The Copenhagen Collapse

Towards year's end and time for lots of people to comment not only on the past year but the past decade.  Based on the collapse at Copenhagen, Lorne Gunter makes this valid observation that environmentalism is just the latest manifestation of authoritarian control, of stasis incarnate:

• ...saving the planet is not what environmentalism is all about. Saving the planet is just the excuse. Controlling other people’s lives and redistributing global wealth is the true goal.
• I’m not saying there is a conscious conspiracy by old socialists meeting in secret to rebrand themselves as new environmentalists so they can revive their Cold War-era campaign for international governance and regulation.
• Rather, it’s a mindset.
• When socialism collapsed as an intellectual movement in the 1990s, the intrusive, holier-than-thou, we-know-best attitude behind it did not disappear, it merely refashioned itself in the last decade as environmentalism.
  
• To be happy, they have to be telling others what to do based on a self-assured belief in their own moral and intellectual superiority.

Change is a constant in life.  The essence of sustainability is the capability of communities to adapt to change, something current environmentalism ignores to its detriment.

Rather than embracing change as the essence of sustainability, stasist politics seeks to control change and environmentalism to direct change towards ideological pre-determinism.  They are mutually reinforcing bedmates: stasist politics supplying the tools of enforcement, environmentalism the moral imperative for intervention.

It is an ideology that neither seeks, nor values, individual empowerment. In contrast, globalization is predicated upon a massive increase in individual empowerment from information technology.  The Copenhagen collapse is evidence that stasist politics is a bankrupt ideology, and so is environmentalism.