Environmentalism is often compared with a religion, and for good reason: Like those in the throes of religious zeal, environmentalists often cling to extreme beliefs even (or especially) in the face of damning contrary evidence. Environmentalism also fosters a sense of moral superiority in its adherents sufficient to justify the demonization and marginalization of those holding heretical views. Never has the comparison been more apt than this year, however, when Earth Day falls on Good Friday.
But there is one area where the analogy breaks down: In our culture, religion and state are separate, a demarcation jealously guarded by liberals. Ironic, then, that those same liberals cherish and champion state involvement in their cult of Gaea.
Thanks largely to agitation by the global green lobby, “renewable” energy received government subsidies to the tune of $57 billion worldwide in 2009, according to International Energy Agency Chief Economist Fatih Birol.
Why? “In the absence of government support, many renewable energy technologies will struggle to survive,” Birol explains.The converse, of course, is also true — without fantastical environmental schemes to provide both revenue and justification for bureaucratic control over large swaths of society, Big Government would struggle to survive.
So vast sums of tax dollars are collected and then flushed down the “green” toilet. Funds many a family might use to buy groceries or go on vacation are instead funneled to support green energy projects that have zero chance of providing even a significant fraction of the energy the dynamic U.S. economy requires.
In 2007 alone, taxpayers subsidized solar energy at $24.34 per megawatt-hour and wind at $23.37 per megawatt-hour, according to the Energy Information Agency.And what did we get for those expenditures?
Not much, save to pay the salaries of God knows how many Washington busybodies and their corporate cronies.There’s a reason, after all, that renewable energies need to be propped up by government — they are unreliable and atrociously expensive.
This cold reality will not deter California, ever the vanguard of fiscal folly:On April 12, Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown got a jump on Earth Day celebrations when he signed into law a mandate that the Golden State generate one-third of its energy via renewable sources by 2020.
That this will increase electricity costs for California’s already beleaguered businesses (which already pay up to 50 percent more for electricity than the rest of the country) did nothing to sway lawmakers, so intent are they on committing the state to economic suicide.
The very idea of Earth Day encourages such madness, leading politicians to fall over themselves to outgreen one another.But from the beginning, the environmental movement was a much “red” as green.
Earth Day founder Sen. Gaylord Nelson reflected on the origins of the movement in the radical left ferment of the 1960s:
“At the time [1969], anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, called ‘teach-ins,’ had spread to college campuses all across the nation. Suddenly, the idea occurred to me — why not organize a huge grassroots protest over what was happening to our environment?
“I was satisfied that if we could tap into the environmental concerns of the general public and infuse the student anti-war energy … we could generate a demonstration that would force this issue onto the political agenda.”
April 22 was chosen as the date for the first Earth Day in 1970, and for every Earth Day thereafter.This year it falls on Good Friday, a coincidence befitting the status of environmentalism as a secular religion.
But every year Earth Day falls on the birthday of Vladimir Lenin, the man who ushered communism from Marxist theory to Soviet tyranny, a noncoincidence befitting environmentalism’s status as a frequent enemy of economic liberty.
Matt Patterson is senior editor at the Capital Research Center and a contributor to”Proud to Be Right: Voices of the Next Conservative Generation” (HarperCollins, 2010.)
