The First Church of Chicken Little

[Geee]

American Spectator:

Rich Trzupek’s insightful piece in Friday’s American Spectator (“Obsessive-Compulsive Environmentalism”) outlines how Big Environment is a well-financed industry, just another political player in the Washington establishment — like Big Labor, Big Business, Big Education, et al. — and as manipulative, shrill, and self-interested as anyone in town.

Environmentalism for many of its members is also a religion, replacing the faith of our fathers with concern for the spotted owl, and other fashionable but inconsequential eccentricities. The groups in the green lobby — The Sierra Club, Greenpeace, the Environmental Defense Fund, Friends of the Earth, et al. — amount to upscale Earth worship cults, peddling a form of eco-paganism to Lexus luddites. The meaning that traditional religion has supplied in the past is pumped back into otherwise vacant post-everything lives through competition to see who cares for the planet most. Care for the planet being expressed through support of fantastical policies that would destroy our economy but would not improve the environment.

Back to the industry point, environmentalism is hardly an economic weak sister. Ian Murray of the Competitive Enterprise Institute in his 2008 book, The Really Inconvenient Truths, reported that these eco-groups have hundreds of thousands of members each, more than two million in the case of Sierra, and had annual resources then in excess of a half billion dollars. We’re not talking about a dowdy group of down-at-heels bird-watchers. These folks have lots of money and enormous clout.

Unlike large financial institutions that have been declared too big to fail, Big Environment is too big to succeed. No one on this gravy train wants to step off of it, even though America is a much cleaner place than it was in 1970, in many cases as a result of sound legislation whooped up by environmental groups decades back when their goals and methods were more sensible. If America ever became so clean the entire continent could pass a Marine Corps white-glove inspection, no one in the Sierra Club would ever say, “Mission accomplished.”

[Valin]

As Eric Hoffer taught us, great causes almost invariably evolve, in a straight line, from a justified moral crusade, to a business, to a racket (see the civil rights movement in America). Environmentalism has reached the racket stage, where the folks running the enviro-organizations grossly exaggerate environmental problems and make up new ones (see global warming) in order to keep the members worked up and the money rolling in.

 

 

Well they have mortgages to pay also. Besides you're a bad person and must atone for your sins.