It’s Not Easy Being Green

April 13, 2025 by Roger Kimball

Climate alarmism, cloaked in pseudoscience and moral posturing, masks a deeper agenda of power, profit, and control—often at the expense of truth and prosperity.

Writing recently in The Spectator World, Joel Kotkin noted, “The crux of the green dilemma lies in part with the realities of physics as well as geopolitics.” You can say that again. The physics part has to do with “energy density.” Fossil fuels have a very high energy density; solar and wind power, not so much. Kotkin quotes Christian Bruch, the CEO of Siemens Energy, who estimates that green energy “requires ten times as much material to work effectively, regardless of whether the wind is blowing or the sun is shining.” The ineluctable pressure of that physical fact leads to subterfuge, fantasy, and outright lying. Kotkin also quotes John F. Clauser, a Nobel Laureate in physics, who tartly observed that “Climate science has metastasized into massive shock-journalistic pseudoscience.”

Indeed. In 2019, the commentator Rob Henderson coined the phrase “luxury beliefs,” beliefs that confer social status because only the well-off can afford to entertain them. “In the past,” Henderson wrote, “upper-class Americans used to display their social status with luxury goods. Today, they do it with luxury beliefs.” A belief that we are in the midst of a “climate emergency” is one such belief. Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, can pretend that the sky is falling and promise to lead Britain into the promised land of “net-zero” emissions by 2050. But he won’t have to worry about heating his house or the cost of petrol for his car.

Al Gore can lecture the world about “inconvenient truths,” but cynics note that one major effect of his proselytizing on behalf of climate extremism has been to line his own pockets with that other green stuff, US dollars, and plenty of them. In 2000, Gore had a net worth of about $1.7 million. By 2012, he had amassed a fortune of some $250 million. Nice work if you can get it.

Regular readers may recall my fondness for the philosopher Harvey Mansfield’s observation that “environmentalism is school prayer for liberals.” Professor Mansfield delivered that mot more than thirty years ago. It seemed almost quaint at the time. It was, I thought, a comparison that had the advantage of being both true (environmentalism really did seem like a religion for certain leftists) and amusing (how deliciously wicked to put a bunch of white, elite, college-educated leftists under the same rhetorical light as the Bible-thumpers they abominated). Ha, I mean to say, ha!

Well, I am not laughing now. In the intervening years, the eco-nuts went from being a lunatic fringe to being lunatics at the center of power. Forget about Al Gore (if only we could): sure, he was vice president, but that was in another country (or so it seems) and besides . . . I trust that many readers will catch the allusion to Marlowe via T. S. Eliot. Despite his former proximity to the seat of power, Al Gore is relevant these days partly as comic relief, partly as an object lesson in the cynical manipulation of public credulity for the sake of personal enrichment. The collections come early and often in the Church of Gore. Who knew that pseudoscience, wrapped in the mantle of anti-capitalist moral self-regard, could pay so well?

But I digress. The issue is not Al Gore but the institutionalization of a radical, anti-growth ideology that was, until the election of Donald Trump, at the center of American political power, abetted by yes-men in the media and the academy. They parrot the party line in exchange for a chance to bathe in the warm effluvium of self-congratulation followed by a brisk turn on the soapbox of moral denunciation.

I thought about this unedifying spectacle the other day when I chanced upon “Environmental Activists Turn Up the Rhetorical Heat,” an earlier essay by Joel Kotkin for The Orange County Register. “The green movement’s real agenda,” Kotkin points out, “is far more radical than generally presumed.” And what is the green movement’s “real agenda”? It involves, as part of its emotional fuel, what the former Sierra Club President Adam Werbach called “misanthropic nostalgia,” a “deeply felt ambivalence,” to quote another eco-crusader, “toward the human race and our presence here on planet Earth.”

If that seems extreme, consider this statement from the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College (cross that college off the list), i.e., Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature and other exercises in hectoring alarmism: “Meaning has been in decline for a long time, almost since the start of civilization.” Worse luck for us! No, really, titters aside, stop and think about that statement (from McKibben’s book Enough—again, if only!): “Meaning has been in decline for a long time, almost since the start of civilization.” So what do you think, Bill? Would the world be more meaningful if we could only obliterate civilization and return to the primordial ooze? What about your tenure? What about your royalties?

Returning to some pre-civilizational state in which the world was not cluttered up with humans building things might be the long-term goal of enviro-loons like McKibben. For the immediate future, plunging the Third World deeper into poverty while shackling the engines of economic prosperity in Europe and America is enough to be getting on with.

In a way, this is old news. Consider, to take one prominent example, Paul Ehrlich’s neo-Malthusian jeremiad, The Population Bomb. Published in that annus horribilis 1968, it is a fittingly fatuous contribution to that most fatuous of years. “In the 1970s and 1980s,” Ehrlich wrote, “hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. . . . We are today involved in the events leading to famine and ecocatastrophe.” Of the world’s poor, he skirls, “a minimum” (Ehrlich’s emphasis) of ten million, mostly children, will starve to death every year in the 1970s. And that’s just for starters. Those tens of millions are but “a handful” of the hundreds of millions slated for starvation because (as per Little Father Time in Jude the Obscure) “we are too menny.”

Back in the 1970s, Paul Ehrlich was warning about the coming ice age. That was before the hysteria formerly known as “global warming” (now called “climate change,” since the globe hasn’t been cooperating on the warming front for more than twenty-five years). But there are two things to note about the modus operandi of Ehrlich and his like-minded extremists. 1) Whatever their campaign du jour—overpopulation, global warming, or global cooling—it’s always too late. “Nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate,” Ehrlich intones at the beginning of The Population Bomb. Should we all just pack up and go home then? All is lost. The sky is falling. Mass starvation is imminent and unavoidable. Nothing can prevent it. Nevertheless, you don’t want to let a good crisis go to waste™. Although nothing can be done, we need to “take immediate action at home and promote immediate action worldwide.”

What sort of action? “Population control,” for starters. And this brings us to 2): No matter what the crisis, massive government intervention is always the answer. Ehrlich (albeit with shaky grammar) would have us denude the planet of humans “hopefully through changes in our value system, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail” (my emphasis).

“By compulsion”: there, in a single phrase, you have the secret to the appeal of climate hysteria to the Left. Where’s Robespierre when you need him? The world is ending, Comrade, and although there is nothing you can do about it, a whole alphabet soup of government agencies is here to dictate what kind of car you drive, how you heat your home, where your electricity comes from, what you may eat or drink, and on and on and on.

Considered as a political movement, environmentalism may, as Harvey Mansfield said, betray a religious or cult-like aspect. But for every true believer in the religion of Gaia, there is a squadron of cynical opportunists eager to exploit the new paganism of earth-worship for decidedly secular ends. We’ve heard a lot about the radical community organizer Saul Alinsky in recent years. A fundamental rule of thumb for a paid-up Alinskyite radical is that “the issue is never the real issue.” In the present context, that means that “climate change” is largely a pretext. For some, it is a pretext for personal enrichment. Think again about Al Gore, who peddles the philosophy of Chicken Little on the one hand and has managed to rake in hundreds of millions of dollars by exploiting various government-subsidized “green energy” initiatives on the other.

Climate alarmism can also be a pretext for the redistribution of wealth on a global scale. You can never be green enough, Comrade, and climate change offers a potent pretext for the consolidation of governmental power. It is, as one wag put it, the “killer app” for extending governmental control. Like the House of the Lord, governmental control is a domicile of many mansions, from intrusive, prosperity-sapping regulation to the silencing, intimidation, dismissal, and even the legal prosecution of critics.

Indeed, in its transformation of critics into heretics, we see once again the religious or cult-like aspect of radical environmentalism. One argues with a critic. One must silence or destroy a heretic. Galileo would have understood exactly how this new Inquisition would proceed. And this brings me to one of the most frightening aspects of the gospel of climate change: its subordination of independent scientific inquiry to partisan political imperatives.

Scientific inquiry depends upon the freedom to pursue the truth wherever it leads, regardless of political ideology or vested interest. Recently, climate hysterics and their political and academic enablers have begun describing those who disagree with them about the science of climate change as “climate deniers.” The echo of “holocaust deniers” is deliberate and pernicious. A “holocaust denier” is someone who denies a historical enormity. But a so-called “climate denier” is merely someone who disputes an ideological construct masquerading as a scientific truth. The irony, of course, is that this farce should proceed in an era in which science and technology have remade the world for the benefit of mankind. Climate-change hysteria takes issue with those benefits, which is why it has also been a pretext for the systematic attack on specific industries and technologies—the coal industry, for example, or fracking.

Al Gore is just a cynical mountebank, and Paul Ehrlich and Bill McKibben are just crackpot writers. Have you heard about John Holdren? Allow us to introduce you to the man who was President Obama’s top science adviser. Holdren was Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Co-Chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. He is also an acolyte of Paul Ehrlich and the co-author, with Paul and Ann Ehrlich, of Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment, another doomsday scenario in which the specter of overpopulation and putative exhaustion of the world’s resources is paraded in a cornucopia of imminent apocalyptic fantasy.

Never mind that the world’s chief population problem these days is collapsing birth ratesthroughout the industrialized world. In another thirty or forty years, there might still be a country called Italy, for example, but precious few Italians. But according to Holdren and the Ehrlichs, “compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion,” might be just around the corner. Such interventions, they speculate, “could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society.” But never fear! “If effective action,” such as voluntary sterilization, “is taken promptly against population growth, perhaps the need for the more extreme involuntary or repressive measures can be averted in most countries” (my emphasis).

For the Ehrlichs and Holdren, though, the need for such “coercive control” is far from unimaginable. (Indeed, they note that “the potential effectiveness of those least acceptable measures may be great.”) They dream about “an armed international organization, a global analogue of a police force” to provide security, and they cheerfully note that “the first step” on the road to this utopia “necessarily involves partial surrender of sovereignty to an international organization.” Other steps include “a massive campaign . . . to restore a high-quality environment in North America and to de-develop the United States.” “De-develop”? Yes, that’s right. The authors note sadly that the idea of “de-development,” like the idea of mandatory sterilization, has met with “considerable misunderstanding and resistance.” They are not, they explain, anti-technology. They just want to put an end to technology they don’t like—“giant automobiles,” for example, or “plastic wrappings” or “disposable packages and containers.” Their list is long and varied. “Environmentalism is school prayer for liberals.” It’s enough to make one indulge in a bit of selective misanthropic nostalgia.

Fortunately, Donald Trump is now president. Instead of climate hysteria, we have the cheerful exploitation of our energy resources (“drill, baby, drill”) and even a return to sanity in the matter of water pressure for your home shower, dishwasher, and washing machine. It couldn’t come soon enough.