Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin

Bret Stephens in the Wall Street Journal argues that “climate change” enthusiasts are driven by a “totalitarian impulse.”

It is apparent to many, especially after “climategate,” that the psychology of those who believe that man-made global warming is soon to destroy us all is about more than scientific evidence. Stephens outline seven areas that capture the mindset of the Copenhagen cabal. To those who remember the Club of Rome and the warnings in the 1970s that we were at the dawn of a new ice age and that millions would starve because the planet couldn’t sustain an exploding population, this is nothing new. Julian Simon put the lie to the doomsayers back then, but predictions that never come true don’t matter to the true believers.

This is as obvious and predictable as everything else the left does. Here are a couple of points Stephens makes and you can read the rest in the article:

Utopianism: In the world as it is, climate alarmists see humanity hurtling toward certain doom. In the world as it might be, humanity has seen the light and changed its patterns of behavior, becoming the green equivalent of the Soviet “new man.” At his disposal are technologies that defy the laws of thermodynamics. The problems now attributed to global warming abate or disappear.

• Anti-humanism: In his 2007 best seller “The World Without Us,” environmentalist Alan Weisman considers what the planet would be like without mankind, and finds it’s no bad thing. The U.N. Population Fund complains in a recent report that “no human is genuinely ‘carbon neutral'”—its latest argument against children. John Holdren, President Obama’s science adviser, cut his teeth in the policy world as an overpopulation obsessive worried about global cooling. But whether warming or cooling, the problem for the climate alarmists, as for other totalitarians, always seems to boil down to the human race itself.

—Mike D’Virgilio