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Wordt het ooit nog wat met de milieubeweging?

Geen categorie30 nov 2010, 16:05
Door de jaren heen heeft de milieubeweging zwaar ingezet op het verspreiden van de klimaathysterie. Zoals Aaron Wildavsky, politicoloog die doceerde aan de universiteit van Berkeley, ooit eens opmerkte:

Global warming is the mother of all environmental scares.

Zelf was ik verschillende malen spreker in programma's waarin ook vertegenwoordigers van de milieubeweging optraden - met tenenkrommende paniekpresentaties over dat thema. Ik verbaasde mij dan daarover, want de personen in kwestie leken mij hele intelligente, welbespraakte (soms in prachtig Engels!), beschaafde en ook aardige jonge mensen. Maar ik kon toch niet anders concluderen dan dat zij zich wat te veel hadden laten meeslepen door hun kritiekloos, jeugdig idealisme om de wereld te redden. Jammer, want zo veel inzet is een betere zaak waardig.
Onder de titel, 'Can environmentalism be saved from itself?, vroeg Margaret Wente zich in de 'Globe en Mail' af of de miliebeweging nog op het goede spoor zou kunnen terugkeren.
Margaret Wente:

Just a year ago, 15,000 of the world’s leaders, diplomats, and UN officials were gearing up to descend on Copenhagen to forge a global treaty that would save the planet. The world’s media delivered massive coverage. Important newspapers printed urgent front-page calls for action, and a popular new U.S. President waded in to put his reputation on the line. The climate talks opened with a video showing a little girl’s nightmare encounter with drought, storms, eruptions, floods and other man-made climate disasters. “Please help the world,” she pleads.

The plot thickens . . . After two weeks of chaos, the talks collapsed in a smouldering heap of wreckage. The only surprise was that this outcome should have come as a surprise to so many intelligent people. These people actually seemed to believe that experts and politicians have supernatural powers to predict the future and control the climate. They believed that experts know how fast temperatures will rise by when, and what the consequences will be, and that we know what to do about it. They believed that despite the recent abject failure of Kyoto (to say nothing of other well-intentioned international treaties), the nations of the world would willingly join hands and sacrifice their sovereignty in order to sign on to a vast scheme of unimaginable scope, untold cost and certain damage to their own interests.

Copenhagen was not a political breakdown. It was an intellectual breakdown so astonishing that future generations will marvel at our blind credulity. Copenhagen was a classic case of the emperor with no clothes.

Mercifully, nobody will pay attention to the climate conference at Cancun next week, where a much-reduced group of delegates will go through the motions. The delusional dream of global action to combat climate change is dead. Barack Obama’s cap-and-trade scheme is dead. Chicago’s carbon-trading market is dead. The European Union’s supposed reduction in carbon emissions has been exposed as a giant fraud. (The EU is actually responsible for 40 per cent more CO2 today than it was in 1990, if you count the goods and services it consumed as opposed to the ones that it produced.) Public interest in climate change has plunged, and the media have radically reduced their climate coverage.

The biggest loser is the environmental movement. For years, its activists neglected almost everything but climate change. They behaved as if they’d cornered the market on wisdom, truth and certainty, and they demonized anyone who dared to disagree. They got a fabulous free ride from politicians and the media, who parroted their claims like Sunday-school children reciting Scripture. No interest group in modern times has been so free from skepticism, scrutiny or simple accountability as the environmental establishment.

Maar ondanks deze dwalingen schrijft Wente de milieubeweging niet af. Er zijn nog voldoende terreinen waarop de milieubeweging volgens haar een constructieve rol kan spelen.
Zij concludeert:

“How high a price must the world pay for green folly?” asked the thinker Walter Russell Mead. “How many years will be lost, how much credibility forfeited, how much money wasted before we have an environmental movement that has the intellectual rigour, political wisdom and mature, sober judgment needed to address the great issues we face?”

The answer is too high, too many and too much. Please grow up, people. You have important work to do.

Lees verder hier.
PS,
Onlangs was ik te gast bij de VVD in Amsterdam voor een praatje over klimaat. Een van de organisatoren, Richard Valkering, besloot op het laatste moment om mijn presentatie te registreren op zijn mobieltje – een technisch wonder, zij het met nog wat kinderziekten. De video's daarvan zijn hier en hier te vinden.
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