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In one of the season’s most predictable developments, climate activists have declared war on Christmas trees, vandalizing holiday displays in cities across Germany.
Like any new religion, the climate cult despises competition, and so its members target religious symbols — not only Christmas trees but also Raphael’s “Sistine Madonna” — as well as civic institutions, recently having defaced Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate.
With great pomp and gloom, the anti-Christmas tree group calls itself Last Generation (Letzte Generation), and, while apocalyptic youth cults do not have a very inspiring record anywhere, they have an especially ugly history in Germany — Seig heil and jackboots and all.
I do not make the comparison lightly.
There is a real debate to be had on climate policy, but these young vandals are not a part of it.
What they are about is pure millenarian hysteria, with all its usual destructive features: the cult of youth, contempt for political norms and property and an unearned sense of importance.
The German cities that endured this Christmas tree vandalism have seen this sort of thing before, from the Protestant iconoclastic riots of the 16th century to the book-burnings and church-strippings a few hundred years later.
There’s nothing new here.
As I saw for myself while attending the 2021 UN climate confab in Glasgow, what dominates the climate conversation is not policy wonkery but ritual rooted in apocalyptic mysticism.
That isn’t an exaggeration: I didn’t meet a lot of scientists or engineers at COP26, but I did meet many monks, magicians, and shamans; there was lot of incense-burning and chanting.
But there was very little talk about building a better power grid and lots of rubbish about the folk wisdom of the indigenous peoples of . . . wherever.
Climate change is a real issue that requires a real response: Ironically, our European cousins were until recently among the best positioned to actually do something about carbon-dioxide emissions.
They had the infrastructure and experience to build out the most important mitigation technology on offer: nuclear power.
Unfortunately, Europe at large — and Germany in particular — has turned away from that option.
Germany’s last three nuclear plants were shuttered in April.
The current German governing coalition includes the Green Party, which grew out of anti-nuclear protests in the Cold War era and never made peace with peaceable uses for nuclear power.
And if nuclear power gives them fits, then they absolutely go nuts at the mention of natural gas, even though expanding gas use would represent a significant carbon-footprint improvement for countries that rely heavily on coal for generating electricity.
Mitigation, adaptation, incremental improvement — that’s how constructive public policy works, but that’s not how a religious revival works.
Religious revivals require a conversion, the experience of being born again, along with pledges, acts of penance, symbolic sacrifice and striving toward personal holiness.
Such holiness even extends to Pope Francis, who’s been pressured recently to reinstate the Catholic practice of abstaining from meat on Fridays.
The pressure, however, is not coming from traditionalists looking to reinforce Catholic observances but from climate activists who argue (with some pretty fuzzy math) that this would meaningfully mitigate climate change by meat production emissions.
This would have no real effect on the climate, of course, but co-opting the pope would be a major spiritual coup.
The most recent UN climate conference just concluded in Dubai — the Rome, Jerusalem, and Mecca of hydrocarbon-enabled consumerism.
The Dubai conference produced the same thing every previous conference did: non-binding pledges by governments to mend their nations’ ways and similarly non-binding pledges to spend a lot of money helping poor countries adapt to climate disruptions.
Speaking for the United Arab Emirates, Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber said his country would commit $100 million to a climate-mitigation fund.
For perspective, consider that the figure is about 1/15th of what UAE residents spend on Rolexes and other luxury timepieces in a given year. It’s also about one half of 1% of what Emiratis spend on the gas-guzzling automobiles of which they are so famously fond — booming demand in the Arab oil kingdoms helped Rolls Royce set an all-time sales record in 2022. Not everyone in the church is a true believer.
What the climate cultists want is something very familiar: a new birth that will transform mankind. They just don’t want the one celebrated at Christmas.
Kevin D. Williamson is a national correspondent for The Dispatch and a writer in residence at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
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