What, no hair shirts? Even if woven from ecologically-sustainable, free range alpacas?

They're back (if they ever went away)

Indiana's Student Association's "sustainability department" urges fellow students to take cold showers in order to save the planet.

“Living sustainably is one of the easiest things you can do. Turn off your lights, unplug your electric devices, take shorter, cold showers.”

This is the pitch to Indiana University-Bloomington students from the head of the new “sustainability” department inside the Student Association, the Indiana Daily Student reports.

That suggestion was made back in September. It's 8 degrees in Bloomington this morning: I wonder how the green babies are doing?

Virtue signaling, self-denial and useless, meaningless activity in the name of the Holy Mother Gaia; all this would be (more) amusing except that, just like those lovable whack jobs, the Muslims, advocates of ecotheology want to bring the rest of the world under the subjugation of their God, and that means cold showers for all of us - and no heat, no refrigeration and no anything post, say, 1870, for that matter; I don't want to share their vision.

 Those who don't understand that environmentalism is a religion, the only religion, for the urban elite, just aren't paying attention. Here's someone who is. Writing on the new "Ecotheology", the author starts by quoting the late Michael Crichton:

 In a widely quoted 2003 speech, Crichton outlined the ways that environmentalism “remaps” Judeo-Christian beliefs:

There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.

It's a lengthy essay, but it's your solemn duty to read it all - go strip off your clothes, soak in a tub of cold water while yu read it and report back here when you've finished.