Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Sustainability, stupidity and progress

So, where are we?  Is today’s political landscape resplendent with potential and progressive innovation?  Or is it still entrapped in a plethora of dogma and adrift in a sea of stupidity?

Well let's consider the narrative from the summer months:



  • The world's economy has fundamentally changed and continues to undergo serious revision.  Despite the improvements in human welfare from globalization, the ideology of environmentalism remains entrenched in the dogma of eco-imperialism which ignores facts in favor of spouting moral rhetoric about environmental justice and fairness.  
  • This moralism is a guise for ideological money laundering. It is exposed by the fallacy that is green growth, most evident in the energy sector, which continues to force supposed green energy non-solutions.  The two most popular currently are windmills and solar panels, which are promoted primarily on moral grounds precisely because their economic justification is untenable. 
  • The answer to our energy needs (cheap energy, especially in developing nations) is, actually, more efficient and effective use of our existing resource base.  
  • Instead, politicians from all over the developed world are on a binge of tax imposition, in the name of environment and in deference to the continued use of the global warming scare, despite its constant refutation and lack of scientific validation. 
  • But why the need to constantly refute and slay the myth of global warming?  In part because those truths are systemically obscured and obstructed, ignored as inconvenient by celebrity activists and/or misconstrued, perverted and misrepresented in the junk science that predominates the environmental landscape today. 
  • That dogma is pervasive and affects public policy not only in areas such as energy and development but also into lifestyle regulation and social engineering fear mongering about obesity epidemics, the perils of junk food and the moral failings of the very development that is improving the human condition.
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    So although we have the capacity to be sustainable, we appear locked into a cycle of political stupidity, promoted and promulgated by an environmental activism that seemingly rejects sustainability as a primary concern for the human condition, for improved human welfare.


    Environmentalism remains an ideology of the intellectual elite. Moreover, it is an ideology of the economic and political elite, the ruling classes.  They view their intellectual hegemony as "truth", their dogma as "science" and their politics as "justice". Worse still, in their arrogance and conceit, they fail to see where they are stupid and not sustainable.