Fury at Bjorn Lomborg shows the black heart of green thinking

Sceptical environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg.

Environmentalism has always had a McCarthyite streak. It has an irrepressible instinct to hunt down, and shut down, not reds but anti-greens, anyone who dares to question eco-orthodoxy.

This is a movement that dreams of jailing those who question the science of climate change. Mark Lynas, a chief British theoretician of the nonsense idea that humanity has only a few decades left on this battered mortal coil, has fantasised about “future international criminal tribunals” at which deniers will have to “answer for their crimes”.

The British Greens have called for a purge of officialdom to get rid of anyone who doesn’t accept “the scientific consensus on climate change”. In short, all aspiring hacks and politicos should be asked: “Are you now or have you ever been a climate-change denier?”

And of course, that dreaded D-word, which is branded on everyone who refuses to bow and scrape before the altar of eco-correctness, echoes the Inquisition, when mankind was likewise divided into two camps: believers, to be left alone, and deniers, who would be hounded.

So it wasn’t really surprising when, following the announcement that climate-change troublemaker Bjorn Lomborg would be setting up a government-funded think tank at the University of Western Australia, greens had yet another of their infamous intolerant hissy fits.

Even by the standards of discussion-dodging greens, the Lomborgphobia of the past week has been shocking.

For Lomborg is being slammed not for “denying the science” of climate change — he accepts climate change is happening — but for putting forward “contrarian” views on how to deal with it. That is, he is raged against for holding alternative political views, for daring to think differently to the mainstream.

So a new term of abuse has been invented. His haters call him a “climate-change contrarian”. Unable to attack him for the crime of denial, they instead attack him for — get this — stirring up controversy.

The UWA Student Guild said that “while Dr Lomborg doesn’t refute climate change itself”, he does have a “controversial track record” as a “climate contrarian”.

Everything you need to know about PC intolerance, especially on campus, where student leaders now shout down everything that doesn’t conform to their pseudo-progressive groupthink, is contained in that statement.

The student guild wants to keep the Lomborg poison away from its prestigious institution on the basis that he says edgy stuff. And what exactly is it about his “climate contrarianism” that so offends greenies? What does he say that adds up to a “controversial track record”?

This is where we cut to the black heart of green thinking: the thing they hate most about Lomborg is that he thinks mankind should grow and develop and build its way out of poverty and climate change.

He thinks we should tackle these problems not by tightening our belts and lowering our horizons, as greens insist, but by digging up more fossil fuels and using them to liberate the vast swaths of humanity that still fester in poverty and to make the world a more modern, wealthier and, as a result, cleaner place.

To eco-activists who care more about biodiversity than humankind, that’s a massive no-no.

For all the tree-hugging, tie-dyed trendiness of the green lobby, this remains, at root, a movement innately hostile to development and progress, to the use of natural resources to the end of creating more stuff and comfort for human beings.

Scratch a softly smiling, dutifully recycling green, and you’ll find a hard-nosed misanthrope underneath. Greens fret over overpopulation (too many grasping humans!), consumerism (apparently we’ve all been brainwashed by adverts, because we’re really stupid) and, of course, economic growth, because they believe protecting nature is more important than liberating people from poverty.

Seriously. Consider Lynas again. He has said “the struggle for equity within the human species must take second place to the struggle for the survival of an intact and functioning biosphere”.

In short, growth and creation and economic equality should be put on hold while we save the rainforest or whatever.

What we have, in essence, is some of the most privileged people in the West — white, well-off academics and students with lovely, leisurely lives — pulling up the drawbridge on the rest of the world.

“Keep it in the ground,” says The Guardian’s new campaign on fossil fuels.

“Stop sending coal abroad,” say Aussie eco-activists.

This is nothing less than a demand that the non-West be left in a grim, pre-industrial state, being made by activists who have the fortune to live in highly industrialised, super-comfortable nations. It’s gross.

Give me Lomborg’s “contrarianism” over such callousness any day of the week.