There is no such thing as an optional cataclysm.

I recently suggested that it was silly for consumers to buy or sell commercial products on the basis of whether they happened to like the political views of the CEOs of the companies that make them. This, of course, was a response to those Americans who had bought a Tesla because they liked the idea of it politically, and have now sold that Tesla because they no longer like the idea of it politically. In my view, this practice is irrational — and, worse still, it is likely to contribute to the politicization of everything that, as a classical liberal who wishes the government to be limited in size and influence, I abhor.

If anything, I think I understated my case. Every day, more and more left-leaning Americans trade in their Teslas, while a handful have gone even further and either destroyed their own cars or attacked Tesla dealerships. In their eyes, these actions represent a form of practical protest that confirms their commitment to the cause. In my eyes, they suggest that a sizable number of America’s most vocal progressives never actually believed in any of the things that they said they did — and, indeed, that all it took to expose this was the arrival of a sexier ideal.

Environmentalists — particularly those environmentalists who say they are concerned about climate change — like to make big claims. And those big claims, by necessity, extend to everyone else whether everyone else likes it or not. The core environmentalist claim is that the world is heating up as a result of human industrial activity. The core environmentalist demand is that we take concrete steps to stop this heating, lest our inaction yield global disaster. Some of the concrete things that we are supposed to do are big and can only be done by governments, and some are small and can only be done by individuals. In both cases, though, our doing them is not presented as a matter of taste, but as a matter of survival. We can’t have incandescent lightbulbs, or inefficient water heaters, or gas-guzzling cars, we are told, because, if we do, we will destroy the planet. Over the years, I have had a good number of conversations with people who think like this, and they have invariably explained to me that they extend the thinking to cars, and that they bought their Prius or their Volt or their Tesla because they believe that, if they had not done so, we would be closer to the apocalypse.

And now?

Well, that’s the point, isn’t it? Imagine, as a thought experiment, if one of the two major political groups in the United States thought that, by buying a particular set of consumer products — and, indeed, by forcing those products on everyone by law, as the Democrats are fond of doing — would help to prevent an alien invasion or an earthquake. (The mechanism by which this would be achieved doesn’t matter here; what matters is the belief, which, like all such beliefs, would be proselytized in ways that ranged from polite persuasion to hysterical rage.) Next, imagine that, one day, the CEO of the company that made the most popular of those consumer products said something that the people who were scared of the alien invasion or the earthquake did not like, and that, in response, those people decided to sell their prophylactic products, and, in many cases, replace them with products that they thought were contributing to the likelihood of an alien invasion or an earthquake. In such a scenario, what would a reasonable person conclude about the depth of those people’s convictions? And, if the answer is, “One would conclude that they were full of it,” then what would one conclude about the importance of everyone else doing the things that, hitherto, they had declared imperative?

From a purely chemical perspective, I have never been of the view that mankind can do literally anything to the earth and yield no consequences. But, equally, I have always considered the catastrophism to be uniformly silly, frequently pretextual, and, above all, unduly pessimistic about the prospect of human innovation. Watching the speed and fervor with which so many American progressives have subordinated their environmentalism to their dislike of Elon Musk has done nothing to change my mind. There is no such thing as an optional cataclysm.