Ayn Rand’s Take on the Paris Climate Treaty

Ayn Rand died in 1982, but she nailed the problem with the Paris climate treaty way back in the 1960s and 1970s when she wrote:

Now observe that in all the propaganda of the [environmentalists]—amidst all their appeals to nature and pleas for “harmony with nature”—there is no discussion of man’s needs and the requirements of his survival. Man is treated as if he were an unnatural phenomenon. Man cannot survive in the kind of state of nature that the [environmentalists] envision—i.e., on the level of sea urchins or polar bears . . . .

In order to survive, man has to discover and produce everything he needs, which means that he has to alter his background and adapt it to his needs. Nature has not equipped him for adapting himself to his background in the manner of animals. From the most primitive cultures to the most advanced civilizations, man has had to manufacture things; his well-being depends on his success at production. The lowest human tribe cannot survive without that alleged source of pollution: fire. It is not merely symbolic that fire was the property of the gods which Prometheus brought to man. The [environmentalists] are the new vultures swarming to extinguish that fire.

And:

Without machines and technology, the task of mere survival is a terrible, mind-and-body-wrecking ordeal. In “nature,” the struggle for food, clothing and shelter consumes all of a man’s energy and spirit; it is a losing struggle—the winner is any flood, earthquake or swarm of locusts. (Consider the 500,000 bodies left in the wake of a single flood in Pakistan; they had been men who lived without technology.) To work only for bare necessities is a luxury that mankind cannot afford.

It’s not just the Paris climate treaty. It’s environmentalism itself. As Rand points out, anything that mankind does to better its own survival is considered “pollution”. Back in the 1970s, the focus was on smog. Smog eventually became less of a problem, because improvements in technology brought about by science and the market improved conditions. Today the fixation is climate change. The obsession with climate change follows a warmer than average summer with cries of “global warming” and a colder than average winter with cries of “new ice age”. Leaving aside our inability to accurately predict the weather three days ahead, much less three centuries ahead, we’re told to accept — uncritically, outside the boundaries of science — that all such problems are automatically and always man-made.

The Paris treaty is a war against human mastery over the environment and, as Rand pointed out, against man himself. It’s also a war against the United States, since the United States has the most to lose from such a treaty, which it will follow, while nations such as China and Russia will never follow it.

Rand presciently labeled the early ecology/environmentalist movement “the anti-industrial revolution”. That’s precisely what environmentalism was — and still is.