… Whoops!

I learn from Australian traditionalist blogger Mark Richardson that the liberal Australian newspaper The Age had no less than three opinion pieces in one day denouncing those who doubt the claim that global warming is due to manmade factors and can be reversed by concerted human action. Reading Richardson’s post, I thought, Uh-oh, they’re going to accuse climate change critics of racism. After all, that wouldn’t be so far fetched. Chris Matthews of MSNBC said this last week about people waiting on line in a Michigan shopping mall to get Sarah Palin’s signature on their copy of her book:

Well, they look like a white crowd to me. Not that there’s anything wrong with it, but it is pretty monochromatic up here. No surprise in terms of the ethnic nature of the people showing up. Nothing wrong with that. But it is a fact. I think there’s a tribal aspect to this thing, in other words, whites versus other people. I think she’s very smart about this.

Richardson writes:

What is the message in these pieces? The argument being made is that the climate change campaign is part of the long history of liberal progress that is threatened by a conservative opposition to change. A response to climate change means change to society and this is a good thing as change means progress. The only people, so the argument goes, who would oppose change are those with vested interests and those who are instinctively, and therefore ignorantly, conservative.

But, once again, I had been tricked by my ineradicable naivete, my desire to believe the best of people, because Richardson then continued:

If you oppose an emissions trading scheme, argues [Tim Colebatch, economics editor of The Age], you are no different to those who opposed the abolition of slavery:

Two centuries ago, when William Wilberforce led the campaign to abolish the slave trade, the counterparts of Nick Minchin and Barnaby Joyce fought to defend it as an area of legitimate business in which governments should not interfere. Yet who thinks we should allow slavery today?

This is an example of why I say that liberalism, no matter how powerful and unchallengeable it may seem as the ruling ideology of the West, is doomed. A belief system that not only asserts such crackpot ideas but makes them the moral center of society cannot endure. And that is something for which to be thankful.

November 27

A reader writes:

Those who continue to promote the farce, facade, and hoax that is AGW/manmade global warming should be labeled “warm mongers”