Global Warming: The Anti-Capitalism

Bret Stevens writing in the Wall Street Journal hit the nail on the head in regards to what motivates the hard core believers in global warming- and it isn't scientific evidence.

Socialism may have failed as an economic theory, but global warming alarmism, with its dire warnings about the consequences of industry and consumerism, is equally a rebuke to capitalism. Take just about any other discredited leftist nostrum of yore – population control, higher taxes, a vast new regulatory regime, global economic redistribution, an enhanced role for the United Nations – and global warming provides a justification. One wonders what the left would make of a scientific "consensus" warning that some looming environmental crisis could only be averted if every college-educated woman bore six children: Thumbs to "patriarchal" science; curtains to the species.

That is exactly right. Vaclav Klaus, the President of the Czech Republic recently wrote

As someone who lived under communism for most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not in communism. This ideology wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning.

The environmentalists ask for immediate political action because they do not believe in the long-term positive impact of economic growth and ignore both the technological progress that future generations will undoubtedly enjoy, and the proven fact that the higher the wealth of society, the higher is the quality of the environment. They are Malthusian pessimists

I do not expect that global warmists will be happy with the recent technological improvements in solar energy and algae fuel that I have been writing about on this blog. Because while these technologies address the issue of carbon emissions they do not address what really motivates the climate change alarmists - dislike of capitalism.