The Power of Eco-Nightmares

A massive wave sweeps across a major city turning skyscrapers into splintered rubble, flooding streets and highways, and sending cars flying through the air. The Statue of Liberty freezes, Los Angeles burns, and everyone is forced to inexplicably commit suicide.

The message of course is clear. Our inability to recycle paper bags, swap out cars for public transportation and stop using air conditioners has doomed the planet to utter destruction. Welcome to the power of eco-nightmares.

The secular apocalypse of the eco-nightmare, the environmentalist Armageddon doomed to strike at an ever-changing date, is a green boschian vision of a sinful humanity being punished for its sins against Mother Earth, that is as dogmatically fanatical and practically unproven, as the rantings of any doomsday prophet crying out, "The end is near."

Environmentalist eschatology may be short on theology, but it's long on nightmarish apocalyptic visions of eco-disasters with technology taking the place of vice, industry replacing sodomy, and excessive use of water and power taking the place of debauchery. After God had been replaced with the one-two combination of the Big Bang and Evolution, environmentalism developed a godless theology of sin and damnation, apocalypse and salvation preached by eco-televangelists like Al Gore soliciting your money to help stop the plastic devil and his CFC archdemons from destroying the earth.

Of course a Marxist coined theology was bound to focus on resource consumption and wealth, wealth and resources being the sin and good works of Marxism. And like its Marxist godfather, environmentalism is perpetually obsessed with what you have, how much of it you have, how much of it you use, and what you can do to make up for it all. Which most people would consider rude and annoying-- unless you frighten them with visions of the environmental apocalypse devouring all of mankind's works, because too many people flushed their toilets once too often and used plastic instead of paper.

The power of eco-nightmares is leveraged to frighten and intimidate people into surrendering power over their lives and pumping untold billions into a variety of schemes to stop a crisis that doesn't actually exist.

Like Marxism, environmentalism views unregulated human productivity as a venial sin. And is determined to place it under very tight regulation. With Marxism's main thrust of worker rights losing steam in the mid-20th century as Western workers became some of the most prosperous people in the world, environmentalism slowly began to take its place, adopting a new class of the oppressed, no longer workers, but random people, animals and eventually the entire globe itself. All the better to be able to speak on behalf of a demographic that will never demand to speak for itself.

If Marxism viewed the capitalist businessman as its enemy and profit as his crime, the environmentalist has slightly modified that with the businessman still the enemy, but technology as the crime. Technology after all is what makes human industry possibly. Or rather efficient productive use of technology does. And the goal of environmentalism is to reduce technology, make industry inefficient and tax all products for their benefit.

This global environmental shakedown requires a compelling vision to enforce its diktat. And that is where the power of eco-nightmares comes into the picture. While the left repeatedly refuses to acknowledge the threat of Islamic terrorism, it has instead been busy shoving the threat of environmental collapse at us. From polar bears doing perfectly well on ice floes, set to the strains of mournful violin music, to waves destroying entire cities, to Al Gore proclaiming that the pole would be gone in five years-- the power of eco-nightmares continues to haunt popular culture.

Like every other ideology, environmentalism in the end is about power. Power over the lives of ordinary people. It is driven by a twisted mixture of eco-fanaticism, ignorance, greed and contempt for the ordinary man, for the suburb and the two car garage, for the same bourgeois middle class that the Marxists so ardently despised.

It is not after all the rich who will be made to suffer by the environmentalists. There will always be indulgences that can be bought, carbon credits, various offset schemes and donations that can be made to the fund of your choice. Nor will it be the poor, who under socialism, are meant to live heavily subsidized lives. They will of course have more trouble than ever buying some basic products, but that will only give socialism more power over them.

No it is the middle class, the "damned bourgeois" who forms the backbone of a free country that as always is the target of the far left. The small businessman, the middle class whose increased productivity and spending has driven national wealth. Who must be destroyed so that the age of the commissar and community organizer can truly take hold, and free nations can become slave nations.

That prosperity, that self-sufficiency and independence is the biggest threat to those who want a totalitarian state. Environmentalism is merely one more way to bring it about, to create scarcity where there was prosperity, fear where there was self-sufficiency, so that no man man live in peace in his own home ever again.

The final outcome of environmentalism is a nightmare, but not a nightmare of collapsing buildings, frozen cities, burning deserts and giant waves, but an entirely human nightmare vision of a hive warren of environmentalist bureaucracies, totalitarian decrees and byzantine regulations. This is the promise and the threat behind the illusory eco-nightmares fed to the public, exploiting the illusion of a crisis to convince a billion people to don their own chains and give up their own freedom.

Behind the imaginary nightmares of ecological catastrophe, the true nightmare of lost freedom remains.