"Religious-like" intensity of passion about climate change

[C C]

Raising My Child in a Doomed World
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/16/opini...nting.html

EXCERPT: . . . Barring a miracle, the next 20 years are going to see increasingly chaotic systemic transformation in global climate patterns, unpredictable biological adaptation and a wild spectrum of human political and economic responses, including scapegoating and war. After that, things will get worse. The middle and later decades of the 21st century — my daughter’s adult life — promise a global catastrophe whose full implications any reasonable person must turn away from in horror.

Some people might say the mistake was having a child in the first place. As Maggie Astor reported, more and more people are deciding not to have children because of climate change. This concern, conscious or unconscious, is no doubt contributing to the United States’ record-low birthrate. Some people can’t bear the idea of having a child whose life is going to be worse than their own. Others, struggling with the ethics of living in a carbon-fueled consumer society, consider having children selfish and environmentally destructive.

[...] Of course, nobody really needs to have children. It just happens to be the single strongest drive humans have, the fundamental organizing principle of every human society and the necessary condition of a meaningful human world. Procreation alone makes possible the persistence of human culture through time.

To take Wynes and Nicholas’s recommendations to heart would mean cutting oneself off from modern life. It would mean choosing a hermetic, isolated existence and giving up any deep connection to the future. Indeed, taking Wynes and Nicholas’s argument seriously would mean acknowledging that the only truly moral response to global climate change is to commit suicide. There is simply no more effective way to shrink your carbon footprint. Once you’re dead, you won’t use any more electricity, you won’t eat any more meat, you won’t burn any more gasoline, and you certainly won’t have any more children. If you really want to save the planet, you should die.

This is the choice David Buckel made one crisp April morning, when he walked from his Brooklyn apartment to Prospect Park, doused himself in gasoline and lit himself on fire. [...]

[...] When my daughter was born I felt a love and connection I’d never felt before: a surge of tenderness harrowing in its intensity. I knew that I would kill for her, die for her, sacrifice anything for her, and while those feelings have become more bearable since the first delirious days after her birth, they have not abated. And when I think of the future she’s doomed to live out, the future we’ve created, I’m filled with rage and sorrow.

[...] Living ethically means understanding that our actions have consequences, taking responsibility for how those consequences ripple out across the web of life in which each of us is irrevocably enmeshed and working every day to ease what suffering we can. Living ethically means limiting our desires, respecting the deep interdependence of all things in nature and honoring the fact that our existence on this planet is a gift that comes from nowhere and may be taken back at any time.

I can’t protect my daughter from the future and I can’t even promise her a better life. All I can do is teach her: teach her how to care, how to be kind and how to live within the limits of nature’s grace...

MORE: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/16/opini...nting.html

[Syne]

Again, why do you keep interjecting religion when the cited article has no mention of even belief, much less religion?

If you're trying to add commentary, just do so. Do you think the climate change doomsayers are irrational?

[C C]

Again, why do you keep interjecting religion when the cited article has no mention of even belief, much less religion?

Belief in doomsaying predictions, passionate suicidal martyrdom over things like fossil fuel usage and other crusader-ist impulses, hand-wringing over whether or not have children in the looming apocalypse to point of exploring self-extinction for the good of the planet, etc. Not that the example below of such informal categorizing is anything other than an occasional recreational interpretation (among many other perspectives) to fleetingly entertain. But the wonk below is certainly not the only one who has ever expressed it out loud or on the web; and there's accordingly everyday population groups or factions which might identify with the conception or get a discussion board arousal from it.

A Cult of Climate Change?: ... Perhaps climate change devotion should be viewed in religious terms, not scientific. It can be argued that many of the most fervent believers in global warming theory bear resemblance to a kind of mystical climate change cult, complete with a priesthood and theology. We’ll call it “climatism.” Cults revolve around unique access to a kind of special knowledge that sets members above the ignorant. Administration of that knowledge is almost invariably authoritarian, since it must be protected from outside criticism. [...] Entertainment elites are famous for championing environmentalism with an evangelistic zeal. [...] Bolstered by a sympathetic media using phrases like “speaking out”—designed to cast them as heroic warriors selflessly looking out for the helpless Earth—their words soon permeated the airwaves. [...] To this end, science-lovers should promote healthy skepticism and not chase an elusive consensus—or we risk cultivating a myth of ideological pseudo-science.

~

[Magical Realist]

There is a definite religious aspect to the climate change cause. A monomaniacal angst over global conditions and the fate of humanity. A dream of some utopian age where all will be made pure and right again. A respected if not sacred body of indisputable truths and arguments that everyone needs to be made aware of. And the necessarily dramatizing league of evil foils and villains working to subvert the mission. It has all the vibe of an urgently evangelized gospel that one is morally obligated to believe in and preach to the world or else be cast out as heretical and selfish.