, this self-aware article is in, of all places, The Grauniad. From Let's face it: none of our environmental fixes break the planet-wrecking project by George Monbiot. Monbiot concludes:

All of us in the environment movement, in other words – whether we propose accommodation, radical downsizing or collapse – are lost. None of us yet has a convincing account of how humanity can get out of this mess. None of our chosen solutions break the atomising, planet-wrecking project. I hope that by laying out the problem I can encourage us to address it more logically, to abandon magical thinking and to recognise the contradictions we confront. But even that could be a tall order.

Walter Russel Mead of course has a smart reaction in Top Green Admits: “We Are Lost!”.

This is an awesome admission of categorical intellectual, political and moral failure. For two decades greens have arrogated to themselves the authority of science and wrapped themselves in the arrogant certainty of self-righteous contempt for those who oppose them. They have equated skepticism about their incoherent and contradictory policy proposals with hatred of science and attacked their critics as the soulless hired shills of the oil companies, happy to ruin humanity for the sake of some corporate largesse.

Monbiot has worked his way through to a cogent description of the dead end the global green movement has reached, but he has not yet diagnosed the cause. In particular, he remains a staunch Malthusian. In his view, humanity is good at creating new ways to destroy itself, but not at finding solutions to the problems we create. Our ingenuity is magically good at finding new fossil fuels, but we have no skill whatsoever at managing the consequences of our discoveries. The unknown technologies of the future will create horrible new disasters, but they will offer no new ways to contain or manage the disruption they cause.

Yep. Most of the mainstream global warming alarmists are totalitarian Malthusians.