It seems every day I come across some new, eloquent and bitter excoriation of the fairytale that is “Intelligent Design”. Irradiance did one recently, other sites I know are seemingly obsessed with debunking every little bit of this ill-conceived manipulation of half-baked science to serve a preordained outcome.
But it’s funny when I read these kinds of articles. You see, there are many such wacky theories out there – based on manipulation, hidden agendas, bad science, preordained outcomes and outright superstition, and I think they’re potentially a lot more damaging than some kooks in Red State America trying to get their god-books into classrooms.
I’m talking, of course, about Global Warming, and to a lesser extent Peak Oil. In fact I equate all these modern fallacies, and the people who believe in them. Global Warming – sorry, Climate Change (since they found that, er, the globe isn’t actually warming) – all rely on the same core principles. Intelligent Design relies on a deep Christian faith, informing the subject that what he/she feels or believes is somehow a credible theory, and the suspicious, secular science must be bent to fit the obviously true word of The Book. Climate Change is the same. Its proponents willingly – eagerly – ignore the principles of the empirical scientific method. They ignore, attack, scandalise dissenting views. They hound governments to cut funding for research counter to their views, then dismiss as “tainted” otherwise credible privately-funded research. They doctor evidence and twist facts, relying on “what if” scenarios, decrying decades of scientific data as irrelevant or “compromised” whilst concentrating on the skerrick of out-of-context evidence which supports their views, and rely on well-funded media campaigns to attempt to curry popular opinion, not in a peer reviewed court of scientific merit, but in the glitzy, shallow world of celebrity mass media.
And it’s all absolute bullshit. Just like anyone who has any understanding of evolution or the scientific method scoffs at Intelligent Design, anyone who has gone out of his way for 10 minutes to look at the evidence for and against Climate Change concludes that it’s just as much an agenda-driven fantasy. Unfortunately for the world, evolution was generally taught in school, whereas skepticism in the face of media misinformation and scaremongering, and the basic principles of global climate, were not. Thus whereas almost any reasonably schooled person is resistant to the farce of Intelligent Design, a much smaller number seem able to muster skepticism in the face of its much larger, more ambitious and ultimately more dangerous big brother. And whereas organised religion, in the shape of Churches and Mosques, has lost its credibility as a source of theory and information in an age of (partial) education, the church of Green Hysteria, for want of a better term, is only just beginning. And adrift in a sea of misinformation, bourgeois guilt, and misguided longing for a Cause, the (largely leftist) Green finds millions of goodnatured, intelligent, but hopelessly naiive and unquestioning eyes and ears – and, eventually, wallets and ballot papers.
As for the Peak Oil theory, since it is so ludicrous on its face, and is as yet unbacked by the same level of funds and star power that Climate Change attracts, we can dismiss it for now as a noisy – but, unfortunately, growing – crackpot fringe who have yet to gain popular traction. But hey, it was the same for the Global Warming people in the 1970s. Oh, except then, they were agitating against Global Cooling and an imminent new ice age.
But who cares, right? It’s all in a good cause, right? Who wouldn’t be in favour of “saving the planet”? And if they have to fiddle the facts now and again to get people to see the larger truth – well, that’s just a forgiveable white lie for a good cause, right?
Wrong. We are talking trillions of dollars. We are talking about making big decisions, decisions that can alter the path of the future. We are talking arbitrary state interference in the natural, democratic course of free markets and free countries. We are talking large-scale governmental interference in free economies – which is maybe why the left seems to like it so much, since environmentalism is the only cloak under which their discredited theories get taken seriously anymore. And all that money – all that lost growth, lost productivity, lost investment – adds up to a total tax on humanity, an opportunity cost unprecedented in magnitude since perhaps World War II. Wasted money, wasted chances, wasted possibilities. Life-saving technologies won’t be invented because of that waste. Space exploration programs will be cut back to pay for unnecessary restrictions and renovations of whole industries. The path of innovation, the focus of research, will be distorted away from its natural course – technology to improve the world we live in – and will be forced to find solutions we don’t need for problems we don’t actually have. The infrastructure we live will needlessly degrade. Quality of living will drift below its otherwise inevitable trajectory. Hospitals and schools will suffer. Taxes will rise, and investment will further decline. The money has to come from somewhere. This is the true cost of that little white lie.
The whole basis of capitalism is efficiency. The innately democratic idea that people decide how to spend their own money has lead to the wealth creation and fantastic improvements in every facet of living we’ve seen in the last century. When you deliberately do things less efficiently, when you rob people of choice, when you make it illegal to conduct business and your daily life in the most efficient way for you, whichever way you choose to do it, you better have a damn good reason, or you fuck up the world. And the popular myth of Climate Change is not, not by a million miles, a good enough reason.
Well, I’ve wanted to say that for a while. I’ve rushed it out now, and maybe it reads as much, but I wanted to get it down before I even picked up State of Fear, because I know it deals with a lot of these issues, and I didn’t want to be accused of just getting my opinion from a book.
Oh, and if you can’t tell by now, I am strongly against the Kyoto Protocol… 
