Save the planet from an age of unreason

Another book that offers some good sense on the hot button topic of “global warming” and a well argued piece in the Daily Mail by it’s author Nigel Lawson.

Who is going to save those poor polar bears from Al Gore's nonsense?

Unbelievers should not be dismissive of the comfort that ‘religion’ can bring. If people feel better when they drive a hybrid car or ride a bicycle to work, and like to parade their virtue in this way, then so be it.

Nonetheless, the new and unattractively intolerant religion of eco-fundamentalism and global warming presents real dangers. The most obvious is that the governments of Europe may get so carried away by their own rhetoric as to impose measures that do serious harm to their economies. That is a particular danger at the present time in the UK.

Another danger is that even if the governments do not go too far and damage their own economies, they may still cause great damage to the developing world by engaging in what might be termed green protectionism. The movement to make us feel guilty about buying overseas produce because of the “food miles” involved is just one example of this.

And France’s President Sarkozy is currently urging the European Union to impose trade barriers against those countries that are not prepared to limit their carbon dioxide emissions.

It should not need pointing out that a lurch into protectionism, and a rolling back of globalisation, would do far more damage to the world economy – and in particular to living standards in the developing countries – than could conceivably result from the projected continuation of global warming.

But even if this danger can be averted, it is clear that the would-be saviours of the planet are, in practice, the enemies of poverty reduction in the developing world.

So the new religion of global warming, however convenient it may be to the politicians, is not as harmless as it may appear. Indeed, the more one examines it, the more it resembles a Da Vinci Code of environmentalism. It is a great story, and a phenomenal bestseller. It contains a grain of truth – and a mountain of nonsense.

And that nonsense could be very damaging indeed.

We appear to have entered a new age of unreason, which threatens to be as economically harmful as it is profoundly disquieting. It is from this, above all, that we really do need to save the planet.

If the book makes the same argument I expect that there may just be a chance that some of those on the brink of taking the plunge into the baptismal pool of the new faith may reconsider taking up the profoundly unreasonable belief that we can change the climate, but sadly I think that many of the Zealots are actually beyond redemption and we may have to respond to their unreasoning belief with more than logic and empirical measurement.
Cheers Comrades