Climate Change Weekly #421: Alarmists Embrace Authoritarianism, Ignore Lessons of History

A rump group of the environmental movement has always been wedded to authoritarianism—primarily the movement’s intellectual leadership. Going back to the beginnings of environmentalism as a movement, Progressive-era politicians such as President Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot (Roosevelt’s friend and choice to be the first head of the newly created U.S. Forest Service) believed democracy and markets were both ill-suited to manage natural resources. Progressives believed natural resources should be controlled, developed, and conserved by elite scientific managers, bureaucrats unbeholden to the wishes of the public.

Later, as detailed by Alston Chase in his powerful book In a Dark Wood, many Nazis were at least in part inspired by an expansive vision of environmental purity.

Although few if any progressives were full-on misanthropes, there have always some of these within the environmental movement, pushing for increasingly extreme actions in defense of the environment and against human use of natural resources. The misanthropic wing of the movement has referred to humans as “a cancer,” “a disease,” and “a parasite,” with some openly hoping for a killer virus to come along and wipe out most of humanity. Eco-philosopher Arne Naess, who coined the term deep ecology, said the ideal human population on Earth is 200 million, and he called for policies and personal actions to achieve that goal as soon as possible. Others have estimated the “optimal” human population as 1.5 to 2 billion people and claimed this justifies population engineering, including both “active” and “passive” means to get there.

Although authoritarians among the climate alarm crowd are not all misanthropes, all misanthropic climate scolds support authoritarian measures to prevent climate change.

Now even the academic literature is increasingly embracing authoritarianism as the world’s allegedly last best hope to avert supposedly apocalyptic climate change. A book released by leading academic publisher Routledge in late 2019 (missed by many because of the pandemic), Liberty and the Ecological Crisis: Freedom on a Finite Planet, says it is urgent for governments to take away people’s freedom:

This book examines the concept of liberty in relation to civilization’s ability to live within ecological limits.

[I]t is our relatively unbounded freedom that has resulted in so much ecological devastation. … The overarching framework for this collection is that liberty and agency need to be rethought…. On a finite planet, our choices will become limited if we hope to survive the climatic transitions set in motion by uncontrolled consumption of resources and energy over the past 150 years.

The American Political Science Review, a publication of Cambridge University Press, recently published an article, “Political Legitimacy, Authoritarianism, and Climate Change,” which begins by asking, “Is authoritarian power ever legitimate?” The author, Ross Mittiga, answers with a resounding “Yes!” Pointing to the restrictions many governments established in response to COVID-19 as the type of emergency justifying authoritarian limits on freedom, the author states, “Climate change poses an even graver threat to public safety. Consequently, I argue, legitimacy may require a similarly authoritarian approach.”

It should be noted that some governments resisted the authoritarian urge. South Dakota in the United States and Sweden in Europe, for example, did not impose authoritarian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic. Their populations’ health fared better than those in many places where governments imposed draconian restrictions on personal freedom, movement, public and even private gatherings, and work, under emergency powers. Based on the ongoing nature of the pandemic and the rise of multiple virus variants, there is limited evidence the authoritarian emergency restrictions imposed by most governments did anything to contain, much less end, the virus.

“The restrictions just weren’t stringent enough or imposed for a long enough time,” I can almost hear some climate alarmists saying.

What we can say with some confidence is that democracy suffered under the COVID response, with Freedom House reporting democracy grew weaker in 80 countries, among them the United States, during the pandemic. Abuse of power by governments and mistrust of government both grew during the pandemic, Freedom House reports.

Mittiga says climate change is a greater threat than COVID and therefore justifies long-term restrictions on life choices even stricter than those imposed over the past two years. How the public will respond to that might best be judged by the visible street protests to ongoing or newly reimposed restrictions in Europe and elsewhere, and the people widely flouting mask mandates, fighting vaccine mandates, and publicly sharing information about adverse vaccine reactions and COVID cases among the fully vaccinated in the United States. This type of pushback presents a problem for Mittiga unless the type of authoritarian solutions he supports are much more like those of North Korea, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, China under Mao, and Russia under Stalin than what the liberal democracies have dared attempt thus far.

This authoritarian turn does not surprise me. I wrote about it in the past, most recently in Climate Change Weekly 411 and Climate Change Weekly 406. In the latter I wrote this:

[T]he energy cuts and lifestyle changes required to hit net zero will mean going back to early-1800s levels of emissions. This will force enormously negative economic growth and giving up modern conveniences (and the freedoms they have created) that people in developed countries have come to take for granted over the past century.

For people in developing countries the news is even worse. They will have to be kept from developing, which will consign even more generations to premature deaths and abject penury due to energy poverty and food privation.

Oh well, climate alarmists whisper (usually in secret), you’ve got to break a few eggs to make an omelet.

Based on the evidence, I believe that no climate crisis is in the offing, that science shows the modest warming of the past century and any reasonably expected warming in the coming century has not  caused calamity or even worsening weather extremes and is unlikely to do so. But even if I’m wrong, authoritarianism is the worst possible response to the climate crisis.

Climate alarmists praise China, ignoring the fact that it produces more greenhouse gases than every other industrialized economy on Earth combined and its emissions are growing. Also, as I detailed in a 1997 article titled “Five Eco-Despoiled Nations” in The World & I magazine, the countries with the worst environmental problems in the twentieth century were, with just one exception, communist or socialist dictatorships. (The exception was an impoverished, largely failed state with a history of careening back and forth between deeply disputed democratic elections and coups leading to authoritarian rule.)

Time and again, one finds the environment fares better in liberal democracies with largely market economies than in countries under authoritarian rule. This is not a coincidence.

Climate alarmists ignore this clear fact and display ignorance of history (and no understanding of human nature and how institutions shape behavior) in a second way: people like Mittiga, James Hansen, and others who embrace authoritarianism as a solution to the climate crisis somehow believe they will be the anointed ones wielding power if liberal democracies are displaced by authoritarian governments. I’m sure Robespierre and Trotsky felt the same, but history tells a very different story. See, for a contemporary example, China’s treatment of its environmental protesters and suppression of the environmental movement. Environmentalism doesn’t thrive under authoritarian rule. It is suppressed.

History shows revolutions resulting in dictatorships typically eat their children and those who they overthrew alike, indiscriminately and with equal fervor and self-perceived righteous indignation.

There is no good reason to believe climate alarmists who help bring down liberal democracies around the globe and replace them with authoritarian rule will enjoy a different fate.

On the contrary, statements made by those pushing the hardest for political action to fight climate change indicate they are in fact more interested in imposing socialism or authoritarianism, with them in control, than in protecting the environment or those most vulnerable to climate change. Many of my friends and colleagues refer to these wolves in sheep’s clothing as “watermelons”: green on the outside, Communist red on the inside. They are opportunists who use the specter of climate change to push their socialist political goals by indirect means. Many watermelons are longtime, deeply embedded, experienced political operatives, so there is good reason to believe they—not the academics, intellectuals, or true believers—will seize the reins of power if their revolution comes. The true believers, not the political schemers, would go to the wall along with the former regime.

Authoritarianism is bad, regardless of the cause it purportedly serves. Painting evil green does not make it better.

SOURCES: Grist; American Political Science Review; Freedom House; Climate Change Weekly; Climate Realism