An environmental reformation...

...is at hand. Fossils of the environmental movement are on their knees, stunned by the influence of neo-liberal thinkers who see that decades of Malthusian doom gloom and catastrophe have failed. This reformation is profound and universal and will eventually see remants of the discredited green watermelons seek their political vehicle elsewhere. In NZ we think of relics such as Sue Bradford, John Minto and their newly formed Mana Party. Green navel gazing and regrouping is producing startling treats such as recantation from the likes of the Guardian's George Moonbeam Monbiot (I was wrong about nuclear energy)and the Daily Mail's Mark Lynas. This particular summation is excellent, and would of course please Denis Dutton, smiling above, and the late Petr Beckmann who tirelessly edited the pink monthly newsletter Access to Energy and the late, great Julian Simon, who saw it all coming in 1981 when he wrote "The Ultimate Resource" ...

...When Gregg Easterbrook's voluminous book A Moment on the Earth: The Coming Age of Environmental Optimism was published in 1995, it received the predictable reaction from the environmental community: outrage...Something similar happened in 2001 when Bjorn Lomborg published The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World, which also argued that most environmental problems were overestimated and most global conditions were stable or improving...there are additional signs that at least a few within the environmental establishment are starting to have some long-overdue second thoughts. There are starting to appear serious books from major publishers that not only break with standard environmental orthodoxy but verge on outright optimism about the planet's future. Perhaps the most surprising is British journalist Fred Pearce's The Coming Population Crash and Our Planet's Surprising Future. There's not much left standing of Malthus and his epigones (especially Paul Ehrlich) after Pearce gets through mauling their factual and conceptual errors. And David Roberts, the deep-green writer for Grist.org who coined the term "climate hawks" to describe the most dedicated global-warming crusaders, wrote recently in The American Prospect that "after 20 years, it may be time to admit that the climate movement's fundamental strategy, not a deficit of personal courage or heroic striving, is behind the lack of progress."

With thanks to Climate Debate Daily...Read the full article here...