In having another bite at the Green issue, one thing struck me as I surfed around the Net looking at some of the comments made by people about the idea of the Tories’ trying to stop people from flying to holiday and business destinations. Some people genuinely seem to feel that a crackdown on global warming, and hence a halt to rising sea levels, is good for the poor. So we capitalist zealots should stop trying to argue that Tory leader David Cameron or Labour’s Tony Blair are acting out of snobbish disdain for Essex Man and the latter’s desire to go to Malaga for a cheap holiday. Oh no.
I guess it is true that if sea levels do rise as much as the gloomier scientists suggest, and the Earth gets progressively hotter, that poor people will suffer disproportionately from that. Air conditioning costs money. Buying a home away from a flood plain also costs money. I recall that about 3 years ago, hundreds, in fact thousands of French elderly people died because all the pharmacies were shut for the August holidays and they could not get treatment. That is what poverty does – it cuts your optiions and means of escape from trouble. So maybe David Cameron is acting out of paternalistic concern for the poor — in the future.
And that is the kicker. Even if global warming is man-made and can be reversed, the benefits of such an expensive exercise will not come through for decades, centuries, or even longer. How can the interests of a guy who cannot afford an expensive flight be set against the interests of someone living in 2300? Why should a politician, answerable to an electorate, sacrifice or ask to sacrifice its interests for the interests of people in such a long time to come, and over a theory or set of theories that are, at best, not proven to the standards of a court of law?
We have been beastly to Cameron and his ilk on this site lately, and with ample justification. If Cameron wants to explain quite why the ordinary citizen should be shafted, yet again, by some grand project to make the world a better place in centuries to come, let him make that case.
Meanwhile, my boss, not the most excitable of men, said, in a quite unsolicited moment of rage this morning, that Cameron was a “communist”. He is not even a rightwing Tory voter. I wonder if this view is starting to spread.
He is no communist, but he is unquestionably a Blairite. An authoritarian tending to neofacist.
In fact, making the opposite journey to the neocons.
A neofas?
Well most communist were fascistic in the end so its not really much to argue over. One thing that infuriates me is the fact that the envirofascists continue to claim that all this bad stuff is going to happen in our lifetime…playing off that dross of a movie ‘Day after Tomorrow’.
As anyone blamed sunspots on Neo-Cons yet?
It is amazing how quick the environazi attitude to the future is grasped when trendy taxation and control is a tool, yet the utter disgrace of mortaging our children on the altar of pension provision cop-out seems so easy to them.
I would have more trust in their sincerity if they just did the right thing and built Nuclear and researched all sensible avenues for fusion (and not just the white elephant ITER project). I do suspect the fusion project could be funded for the same or less than the subsidies for daft tinkering such as wind and wave. I also suspect that these bright ideas for wave will end up destroying habitat because we are too ignorant of the harmony waves sustain.
The Earth gets all its energy from the Sun. It would make sense if we built our own little suns to provide our energy in a convenient form. The issue about CO2 emissions would then focus on atrocities such as the Indonesian fires, which in 1997 was the equivalent of 40% of ALL human CO2 production in that same year.
TimC,
Why are you referring to ITER as a white elephant? Is it because it is state-financed?
ITER’s cost is estimated at around $12Bn, or approximately £7Bn. On the subject of white elephants, I’d rather have a fusion generator down the road from me, than the 2012 Olympics (now estimated to cost circa £9Bn.
Cameron is most certainly not a communist. The one virtue that communists have is that they believe in production.
Blair & Cameron apparently, like the other fascisti, are aware that ownership of capital and productive resources is an irrelevancy when it comes to control.
Under NuLab and CamerCon ownership is left in private hands, but subject to control and diktat by an overbearing state.
Classic Fascist policy.
Normally, in a discussion, the first person to mention Hitler or throw an accusation of fascism loses, but in this case I claim that the two main British political parties are, in fact, and by definition, turning fascist under the current leadership.
In the First World,it is the rich that live by the rivers and the sea.
To the point,Cameron like Blair is simply another political huckster with absolutely no understanding of the mechanics of the issues about which he speaks.All the buggers are getting on the GW bandwagon,great soundbites,makes them sound serious and caring,but they simply do not know what they are talking about.
All of you are missing the main point which is that most the present crop of boomer politicians are all ranging from extremely dumb to utterly stupid. Yes, I know they have degrees from this place and that but they are all social science twaddle mongers. The greater part of them just had to repeat whatever tosh was being slopped up to graduate and since then none of them have added any value to their ‘knowledge’ – why – because they know it all.
Just look at how they lap up the nonsense Al Gore – an undergraduate D student, and failed graduate student – has dished up.
Out of control themselves they want to exert control over the rest of us. But as my compatriot Canadians would say franchement la, the Nancy Pelosis, Harry Reids, and their political counterparts worldwide, are all brain dead twits who have never learned not to preach on empty heads.
Simon,
From the Google video showing a respected fusion scientist, Dr Robert Bussard discussing fusion reactors.
“…This whole thing [the tokamak project] is an
enormously expensive proposition which even some of
its proponents say they don’t think it might ever be
economic, but it’s really good science.
[audience laughter]
“The problem that we saw is everything that they’re
doing is highly radioactive; it’s expensive; it’s measured
in tens of billions of dollars. The projected runout cost
of ITER is $12 billion, the program over the next 25
or 30 years is another $30 billion; the United States has
already spent $18 billion chasing this tokamak dragon
and [by contrast our] initial electrostatic stuff comes in
at [only] the order of tens to hundreds of millions.
“There’s no end is sight that we see in the tokamak
world, giant machine, no predictability; it’s all
empirical. One of my friends, Dr. Nicholas Krall, a
consultant to us, probably one of the top three theorists
in the world, said some years ago, “We spent $15
billion dollars studying tokamaks and what we know
about them is they’re no damn good.”
[audience laughter]
— Dr. Robert Bussard
The UK spends £250m on renewables and subsidising uneconomic companies so people can buy cheap beach windmills that will yank down their chimney through the roof one stormy day so that they can save £3 a year on electricity bills, when instead we should be setting up the facility to prove a commercial IEC fusion reactor.
“By what right does this forgotten future seek to deny us our birthright? None I say! Let us take what is ours, chew and eat our fill.”
CEO Nwabudike Morgan
Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri
Tim,
Thanks for that explanation.
On Bussard’s comments on tokamaks, I’m reminded of Clarke’s first law: ‘When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.’
The radioactivity produced is obviously high when compared to aneutronic fusion, but low when compared to fission reactors.
The prospects for tokamaks to produce power are now good enough for the governments ruling more than half the world’s population to commit several billion dollars to the project.
Having said all that, I would like to see further research on IEC fusion. I just have a nasty feeling that it’ll turn out to be a lot more expensive than Dr. Bussard expects.
But, Johnathan, GW is a collectivist’s dream come true.
A nebulous, shadowy threat which can be used to justify almost anything, but especially an open-ended, never ending demand for sacrifices in the here and now to prevent some future catastrophe.
And it justs gets better and better. What are the signs of this climatic apocalypse?
Well, maybe warming, but maybe cooling. Maybe deserts, but maybe glaciers. Maybe warmer temps around the world, but maybe a new ice age. Maybe furious storms, but maybe drought, and no rain storms at all.
It’s even better than the war on drugs, or the war on poverty—it’s the war on excess, the war on lifestyle, the war on mean, greedy capitalism and all its accompanying waste and frivolity.
After all, why should all these spoiled, self-indulgent westerners be allowed to go flying and driving all over the place, taking vacations, going to Disney World with a bunch of snot nosed kids, travelling all over the world for crass, commercial purposes, or worse, just for fun.
Those precious carbon emmissions should be reserved for truly important purposes, such as international seminars and UN conferences on GW, rallies to support further stringent action, award ceremonies for those who develop the most draconian measures for everyone to follow—and I mean follow, or else—and, of course, the eventual show trials of those who continue to deny, or offend, the consensus agreeing that everyone who really matters thinks this is the way to proceed.
When we all have to climb into the lifeboats, then this personal, individual liberty stuff will just have to go, and everyone will have to cooperate by doing what they’re told, no matter what sacrifices are demanded.
After all, it’s for the children, and grandchildren, ad infinitum—what could be more precious than that?
It’s just you selfish, individualist types who can’t see what needs to be done, and that those in the know must enforce the doing. I mean, it’s all for the common good.
Isn’t that enough justification for anything our betters might decide we need to do? Didn’t you get the memo?
That is what poverty does – it cuts your optiions and means of escape from trouble.
Odd, isn’t it, that the policy prescriptions pushed to solve global warming will all involve reducing total global production in the near and medium terms, at an absolute minimum.
Inevitably, the burden of this reduced production will be felt from the bottom up.
Thus, their own prescriptions increase the impoverishment which makes people vulnerable to harm from the environment, while doing little, by their own admission, to affect said environment.
Whereas the real solution to global warming, if one is needed, is the kind of geo-engineering that only a very wealthy planet can afford. It will likely require the kind of wealth that an economy strangled by “carbon taxation” schemes can not produce.
verytired,
Nice comment. I simpy call it the Puritans’ Revenge.
They were kicked to the curb for a few generations, even as Statism increased, the zealots were marginalized. They tested to waters with smoking. Now we are going to have a merging of the State Apparati with the zealotry of the New Puritanism in full force. Can’t wait for the “ax wielding prohibitionist” of the modern era.
Wonderful days ahead….
(carbon foot print of this comment – .0001 micrograms per liter)
DaveJ;
lol, thats the first thing I thought of too, guess great minds thing alike. I think that was one of the best parts of that game, all the little quotes with the research.
I find it inconsistent that there should be such overarching concern for hypothetical future generations (who may by then have conquered the scientific problems of man-made global warming, if it exists), while at the same time such apparent contempt for an actual future generation in the shape of unplanned or unwanted foetuses.
Also, it is generally the most vocal greens that are also the most fervently ‘pro choice’.
So, you can kill your unborn child for any reason, but not contribute in any way to possibly making his environment a couple of degrees warmer, should you decide to sapre him.
VeryRetired, absolutely. I think the puritanical origins of Greenery run very deep.
Allan, hmm, not sure really. I guess some Greens take a relaxed view on abortion out of their general desire to limit, or even reverse, population growth. But a lot of Greens seem to embrace a variety of positions – I would not jump to conclusions on this issue either way.
The late Julian Simon, prime debunker of population doomongering, was a Catholic. He liked the idea of population growth and celebrated human fecundity, just as the ghastly Ehrlichs, with their predictions of disaster, seemed to almost revile humanity as a plague. So maybe you have a seed of an idea here.
Some puritans were big fans of the ‘be fruitful and multiply” side of their religion. There are plenty of killjoys in all religions.
What I wonder about is, what is it that makes it so relatively easy for the UK’s government to impose this ‘green authoritarianism’ on its people. Is it decade after decade of tax funded BBC propaganda?
Lots of use of the f-word on here, but it seems as inappropriate as its use for Islamic fundamentalists on the other thread. Both groups (greens and fundamentalists) seem inclusive, not exclusive to me – the problem is that they want all of us to accept the faith, not that they see themselves as a master-race or their issue as a question of national superiority. So, rather than call them Islamo-fascists and Enviro-fascists, can we (like Jonathan’s boss) call them Islamo-communists and Enviro-communists?
As most people still make the mistake of thinking of fascism as a right-wing creed (which I realise is not what most people here intend), calling them communists will help to make it clear that these movements are making the same collectivist mistakes that failed in Russia and China. When you get right down to the fundamentals of many of the green proposals, they are about state-allocation by rationing (as opposed to market-allocation by price), which is pretty close to “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”. Dave’s flight-rationing scheme is an excellent case in point.
As for the original post, the arguments about impacts on the poor are more to do with the poor of the third-world and developing world, rather than of the rich-world, I believe. The fears of environmentalists are not so much that British poor will not be able to afford air conditioning, or that French elderly will not be able to get medicine (though I’m sure they’d seize on those examples as well, if asked), but more that the poor will be driven out of their homes and into greater destitution (or worse) by flooding in places like Bangladesh and by drought and starvation in parts of Africa and Asia.
But this only serves to reinforce your point, Jonathan. As the “…Swindle” programme pointed out, the impact of constraining the economic development of poor countries may be more severe and certain (in terms of mortality, health and quality of life) than the risk from AGW if their (and our) growth were unconstrained. That, of course, is the basis of the Lomborg argument.
It is by no means certain that current impacts are more important (the worst cases, if AGW did turn out to be severe, are very serious indeed), but what I am confident about is that it is better for Africans to make judgments about the relative merits of improving their standards of living now at the possible expense of their descendants, or of accepting constraints to their development now in order to minimise the risk to their descendants, than it is for us rich Westerners to paternlistically/patronisingly tell them what is in the best interests of them and their descendants. Some of them may feel that, if they are at significant risk now of death and disease, there’s not a lot of point worrying about their descendants.
What we can inflict on them (as opposed to what they can choose to inflict on themselves), on the other hand, is another matter. That ought, in effect, to be a liability and insurance issue – if we do something that risks harm to someone else, and it turns out that the harm is incurred, we ought to compensate them for it. If we accept that obligation, the obvious answer would be for us to “insure” against the risk, and the cost of that “insurance” would be the real cost of carbon. The more likely or significant the harm, the higher the cost of the insurance (and therefore of carbon), and the more doubt is thrown on the science, the lower the cost of carbon. If you doubt the AGW theory, and you are willing to put your money where your mouth is, you could make money by underwriting some of that risk at a market-rate which, in your opinion, would be overvalued.
The question of the extent to which we should value the future relative to the present, from a classical liberal perspective, is an interesting one. The answer may not be quite as simple on this planet as it is in Alpha Centauri.
Henry Hazlitt, extending the lesson of his Economics in One Lesson into the field of morality, was of the view that differentiating between short-run and long-run interests was the key to avoiding the false conclusion of collectivists “that the interests of the individual and of society (or the State) are fundamentally opposed, and that the individual can only be led to cooperate in society by Draconian compulsions” (The Foundations of Morality, start of Ch.7). The interests would usually coincide in the long-run. Our moral and legal rules existed to ensure we gave fair weight to the future and to guide us towards the courses of action that would tend to produce the optimal outcome for the most people in the long-run. On this foundation, he concluded that “the ideal moral rules, therefore, may not only sometimes oblige an individual to make some immediate or temporary sacrifice in his own long-run interest, but even (though very rarely) to sacrifice even his own long-run interest to the larger long-run interest of everybody else” (end of Ch.14). He highlighted both the Voluptuary’s Fallacy (encapsulated in a quote by Byron similar in spirit to that from CEO Nwabudike Morgan: “Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter, Sermons and soda-water the day after”) and the Ascetic’s Fallacy, which sees some false virtue in self-deprivation for its own sake. We should not fall for the greens’ Ascetic’s Fallacy, but we should also not fall into the Voluptuary’s Fallacy of undervaluing prudence.
I have spent a bit of time arguing with greens, and it still surprises me how many of them are devoted to the short-termist solutions of people like Keynes when they appear to place such a high value on the future in other regards. Classical liberals shouldn’t make the opposite mistake – confusing individualism with selfishness and short-termism.
Keynes dismissed the importance of the future with the famous aphorism “in the long run, we are all dead”. Sir Alan Walters restored regard for the future to its proper place in economic thinking with the rebuff “but now Keynes is dead, and we are in the long run”, written in 1986 when we were recovering from decades of Keynesian short-termism.
As for testing the need for prudential action on the basis that the case has been “proven to the standards of a court of law”, is that really the right test where it is a question of risk? Do we, in any other regard, disregard risk until it has been proven beyond all reasonable doubt? If this were the usual rule, we would never act to mitigate risk, because by the time it has been proved, it is no longer a risk but a certainty.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, markets are our friends. Where there is uncertainty or risk or differences in perception, we can deal with them by valuing them in markets. To say that we should not act until a case has been proven (who should be the judge of that, by the way?) ignores other people’s subjective valuations as much as saying that we must act regardless of doubt. Let’s treat carbon as risk, create a market where people can trade that risk, and discover the optimal balance between prudential action and inaction. To oppose all action, or to prognosticate on the best courses of action, is to display as much unwarranted certainty about the science as is shown by the enviro-communists.
The worst thing about doing something for the future is that they’ll never come back and thank you for it! They’re so ungrateful! We here in Australia are saving the planet by clearing up all our beaches, and the future hasn’t thanked us, not even once! Some Brit wit once sagely observed, ‘Why should we do anything for posterity? After all, what has Posterity ever done for us?’ Wiser words were never spoken.
And while we are on the subject of saving the world for the puritanical nanny state Compact Fluorescent low energy lights may not be the great panacea that the Oz pm and certain UK politicians think it is. Leaving aside that if global warming is not manmade then it is probably a waste of time and money anyway.
Follow the link. It’s a bit of a dry read but, is enough to make you think twice.
Nuclear is too expensive and it still won’t provide enough energy — see this lecture for more info,nless your knee-jerk right-wing ideology is too ignorant to be undated:
http://www2.slac.stanford.edu/lectures/info_2007/2007_02_27.htm
Renewable energy is the only intellegent solution for the future — the only question is whether or not the ignorance of the right-wing will doom the future of humanity or not by failure to appreciate what’s at stake.
Brent,
I take it that you will be prepared to have no power when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun is not shining then?
It is also refreshing to note that the ad hominem is still alive and well in what passes for Leftist “discourse”.
PS – enjoy your computer-modelled future. When the models can actually approach reality then maybe we’ll listen.
PPS – You seem to be unusually keen to doom the present…
There are lots of control-freaks in our midst who want to “save our future” by banning this, taxing that, regulating this practice or making X or Y compulsory. Instead of claiming that GW skeptics are “right wing” – that is wrong as I know half a dozen Marxists who are skeptics — try and argue why we should sacrifice so much for such an uncertain payoff. And if the only evidence of a risk is some computer model, then that is frankly not good enough.
What the GW worriers have to show is how to tackle this without the sort of crippling sacrifices they now argue for. The Green movement is, in the main, a movement run and supported by guilt-ridden wealthy folk with the time and the money to afford to get steamed up. Poor people are less inclined to be interested. If the “left” really thinks that shafting the poor for an uncertain payoff is smart politics, think again.