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But more importantly, I don’t believe that people can be easily and accurately divided into enlightment categories – I think they are mostly a distraction. Nor do I think that the climate change debate exists in the terms that most climate activists frame it, between skeptics and activists/scientists. There are certainly some people on both sides who come to this with a single, all-encompassing worldview that could be described that way, but mostly, I don’t think that’s accurate. Instead, I would frame the distinction differently – that the populace is roughly divided into two groups – but not the ones you think they are.
The first, I’m going to call “Moloch’s Children” – which isn’t a very nice name, but it is, I think, accurate. By this I mean that like Moloch, they devour their own young. I do not claim that the Children of Moloch do so intentionally – at worst, their seeming god is Mammon. But the reality is that the worship of consumption leads to the cannibalizing of our future and our children. Who are these people? The children of Moloch consist of the great mass of Americans and other rich world denizens whose central ideology is technological progress and consumption – Moloch is their god, the overarching center of their world is the urge for more and more comfort, more and more possessions, more and more wealth, more and more technology in complete disregard of the fact that these things are not possible. They do not realize that they devour their own future as they consume. I realize that most of the people I am describing would fervently deny that this is true of them – but they would mostly be wrong. At the center of their value system is something empty and deeply wrong, and that emptiness stretches out and empties their world. They do not know what is missing from their lives, so they seek out more to fill the empty space.
The Children of Moloch cross political, religious, cultural and ethnic lines. That is, there are plenty of climate skeptics who believe that the climate probably isn’t changing and even if it is, we can just fix it with more free enterprise. But there are equally many people in the same camp who believe that yes, climate change is a big problem, and someone really should do something about it, but not me, and nothing that impacts my mutual fund statement. It is possible to be a devout Christian and still hold prosperity, comfort and your game cube at the center of your world in practice, while going to Church on Sundays. It is possible to be a radical leftist athiest and still hold those same values at the center of your world. Every shade of middle ground runs through the center. Moloch knows no political bounds.
The truth is that if you could meaningfully divide the world up into climate skeptics and climate believers and use that information politically, then we’d already be acting on climate change. The fact is that you can’t – the vast majority of people who believe we should do something about climate change believe that we shouldn’t do anything very difficult, expensive or inconvenient – pretty much what the skeptics believe. They are different in that if it doesn’t cost them anything substantive, they’d be happy if the problem went away.
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http://www.energybulletin.net/node/50856
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