Environmental Progress Is a Cause for Right-Wing Paranoia

[marmar]

via AlterNet:



Environmental Progress Is a Cause for Right-Wing Paranoia

By Janet Smith, Intelligence Report. Posted December 12, 2008.

Some conservatives have the wild notion that environmental policies are out to destroy American's freedoms.



Addison, Texas -- "Environment is not about saving nature," the founder of Freedom Advocates, Michael Shaw, sternly warned an audience of antigovernment "Patriots" and far-right conspiracy theorists during a mid-July conference. "It's about a revolutionary coup in America. (Environmentalism) is to establish global governance and abandon the principles of Natural Law." Sustainable development policies, Shaw argued, will require "a police state" and ultimately "turn America into a globally governed homeland where humans are treated as biological resources."

Shaw's fearful call to arms against environmentalism was sucked in whole hog during the Ninth Annual Freedom 21 conference held in a Dallas-area Crowne Plaza hotel. Co-hosted by the Texas Eagle Forum, a hard-line Christian Right organization, and the anti-"New World Order" American Policy Center (APC), the three-day convergence included such right-wing heavyweights as the error-prone conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi, gay- and feminist-hating Phyllis Schlafly, and the far-right Constitution Party's presidential candidate, Chuck Baldwin.

One former popular Freedom 21er was disinvited. Bob Barr, a former conservative Republican congressman from Georgia, was asked not to return by the head of APC, Tom DeWeese, because Barr had talked to Al Gore about global warming. "This is not some nice little debate," DeWeese said he told someone in Barr's office. "This is war."

This year's conference linked up several of the far right's bogeymen into one giant whopper of a conspiracy about sustainable development policies that attempt to protect the earth for future generations. The basic thesis pushed at Freedom 21 was that the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), a trade agreement between Canada, Mexico and the U.S. that includes some environmental requirements, is part of a nefarious and secret plan to merge the U.S, Canada and Mexico into something called the "North American Union" (NAU) -- an entity which does not, in fact, exist, and has never been planned, despite the hysterical warnings of conspiracy theorists like Corsi. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/environment/111956/environmental_progress_is_a_cause_for_right-wing_paranoia/

[DCKit]

1. The Dominionists musta' had several spontaneous orgasms during this conference. n/t

[nebenaube]

2. and here..submitted for your review is a

larger portion of Bush's so called base.

[quidam56]

3. HANNITY' AMERICA sure isn't MY AMERICA !

He sure has some wild notions that Obama will bankrupt THE COAL INDUSTRY. Come on Sean ! Here's the facts. THE COAL INDUSTRY comes into Appalachia, decapitate, gouges and blasts every damned dime and dollar they can get out of the mountains then they file bankruptcy so there's no one culpable for the destruction left behind. http://www.wisecountyissues.com Wise County, Virginia, Third World America can't stand anymore prosperity thanks to Presidebt Bush and THE COAL INDUSTRY.

[kristopher]

4. It is worse than you think.

Peter Jacques wrote two papers that cover this, and according to him when the Soviet Union fell in the 90s, the Conservative movement needed a new bad guy. The 1992 Earth summit provided them with the victim - the environmental movement. Since then they have stepped up vilification of the environmental movement and it's goals - painting them as antiAmerican and being founded on principles that require the destruction of "the American Way of Life".
What it is.
The Rearguard of Modernity:
Environmental Skepticism as a Struggle of Citizenship
•
Peter Jacques*
Environmental skepticism doubts the importance and reality of environmental
problems, but it is not about science. It is about politics — global politics to be
specific. In 2001, Cambridge University Press published Bjørn Lomborg’s The
Skeptical Environmentalist,1 which argued that the world’s environmental
conditions and human well-being were nearly universally improving, using Julian
Simon’s work as an inspiration.2

This is my long-run forecast in brief: The material conditions of life will continue
to get better for most people, in most countries, most of the time,
indefinitely. Within a century or two, all nations and most of humanity will
beat or above today’s Western living standards. I also speculate, however,
that many people will continue to think and say that the conditions of life are
getting worse.3

In its elemental form,4 the skeptical program asserts that there are no
environmental problems that threaten environmental sustainability,except perhaps
the environmental movement which they believe is obstructing human progress.5
Importantly, environmental skepticism is distinct from, if sympathetic to,
what is often referred to as “free market environmentalism,”6 which questions
the legitimate role of government in environmental problems but does not
argue that environmental problems are imagined or politically fabricated.
Skepticism is also distinct, if sympathetic with, the US counter-environmental Wise
Use movement for local industrial access to public lands,though Wise Use leaders
such as Ron Arnold and Alan Gottlieb are also environmental skeptics.7
Thus, even though skepticism“ from the start” has been and is part of the
“broader stream of right-wing political”8 movement, skepticism is anew
kind of anti-environmental sub-movement.

Since most of the controversy surrounding environmental skepticism has
been on the order of “why it iswrong,”9 academic discussions have been
focused on the fact that its assertions are scientiac outliers.10 However, the
importance of skepticism lies outside of its epistemic challenges.
There are two reasons why its political claims are more important than if
and how skepticism is generally incorrect. First, science alone, if at all, does not
drive international environmental (or other) policy, and the fact that skepticism
has found an audience among important elites is more consequential than its
(mis)representation of environmental conditions.11 Second, if the Kyoto
Protocol controversy in the US is any indicator, simply creating signiacant levels of
conflict within epistemic communities maybe just as effective installing
protective environmental policy as settling a debate between claims. Therefore, the
contrarian knowledge claims made by skeptics are of secondary importance
to the political conflict they generate and the meaning this has for global
societies.12

Skepticism’s doubt of environmental knowledge is thus superficial,
tangential even, to its more important arguments for limiting who and what
citizens are responsible to and for. More importantly, the struggle over the state of
the planet is a struggle over society’s dominant core social values that
institutionalize obligation and power. This contest has been overshadowed if not
wholly unrealized because academics have been overly concerned with the
contrarian claims themselves, leaving the meaning of skepticism relatively
under determined and under-analyzed. This paper begins addressing these more
profound political issues.

From here, the paper is ...

http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/global_environmental_politics/v006/6.1jacques.html

How it works

"The organisation of denial: Conservative think tanks and environmental scepticism"

Authors: Peter J. Jacques a; Riley E. Dunlap b; Mark Freeman a
Affiliations: a Department of Political Science, University of Central Florida, Orlando, USA
b Department of Sociology, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, USA

Environmental scepticism denies the seriousness of environmental problems, and self-professed 'sceptics' claim to be unbiased analysts combating 'junk science'. This study quantitatively analyses 141 English-language environmentally sceptical books published between 1972 and 2005. We find that over 92 per cent of these books, most published in the US since 1992, are linked to conservative think tanks (CTTs). Further, we analyse CTTs involved with environmental issues and find that 90 per cent of them espouse environmental scepticism. We conclude that scepticism is a tactic of an elite-driven counter-movement designed to combat environmentalism, and that the successful use of this tactic has contributed to the weakening of US commitment to environmental protection.

Available for download here.
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a793291693~db=all


You might want to browse the sites that provided relevant (otherwise expensive) academic journal articles as a free public service:


http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/pdf/papers/fenp_articles.asp


http://muse.jhu.edu/