Environmentalism and Global Warming
Spiked has been consistently critical of environmentalism. It accuses environmentalism of misanthropy for supporting cuts in population and economic growth, particularly in response to climate change. James Heartfield, for instance, argues that the environmentalist concern with cutting back growth is linked to elitist prejudices:
The ecological outlook is an expression of middle-class rage at the masses ... Environmentalism, like all political discourses that take shortage as their starting point, will tend towards misanthropic solutions. Any movement that begins with the view that mankind must be curtailed to reduce the pressure on the environment will have to start thinking how it will select those who must make sacrifices.
George Monbiot has accused Spiked of climate change denial: "there are articles on Spiked Online that say there is no problem and that take the side of the anti-scientists, the climate change deniers."
Spiked has not denied that human carbon emissions are contributing to climate change. Spiked criticises what it sees as the political interpretation of this fact put forward by the environmentalist movement. For example, in 2007 James Woudhuysen and Joe Kaplinsky argued that "the IPCC's fairly sober summary of climate science has been spun to tell a story of Fate, Doom and human folly." Josie Appleton argued that: "Today's 'global warming story' — where morality equates to carbon calculating – owes more to the anxious zeitgeist than scientific findings."
Spiked criticises environmentalists for preferring to reduce economic growth in response to climate change, rather than to expand it by finding alternative sources of energy. Furedi argues that "innovation is necessary, not only to deal with climate change, but also to produce a great deal more inexpensive energy in order that more people can enjoy the fruits of modern society." Spiked contributors have thus written in defence of hydroelectric and nuclear power, often dismissed by environmentalist campaigners.
Spiked gave favourable coverage to the film The Great Global Warming Swindle which argued against the scientific consensus that global warming is "very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic (man-made) greenhouse gas concentrations".
Read more about this topic: Spiked (magazine)
Famous quotes containing the words global and/or warming:
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