All religions, as with ideologies, wish to refer to some unchanging principle or text in which to ground its beliefs. Wishing to avoid doctrinal compromises and the fickle nature of current thought and interpretation, a religion will produce guidelines which over time become held as inerrant. In their absence, as is the case with Environmentalism (which I will refer to as ‘Arcadianism’ to represent its religious aspect), substitutes will be created. Thus it is with temperature and CO2 levels. With ‘pre-industrial’ equalling Christianity’s ‘prelapsarian’, it is used as a standard to which the sinful modern world can refer, striving for it provides a penance, and its achievement will go some way to assuage the collective guilt of the Industrialised World.
It’s no surprise on this score that the phrase ‘global warming’ has been usurped by ‘climate change’. Given its pejorative twist it comes to represent an undesirable threat to modern life, without the comfortable implication that ‘warming’ gives. Change is bad. It has unquantifiable risk, something it shares with the Arcadians’ hubristic bugaboos like nuclear energy, radiation, and DNA manipulation. And, like these, they feel that climate change must be halted by the exercise of public will.
With many New Zealanders' unhealthy aversion to unquantifiable risk and its obverse of 'the precautionary principle' it's likely this country will be on its way to achieve pre-industrial status. It will give the Arcadians frissons of rectitude and sanctimony at the expense of the rest of us.
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