Remember, these same college kids have the highest support of abortion of any age group. They also support “post-birth abortion“. They are less likely to be religious, and more likely to really know what the hell is happening in the world. To get idiot drunk and/or do drugs and have sex. In comes Vox
College students are making global warming a moral issue. Here’s why that scares people.
The Pope plans on delivering an encyclical on climate change this summer, and it has American conservatives freaking out. The Heartland Institute, a leading anti-environmental “think tank,” has even dispatched a crack team of deniers to Rome to dissuade His Holiness.
Why the agita from the right? After all, similar statements of climate concern have been issued by virtually every major government, international development organization, and national science council in the world. It’s not like the Pope is spilling the beans on a well-kept secret.
But as Heartland clearly recognizes, the Pope’s statement carries unique significance for the simple reason that he has unquestioned moral authority for millions of people. He threatens to situate the fight against climate change as a deeply moral issue, a matter of God’s work on earth. Once it is so situated, it will slowly and inexorably drag culture and politics along in its wake.
Say, where’s the part about college students?
Especially among young greens, that technocratic attitude is on the wane, especially in the wake of the 2010 cap-and-trade defeat, a decisive failure for the top-down, technocratic approach. Nowadays, activists are trying to put the plodding moralism back in, particularly through the fossil fuel divestment movement, which calls on institutions to cease all investments in the fossil fuel sector.
That’s about it, folks. The article is very much about divestment from fossil fuels (by Other People, of course), which is something that is rampant on college campuses. So, that’s about it. But we do get this
But the climate movement’s message, despite back-to-the-land stereotypes still floating around, is not that humanity ought to return to a pastoral, pre-modern, low-energy lifestyle, or that the global poor ought to remain poor. It’s that a better world is possible — clean, high-tech, prosperous, and just — and that fossil fuel companies are using their enormous legacy wealth and power to prevent the transition to that better world. Doing so is immoral, as is supporting the enterprise with investment dollars. It is that narrative behind which activists are seeking to brand fossil fuel companies as social pariahs.
In other words, Warmists are 1) very unhappy that their agenda of turning the clock back half a millennia (for Other People, of course) has been exposed, and 2) they’re trying to excuse their own hypocritical behavior.
