From the WeGetIt campaign:
Former Vice President Al Gore, who has become the world’s most visible advocate of urgent action to stop manmade global warming, lately shocked at least one attendee at hisspeech at the Smith School World Forum on Enterprise and the Environment in Oxford by giving what blogger Geoff Brumfiel called “a pop neuroscience lecture.”
Saying climate change is “ultimately a problem of consciousness,” Gore, as reported by Brumfiel, said evolution had trained humans “to respond quickly and viscerally to threats. But when humans are confronted with ‘a threat to the existence of civilization that can only be perceived in the abstract’, we don’t do so well.” Why? Because ”the connecting line between amygdalae, which he described as the urgency centre of the brain, with the neocortex is a one way street: emotional emergencies can spark reasoning, but not the other way around.”
Aside from dubious neuroscience, Gore–who first demonstrated his willingness to mix science, New Age religion, and pop psychology in Earth in the Balance: Psychology and the Human Spirit (1992)–seems to be saying there’s some genetic inability for us to recognize and respond properly to global warming. Yet he thinks he and fellow alarmists can do so. They must be more highly evolved. And the rest of us must be suffering from a mental disorder.
That’s a scary thought. In the old Soviet Union, to oppose the Communist Party was evidence of mental illness–and therefore ground for involuntary confinement in the Gulag for “psychiatric treatment.” Would Gore, who in the same speech said growing awareness of manmade global warming would drive change “through global governance,” embrace such treatment? The totalitarian vision of a “Global Marshall Plan” outlined in the last chapter of Earth in the Balance suggests he wouldn’t be opposed.
and…
Gore’s totalitarianism may be implicit, but not Gore’s fellow global warming alarmist John Holdren’s.
Science advisor to President Barack Obama, Holdren, in the 1977 book Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment, which he co-authored with Paul Ehrlich (author of 1968’s The Population Bomb, in which he falsely predicted famines killing hundreds of millions around the world in the 1970s), prescribed as cures for overpopulation
- forced abortions,
- introduction of sterilization drugs into drinking water and food,
- implanting contraceptive capsules in women at puberty and permitting their removal only “with official permission,”
- forcing single mothers to have abortions, or seizing their babies and giving them to couples,
- compulsory abortion or sterilization for people who “contribute to social deterioration” (i.e., who are genetically inferior–the old eugenics view of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger and Adolf Hitler), and
- a transnational “Planetary Regime” to control economies and individual lives through an international police force.
In defense of legal limits on child bearing Holdren wrote, “. . . no one may lawfully have more than one spouse at a time. Why should the law not be able to prevent a person from having more than two children?”
The Planetary Regime’s powers would be vast. It could ”control the development, administration, conservation, and distribution of all natural resources, renewable or nonrenewable, at least insofar as international implications exist. . . . regulat[e] all international trade, . . . including all food on the international market.” It could “determining the optimum population for the world and for each region and for arbitrating various countries’ shares within their regional limits. Control of population size might remain the responsibility of each government, but the Regime would have some power to enforce the agreed limits.”
In light of low birth rates among secularists, religious conservatives, who tend to have more children, might be a little disturbed by this suggestion by Holdren:
A legal restriction on the right to have children could also be based on the right not to be disadvantaged by excessive numbers of children produced by others. Differing rates of reproduction among groups can give rise to serious social problems. For example, differential rates of reproduction between ethnic, racial, religious, or economic groups might result in increased competition for resources and political power and thereby undermine social order.
