An apocryphal quote often (incorrectly it seems) attributed to John Maynard Keynes goes something like, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” Eliot Ness, as portrayed by Kevin Costner in The Untouchables, answers a reporter’s question about the lawman’s plans once Prohibition is repealed: “I think I’ll have a drink.”

The point of these quotations, though fictional, is to draw attention to the virtue of intellectual honesty. For real-world, verifiable intellectual honesty one can turn to a June 13, FrontPage essay by Arnold Ahlert. In it, Ahlert names leftist environmental activists who actually did change their minds in accordance with a deeper understanding of facts.

Unfortunately missing from Ahlert’s roll call are those religious and clergy affiliated with the Interfaith Council of Corporate Responsibility and other organizations that submit proxy shareholder resolutions for a variety of leftist environmental causes having nothing to do with verifiable science and everything to do with a radical, misinformed and secular view that has more to do with worshiping Mother Earth rather than God.

Those who do make Ahlert’s list include Mark Lynas – identified as “a leader in the movement against Genetically Modified (GM) crops” – who “apologized for demonizing ‘an important technological option which can be used to benefit the environment,’” and Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore, who said that some of his former environmentalist friends “have abandoned science and logic altogether.” And this:

Lynas is also seeing the light in the energy arena. “Nobody can look you in the eye and say you shouldn’t be worried” about nuclear energy, hesaysin the new documentary “Pandora’s Promise.”Yet he, along withauthor Richard Rhodes, writer of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Making of the Atomic Bomb”; Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalog founder; andMichael Shellenberger,a man Time magazine labeled a “hero of the environment,” have decided nuclear power is an integral part of our energy future….

Right on, as we used to say back in our hippie activist days when protesting nuclear power plants seemed like a surefire way to meet Jackson Browne and Bruce Springsteen. But when the facts changed and The China Syndrome became a cinematic and scientific relic, so did our minds as well as our hearts – for many of us, anyway.

Those ICCR members issuing proxy resolutions against GMOs and energy derived from nuclear and fossil-fuel power plants, for example, could definitely benefit from a reboot of their faith as well as their knowledge of science and economics. They may not get to hang out with rock superstars, either, but they’ll certainly do more to benefit the world’s poor.

Read the remainder of Ahlert’s article here.