Calling the Kettle Black

I just read an article in the Huffington Post, “Educating the Next Generation of Sustainability Professionals,” by Steven Cohen. Cohen tells how the demand for business courses in sustainability has grown exponentially since he first began teaching at Columbia University in 1981. He scoffs at “The scare tactics being used to de-legitimize climate science and environmental policy” and then says: 

Before long the definition of high quality management will be sustainability management. The students I teach know this and no amount of propaganda is going to change their minds. 

This is rich. One out of three children fears that the earth won’t be around when he grows up, because that’s what they’ve been taught in school. The entire environmental movement is built on scare tactics. But Cohen says that’s just what global warming skepticism is.  

He also calls it propaganda. He writes, “The students I teach know this.” Right, because you taught them that, using propaganda.  

The sustainability movement is deceptive. Its proponents like to make it sound as if it’s only about environmental stewardship, thrift, and prudence. But in reality it’s a political ideology intent on establishing big government, economic redistribution, and loss of personal freedoms. How convenient for Cohen to call resistance to such a radical, anti-Western, anti-liberal movement “propaganda,” when he’s the one disseminating biased and fallacious hype. 

We are at a moment when the entire edifice of “global warming” theory is tottering. Phil Jones, the former head of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia admits to the BBC that there has been no global warming for the last fifteen years, and that the medieval warming period (with no human contributions) may well have been warmer than the 20^th century temperature highs. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s grand report turns out to be riddled with misstatements, poorly sourced claims, and outright fictions. This isn’t an especially good moment for Professor Cohen to be inveighing against skeptics as mythmongers. Mythologist behold thyself.  

N.B. Cohen is the executive director of Columbia’s Earth Institute, whose goal is to “help achieve sustainable development primarily by expanding the world’s understanding of Earth as one integrated system.” On the Institute’s board of advisors is Bono, the lead singer of U2; and George Soros, the billionaire who bankrolls multiple projects of the Left, called removing President George W. Bush from office “a matter of life and death,” and was convicted of insider trading in 2002.