From Joel Kotkin writing at City Journal - really like his writing and really like City Journal overall.
Climate Stalinism
The Left’s fixation on climate change is cloaked in scientism, deploying computer models to create the illusion of certainty. Ever more convinced of their role as planetary saviors, radical greens are increasingly intolerant of dissent or any questioning of their policy agenda. They embrace a sort of “soft Stalinism,” driven by a determination to remake society, whether people want it or not—and their draconian views are penetrating the mainstream. “Democracy,” a writer for Foreign Policy suggests, constitutes “the planet’s biggest enemy.”
Today’s working and middle classes are skeptical about policies that undermine their livelihoods in the promise of distant policy goals. Even now, after a decade-long barrage of fear-mongering, a majority of Americans, Australians, and even Europeans doubt that climate change will affect their lives substantially. A recent UN survey of 10 million people found that climate change ranked 16th in concerns; most people in the developing world, notes environmental economist Bjorn Lomborg, “care about their kids not dying from easily curable diseases, getting a decent education, not starving to death.”
Much more at the site - calling it Climate Stalinism really defines the problem. This is science forced to fit the narrative and not the pure gathering of data and extrapolating trends. Reminds me of Trofim Denisovich Lysenko and his failed agronomy research. He was wrong wrong wrong but he was also politically connected so they accepted his narrative as fact and 100 million people starved to death.
Tip of the Stetson to Kim DuToit for the link. A daily read for me.
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