Reminds me of a post over at the Border Wars blog [a dog blog], where the poster points out the hypocrisy of people who protest against things like “war for oil”:

“Every component of [the protester's] sign is made from oil. The foam core, the plastic handle, the paints, the glues: all petroleum based products. The price of any one of those doubles and you won’t see too many out of work “students” waving those signs.

The fact that the protesters’ umbrella awning was made from oil, their ice chest was made from oil, the ice in the ice chest was created using refrigerants made from oil, the plastic bottles holding the water in the ice chest were made from oil, and all the filters, hoses, gaskets, and pumps required to get the water into the bottles are made from oil.”

Read the rest here: http://borderwars.blogspot.com/2008/03/pacifist-hypocrite-shopping-list.html

Well, no one has yet explained the mechanism by which smoking causes lung cancer, so it could well be a myth – though there seems to be a reasonable statistical co-relation.

But I would be happy to start the ball rolling on THE GREAT PASSIVE SMOKING CONSPIRACY!

Of the oil used in the USA, under half of this is actually burned as fuel. The rest is used in plastics and so on. Oil is much too valuable to simply burn.

If magically tomorrow morning we all woke up to super efficient 400 bhp electric cars with 10,000 miles of range and 100% free electric running from a clean and pure source of Unobtanium, Exxon would still be in business. Given supply/demand curves Exxon would basically be doing the same amount of profit it’s doing now. Again this is because… Oil is much too valuable to simply burn.

The Oreskes claim seems premised on the supposition that if we simply stopped burning oil Exxon would go out of business, hence Exxon must be secretly fighting the “settled science” to stop from going under. It’s the only possible reason Exxon would have to engage in this supposed battle — to save itself (and die in a capitalist orgy of frenzied money.)

It’s a real hoot that these clowns can advance this argument because it ignores the reality of what oil is used for, how Exxon makes their money, and Exxon’s long term interest (eak out the profit for generations if possible. Duh.) It’s less of a hoot however that the left seems to have the collective IQ of broccoli since they all seem to buy the Orsekes argument.

You post reads (to me) that you’re willing to view the left as potential good guys if only you could get them to see. I view them differently; if we lived 20,000 years ago they would be… food.

We would agree that the Left has adopted environmentalism as a “saving cause.” Unfortunately for your thesis, however, so has the Right. It was Margaret Thatcher, no less, who introduced the spectre of climate change and sustainability to mainstream UK politics, and the UK political parties are now all but indistinguishable on environmental policies. Indeed, David Cameron, leader of the opposition Conservatives is generally seen as the greenest of them all. In the US, even John McCain and Bob Barr are now singing to Gore’s tune. Certainly, a few right-wingers are refusing to be swept along with the tide – you would seem to be one such – but so too is a handful of Lefties. So, while we would also agree with you that “the attraction of hysterical enviromentalism is that it provides a moral basis to life; sure, a skewed and delusional one, but a basis anyway”, we suggest that that applies equally to the Left and Right.

It is too easy to write off global warming as some sort of flawed science, as you seem to be doing. It is just science. And that is what seems to be forgotten. Sure, it tends not to be subject to the same scrutiny as most science. But that is not a fault of the science per se. It’s what happens when science is invested with moral/political authority. Which, in turn, is what happens when politics – Left and Right – has lost its orientation.

We’ve dealt with this in more detail in various posts, most of which you can find at http://www.climate-resistance.org/tag/left-and-right

But you lost the “moral compass” after the first two paragraphs May I suggest youd rop the frist three paragraphs. The rest is cogent.

Au contraire, the attraction of hysterical enviromentalism is that it provides a moral basis to life; sure, a skewed and delusional one, but a basis anyway.

The left has adopted enviromentalism (sic) as a “saving cause”. It started with the Brundtland report in the 1980s, just when the Soviet Union, and socialism in general, was collapsing, losing its moral purpose.

There are obvious parallels between traditional religion, which defined moral purpose, with Day-of-judgement Swords of Damocles hanging over one’s head, and the new pantheist religion, with it’s Death of the Planet, performing the same function of providing moral the purpose that the left had lost.

Further, the enviromentalist totalitarian zeal makes socialists feel very much at home.

There is still the appeal to “science”. Remember that Marxism was a supposed scientific analysis of society and economy, as is “global warming” supposedly science. And if one doesn’t get it, then one will be re-educated.

So, to sum up: Enviromentalism has been adopted by socialists. It fulfills all the requirements of a religion, as did socialism of old. There is a belief that provides justification for over-reaching zeal: the very end of the world, judgement day. It provides an intellectual fabric to justify the stoning of non-believers and the persecution of apostacy. It provides a very simple means to make moral judgements.

By following a few very simple ceremonies, such as candle-lit Earth Hours, and donating money to the high priests for carbon credits, or indulgences, one can assuage one’s guilt for being human and publicly demonstrate one’s adherence to the orthodoxy.