Everywhere one looks, longstanding snooty prejudices are being "scientised"; old-fashioned hatred for mass behaviour is being replaced by new, superbly convenient scientific facts that apparently show - on spreadsheets, graphs and pie charts, no less - that mass behaviour is quantifiably, unfalsifiably, unquestionably harmful. For example, a certain breed of middle-class writer and thinker has always hated the consumer society and the masses who patronise it. They talked about the rat-race and of the masses' brainless dash to buy more and more stuff they don't need.
Today, a new diagnosable, scientifically provable illness has emerged to describe the stupidity of the masses: "affluenza". Serious writers, researchers and policymakers claim that years of fact-gathering and scientific-style study proves that the rat-race and the stuff race makes people mentally ill.
Likewise, snobs have always detested mass tourism, all of those thousands of good-for-nothings tramping to some beach or to an unfortunate foreign city.
When British workers first started venturing to the English seaside in the 1870s, thanks to one Thomas Cook, an outraged writer declared: "Of all noxious animals, the most noxious is a tourist."
This prejudice, too, has been scientised.
The idea of the mass tourist as noxious, that is, "harmful to living things, injurious to health", has been rehabilitated through the science of environmentalism. Now tourists are seen as literally noxious, farting out smog and poisons from their cheap flights.
I've heard this argument before: that the true aim of these and other environmental efforts is to control people. To what aim, I don't know. Surely if this is the case, the whole idea of creating a defacto 'slave class' is repugnent to say the least. Every experiment down that avenue has ended in failure: the fall of the Roman Empire; the serfs and pesseants of the European Middle Ages; the US Revolutionary War; the French Revolution; more recently the Soviet Union; etc. China is slowly evolving a seemingly more liberal form of government.
Only where societies are truly free that ideas flourish--that is an experiment which all too often has not been explored enough. The US has 'dabbled' in it for a relatively brief two hundred years or so...but we seem to be backsliding back into an Authoritarian form of government...and that's not good.
Of course, it doesn't help that we seem to be enslaved to oil: the next time you buy gas think of the gigantic construction boom going on in Dubai--yes, that's your money hard at work! Wouldn't it be nice if we chose to invest domestically and create a viable alternative to Middle Eastern petroleum: the money you spend here will stay here and grow...
By continuously increasing the strangle hold of oil by shirking more environmentally friendly technologies (here nuclear power is one of those) we are ensuring that sometime in the future there will be an oil war--a real war fought with real nuclear weapons; with real people dying by the billions; and a real environmental catastrophe far worse than just about anything else...
The only path I see to Survival of the Human Species lies in Freedom. The other paths have already been thoroughly trampled...
Wouldn't it be nice if we chose to invest domestically and create a viable alternative to Middle Eastern petroleum: the money you spend here will stay here and grow...
It's interesting that the "environmentalists" seem to favor only those energy sources that are marginal and oppose those that will work economically. The like ethanol but not liquid fuels made from coal. They like solar but not nuclear, etc. Their does seem to be an agenda with the "hard greens" isn't just protecting nature.
I'm beginning to see your point about "Environmental Elitism".
It almost seems (maybe an over statement) that the 'rush' toward this Enviro-elitism advocates restrictions on movement (travel). Until recently the Peoples Republic of China restricted travel of its citizens to within a province that issued ID for only a certain province.