The Greenies are trying to figure out where they went wrong:
At least three central reasons were identified.
Misanthropy. According to a veteran American Green, Stewart Brand, too many Greens believe “Nature good – humans not so good”. This approach is ultimately unpersuasive, since it is human beings you are trying to persuade. A policy focused on preventing human activity is one which defies human nature. Mark Lynas, one of the repenters, was shown in his younger days stuffing a custard pie into the face of the environmental sceptic Bjorn Lomborg. Now, he admits with shame, he was ”motivated by a sense of righteousness” which was self-regarding.
Exaggeration. If you say that the end of the world is nigh all the time, people start to disbelieve you. Paul Ehrlich talked utter rubbish about how the world would starve in the 1970s. A glorious clip showed a young but authoritative Magnus Magnusson explaining against a backdrop of artificial snow that “the new Ice Age” was upon us. Green activists give out the figure of 93,000 for deaths attributable to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986. The figure favoured by the recent UN investigation is 65. The idea that there are only a few months or years left to save the planet is both so discouraging and so untrue that it disables the cause it is supposed to galvanise. “We have got some time,” said Tim Flannery of the Copenhagen Climate Council, with heretical courage.
Damage. The most powerful part of the programme was that arguing that the Green obsession with banning and preventing things has done actual harm. The refusal to contemplate nuclear power has encouraged more use of fossil fuels and therefore – if you believe the warmist theories – more adverse climate change. The banning of pesticides has led to the deaths of millions of Africans from malaria. The obsessive hatred of GM crops led, in 2002, to the Zambian government refusing US supplies of GM food sent to relieve its people’s starvation.
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