Fostering a Climate of Intolerance

The Paris Climate Conference, convening this week, takes place in the very place where, arguably, the most dangerous exemplar of hysteria, the Islamic jihadi movement, has left its bloody mark. Yet the think tank mavens, academics, corporate shills and endless processions of bureaucrats gather in the City of Light not to confront the immediate deadly threat, but to ramp up their own grisly scenarios and Draconian solutions.

Welcome to the age of hysteria, where friends and foes, and even those who blissfully talk past each other, whip themselves into an emotional frenzy that bears no discussion, debate or nuance. Rather than entering a technological age of reason, we seem to lurching towards a high-tech middle ages, where warring bands – greens, jihadis, libertarians, social conservatives, nationalists – immerse themselves not in intellectual competition but, inflating their own individual outrage. In this environment, exaggeration and hysteria are weapons of recruitment, while opposition is met with demeaning attacks, potential imprisonment and, at the worst, vicious acts of violence.

Establishment’s hysteria

Amid the recent carnage in Paris – not to mention bloodshed in the Sinai, Beirut and Mali – one would expect the world’s economic and political leadership to focus on that clear and present danger presented by Islamic extremism. But for years, much of the world’s power structure, particularly on the Left, has convinced itself that climate change represents the greatest challenge to mankind, rather than more immediate threats such as terrorism, poverty, deforestation and stagnating global economies.

For some, climate change has become the default cause of virtually everything, even the Syrian civil war. However much dry conditions may have contributed to the crisis, this assertion ignores the fact that people have been killing each other in the Middle East from time immemorial and that droughts have been a constant threat in that region, as here in California, since before biblical times.

Read the entire piece at The Orange County Register.