There’s a common misconception that the next great evil ideological mania to sweep our world will be easily identified as a sinister movement from the outset. But that’s not true. The next great evil will play out like all the past ones. It will sound good to many. It will be popular. And there will be social pressure to join in. But underneath the moving language will lie a rejection of humanity—be it a subset or the whole species. That rejection plants the seed for future atrocities.
Now every state would be telling US not to charge EVs because power plants can’t keep up.
https://mises.org/wire/environmentalism-and-immoral-low-ground
Last month, the Biden administration’s Environmental Protection Agency proposed new power plant regulations that would put harsh limits on the amount of carbon dioxide released while producing electricity. This comes from the same administration pushing to electrify all parts of daily life, from driving to cooking. As if slamming the power grid with artificial demand is not enough, now the federal government has also set its sights on electricity suppliers.
Policies as ludicrous as this are only possible because the ideology they rest on, environmentalism, has long enjoyed a perch on the moral high ground that has gone almost unchallenged. That needs to change. Environmentalism presents itself as a philosophy advocating benevolence toward nature and prudence with resources. But in reality, it is an antihuman ideology capable of justifying atrocities.
Environmentalism rests on the valuation of untouched, nonhuman nature as the highest good. There are, of course, radical and moderate environmentalists, but all adherents subscribe to this fundamental moral valuation. They only differ in their degree of consistency.
This moral view was perhaps best summarized by National Park Service biologist David Graber in his 1989 review of Bill McKibben’s book The End of Nature. Dr. Graber concludes his review with these three haunting paragraphs:
That makes what is happening no less tragic for those of us who value wildness for its own sake, not for what value it confers upon mankind. . . . McKibben is a biocentrist, and so am I. We are not interested in the utility of a particular species, or free-flowing river, or ecosystem, to mankind. They have intrinsic value, more value—to me—than another human body, or a billion of them.
Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, are not as important as a wild and healthy planet. I know social scientists who remind me that people are part of nature, but it isn’t true. Somewhere along the line—at about a billion years ago, maybe half that—we quit the contract and became a cancer. We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth.
It is cosmically unlikely that the developed world will choose to end its orgy of fossil-energy consumption, and the Third World its suicidal consumption of landscape. Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.
That final line was unsurprisingly revisited during the last few years. In this view, if there was anything bad about covid-19 it’s that it was not deadly enough—especially for young people who have yet to have kids. That viewpoint is evil.
This idea that humanity is a cancer can be found in the writings and arguments of other environmentalists, though most are less explicit.
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