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This summer, secular environmentalism died in plain sight. From the choking wildfire smoke blanketing American cities to the deadly European heat wave to the crumbling power grid in New York, the evidence is piling up: decades of ideology masquerading as environmental stewardship have left people less safe while doing little to help the environment.
Start with Canada. More than 800 wildfires burned across the country this summer, and the smoke descended on over 100 million Americans from Milwaukee to Washington D.C. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney blamed the fires on climate change. But that raises an obvious question: if climate change is driving these disasters, then what exactly have decades of Canada's aggressive climate policies accomplished? By Carney's own logic, they've failed. Canadians accepted higher energy costs, more regulation, yet the forests are still burning and Americans are breathing the smoke.
Canada has been governed for years by politicians who embraced the secular environmentalist vision wholesale. Prime Minister Carney is a former UN special envoy on climate action. Former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was the poster child of left-wing climate policy. Canada has had over a decade of committed "climate leadership."
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Yet the fires are still here, not despite secular environmentalists, but because of them. Environmental groups have blocked the very forest management practices that prevent catastrophic wildfires, opposing forest thinning, firebreaks, and controlled burns on the grounds that human intervention is inherently destructive. As Andrew Hale of Advancing American Freedom put it, Canada's wildfire policies reflect the "undue influence of environmental groups who are firmly politically motivated and have divorced themselves from science and good stewardship."
The 2023 Canadian wildfires alone released nearly 480 megatonnes of carbon, roughly twice the annual emissions of global aviation. The fires this year could be even worse. Canada's purported commitment to international emissions agreements and a left-wing green agenda have all been overwhelmed by wildfire smoke, and it’s everyday ranchers, homeowners, and citizens that pay the price.
But Canada isn’t the only showcase in environmentalist failure. Earlier this summer, roughly 14,000 people died in a European heat wave. But it would be wrong to say they died from heat. Vast swaths of America face similar levels of heat every summer without the death toll. The difference is in America, roughly 90% of homes have air conditioning, whereas in Europe, only about 20 percent do.
That choice is deliberate. When asked whether Europeans should install air conditioning in response to deadly heat waves, a European Environment Agency expert told CBS News that she did not think it should be the solution anywhere, warning that installing more AC emits more heat into the environment and accelerates warming. In other words, to save lives we must let people die. Meanwhile, in a resurrection of feudalism, senior European Commission officials kept their AC running on upper floors while it was shut off for regular staff below.
Here in America, we can look at Canadian haplessness and European hypocrisy and shake our heads. But we’re hardly immune from warming temperatures and inane political responses.
This past Fourth of July — the grand 250th birthday of our nation — Washington D.C. hit 103 degrees for the hottest Independence Day on record. Philadelphia cancelled its parade after three consecutive days above 101. And New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani asked residents to set their thermostats to 78 degrees to protect the power grid. At least in America we have AC, but that AC won’t matter much if the grid fails — and in New York, it’s at risk of failing because of, once again, the environmentalists.
In 2021, green activists forced the closure of Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant, eliminating roughly 25 percent of the New York City region's power supply. As expected, wind and solar could not fill such a gap, so New York began to use more natural gas. Not only did environmentalists force New York to increase emissions for no reason. They made New York’s grid highly dependent on a single fuel source and more vulnerable to demand spikes that cause grid failure. Like those in Canada and Europe, American greens value ideology over outcome.
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The failure of secular environmentalism has one root cause: it sees people and human activities as enemies. But when human flourishing is put at the center of environmental policy and human resourcefulness is applied to the environmental problems of our day, our current crises become solvable.
With a human-centric environmentalism, Canada would have no difficulty engaging in responsible forest management that uses reason to steward the land and reduce wildfire risk. Europe could accept that the miraculous invention of air conditioning saves lives without meaningfully worsening the climate. And New York would see that the incredible advances of nuclear energy provide clean, reliable baseload power that intermittent renewables cannot match.
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There’s no reason to sacrifice people’s lives and well-being to save the planet. If anything, the opposite is true: Only people have the power to care for God’s creation and leave it better than we found it.
Clare Ath is the Co-Founder and President of Vita et Terra, a conservative Catholic environmental nonprofit that champions care for creation.
