In this week’s Acton Commentary, Ryan H. Murphy asks, “Why don’t we bat an eye when extremists hope a pagan god will smite SUV owners?”

TV Tropes, a Wikipedia-style website, catalogs many clichés of fiction, including this, which the site calls “Gaia’s Vengeance.” Some variation on this theme can be found in major Hollywood movies like The Happening, The Day After Tomorrow, and Avatar. To take a specific example, Kid Icarus: Uprising, a 2012 Nintendo 3DS video game that has sold over a million copies worldwide, features a genocidal maniac of a nature goddess whom the player-protagonist must protect humanity from even while quipping, “I have to admit, she has a valid point.”

It’s this type of attitude that makes it appear that many activists, rather than recoiling from the global warming that they see as inevitable, instead e its onset as a day of reckoning for the prideful men who dare emit carbon into the atmosphere. If global warming ends up never causing serious problems for human beings, it would be as if a murderer was acquitted, not the release of a collective burden.

The full text of his essay ishere. Subscribe to the free, weekly Acton News & Commentary and other publicationshere.