“the Left’s embrace of the anti-road/anti-motorist lobby marked its turn up a deadend: abandoning the social –the progressive attempt to transform society through human action –in favour of the natural –the reactionary attempt to defend the environment against humanity”
— Mick Hume
As fossil fuels and other resources begin to approach their end, and the risks of climate change loom nearer, one can only imagine the rational and pragmatic plans people are putting into place the world over. Such as: dismantling nuclear power plants and putting further strain on coal, preventing the repair and rebuild of highways and infrastructure, increasing social instability and civil disobedience, and campaigning against science and technology.
Wait, these are terrible things–the planet is in fact being run by a particularly noxious type of primate whose response to pending resource depletion and dangerous climate alterations has been as mindless and reactionary as it has been varied and chaotic.
A more immediate threat than climate change deniers, green reactionaries, extremists and primitivists are typically people who have always opposed modern civilization in some way or another, whether it be one core aspect of the system (or their perception of it) such as globalist capitalism, or hatred of all modern technology and culture, and a desire to return to a “simpler time”, such as tribes of primitive hunter-gathers.
People and groups such as these have hijacked climate change and resource depletion to fuel their ideological agendas–agendas that, if allowed to gain significant power, would ultimately result in the end of every lifeform on earth.
From Greenpeace, whose irresponsible harassment of companies, concerted efforts against biotechnology and nuclear energy, and subversive influence on developed nations has served as molasses in the wheels of life-saving research, to Anarcho-primitivists whose goal is the destruction of all technology, including language, and return to a feral state on par with other primates. Large-scale movements against infrastructure improvements, direly needed biotech advances, vital nuclear energy and much more has broken out across the world.
The result of these varied groups all campaigning against progress, which is not easy even under ideal conditions, has been a gross slide backward on almost every metric of societal health. If only the environmentalists knew that their actions won’t result in a return to “simple living”, but a post-apocalyptic hellhole of chaos, misery and death.
Anti-GMO activists are a notable example of the hypocrisy, belligerent ignorance and outright refusal to face reality in the naturalist movement. When the topic is climate change, pretty much all naturalists will claim to accept the scientific consensus and that others should as well, then, change the subject to the safety of GM food and the table flips–they begin to rationalize away the scientific consensus on the matter with the same claims of conspiracies, massive cover-ups, and unreliability of science that they regularly accuse climate change deniers of. You don’t get to pick and choose which science you agree with.
Thanks to these activities, biotechnology, nuclear energy, and other vital techs have been banned in many of the world’s poorest nations who need them most, and are suffocating under mountains of costly regulations in developed nations–this has slowed progress to a snail’s crawl, and, in the area of biotechnology, prevented any but the largest of corporations from getting involved in the field–stifling competition, public and open source research, and creating an artificial monopoly.
Current worldwide human society is overwhelmingly dependent on fossil fuels. Every aspect of our standard of living and continued progress is only possible through the availability of fossil fuels. Even if all government forces were dedicated to stop using them immediately, societies do not have the utility infrastructure, nor the vehicular and industrial technology necessary to maintain an adequate standard of living and continue to progress on non-fossil sources of energy.
The discontinuity of coal, oil, and natural gas must be a planned obsolescence, replaced gradually and intelligently based on what is possible–ideological noise making should not be a factor in this process.
Resource depletion is also a more immediate concern than C02 emission, one that could have brutal consequences within decades without significant scientific and technological progress–progress that we’re more than capable of making, but which anti-science environmentalist organizations like Greenpeace are doing their best to prevent in every way possible.
Every technology, from genetically improved food to nuclear fission could be vital to our ability to survive the coming decades and reach key breaking points in technology–such as nuclear fusion–until that time we are delicately balancing on a precipice of extinction, and with each blow environmentalists deal against technological progress we’re shoved just a little bit closer to the edge.
The political polarization of the issue has only exacerbated things, even suggesting not all environmentalists are beings of pure knowledge and virtue will get you beaten to death with an organic, locally grown carrot in some places. When non-political issues that are objectively quantifiable become politically charged party points, you can throw the possibility of rational discussion out the window with most people, knowing they’ll blindly toe their party line.
Issues fundamentally affecting the survival and flourishment of all life on the planet should never be poisoned in this way, it threatens to eat away at the very foundation of human civilization. If physics had been a party issue like climate change, or an ideological conspiracy theory like biotechnology, we’d still be riding around on rickshaws–allowing resource depletion and climate change to become so could very well wipe us out.
In this way today, society is mainly being balanced by two competing factions attempting to destroy it in different ways: one through climate change denialism, the other through economic and resource denialism. Global climate change is a fact, so is fossil fuel’s ultimate end. Neither of these things justify regressive environmentalism, which has shown itself to be a clear and present danger to humankind.
Correction: the author was beaten to death with an organic, locally grown squash hours after writing this article–rather than a carrot as this article stated was likely. We apologize for this error.
