Why Climate Change Has Become a Religion of Power
”Modern man no longer believes much in God, but he does believe – and a lot – in ’science’. ”
by Francisco Javier Santas, https://reseauinternational.net/pourquoi-le-changement-climatique-est-devenu-une-religion-du-pouvoir/
“ Climate dogmatism ,” could be read in the slogans that the Minister of Equality in Spain, Ana Redondo, distributed to her supporters about the Valencia disaster. And she added: “ This is our time .” I wonder what is in someone’s head to think that a tragedy that has caused more than two hundred deaths is “ our time .” But let’s look at this other first phrase: “ Climate dogmatism .” Dogmatism! It is a confession. And it is an eloquent demonstration that the doctrine of anthropogenic climate change is today the ideology of power.
Let's look at this a little more closely. Climate change exists. This is a historical fact. It is even a pleonasm, because the climate changes by nature. Any history buff could name three or four moments when a change in climatic conditions caused major changes in human societies. It may be that we are facing one of these changes today or, on the contrary, that we have experienced a brief cycle within a larger cycle. It is not easy to know, because climate science is one of the most imprecise there is: so many factors intervene at the same time and are so difficult to measure on a human scale that any axiom is necessarily relative (there is therefore no axiom).
In this context, the theory of global warming is only a hypothesis, and the attribution of this warming to human CO2 emissions makes this theory even more risky, because it is improbable in the strict sense of the term. Certainly, the dominant discourse today is moving from "warming" to "emergency", that is to say to a context that also includes cold, but in this case, is it still valid to blame CO2? On the other hand, if we accept the doxa of climate change via CO2, why do we adopt in its name policies that seem to aim to accentuate the negative effects of change, such as the removal of natural barriers?
What I say here does not teach the reader anything new: these are questions that everyone asks themselves when thinking about them. I am simply trying to show that in this discourse, there are more uncertainties than certainties and more contradictions than convictions. But precisely, the big question is to know why "climate change" remains despite everything at the center of the discourse of power in the West (and moreover only in this West). This is where public opinion tends to bend over backwards: if most institutions agree on the same discourse, it is because it is true. But this argument is so naive that it can only be suspect. If the power in place agrees to defend an idea to the end ("dogmatically", Minister Redondo would say), can we really think that it is out of love of the truth? Wouldn't it be wiser to demonstrate a minimum of critical sense? Starting with the essential question: what profit does the power in place draw from all this?
Normally, when power seeks to make a profit, it is always about granting itself more power. It is in its very nature. But we must understand that power today, in our world, lives in spaces that are no longer the same as they were a century ago. The expression "global power" often elicits wary glances or suspicious smiles: it resembles (even today) a conspiracy theory and, at best, it is dismissed as a kind of abstract "intellectual construction" without foundation in everyday political reality. Yet nothing that we have experienced for half a century in the field of power can be understood without it.
The dominant trend in the contemporary world, which accelerated after the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989, is the construction of transnational, that is, global, power structures that aim to structure the world according to an increasingly homogeneous political and economic system. Historically, this goal has been the permanent ambition of the great ideologies of modernity.
Politically, it is the natural vocation of a hegemonic superpower identified with what is called the "Anglosphere" and whose epicenter is the United States, even if its spirit is no longer that of American national imperialism. Economically, it is the logical consequence of the current financial phase of capitalism, which is no longer content with national or continental spaces (as in its previous industrial phase), but needs the widest possible markets to develop, without political (state) barriers holding it back. What is called "world power" is the result of these three processes.
To build such power and make it willingly accepted, it is essential to convince citizens that we need supranational bodies to govern us. How can we generalize such a conviction? By making everyone believe that we are facing challenges that far exceed the possibilities of a state; challenges that are truly global, planetary. For example, an imminent threat of destruction of the Earth due to… climate change. A threat that, of course, we can stop if we all obey the redeemers.
Modern man no longer believes much in God, but he does believe – and a lot – in science. If “science” orders it, modern man will accept any sacrifice at its fair value. For example, paying the cost of an energy revolution that will only benefit the owners of the new energy sources. And also, for example, that of seeing his freedoms reduced under the diktat of a new transnational elite that finds in the new faith – the global climate religion – a legitimacy superior to that of any democracy. Thus, the interests of one and the other converge to build a new framework of power that the initiates will know how to take advantage of. “ This is our moment ”, indeed. Theirs.
“ Shame, shame, shame ,” the same Minister Redondo once cried from her seat, in one of the most grotesque reactions in the world history of parliamentarianism. Shame, in fact, of a ruling elite capable of confronting a colossal human tragedy and putting it at the service of its own power project. Yes, “climate dogmatism.”