The green god isn’t dead

As Gregory Rodriguez notes in his column, environmentalism has become a secular proxy religion. And it’s growing faster than any of the world’s traditional beliefs. Sadly, Rodriguez fails to note that the productive scientific motives and technologies that solve environmental problems have been bypassed and replaced by perverse political dogma and fear-mongering propaganda.

Today, the environmental movement increasingly mimics religion in its identification of humans as sinners against nature, its calls for personal redemption via lifestyle changes, its claims that environmental issues are now moral issues. And, with its predicted global warming apocalypse, environmentalists even have their biblically-proportioned Armageddon.

As with other religions, environmentalism also has its false prophets - and its political opportunists. The religion of environmentalism has a simple, godless good-versus-evil orthodoxy: Nature does good, man does bad. This basic belief enables anti-capitalist, internationalist and global-socialist political operatives.

The faithful congregations of environmentalism are found under the roofs of the United Nations, the European Union, the global Green Party, the Democratic Party in the U.S., and hundreds of proselytizing nonprofit eco-groups. Eco-activists claim moral authority in requiring everyone’s adherence to the cause of environmentalism. Your personal commitment and sacrifice for their fanciful moral imperatives — such as global sustainability, smart (you fill in the blank), carbon footprinting and environmental justice — provide your path to environmental enlightenment, purity and ultimate redemption.

Global news media and corporate marketeers have been willing and gullible accomplices in the hysterics of environmentalism. Politically-biased U.N. committee reports and wild doomsday speculation from green group fundraising propaganda have distorted the issue of climate change far beyond rational scientific discovery or discourse.

Short-term leverage of environmentalism for political expediency will only hasten and lengthen a global economic collapse, with far greater human suffering, conflict and pollution than any of the worst-case scenarios being proliferated by environmentalism’s 21st century climate crusade.

Paul Taylor is an environmental policy analyst and author of “Green Gone Wrong: Ecopolitics Exposed.”