I have never received so many responses to a series of articles as I received regarding the Climategate scandal. What I found was that there are many more people who were skeptical of the whole global warming hoax than those who bought into the lie that it was. I got that response because those who had never accepted it felt liberated when the proponents of global warming were exposed and the truth had been explained with facts instead of hearsay.

But the lie went on for so long that it spawned the Green movement, which has affected policymaking not just at all levels of governments, but in professional organizations such as the American Institute of Architects.

I’ll pause here for a moment of disclosure. In 2009, I began serving on the board of directors for the Oklahoma AIA, the state-level part of what is a national organization. What I write in my columns is not in any way intended to reflect the positions of the other members of the board, or of the organization itself.

What I can say is that within the overall organization you will find architects at both ends of the spectrums between conservative and liberal, pro-global warming and anti-global warming, or Democrats and Republicans. In that sense, they represent a real cross section of the population of this country.

What is also apparent is that because a long-standing belief has been totally disproved, it has left many to wonder what about the Green movement is worth saving.

New Urbanism was one of those movements that saw its greatest growth during the years that global warming was accepted as a fact. As a point of fact, one of the key ingredients of New Urbanism is to reduce (or to some of the more radical, eliminate) the use of the car, because the movement said that cars were causing global warming. Of course, even though they will eventually give up global warming (very quietly I think), they will find other justifications for their beliefs.

So my point is, just because the myth of global warming goes away, the Green movement, New Urbanism, LEED, and a whole host of industries that have reinvented themselves won’t. There’s simply too much money and pride invested in it.

The real question remains, what portions of these movements should we continue to accept if global warming is no longer the incentive?

Some of those who have been deeply involved in the Green movement have elevated it to a set of morals, and to the fanatics, even to the level of religion. Regardless, it might come as a surprise that even us “skeptics” have a set of values in regard to the environment. There are, for example, a lot of Christians who believe that when God told the survivors of the Great Flood that they had dominion over the earth, He was in effect telling all us to be good stewards of the earth.

It is obvious that there are some good things that have come out of the Green movement. Advancements in technology are reducing our need for foreign oil and are making our air and water cleaner. Skeptics of global warming are just as fond of these things as the most ardent ecotheologist, only for different reasons. We consider good stewardship to be the right thing to do to make life better for us all; but we don’t believe in turning good stewardship practices into criminal laws to dominate and to steal from other people.

And that is where the real question about responsible environmentalism meets a fork in the road. Just as the Founders struggled to choose a Constitutional path that laid between anarchy and tyranny, we too will have to decide whether environmentalism will be a weapon for the powerful to subdue the population, or a tool that gives our civilization a continuously improving standard of living.

For me it is rather easy to tell the difference. One only needs to examine environmental issues by asking the question, “will this lead to more individual liberty, or less?” So, for example, if the government says that they can take property from one person because some other person can generate more tax revenue with it, it is a clear violation of individual liberty.

Environmentalists will argue that without the heavy hand of government, we would not have all the environmentally friendly products we have now. But I don’t agree. A capitalist economy will always meet the demands of the customer. A capitalist system, under the Constitution that our Founders wrote (not one that is reinterpreted as though it were a “living” document) is capable of delivering the best standard of living. We need only to examine each environmental issue in that light to know whether or not it would become our dictator or our servant.

©2010 Randy W. Bright

Randy W. Bright, AIA, NCARB, is an architect who specializes in church and church-related projects. You may contact him at 918-664-7957, rwbrightchurcharch@sbcglobal.net or www.churcharchitect.net.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 4th, 2010 and is filed under Columns.