Vincent J. Curtis
11 May 2019
RE: Saving the natural world is akin to saving our home. (Hamilton Spectator)
When it comes to pseud-scientific forecasts of an apocalypse, the Spectator rises to the bait like a trout to a fly. In this instance, an UN body called, Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, declares that one million species are going to die-off soon – and the first question the Spectator asks is not, “is this even true?” or “how can they know?” Instead, the Spectator asks, what are we going to do about it?
I guess the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is running out of steam, and so a new scare is needed to sow economic chaos in western economies. But let’s try to answer first questions first. How can they know? Biologists do not know how many species there are on earth, and I don’t think biology has a million names of species in its catalogue. We are not witnesses mass die-offs with our own eyes, and all we have of evidence of mass extinctions in the past are inferences from the fossil record. In addition, no cause is offered as to why such things happened in the past, or what proximate cause should be operating now.
On the other hand, what is a UN panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystems supposed to find, except catastrophe unless…. ? If the panel came back and said everything was A-Okay, what would happen to the panel’s funding and to the jobs of the bureaucrats who work on it? Survival of species may be more personal that appears on the surface.
Another congenial reason for finding catastrophe is the one of calling on member governments to exert more power in the economic sphere. You know, socialism as opposed to laissez-faire capitalism. The sort of thing progressives leap to as the solution to the cause du jour.
What else? One of the beliefs of Gaia and Deep Ecology is that there are too many human beings in existence. They think that one billion is the right number, whereas presently there are over seven billion. To get there you need a die-off of 87 percent of the human species, and a way to get there is to so mess up the world’s economic system that it can only support a billion.
As with climate change, the general aim of the panel’s report is to blame the successful western economies for a forthcoming calamity (which is always just down the road) in the hopes that western countries will bring themselves down a few pegs. How can we know this? As the Spectator notes, “One of the scientists insisted the world must rethink its ‘infatuation’ with economic growth.” And the Spectator responds, “That’s sound advice, and surely we’ll need to regulate human activity in new ways…even if that makes some of the luxuries we want more unaffordable or even unattainable.” Spoken like a true progressive. Try telling that to a Chinese peasant waiting for the Chinese economy to get him off the farm and into decent clothes. So, who else is there but us?
Just like the climate change hoax. Same program, different excuse for it. And the Chinese are even less interested in limiting economic growth than they are about CO2 emissions.
We are getting the same message from the same people. A UN panel and progressives blame successful western economies for a global catastrophe that is just down the road, and only western countries can save the world and must do penance for their sin of immoderate success.
Fool us once, shame on you. Fool us twice, shame on us.
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