The Trojan Horse in Paris

Leaders of the climate meeting in Paris would like us to believe that it is a global effort to reach a global climate agreement on emission reductions, national plans to achieve them, support for clean energy, and wealth transfers to developing countries. This is an illusion. The media has overlooked that the Paris meeting is a Trojan Horse hiding the religious zealotry of environmentalism, the quest for power, and the blackmail by developing countries to get $100 billion given to them annually. 

Ever since Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring there has been a gradual melding of religion and environmentalism. The late author, student of anthropology, and physician Michael Crichton addressed this in a speech at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco in 2003. He made the point that in a secular society people have to believe in something to give meaning to life. He explained why “one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. … just look at the beliefs, ... you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.” 

Paul Rubin, a professor at Emory University, in a 2010 opinion article in the Wall Street Journal, offered the perspective of evolutionary psychologists, who have concluded that “identification with religion has replaced the tribalism that is an innate part of our evolved nature.” He went on to explain the ways in which people, who identify as being green instead of being Christian or Jewish, adopt many environmental behaviors that have religious origins. For example, “belief systems are embraced with no logical basis… (and) Skeptics are …treated as evil sinners.” A longer treatment of environmentalism and religion is contained in the summer 2010 issue of The New Atlantis.

The reality is that the Paris Conference of Parties 21 meeting, as it is officially known, is a conclave of environmental evangelists whose orthodoxy is intended to reshape societies and economies.

Viewing it in religious terms goes a long way in explaining why its leaders and many delegates are immune to scientific and economic evidence that pursuing the objective of controlling climate change is a fools’ errand and will result in serious economic damage, especially in the developing world.

Beyond the broader agenda of saving the planet, is the goal to expand global governance. In 2000 at the climate meetings in The Hague, French President Jacques Chirac made clear the goal of the agreement being negotiated: “For the first time, humanity is instituting a genuine instrument of global governance, one that should find a place within the World Environmental Organization which France and European Union would like to see established.” His statement was viewed by many as simply political rhetoric. It wasn’t. Earlier this year, Investor’s Business Daily reported that Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of U.N.'s Framework Convention on Climate Change, was unambiguous in stating that “the goal of environmental activists is not to save the world from ecological calamity but to destroy capitalism. This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution."

Many Europeans, and some in the United States, believe that Europe’s social democracy model of governance is superior to democratic capitalism and will be the way to achieve the ideals of socialism. They believe that elites running governments are better able to achieve the goals of social justice and equality than governments that are based on the rule of law, personal freedom, property rights, and market economics. 

This utopian vision is a deeply flawed belief as demonstrated by history and documented with great insight by Frederic Hayek in The Road to Serfdom.  The debate over socialism and capitalism was clearly articulated by the late Milton Friedman in an exchange on greed in a TV interview by Phil Donahue. The most telling point made by Friedman was when he asked, “Is it really true that political self-interest is nobler somehow than economic self-interest? … Just tell me where in the world you're going to find these angels who are going to organize society for us?” Figueres and her allies would be hard pressed to provide a convincing answer.

The final agenda hidden by the Trojan Horse is money. Developing countries participate in the Paris meetings because they expect to be bribed to to accept an agreement. Talk of $100 billion annually is a powerful attraction. But where will it come from? The economies of developed countries are too weak to provide that level of aid and if they did, would it actually go to real development? The history of the Clean Development Mechanism tells a different story. The Millennial Challenge in 2000 contained similar promises to reduce poverty and promote clean development and yet there are still over 1 billion people who do not have commercial energy and potable water and who suffer high disease and mortality rates. 

The likely outcome from the Paris conference is a claim of progress and a promise to keep shouldering on. The leaders will do so until their real agenda is exposed and discredited. Crichton asked, rhetorically, how do we get “environmentalism out of the clutches of religion, and back to a scientific discipline? There's a simple answer: we must institute far more stringent requirements for what constitutes knowledge in the environmental realm”. As long as politicized science is tolerated, that will not happen.

William O'Keefe is the President of Solutions Consulting. You can follow him on Twitter here.

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