July 31, 2007

Environmentalism is not a religion (but it's still bad)

There's a meme that circulates among right-wingish folk that attempts to score polemical points by alleging that environmentalism is a form of religion. I've recently established my own anti-environmentalist credentials by objecting to the nihilist strain in environmentalism, so I'd now like to take this opportunity to explain why I think that the "religion" accusation is misguided.

Let's start with a rough (but fairly accurate) definition: A religion is a belief-system affirming the existence of a supernatural agent or agents. Now with the exception of "Gaia"-worshippers, if there really are any of these, environmentalism does not posit the existence of any supernatural agents. It is a manifestly naturalistic philosophy, concerned with the status of the natural world (for better or for worse). This is my chief objection. Perhaps there are ways in which environmentalism is like religion. But it is not literally a religion, and this has important implications.

Consider the following note from Leonard Peikoff, in response to a question about which is worse, environmentalism or religion:

The global-warming movement is one offshoot of today’s mysticism and statism. As many have observed, it represents in essence the onetime pro-industrial Reds changing—with the same purpose, but to be achieved this time by different means—into the anti-industrial Greens. The global-warming call to statism will have harmful effects but, I think, the movement is going to be short-lived; too many people remember how recently we were terrorized by the prospect of an imminent, man-caused ice age, and before that by the doom of over-population, DDT, etc.

Understanding why environmentalism is not a religion helps to understand why the threat it poses will be relatively short-term.

Peikoff's comparison of the Greens with the Reds is apt here. Indeed environmentalism is the New Left incarnation of anti-capitalism. In virtue of their common Leftist origins, both Reds and Greens make testable predictions about the natural world, rather than making promises about an afterlife in a supernatural dimension. Whereas communism predicted a glorious future when the proletariat took control, environmentalism predicts environmental disasters, offering only stopgap measures to slow their approach.

Testable predictions can fail. First, notice how communism failed when, after 70 years, its predictions about the glorious future were not confirmed, because collectivism couldn't produce. Environmentalism makes predictions, too. Unlike communism, it even does so using numbers. The Earth's temperature is supposed to rise X many degrees in Y many years leading to Z many feet of sea-level rise. If their prediction is wrong (and it will be easy to tell in much less than 70 years), the movement will be clearly discredited. If they're right about it, then we should pay attention to them.

Compare this to religion, whose predictions concern life after death. As Peikoff has mentioned elsewhere, religious civilizations can endure for hundreds or even thousands of years, because there is no way to check to see if promises about the hereafter are being fulfilled. Not so for communism or its descendent, environmentalism, because neither worldview contains an afterlife or a supernatural dimension.

Incidentally, notice the oddity that whereas communism was motivated by love (of humanity), environmentalism is motivated by fear (of the destruction of nature). Fear does not motivate in the long-term. It is a response to imminent danger. Also, a motivation expressed in terms of love of humanity is essentially of higher quality than one in terms of fear for the loss of nature. All things being equal, human beings have natural affection for each other. Not so for rocks and trees and snail-darters. So in addition to being an essentially secular ideology open to relatively quick disconfirmation (in historical terms), environmentalism is even less motivating than communism.

As a philosophic worldview, communism already had very little to offer in the way of guidance for living. Did it have any ethical code beyond "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs"? Environmentalism has even less to offer in this regard. Its essential advice is negative: don't pollute, don't consume, don't produce, don't disturb, don't grow—in the end, don't live. Perhaps it offers positive advice about recycling, but that's not much of a catechism.

So why do people think environmentalism is a religion? Leftist ideologies do have many things in common with religion. They reject reason, oppose selfishness, and suppress individual freedom. Fine. But there is a world of difference between naturalist and religious versions of these doctrines. One world, to be exact: the naturalists believe in just one, while religion believes in two. As I've illustrated, that also makes a world of difference.

Frankly, I think that the "environmentalism is a religion" charge originated among the religious, particularly those on the right, who saw environmentalism as a competitor. After all, according to monotheism, it is a great sin to worship false gods. You can see the same objections among the religious in relation to the New Age movement and the Harry Potter books. But Harry Potter isn't a religion and neither is environmentalism. Other religious folks have had an easy time assimilating environmental views to religion, by saying that God has made us the steward of the Earth, etc. But that doesn't make environmentalism a religion any more than the religious adoption of socialism makes it a religion.

So I really wish that secular opponents of environmentalism wouldn't resort to the "environmentalism is a religion" charge. Compare the two, say that environmentalism is a lot like religion in all of the bad ways if you want to score points with secular environmentalists. But don't equate the two, especially not in your own thinking. The way to battle environmentalism is to separate its scientific from its philosophic component: evaluate the first, and challenge the second on principle.

Posted by admin at 08:33 PM | Comments (18)

July 30, 2007

In which I reveal my seedy green underbelly?

In a comment on my post about environmentalist nihilism, "Galileo blogs" asked the following good question:

Your last paragraph is a teaser. Could you elaborate? What environmental problems need solving? How do you see man contributing to global warming?

More importantly, how should these problems be solved, if at all?

What I said in my earlier post was that there are probably some environmental problems that need to be solved, and this maybe even includes manmade global warming. Let me discuss just the issue of global warming, because it applies to the other possible environmental problems/solutions, too.

I've gone back and forth about global warming over the years. I think the first point to make is that, as far as I can tell, there is nothing arbitrary about the idea that human emissions might produce warming, and there is of course nothing about this idea that contradicts my knowledge of a) common sense, or b) philosophy. There's nothing arbitrary because scientists offer quite a lot of evidence for this theory.

The big question is whether or not the evidence is any good. I used to think that I could definitively say "no." I had read a number of the enviro-skeptic books produced by right-wingers, and could rattle off half a dozen problems with the idea that there is warming, that it is caused by human beings, and that it is bad. Many of them were plausible objections.

But in the last year or so, I've decided that I'm not so sure. I read a variety of newspapers and blogs from all over the political spectrum, and as a result of this, I discovered that defenders of the manmade warming hypothesis have answers to nearly all of the objections right-wing skeptics usually make. (A good example of a site rebutting most of the objections is realclimate.org.) Some of these answers sound plausible.

Now I am not prepared to say that pro-GW arguments are sound. The thing is, I'm not a scientist, and I'm simply not in a position to evaluate them. I don't think one would need to be an environmental or climate scientist to make the proper evaluations. One could simply have advanced training in statistics and/or physics. I have some background in physics, but even less in math, so I am simply not the right person to decide on a controversy like this. When I can't decide for myself, I will either remain agnostic or defer to the authority of experts.

I would very much like for the manmade GW theory to be false. Not so much because I want environmentalists to be wrong (though that would be a rhetorical side-benefit), but mainly because I don't want the Earth to be warming. So I'd be very happy if serious scientists were to disabuse me of my agnosticism and show me that the GW theory was just wrong. But none of the arguments presented in the popular press have been very compelling. If you're reading this and have a favorite, defensible argument, please do post it. I'll see what I think.

"Galileo blogs" also had a follow-up point:

If the solutions are consistent with individual rights and capitalism, as an Objectivist I do not find myself gasping that you make these statements. In fact, most pollution problems are the result of inadequate property rights and poverty -- i.e., too *little* capitalism.

Well, I know that this is true for some environmental problems, but I'm not sure that it's true for all of them. Clearly any environmental problem involving a definable tort would be subject to individual rights-based solutions. But one of the problems with the GW hypothesis is precisely that the torts are so ill-defined. An individual driving a car is contributing to the problem in a negligible way, but when the acts of all individuals are aggregated, there is supposed to be a more serious problem.

I remember Harry Binswanger wrote on a related topic on HBL, suggesting that local smog problems might be solved by permitting unlimited traffic in afflicted areas up until a certain point. If it could be determined that more than X many cars would make smog intolerable, then car x+1 and on would need to install special emissions equipment if they wanted to buy a car. This would not violate anyone's property rights because by hypothesis cars X+1 could be shown to be committing a known tort without making proper modifications. This sounds like a good solution to me, and I note that something like this is already what California does. Of course there is probably a serious debate to be had about the value of X.

But would a solution like this work for a problem like global warming, if it is a problem? Of course it's harder to define the nature of the tort. Is it a threshold of hurricane intensity, sea level rise, or water shortages? Part of this is because of the uncertainty inherent in the science itself, which is perhaps a reason to doubt the theory, not the rights-based solution. Leaving this aside, even if the tort is definable, it would only be definable on a global scale. How is the government of the United States, for example, supposed to enforce tort claims from a potentially afflicted citizen of Tuvalu? I suppose there are precedents for this kind of question outside of environmental torts, perhaps having to do with extradition treaties.

So my final question is: assuming a tort could be defined, and assuming a jurisdiction could be worked out for it, in what way is it meaningful to call this is an individual rights-based solution, given that the cause of the problem is not any individual's action, but only the aggregation of individuals' actions? Even if only emissions above a certain threshold bring the atmosphere to a "tipping point," it's hard to blame only the people making those additional emissions. Without the previous emissions, theirs would not be a problem. Once the tipping point has been reached, everyone is contributing to the problem equally. At this point, it would seem unfair to punish only the newest polluters.

Perhaps there are good answers to all of my questions about a proper solution to a global environmental problem. But I do think they are questions that need to be answered, particularly because it is not at all obvious to me that there is anything arbitrary about the GW theory that motivates them. Philosophy qua philosophy should answer these hypothetical questions, particularly because it cannot decide questions of science, and because as humanity becomes further integrated, technologically, it is likely that we will begin to encounter more and more of these collective action problems (just consider the internet).

Posted by admin at 12:29 AM | Comments (13)