The View From 1776

With cap-and trade regulation moving again to the top of Congress’s agenda, it’s time to revisit the true nature of the man-made global warming hypothesis.

While not all believers in the hypothesis of man-made global warming are worshippers of secular socialism and salvation through the political state, that hypothesis, as currently hyped by Al Gore, is a product of the secular religion of socialism. 

Socialism’s beginnings are rooted in the scientism of gnostic revelation about the secrets of history’s presumed inevitable course.  Forecasts about the inevitable climate disasters to beset the world within ten years, as Al Gore predicted a year or two ago, are just an extension of that brand of historicism. 

Neither Auguste Comte’s, nor Karl Marx’s predictions about the socialistic course of world history have materialized.  Similarly Al Gore’s predictions have been consistently wide of actual events, and his acolytes’ computer models can’t even conform to what actually happened in the past. 

The Soviet Union, liberal-progressivism’s great hope for perfection of society, was one of history’s most brutal and destructive episodes.  President Obama’s proposed regulation of our economy based upon Al Gore’s prescriptions for global warming will be more of the same.

In the classic gnostic pattern, liberal-progressives see political society as badly aligned, causing all sorts of human misery.  Liberal-progressives are confident that their secret knowledge will enable them to restructure society and to free humanity from the bondage of inequities arising from protection of private property. 

Lawyers will tell you that property is not a thing, but a bundle of rights: rights to use and to dispose of tangible and intangible possessions.  Among those properties, as understood by the delegates who wrote the Constitution in 1787 and as outlined by John Locke in 1689, are the rights to determine for ourselves how we will build our homes, what automobiles we will drive, what forms of energy we will use, and the rights of entrepreneurs to conceive of new technology and to use it to found new businesses that create new jobs for our citizens.

Liberal-progressives, in the name of their special knowledge, propose to abrogate those rights, as they see it, for our own good.  We the ordinary citizens of the United States are too ignorant to make proper choices for ourselves.  As Bill Clinton said about proposed tax reductions, he would be favorably disposed, but people would just use the money for the wrong things.

The hypothesis of man-made global warming in its present-day emanation is a fuzzy, feel-good doctrine used to proselytize young students and ill-informed members of the public.  Under its seemingly beneficent cover, however, is a fist of iron that will crush individual political liberties. 

It is no accident that labor unions, a quintessential excrescence of socialism, strongly support President Obama’s efforts to impose Kyoto-style restrictions on business and individual choice.  Resurgent anti-free-trade protectionism, under the sham of protecting the environment, is a logical implication of the liberal-progressive urge to micro-manage everything and everyone, as well as a political payoff to organized labor.

If Democrat/Socialist Party leaders have their way, the United States will be propelled into relative poverty.  Our standard of living, if regulations to reduce carbon emissions to the extent proposed by President Obama are imposed, will be reduced to less than the standards prevailing when the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock.  Labor unions then will be positioned to resume medieval guild-style control of all production (much of which will of necessity be hand crafted, if San Francisco liberal-progressives like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi determine the model).  Lucky labor union members will be assured of a monopoly position to limit the numbers of apprentices permitted to work in production of goods, while the public pays for their union luxury in fewer jobs, fewer goods, and higher prices.

There is plenty of evidence that the earth has gone through many climate cycles and that the earth has gradually been warming over millions of years.  That, however, is a far cry from the presumption that humans are powerful enough to usurp God’s Will with respect to climate conditions. It is an equally far cry from handing over our nation’s fate to a socialist elite centered in the UN and the Brussels EU headquarters, an elite who presume themselves powerful enough to control the entire world’s climate.

Unfortunately for believers in this socialist dogma, evidence against it continues to mount.  Its foot of clay is the complete inability of scientistic speculators to make their computer models predict accurately any actual weather behavior.  With global temperatures moving over the past decade in the opposite direction from Al Gore’s predictions, believers are left to secular religious faith alone to sustain them.  This, of course, they are free to do, but that is no warrant for compelling us to degrade our lives and the future for our children and grandchildren to support their secular religious belief.

Socialists have long recognized that their religion, which is resisted strongly wherever political freedom exists to any degree, must be imposed by force, either legislatively or by armies.  Moreover, if socialism is to become the dominant religion in the United States, it must ultimately be imposed universally.  Too many people defect from socialism when they can observe people in other nations living in free-market prosperity.

The Soviet Union’s continual drive to pull nations around the globe into its political and economic orbit was motivated by precisely that recognition.  Lenin and other socialist theorists recognized that the imagined social and economic harmony of socialism could be realized only when the entire world had been converted or conscripted into the socialist religion.

This explains why, to promote the hypothesis of man-made global warming, President Obama and his socialistic confreres continually refer to so-called international law and to their vision of a world government.