Break Free from Environmental Fanaticism

The term “environmentally friendly” has now become an all-powerful force. We have gone beyond a social awareness that being environmentally friendly is good; now, if something is branded as not environmentally friendly, it risks being excluded from society or treated as illegal. As people who idolize the environment in a quasi-religious way engage in organized activism, political phenomena have emerged in which laws and institutions stray beyond reasonable limits. We have entered an era in which environmental fanaticism must be guarded against.

Blind faith in the environment does not help improve it; rather, it threatens our environment. The essence is to improve the environment so that our lives may become more abundant and prosperous, but environmentalism blindly worships the environment itself and turns everyone into victims. As we follow the claims of environmental absolutists, human life is diminished and livelihoods become oppressed. Even so, the environment has not improved. On the contrary, because it is neglected, no qualitative improvement is achieved.

As the claims of environmental fanaticism have been incorporated into laws and institutions, the harmful effects have become serious. Regulations imposing arbitrary standards of “environmental friendliness” on products and everyday life have increased. Mandatory use of disposable cups, forced exclusion of plastic products, tax support for electric vehicles, compulsory reduction of nuclear energy, and tax support for solar and wind power—across countless areas, the banner of the environment has been used to restrict people’s behavior and throw society into confusion.

Even without scientific evidence, the image of being environmentally friendly carries enormous power. People tend to accept it as something inherently good. But accepting proposals for environmental improvement that depart from respect for human beings, and claims that diminish quality of life, is harmful in itself.

The Ministry of Environment’s environment-related policies, which put environmental friendliness first while engaging in showpiece administration, deepen the seriousness of the problem. They threaten the lives of the people while spending public funds recklessly. The government is using taxpayers’ money to promote what environmental activists ought to be doing themselves. For a long time, it has been trapped in experimentalism and romanticism, wasting tax revenue. Under the name of alternatives, it imagines itself to be doing something forward-looking, but if that money were its own, it would not spend so lavishly.

Europe, too, became trapped in misguided ideas about the environment and spent many years experimenting with wrong regulations and policies. In particular, it has suffered by trying too aggressively to turn its fantasies about alternative energy into reality. Europeans were unable to bear the high energy costs and had to shiver through the winter cold.

Because social activists can wield influence and make money through environmental absolutism, the number of such activists has continued to grow. But it is wrong for government authorities to support this, turn it into policy, and even take away the public’s freedom of choice by forcing people to use what environmentalists have chosen.

We must break free from environmental fanaticism. Only when laws and institutions protect individual liberty and uphold human dignity can the environment improve as well. We must not regress into a backward country that puts political slogans first.

Sung-no Choi

President, Center for Free Enterprise (CFE)

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Original title: 환경광신주의에서 벗어나라

Author: Sung-no Choi

Date: 2024-06-13

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=press&idx=26716