Watermelons: The Greens, the Commies and the Nazis

Mark Lynas has written a review of acerbic Telegraph blogger James Delingpole’s book Watermelons: How Environmentalists Are Killing the Planet, Destroying the Economy and Stealing Your Children’s Future.

Lynas slates the book- which he confesses he was unable to finish- as

a schoolboy vision, deluded and naive, of a topsy-turvy world in which the Royal Society and other august scientific bodies are peopled by “liars, cheats and frauds”, while the little guy surfing the internet (Delingpole himself) who courageously disbelieves the white-coated “expert” elite is always right in the end.

He goes onto say “I lost count of the number of comparisons to Nazis: environmentalists are Nazis, scientists are Nazis, UN officials are Nazis, and we must fight them on the beaches and never surrender to their dastardly intellectualism and cunning, elitist plans.”

Like Lynas, I read the book on my Kindle, which makes it very easy to count the number of times “Nazis” are mentioned: 34 it seems; but most of them are not, as Lynas claims, Delingpole comparing environmentalists or scientists to Nazis; in fact, the first reference makes quite the reverse point, that it is climate skeptics who are frequently referred to as “Deniers” -a phrase Lynas himself uses routinely without a thought- and by comparison therefore to Nazis, guilty of a presumed future holocaust caused by climate change.
Delingpole accuses climate activists of using tactics common in all areas of politics of “closing down the debate” :

Worried about immigration? You’re a racist. Want your kids to get a good education? You’re an elitist. Suspect all the fuss about AGW might be a little overdone? You’re just the kind of scummy Nazi-sympathizing revisionist who thinks Hitler didn’t murder six million Jews… The term “denier”, it goes without saying, was designed explicitly to provoke comparisons with Holocaust Denial. Shortly after Climategate, I took part in a debate with George Monbiot. When I put this point to him he—funnily enough—denied he was making any such connection. So I gently reminded him of a Guardian article he’d written in 2006: “Almost everywhere, climate change denial now looks as stupid and unacceptable as Holocaust denial.”

Most of the other references to Nazis are also not accusing Greens or climate scientists of being Nazis, but are references to actual Nazis from the Third Reich, some of whom did indeed share much with various hews of modern day greens:

For understandable reasons, modern greens have sought to distance themselves from the Nazis. But as the authors of the essay collection How Green Were The Nazis? argue, this won’t quite wash: The green policies of the Nazis were more than a mere episode or aberration in environmental history at large. They point to larger meanings and demonstrate with brutal clarity that conservationism and environmentalism are not and have never been value-free or inherently benign enterprises. Precisely. Nazi Germany did not represent some grotesque perversion of green values; rather it represented their purest, most honest form of practical expression. If—as the modern green movement does and the Nazis did—you want to create a depopulated, almost “Garden of Eden” world where small numbers of chosen people live in a state of rustic, deindustrialized, organic bliss, then clearly the two key questions you must ask are “Which people?” and “How?”

That many contemporary Green ideals were given some of their earliest and fullest expression under Nazi Germany is corroborated by the historical work of Peter Staudenmaier, whose book Ecofascism Revisited I reviewed in the last post.

Later on in the book Delingpole does make an explicit comparison, telling us about how an editor once compained to him about his apparent angry obsession with climate change:

I think the post he particularly objected to was entitled: “Why do I call them Eco Nazis? Because they are Eco Nazis.” It drew on research by Mark Musser in American Thinker, showing that one of the pioneers of apocalyptic global warming theory was an Austrian Nazi called Günther Schwab. This tied in with a discussion I had about the German Green Party with Dr. Benny Peiser, one of its early members. “Many of our most enthusiastic members were Nazis,” Dr. Peiser told me. (Peiser now runs the skeptical Global Warming Policy Foundation based in the UK.) Given the deep ecological leanings of Hitler, Goering and Goebbels documented in Chapter 9, this should hardly come as any surprise.

As Staudenmaier’s co-author Janet Biehl also shows, figures like Rudolph Bahro kept the mystical-Nazi Green ideology flame burning in recent times and also played a significant role in the formation of the contemporary German Green party. The Nazi influence on today’s green movement should not be taken lightly.

Does Delingpole overstate his case as Lynas claims, by drifting into unsubstantiated conspiracy theory concerning the UN, Agenda 21, and global warming?

Perhaps. But a lot of what he says is hard to completely discount. Yes, CO2 is a greenhouse gas and yes humans probably are warming the atmosphere, and yes the climate change we are experiencing now may be much faster than previous changes, and we should take the threat seriously and do something about it.

But Climategate really does show evidence of unscrupulous and bad science, or at the very least some level of “virtuous corruption”; the main policy responses of international treaties and carbon trading have been far too open to corruption and gaming the system, and doomed to failure given that the poor of the world aspire to western standards of living and there is currently no effective alternative to fossil fuels for billions of people to bring themselves out of poverty. The image of fossil fuel companies representing the Devil incarnate, and of our supposed “addiction” to oil is absurd given that we all need this energy to heat and light our homes.

“Data is dispensable for Delingpole” says Lynas “- that’s for the hated elite with their clipboards, computer models and lab coats. We should rely instead on ideology-based assertion, simple common sense and the ever-trusty anecdote. The “medieval warm period”, now agreed by palaeoclimatologists to have been a minor regional phenomenon, is resurrected by repetition of the hoary old tale of grapes being grown in England and Norse colonies being established in Greenland. (Both of these happened but hardly count as defining proxy markers for higher world temperatures.”

This may well be so; but should we trust that very small coterie of climate scientists who so carefully engaged in gate-keeping to keep contrary papers from passing peer review? The status of the Medieval Warm Period and the Hockey Stick continues to be the subject of uncertainty and controversy. Judith Curry writes:

It is obvious that there has been deletion of adverse data in figures shown IPCC AR3 and AR4, and the 1999 WMO document. Not only is this misleading, but it is dishonest (I agree with Muller on this one).

Richard Muller, Director of the Berkeley Earth Project, discusses “hide the decline” and “vehemently refers to this as ‘dishonest,’ and says ‘you are not allowed to do this,’ and further states that he intends not to read further papers by these authors.”

Bishop Hill commented on an apparent change of emphases in Phil Jones’ statements on the MWP here. Recently Jones has said:

There is much debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent or not. The MWP is most clearly expressed in parts of North America, the North Atlantic and Europe and parts of Asia. For it to be global in extent the MWP would need to be seen clearly in more records from the tropical regions and the Southern Hemisphere. There are very few palaeoclimatic records for these latter two regions.

This issue may be a case of insufficient data to be sure. But regardless of the real state of climate science, the whole subject has been politicized and used to suit the agenda of those who share at least some of the more misanthropic and controlling elements bequeathed the greens by the Nazis.

Consider the case of IPCC chair Pachauri and how his own ideological views may be having a strong influence on climate policy, as Donna LaFramboise explains:

Prior to becoming head of the IPCC, Pachauri’s support for climate action didn’t rest on objective evidence. Rather, he regarded a global emissions treaty as a useful mechanism – as one more way in which his fantasy of introducing a new ethic to govern human behaviour might be realized.

Climate change has been all too often presented in apocalyptic tones, its dangers exaggerated in the propaganda of Al Gore and activist groups like Greenpeace, and presented as so many other environmental issues have been presented, to satisfy what Nordhaus and Shellenberger call “revenge fantasies”: the modern world, technology and hubris of human progress is Evil. Our consumption of scarce resources is unsustainable. We are destroying Nature and it is all Our Fault. Soon the Mother will strike back, with floods, tempests and droughts.

Lynas correctly points out that there is plenty of things wrong with elements in the environmental movement, which is largely anti-nuclear, despite nuclear power being the obvious choice for low-carbon base-load energy.

In other words, some are “watermelons”. I believe that capitalism and democracy sometimes need defending from the more deluded greens, and the environmental movement as a whole is far too much a creature of the political left.

I do wonder however, absent the anti-GE, anti-nuclear, back-to-the-land scythe-wielding hippies- what would be left in any recognizable form of the environmental movement at all? Is not the drive for renewables before the technology is mature just as deluded as a romantic yearning for the pastoral life?

Lynas I feel is too harsh on Delingpole, but I’m hardly surprised. Watermelons is indeed a witty and entertaining read, and not without insight. Lynas told me on Twitter that it could in theory have been an interesting book, but that Delingpole was just not the man to have written it. One might just as easily say that, given Delingpole’s style, he is the only one who could have.

Posted by skepteco on February 16, 2012

http://skepteco.wordpress.com/2012/02/16/watermelons-the-greens-the-commies-and-the-nazis/