Matt Patterson

In the new movie The Avengers (which is excellent: see my review for National Review Online here), Iron man’s alter-ego Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) perfects a renewable, clean energy source, and uses it to light up his company’s new Manhattan skyscraper.

In spite of this green street-cred, Stark is a hero designed—literally—to drive liberals crazy.  Stan Lee, who co-created Iron Man in the 1960’s, has often reminisced to interviewers about his motives for creating Stark.  After helping to create a string of popular heroes for Marvel Comics, including Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four, Lee had decided to give himself a challenge, and asked himself:  Who do young people (read: liberals) hate?  The military, Lee thought right away (it was the 60’s, after all), and the wealthy.  So for his next hero, Lee decided to create a millionaire industrialist who made weapons for the army, and then make him likable.  Iron Man was born.

Now, Filmmakers who have brought Tony Stark to the big screen in a string of recent blockbusters—Iron Man (2008), Iron Man 2 (2010), The Avengers (2012)—have made him even more unpalatable to liberals.  After all, what other super-hero is regularly shown blasting terrorists out of their caves in Afghanistan, or working side-by-side with the United States Military?

Imagine how queasy greens must feel to see that this arch-capitalist be the one to invent renewable energy in the Marvel universe.  And worse, he didn’t do it for the good of Mankind.  He did for entirely selfish reasons, indeed, the most selfish reason:  He built the first, miniature version of his energy source in the first Iron Man film in order to power his wounded heart, which had been shredded by enemy shrapnel.
More unforgivable from the environmentalists’ perspective, however, is that Stark did all of this without a Department of Energy grant.  Unlike Solyndra, he needed no government incentives or funding.  Unlike Solyndra, he succeeded.   Now, in The Avengers, Stark uses this technology to power a gigantic monument to himself, a gleaming tower with “Stark” emblazoned in bright letters at its apex.

True, Stark and his exploits are fiction.  But can there be any doubt that, if and when an actual, viable green tech is invented, that it will be by someone like Stark, a self-reliant, independent genius, as opposed to a pasty-faced D.O.E. bureaucrat?  Can there be any doubt that it will be a capitalist, working for his or her own selfish ends, that will provide the breakthroughs that environmentalists insist the government must provide and/or subsidize?

And won’t that drive them crazy?

Environmentalists are always wringing their hands over the evils of fossil fuels, and no wonder – all these dirty and dangerous substances have done is power multiple revolutions in transportation, manufacturing, commerce and art that have lifted untold billions out of the wretched poverty that characterized most of human life for most of human history.  That is the kind of success loathed by liberals in general and enviros in particular.

Oil, especially, has earned the ire our erstwhile eco-friends, for oil above all has served as the black, gushy heart of Man’s industrial capacity.  And so this naturally-occurring substance, which bubbles up from the belly of the Earth to power our civilization, is demonized and reviled.  Never mind that without this substance, and the brave and brilliant people who find and harvest it, we would have at best a 19th century existence.  We are constantly told that oil is running out!  And that even if it isn’t running out, we shouldn’t be using it, because, you know, someday we will run out.  (Huh?)  Plus, it’s disgusting.  Plus, it’s heating the Earth.  Or something.

The problem for the enviros who evangelize on the evils of oil is simple:  Fossil fuels remain plentiful, cheap, and effective.  We are literally awash in the stuff.  And thanks to new methods of exploitation like hydro-fracking, we appear no way near running out.  So long as fossil fuels remain plentiful and efficient, they will crush so-called green technologies in any marketplace that is even remotely free.  In fact, the only possible circumstance that would actually wean us off oil is if the wells do one day finally run dry.

So I encourage my enviro friends to take a different tack – they should be encouraging oil production!  As much as possible!  The faster we suck the Earth dry, the faster we will transfer to “alternative” fuels (of course, by then, they won’t be alternative, but never mind) or revert to an agrarian existence, either of which would placate the environmentalists’ implacable heart.

What I’m saying is this – if green activists really cared about the Earth, they would ditch their Volts and solar panels and get on board with Big Oil.

I can see the banners now:  “Suck It Dry For Mother Earth!”

Conservatives often complain that government shouldn’t be “picking winners and losers” in the market, by for instance, lavishing some politically favored and connected constituencies (solar companies, unions, et al) with subsidies that give them an advantage over competing interests.

True enough.  Government shouldn’t be picking winners and losers.  But that never stops the Feds from trying…and now, they have gotten into the business of pickling the winners and losers in the game of life itself.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) has proposed new measures to save the endangered Northern Spotted Owl, that bane of loggers and rodents from the Pacific Northwest.  Science Insider fills us in on the FWS’s new pro-owl/anti-owl campaign:

The proposals include designating more critical habitat, encouraging logging to prevent forest fires, and an experiment to shoot a competing owl species.

Wait, come again? What was that last part?  “An experiment to shoot competing owls.”  OK, I did read that right.

Wow.  Science Insider gives the gory details:

The northern spotted owl (Strix occidentalis caurina) ran into trouble in the 1980s as its old-growth forest was severely logged in Oregon and Washington. Even though destruction of its habitat slowed dramatically after the owl was placed on the endangered species list in 1990, its numbers have continued to decrease by an average of 3% a year. A major problem is competition from barred owls, which have invaded its territories.

How dare those Barred Owls out-compete rival species by being more productive and intrepid!  That’s the kind of success Obama loves to punish.  (The Administration’s attitude toward the Second Amendment appears to go something like this:  Guns are bad, unless you are 1) a Mexican drug lord or 2) an Elmer Fudd wannabe out for Barred Owl blood.  In either case, you have the Feds’ full support.)

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In 1841 a Scottish journalist named Charles Mackay published a landmark study of mass hysteria and sociopsychosis titled “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.”

Mackay painstakingly analyzed a wide variety of popular pathologies in his entertaining tome, including financial panics, medical quackery, pseudoscience like alchemy and astrology, and witch crazes.  He wanted to know why so many people choose to believe so much that is not only not true, but also potentially deadly.  His answer:

“We go out of our course to make ourselves uncomfortable; the cup of life is not bitter enough to our palate, and we distill superfluous poison to put into it, or conjure up hideous things to frighten ourselves at, which would never exist if we did not make them.”

Conjure up hideous things to frighten ourselves—I could not help but think of global warming as I was re-reading Mackay’s words.  How he would have delighted in the strange, self-flagellating notion that is anthropogenic warming.  He would have recognized it as kin to his own numerous and insidious subjects—superstition masked as science; Western guilt over having conquered the world manifesting itself as hatred for the technologies that made it possible; apocalyptic yearning in the guise of political enlightenment.

In fact, global warming is the most widespread mass hysteria in our species’ history.  The fever that these legions of warmists warn of does not grip the globe, but rather their own brains and blinkered imaginations.

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So much for consensus.

For years, climate change cultists have attempted to shut down public discourse over global warming by assuring us that “the debate is over,” that scientists are in lockstep agreement that Man is steam-frying his own planet.

That was always bunk, of course.  For one, if the scientific debate was really over, no one would have to say it.  There just wouldn’t be any debate.  No one these days goes around saying “the debate is over” about heliocentrism.  That’s because no one questions the fact that the Earth revolves around the Sun – there is literally no debate.

Second, the fact that it was so often politicians and/or celebrities (or a bizarre hybrid of the two like Al Gore) intoning the “debate is over” canard, instead of actual scientists, was a major clue that something was amiss with the “consensus” claim.

(The Washington Post famously reported on Gore’s scientific acumen: “For all of Gore’s later fascination with science and technology, he often struggled academically in those subjects. The political champion of the natural world received that sophomore D in Natural Sciences 6…and then got a C-plus in Natural Sciences 118 his senior year.”)

Sadly for Gore et al, a growing number of scientists are publically expressing skepticism about anthropogenic global warming, emboldened by a flood of new data that casts doubt on the whole “climate change” paradigm (I address some of this new data in my latest piece for the Washington Examiner).

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