If you’re wondering why arguing with climate change deniers (like me) seems so fruitless, check where you’re standing.
Some things seem destined to go together. Peanut butter and jelly. Puddles and rain boots. Christians and climate change denial.
Climate change activists must feel like they’re banging their heads against the wall trying to get people to listen. I hadn’t thought much about this until recently when I started binge-watching a funny YouTuber who’s passionate about climate change.
For me, the most intuitive response to climate activists’ desperate appeals is a total nonreaction. But I like this YouTuber. And I don’t like his jabs against climate deniers.
So, for the first time, I peeled back my disinterestedness to examine why I don’t give a natural-gas-powered fart about greenhouse emissions, carbon footprints and the evils of plastic straws.
What they think…
I suppose activists would attribute my indifference to being a flat-brained, stoopid ‘ole dummy-head who doesn’t listen to facts. Literally everyone knows climate change is happening. All the scientists say it’s an inarguable fact (except for the ones who don’t). And government leaders are always jetting off to fancy summits to talk about cutting down fuel consumption and reducing carbon dioxide emissions.
It’s true that I can be flat-brained. Once, I absentmindedly cracked an egg in the garbage and threw the shell in the frying pan.
But on occasion, I’ve been known to squeeze out a sensible thought. In fact, very few instances of my own stupidity have escaped my notice for decades on end. I’m eventually bound to realize that something’s off.
If the source of my climate change skepticism was merely ignorance or moral laziness, I’d have changed (or at least started to change) by now. It’s not likely I would’ve dismissed global warming PSAs this long without a reason. So what’s the reason?
What I think…
When I encounter climate activists, I don’t hear ideas first. I see people first. Because people are the product of their ideas. Climate change activists are walking, talking billboards for the strength of their arguments.
What do I see on those billboards? A lot of big no-no’s.
The great divide
In my observation, many climate change activists are secular humanists. They think the world begins and ends with us—there’s no God in the picture, at least not actively.
Your average climate change denier is politically conservative, a group known to be dominated by religious folk who think God exists and (more or less) has the final say over what happens in this world.
I’m aware that, occasionally, a religious conservative intellectual finds their way over to the climate activism side. And occasionally a feminist does her man’s laundry.
But that ain’t the normal way of it.
It’s no coincidence that religious people who believe in an active God tend to be climate change deniers and secular people tend to be climate change activists.
Drawing on reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations website states, “It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land. Widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and biosphere have occurred.”
Positioning itself at the “forefront of the effort to save our planet,” the UN summoned its bureaucratic superpowers in 1992 to launch the Framework Convention on Climate Change “to prevent ‘dangerous’ human interference with the climate system.”
“Dangerous” interference includes activities like generating heat and electricity, manufacturing goods, cutting down forests for farms and pastures, travelling, making food, powering buildings and consuming lots of stuff.
So, basically, living.
We humans have made a mess, they contend, and we need to clean it up.
Birds of a feather
Who has most passionately fallen in line with the UN’s call to exhale less and reduce our carbon footprint? As I mentioned before, the answer to me is secular humanists.
I guess an issue backed by the philosophy that “everything begins and ends with us” resonates with them.
That’s because this philosophy is their bottom line. Everything stems from it. If there’s no God, then we’re the only ones left to solve earth-sized problems.
But don’t be fooled by this appearance of moral responsibility. The “good global citizen” package comes with a (literal) hell of a lot of kickbacks.
Without God in the picture telling you what to do, you can do what you want, when you want, how you want.
Oh wait, I forgot… as long as it makes you happy and doesn’t hurt someone else.
By this same reasoning, secular humanists advocate for social acceptance of getting high, getting drunk, killing unborn babies when you don’t want to have them, leaving babies lucky enough to be born alive in the arms of daycare workers so moms can play Miss Independent at work, trying every intimate arrangement under the sun before actually committing to someone, and divorcing when you just don’t feel like being married anymore. And that’s just the shortlist of gifts this group has given society.
These values ain’t for me. At the root of them lies the same God-expunging beliefs that fuel, or, I guess, solar-power the doomsday message of global warming.
That says something about the message. And I don’t want anything to do with it.