CEI Publishes Collection of Kevin D. Williamson Writing on the Religious Character of the Environmental Movement

The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) published a new monograph today by writer-in-residence Kevin D. Williamson, titled “Inside the Carbon Cult: Reports on the Religious Character of the Environmental Movement.” The monograph is a collection of three feature articles on the environmental movement Williamson published in National Review while he was working for CEI in his previous capacity as visiting investigative writer.

The reporting for Inside the Carbon Cult was conducted at the United Nations’ COP26 conference in Glasgow, where Williamson served as an official observer, and in interviews with leaders and activists in the environmental movement.

Williamson takes readers on an enlightening and highly entertaining swing through and around the UN’s signature annual climate confab, describing the jockeying among the climate elite for prominence inside the conference and relaying the apocalyptic religiosity of the activists – like “Brother Spirit” – who make up the true believers in the climate movement. He introduces readers to Les U. Knight, the founder of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, who is “mainly concerned with speciecide, annihilating Homo sapiens and leaving behind a planet liberated even from the memory that human beings had once existed.” And he explains why nuclear power offers a zero-carbon alternative to fossil fuels available right now, but the Biden Administration is only supporting projects in countries like Romania and friends of the nuclear industry were mostly ignored at the UN conference in Glasgow.

Inside the Carbon Cult features a foreword from former member of the European Parliament Daniel Hannan and an afterword from CEI President and CEO Kent Lassman. Hannan writes: “This is altogether too important a field to be left to the Left— which is why we are lucky to have a thinker of Williamson’s caliber engaged. He has the great gift of being able to take complex themes and make them comprehensible. How fortunate that he uses his powers for good.”

“The monograph you hold in your hand is as suitable for sharing with the political junkie in your family as with your most uninterested neighbor,” said CEI’s Lassman. “While it offers some solutions, it prompts many more questions. It is incisive, sometimes provocative, and a contribution to our civic conversation that I’m proud to have had a small part in producing.”

You can read Inside the Carbon Cult: Reports on the Religious Character of the Environmental Movement here.