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The Coalition’s War on Science
Friday, November 20, 2009
The origins of the chaos in the Coalition parties over climate change go back at least two decades when conservatives in the United States and Australia identified environmentalism as a profound threat to their worldview.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 the ‘green scare’ replaced the ‘red scare’ in the demonology of the right. The repudiation of climate science by Minchin, Joyce and the other deniers is rooted in a visceral hatred of environmentalism that has been largely suppressed in the face of widespread and deep public concern over environmental decline, but which is now spilling out in the most extraordinary way.
Why do they hate environmentalism? They hate the fact that (in Australia and the United States, but not elsewhere) the parties of the left own it. They loathe the fact that in the absence of government regulation the capitalist system destroys the natural world. It sickens them that environmentalism gives people a powerful reason to criticize business and primary producers, their natural constituencies. And above all, they can’t stand the culture of environmentalism, which they associate with smelly, feral, dole-bludging tree-huggers.
But here is the problem for them: environmentalism is driven by science, so they have to choose between accepting three centuries of modernism and modifying their ideology, or sticking to their old prejudices and rejecting science. At the deepest level, it is this choice that separates Malcolm Turnbull from the deniers.
The thing is, once you decide to repudiate the vast accumulation of scientific evidence you start operating in a different universe, the one populated by all of the political fanatics of history. The distinguishing feature of fanatics is the loss of judgment, and because they can no longer assess what is in their own interests (let alone that of Australia) the deniers in the Liberal and National parties are now willing to destroy their own parties. Tony Abbott, always a denialist but one who could see the insanity of trying to persuade the Australian public to reject science, has now forfeited his judgment too by casting his lot with the maddies.
The latest events show what we always knew: the concern of the conservative parties for environmental protection has always been fake, mere pandering to public sentiment. But now the ecophobes’ real beliefs have emerged. If they get their way we will all pay a huge price for their fanaticism.
Posted by Clive Hamilton at 11:20 AM