Christian theologian wrongly blames free market for ecological crisis

 The 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference was winding down in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, as I write this article. Speaking at the conference, President Joe Biden advertised that the bill he disguised as inflation reduction was really a way to push the Left’s climate agenda, which is unpopular among many Americans, through Congress:

“We are racing forward to do our part to avert the ‘climate hell’ that the U.N. Secretary-General so passionately warned about earlier this week. …  And this summer, the United States Congress passed and I signed into law my proposal for the biggest, most important climate bill in the history of our country — the Inflation Reduction Act.” 

Mike Frost blames capitalism for creating the looming “climate hell” because, he wrote, “In order to exist, capitalism must expand without end.” That unrestrained growth destroys the environment and impoverishes the nations that climate change damages the most. The charge of unlimited growth and environmental destruction is Frost’s fourth indictment. I responded to Frost’s first three misconceptions about capitalism here, here and here.

Cold Weather Did Not Create The Modern World

The birth of Christ was the most important event in human history. Second to it was the hockey stick growth in per capita GDP (standards of living) that began with the creation of the Dutch Republic in the late 16th century. Most know it as the Industrial Revolution, which socialists claim impoverished and enslaved mankind, but it was much more than that. It was a revolution in culture, including the laws, government, religion, social structure and attitudes toward business.

Economists call it hockey stick growth because a graph of per capita GDP for the world would be almost perfectly flat from pre-history until 1600 when for the first time in human history the average standard of living began to rise. It caused a continuous increase in average wealth in the Dutch Republic, England, the US, Australia, Canada and eventually all of Western Europe. It ended poverty and the Malthusian cycles of famine with mass starvation in the West and made us 30 times as wealthy as our ancestors who launched it. Since WWII similar prosperity has spread to Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore and finally China. The World Bank estimates that slightly freer markets in India and China cut the worst poverty in half in just the past generation.

Climate change is socialist groupthink

Public relations research tells us there are two types of people in the world: one relies on an authority figure to tell him what to do and the other decides for himself by gathering evidence and using reason. If you’re someone who can think for himself, you have probably wondered why climate science is such a mess. Why do they torture the temperature data to get it to look like a hockey stick in graphs? Why do they ignore or slander critics instead of answering their concerns when they offer good evidence?

A short period existed when climate science was real science and not socialist ideology. Back in the 1980s when the science was in its infancy, scientists openly debated the evidence. A startling experiment in that decade proved CO2 to be an excellent fertilizer for trees and plants.

Christopher Booker thinks the reason climate scientists act like ideologues is because of “groupthink,” referring to the book with that title by Yale psychologist Irving Janis:

Janis’s first rule is that a group of people come to share a particular way of looking at the world which may seem hugely important to them but which turns out not to have been based on looking properly at all the evidence. It is therefore just a shared, untested belief.”

Rule two is that, because they have shut their minds to any evidence which might contradict their belief, they like to insist that it is supported by a “consensus.” The one thing those caught up in groupthink cannot tolerate is that anyone should question it. 

This leads on to the third rule, which is that they cannot properly debate the matter with those who disagree with their belief. Anyone holding a contrary view must simply be ignored, ridiculed, and dismissed as not worth listening to.

Booker describes the behavior of most climate scientists well, but doesn't answer how they fell into the groupthink trap? The answer lies with the collapse of socialism in the late 1980s. Socialism’s main selling point from its fabrication by Saint-Simon in the early decades of the 19th century had always been economic. Socialism would make everyone equally rich as it ended the waste inherent in the anarchy of markets.

The world suffered through 120 years of experimentation with socialism launched by the welfare state of Germany in 1870 through the Russian Revolution and creation of the Soviet Union, the annexation of Eastern Europe, and the victory of Mao in China. China abandoned pure socialism after Mao’s death. Then the Berlin Wall fell; Poland rebelled and the USSR disintegrated, all because socialism had impoverished those nations to the point that they couldn’t feed their own people. Socialism lost the economic debate that had burned through the 20th century.

Reasonable people divorced socialism, but most socialists had never been reasonable. They are aflame with envy. Robert Heilbroner wept ink for twelve pages over the death of his utopia in “The Triumph of Capitalism,” which appeared in the January 23, 1989 issue of The New Yorker magazine. He began with, “Less than seventy-five years after it officially began, the contest between capitalism and socialism is over; capitalism has won.” He concluded with this:

And finally, what of socialism?...I do not think that the triumph of capitalism means its assured long and happy life or that the defeat of socialism means its ignominious exit from history. The collapse of central planning shows that at this moment socialism has no plausible economic framework, but the word has always meant more than a system of economic organization. At its core, it has stood for a commitment to social goals that have seemed incompatible with, or at least unattainable under, capitalism – above all, the moral, not just the material elevation of humankind...the vision has retained its inspirational potential, just as that of Christianity has survived countless autos-de-fe and vicious persecutions.”

Helbroner soon regained his composure, dried his tears and nailed his 95 theses to the door of capitalism in his September 10, 1990 The New Yorker article, “After Communism.” Near the end he wrote,

For all these reasons, I am not very sanguine about the prospect that socialism will continue as an important form of economic organization now that Communism is finished...But the collapse of the planned economies has forced us to rethink the meaning of socialism. As a semireligious vision of a transformed humanity, it has been dealt devastating blows in the twentieth century...

There is, however, another way of looking at, or for, socialism. It is to conceive of it not in terms of the specific improvements we would like to embody but as the society that must emerge if humanity is to cope with the one transcendent challenge that faces it within a thinkable timespan. This is the ecological burden that economic growth is placing on the environment. The challenge has drawn its first blood in the epidemic rise in skin cancer that is a consequence of the depletion of the ozone layer. It threatens to open far deeper and more serious wounds as the atmosphere gradually forms its invisible panes of carbon dioxide and other gases...The ecological crisis toward which we are moving at a quickening pace has occasioned much scientific comment but surprisingly little economic attention. Yet if there is any single problem that will have to be faced by any socioeconomic order over the coming decades it is the problem of making our economic peace with the demands of the environment.

Whatever its other consequences, the closing window of environmental tolerance will impose an utterly new condition of caution and constraint on a civilization...It is perhaps, possible that some of the institutions of capitalism – markets, dual realms of power, even private ownership of some kinds of production – may be adapted to that new state of ecological vigilance, but, they must be monitored, regulated, and contained to such a degree that it would be difficult to call the final social order capitalism.

Heilbroner gave socialists their new marching orders: take over the environmental movement and use it to forge their socialist utopia. And they did. Climate change scientists embraced their new role as the vanguard of socialism and acted just as FA Hayek had predicted they would in Road to Serfdom fifty years earlier.

Socialists frighten about climate change and AI

I’m sure Elon Musk would be highly offended to know that he is a promoter of Marxism. After all, look at the number of businesses he has started. But he has admitted he only started those companies to promote change to cleaner forms of energy until the governments of the world recognize the problem of global climate change and pass the necessary laws to save us. By promoting global climate change (GCC) hysteria and fear about artificial intelligence (AI), while asserting that the problems are so large only governments can solve them, he is unwittingly promoting socialism. It’s an old socialist technique.

After centuries of attempts at socialism beginning with the Spartans, Plato’s Republic and Christian monasteries, atheists and deists (sentimental atheists) introduced the latest iteration of socialism in early 19th century France. Henri de Saint-Simon convinced his followers that the problems of the world were so large than only powerful states could solve them. He considered the chief problems to be poverty and inequality. Socialists were shocked and awed by the meager advances in the natural sciences so Saint-Simon proposed that a junta of scientists, led by a mathematician, should work together to solve France’s problems and dictate the solutions to compliant citizens. That has been the model for socialism since.