Climate Policy Holy Wars: Clashing Secular Religions and Stubborn Economic Realities

Here I am giving a talk about climate change as a religious disagreement, at the Hudson Institute, December 13

Here's some coverage in Climate Wire (part of the Greenwire newsletter group):

9. ADVOCACY:
Some scholars compare climate change to a religion
Evan Lehmann, E&E reporter
Published: Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Can a green crusader working to ease Arctic melting and a calculating economist who looks at the polar bear's extinction as a small financial loss both be on the side of angels?
It depends upon which expert who appeared yesterday at a Hudson Institute forum you choose to believe.
"Environmentalists really implicitly think of it [as] we're playing God with the Earth. And that's morally and religiously objectionable," asserted Robert Nelson, a professor at the University of Maryland's School of Public Policy.
His view that environmentalism is a "secular religion" might be shrugged off as a generalization by some climate advocates who base their policy decisions on a raft of scientific studies indicating that rising temperatures are attributable to human activity.
But Nelson doesn't save his assertions of religiousness for just greens. Morality also colors the viewpoints of strict economists, he says, adding that sea level rise is "no big deal" because it might increase trade and expand access to oil and gas reserves.
"The most obvious thing is that polar bears could be adversely affected, or go extinct," he added. "But how does that bear on human welfare? Well, there are about 400 polar bears a year that are hunted. So we could be looking at the loss of 400 successful hunts of polar bears."
"It would obviously be a no-brainer," Nelson said of the preference for increased Arctic access over the bears. "The economic costs would be trivial relative to the economic gains."
The offbeat discussion came two days after the Durban Platform extended Kyoto Protocol goals for emission reductions in Europe and advanced the notion that all nations, economically established and rising ones, would eventually address their carbon output.
Reverence for the Earth -- good or bad?
But Nelson and another speaker, Lee Lane, described the outcome as a failure.
"It's nearly bankrupt," Lane said of the international climate effort. "In effect, they said exactly nothing [and] committed to exactly nothing."
Lane, a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute, also suggests that environmentalism is steered by a passion akin to religious conviction in a new paper, "History, Ideology, and U.S. Climate Policy: Beyond the Orthodoxies of the Left and Right."
"Clearly, the appeal of [greenhouse gas] controls does not rest on utilitarian grounds," the paper says. "Instead, it largely stems from the quasi-religious reverence for preservation of pristine nature."
Then there was Joel Garreau, an author and fellow at the New America Foundation. He found the religious connection to be an asset. "Many of those making the case that environmentalism has become religion throw around the word 'religion' pejoratively," said Garreau. "I'm not going to disparage environmentalism as a religion any more than I would spit on Mormonism or Judaism or the Southern Baptist Convention. Decrying another person's religion is just uncivilized and rude."
It's also pointless, he says. People are passionate about things that they believe in, and trying to change those views is "a waste of time." Besides, those beliefs might help motivate a large segment of people to address, say, climate change, he suggested.
"The good news about making public policy an alliance with faith is that it could furiously work," Garreau said. "Humans respond much more wholeheartedly to faith than they do to reason. If you want people to quickly and thoroughly do the right thing, go for faith."