Environmentalism is the New Temperance Movement, Part 1

As the careful reader has already noted, I imagine myself to be quite clever.  Usually, though, my brilliant, original insight turns out to be just a rediscovery of someone else's earlier thought.

And so it is with the lightning bolt that struck me at lunch today, "Environmentalism is the new temperance movement."

Through the magic of Google, I found this Yuval Levin essay from 2008, which quotes from this 1994 book by Charles Rubin.  Levin quotes Rubin, "Environmentalism is the temperance movement of our time."

Still, despite its age, I think this metaphor has something to offer us today, more so than "environmentalism as religion."

The parallels between Environmentalism and the Temperance movement are obvious.  Just substitute "demon oil" for "demon rum" and you get the idea.  Both movements address(ed) real problems.  Fetal alcohol syndrome, domestic abuse, industrial accidents all were (and are) real problems associated with alcohol use and abuse.  Likewise, the use of energy does create real environmental harm.

But the useful part of the "environmentalism as temperance" metaphor comes in examining each movement's preferred policy prescriptions:  the preferred policy solutions of both groups would (or did) produce catastrophic results that the public would view as worse than the underlying problem.

As Prohibition in the 1920's turned ordinary citizens into criminals, climate change solutions would turn ordinary citizens over to tender mercies of the recycling police or the light bulb stasi as illustrated in this amusing 2010 Super Bowl ad for Audi cars ("The Green Police").  In Prohibition, a new generation of gangsters, like Al Capone, emerged to profit from the newly banned booze, as dramatized in the HBO series Boardwalk Empire.  The Italian Mafia has already gotten into the wind farm business in Europe.

The preferred policy prescriptions of the environmental movement would be at least as destructive to our economy, to the social fabric, and to respect for the rule of law that Prohibition was in the 1920's.  And, as with Prohibition, the damage will far outweigh any incremental ecological improvement that climate change policy would deliver.

That's why I believe it is less useful to argue the "science" of global warming.  The real issue is not whether global warming is real or not, or whether the potential environmental harm is half, or even one percent, of that predicted by the gloomiest doomsayers.  The real issue is that the environmentalist policies would be 100 percent catastrophe.