1. Morality
One of the most contemptible sins of the environmentalist crusade is that they speak to us like we’re uneducated, evil, and selfish human beings. Environmentalists always act as though they enjoy a moral superiority that our primitive minds haven’t achieved. You and I say, “We love oil and gas!” and a gang of environmentalists responds by treating us with disgust and disgrace.
This is the common (and dangerously effective) tactic that the radical left employs to choke people into submission to their dogma. Again, if we claim we love oil and gas, which we do considering coal fires to generate electricity even when it’s -50 and natural gas guarantees power even in the most extreme and hostile climates, we are admonished for “killing the planet, producing carbon, and warming the Earth.” The result is that people are shamed and silenced into submission and tolerate the lie that carbon must be reduced.
But frighteningly frigid temperatures assault the province of Alberta and the fractured country of Canada. -50 is unfit for habitation as it is not conducive for human life, let alone human flourishing. An unprotected man who dares venture outside will be plagued with frostbite in mere minutes, with death stalking close behind.
It is because of oil and gas that we’re not suffering to stay alive; it’s because of oil and gas that my house is warm, and it’s because of oil and gas that I can lounge with a hot chocolate in a sweater on my couch during nature’s imposed lockdown.
But isn’t oil and gas bad? Where are the environmentalists? Where is Suzuki? Where are Guilbeault and Gore? Where are those moral crusaders marching on their unholy mission to decarbonize the Earth? More than that, why are they using oil and gas (you know they are) during this battle for survival between man and ice? Why are environmentalists content to live in warm houses or apartments insulated and powered, not by wind or the “energy of the universe,” but by fossil fuels? After all, don’t they tend to demand we harmonize with nature and allow the Earth and her ecosystems to heal? Why are they unusually silent at present?
It’s after contemplating these questions that we discover the answer. H.L. Mencken said it best:
The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. Power is what [almost] all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve.*
2. Power
The environmentalist movement isn’t here to save the planet; it’s a vehicle to conquer power. Radicals are trying their best to “sell” us the lie that the Earth is on the brink of collapse and that only they can supply the “cure.” Of course, the only way for the cure to be administered to our society is if the radicals achieve prominent positions of power. Thus, environmentalism is a means to gain control of the state.
That is why our minds are constantly subjected to heavy bombardment, full of scare and terror manufactured by government and media. Slow but sure, people begin to believe that everything is tainted by carbon. Everything associated with oil and gas becomes a guilty indulgence. Driving is sinful, heating your home with oil is sinful, and using your computer is a sin against the soil.
3. Terror
Eventually, the act of flourishing is synonymous with the apocalypse. Are you going on a road trip? You’re using oil, and that’s killing the Earth. Using the AC during a heatwave? You’re emitting harmful molecules and warming the planet. Flying for a vacation? Jets produce harmful by-products, and so you’re polluting the Earth, etc., etc.
Of course, we’re not going to cease using oil and gas—to do so would regress our civilization into an age of poverty and premature death. So how should we actually live in this climate?
Exactly the way we have been.
I would much rather live in an age of oil and gas than in an age without. Study history—humans died at 30 for almost the whole of our species’ existence. But when oil was discovered and harvested, life expectancy, quality of life, and comfort of life skyrocketed while dramatically reducing poverty and starvation. I am grateful to be able to drive 100km in an hour and not days; I am happy I can (or used to be able to) fly to any location on Earth in a couple of hours, and I am very thankful to be in a warm house when it’s -50c outside.
To try and take that away from us, to demand we relinquish our privileges that oil and gas provide, to slander us as unthinking apes who can’t see into the future, to call us selfish for using what treasure God has gifted to us is not only immoral,
it’s cruel.
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*See Minority Report, H.L. Mencken