Following on from Thaddus’s recent posting about how politicians are trying to enlist children in the Green agenda, it is worthwhile pondering why environmentalism, even the more scientifically credible sort, is often depressing, puritanical and unpleasant. Let’s face it, a lot of libertarians’ hostility to Greenery is a suspicion that the Greens are “watermelons” – green on the outside, and socialists on the inside. Socialism, in as much as it has ever been a coherent political and economic point of view, has been economically if not entirely intellectually discredited. It has been a failure, with varying degrees of nastiness, ranging from the stifling if relatively benign version of Sweden through the to mass killing fields of Mao’s China and Pol Pot’s Cambodia. So if you hate capitalism and material wealth then the Green agenda comes in very handy.
There is a danger in this approach, however, and not just because ad hominem points about the motives of one’s ideological opponents often put off the uncommitted. The fact may be that the planet is genuinely getting warmer and that human activity has helped to cause that. Pollution of the air, seas and rivers is a problem for someone who is polluted. The destruction of ancient woodlands and the loss of flora and fauna is bad. So I can see why environmentalism appeals not just to anti-capitalists, but to conservatives and liberals who want to live the good life and ensure there is plenty of that good life around for future generations. There is in fact a school of environmental thought that harnesses ideas of property and markets to make its case.
Another point I’d make is this: why cannot the Greens, or at least the more sensible ones, throw off the image of po-faced puritanism that so often hangs around their pronouncements. His Supreme Blogness, Glenn Reynolds, has interesting thoughts here on how technologies like electric cars and so forth should be sold not as a sort of “hair-shirt” consumer gesture but because such technologies might be fun and interesting for people.
Fun – that is a word one does not hear much about when discussing technological fixes for our planet. Perhaps we should hear it a good deal more.
Perhaps it’s because the greenies generally regard the industrial revolution as having been a bad thing? They therefore regard all the effects of industrialisation and of consumerism as being similarly a very bad thing.
Po-faced puritans is exactly what they are and you might as well invite one of the passengers of the Mayflower to dance naked at your cocaine fuelled orgy as ask a green to say they like any of the fruits of industrialisation. You’re more likely to be bought a rum and coke in a lap-dancing club by an ayatollah than to hear a green say, “Isn’t it great that the A-380* will reduce airline prices and allow more people to go abroad”.
* The A-380 does 80 passenger miles per gallon (and I think that’s UK gallons at 70% passenger capacity as well) so you can stick that in your Prius and smoke it Sir Jonathan Porritt, you unbelievable cunt. (To paraphrase the wonderful Withnail & I).
That was Lomborg’s view: that wealth enabled people to turn from raw survival to issues like the environment, and that clean technologies and environmental measures were strongly correlated with wealth. If you made everyone richer, you would solve the environmental problems too. Identify the most important problems where they exist, and use your technology to fix them.
The environmentalists really hated him for it.
Telling people what to do is seldom a fun activity.
“Because we know what’s for your own good better than you do” is likewise best accompanied by earnestness.
Hey Nick M,
Is that figure of 80 passenger miles per gallon true?
There is a danger that libertarians must avoid and that is the danger of claiming that environmental problems do not exist.
Yes the “Green” leadership are mostly very bad people indeed, and yes governments will jump on any excuse for more powers – but that does not mean that their are no problems.
The Cato Institute (at least up to very recently) was in the habit of either saying that globel warming was not much of a problem or that it was all caused by nonhuman sources (such as the recent increase in Sun spot activity).
This was very unfortunate as libertarians should have a lot to say about how C02 emissions can be reduced.
For example, the vast web of regulations (which do NOT improve health and safety – rather the reverse) that hold back atomic power should be removed. Also Capital Gains Tax should be abolished – so that new technologies are more likely to be developed.
It is all very well talking about electric cars or hydrodgen fuel cells, or (even) new forms of solar cell (for places where the Sun can be relied upon), but without radical reductions in regulation and taxation such things are not going to come to pass (if they come to pass at all) in anything like the short time that is requried.
Such government supported efforts as “wind farms” are not much good (presently earmarked conventional power stations have to be on ALL THE TIME as “back up” should the wind farms fail, they produce very little power anyway, and they fall apart after a few years of use).
However, if we just say that concerns over C02 emissions causeing globel warming are “lies” (as a recent Libertarian Alliance release did) we rule oursleves out of the debate.
It is like evolution versus creationism.
It will always be possible to find a few scientists who reject evolution and support “intelligent design”, but that does not mean we should support them (against the vast majority of scientists).
Bible based conservatives have made a big mistake in comming out against evolution and there was no need to do so. After all the two most important philosopher-theologians of late 19th century America (James McCosh and Noah Porter – both conservative “Common Sense” school philosophers) supported evolution and showed how it did NOT undermine Christianity.
It is a tragedy that so many Bible based conservatives in America (who, contrary to the media, are normally good people) have come to support a basically antiscience point of view (for in spite of the handful of scientists they can cite, Creationism is rejected by the vast majority of scientists).
It would also be a tragedy if libertarians (who should be the strongest supporters of science and reason) should end up denoucing the effects of C02 emissions as “lies” (and so on).
Yes, Paul. The LA could have worded that quite a bit better. But which, here, is creationism and which is evolution? Are we talking about modern-day Gallileos fighting the consensus of orthodoxy, or the Dover school board trying to insert unfounded scepticism into science lessons? Because if it turns out you picked the wrong side, and you let all the children be indoctrinated into anti-Capitalist conformity, what will they all think of you and your movement when they grow up?
Stake your reputation and lay your bets, ladies and gentlemen…
I’ve found a simple litmus test that is very reliable.
If someone is intractible in denying climate warming, they are on the irrational ‘right’.
If someone is intractibly committed to the belief that humans are causing climate warming, they are irrational ‘left’.
The very few who express any degree of uncertainty are capable to that extent of carrying on a rational discussion.
Yes, Bernie, as far as I am aware it is true. And why be surprised? This is 150 miilion Euros of aerospace. This is clever stuff and this is an industry in which margins between making a stonking profit and going down the pan very rapidly are razor thin. The idea that airlines are squandering oil in a free-for-all “lets see who can pollute the most” competition flies in the face of not just reason but basic micro-economics.
I was once involved in an (admittedly unresolved) argument with a bunch of fellow astrophysicists as to which was the most efficient (least energy used) passengers per mile means of transport. We rejected everything until we came down to the two last men standing. They were the bicycle and the subsonic turbofan jet-liner.
Except we missed something out. Sometimes supersonic is better (and hypersonic better still) because it’s all down to friction and Newton’s laws. If you get high enough fast enough you can essentially coast your way in. The fastest manned air-breathing thing ever built, the SR-71 (I’ve seen two and they’re 107’5″ of pure titanium sex) generated most of it’s thrust at maximum speed from the purely geometric, fluid-dynamical effect of compression from the shock cones.
It’s predecessor the XB-70 Valkyrie (one example left, Dayton, OH) used the compression lift phenomenon to achieve an incredibly high lift/drag ratio. It is a common urban myth that this even exceeded the L/D ratio of sailplanes. This is untrue but the XB-70 was astonishingly efficient and no sailplane ever hit mach 3.
So, why the Valkyrie (brilliant name BTW)? In the early 50s SAC decided to start a program for an eventual B-52 replacement. They came up with two specs. One was for a nuclear powered subsonic nuclear bomber (can you imagine anything more likely to give Zac Goldsmith a kiniption fit) capable of hitting any point on the globe from any direction. The other was for a high altitude Mach 3 penetrator. That was the Valkyrie. Now various aircraft companies came up with ideas including the idea of a mach 3 penetrator that subsoniced it over to the Sov’s before letting loose it’s two cruise slip-planeand lighting the fired for a mach 3 dash. It was so enormous that even Curtiss LeMay stopped chomping his cigar* when he saw the weight, size and cost of it, exclaiming, “This ain’t an airplane, this is a goddamn three ship formation!”
The result was that the US (almost) developed an all-the-way mach 3 bomber because NAA had a proposal which (by using a number of aerodynamic tricks – including the above mentioned “compression-lift”) enabled a smaller aircraft to fly all the way at Mach 3. Obviously this was a better idea and two were built.
They weren’t pursued because the ICBM (and SLBM) were coming online about the same time. Well, it’s a bit more complicated, but that’s the short answer.
I have a general point here. Speed does not equal environmental destruction. Speed (and height) are sometimes the architects of efficiency.
*I always imagined Curtiss LeMay to be a cigar chomper.
The reason some of us reject “global warming is a man made phenomenon” out of hand are many, but mainly because the environmentalists have been so frequently and so pigheadly wrong so often that we can’t believe anything that they say.
Let’s call them what they are, a bunch of scared headless chooks, some screaming about the sky falling down, some about the sky falling up, some the sky is bright pink and some the sky is blue.
The only convincing evidence of global warming is also showing global warming on other planets of the solar system.
Global warming and cooling have occured previously without industrialisation. Sorry they did not burn enough bodies during the Black Death to cause the Medieval Warming Period. The world was hotter then, get over it. Stop trying to cover it up and explain it.
Some of them are still screaming that there is indisuputable proof of global cooling. Glaciers are increasing in size in some areas.
Another big issue is that pollution has been decreasing. Environmentalists are the ones shutting down plans for replacing old outdated plants with new cleaner power generation facilities in the US. Then when it causes problems, another group will claim no environmentalist opposes cleaner technologies.
Environmentalists lie, cheat, steal and destroy. Cut the bull and present us with facts rather than childish headlines. “Hottest summer in 30 years proof of global warming”. With that logic, the previous 29 years we had global cooling.
Never trust an “environmentalist” or a “green” who is against trade. If they’re willing to subordinate the science they claim to believe in for the socialist principles they actually believe in, but aren’t willing to state this, then it is unlikely that they are any more trustworthy, on any subject, than Camercon.
Midwesterner, I’m not sure where I’d fit in your scheme. I’m not a climatologist, or a hard scientist of any kind. My knowledge of the science is mostly from environmental law seminars, along with blogs and IPCC 3’s summary for policymakers. That said, I’m simply not interested in people who feel that the IPCC is a tool of Exxon et. al.. While the consensus may be wrong, I honestly believe that if there was a significant body of good science that supported higher figures, those higher figures would be in there.
This faith in a document that I know to have some ugly flaws in it (see Mark Steyn’s latest article(Link) for a couple of them) is based on the fact that I have found that most people, if pushed, will agree to those terms. And there is nothing that I really want to argue that isn’t covered in that document or Kyoto’s performance.
It’s a great shame that those with Marxist attitudes find climate change to be an ideal vehicle for promoting their agenda, for the result is what we often see on this site – statements along the lines of “any evidence for global warming must be a lie, because the lefties are using it as an excuse to tax and regulate us”.
I’m sure that that such lefties could come up with just about any excuse to engage in their preferred forms of collectivism, and it is therefore reassuring to see that some libertarians realise that in addition to being endangered by statists, we may actually be endangered by the climate.
we may actually be endangered by the climate.
I am not convinced mankind will be “endangered” by the climate per se, but I can see that Mankind will be endangered by ITSELF when it reacts to climate change in the form of crop failure, mass migration, water conflicts or just plain clinging on to living where it is no longer practicable until in desperation they flee en masse in disorder.
To me, rather than trying to drag the population back to some neolithic eden, we should be seeking to eliminate one of the prime requirements for mass starvation in my view – subsistence farming. If people eat what they grow, then when crops fail repeatedly, they starve. Further, they are unlikely to be connected to a robust and reliable food transportation infrastructure. A country that exports vast quantities of food is probably pretty capable of importing and distributing it as it has the vehicles, roads, ports and marshalling. A country that has entirely commercial farming is already feeding its population via a distribution network, so much the easier to switch to external sources should that become necessary.
TimC: Your first paragraph is more or less what I meant.
Here’s a link to my view (at 7:09PM on 3rd Feb, 4th comment), at least somewhat on the issue of science versus spin.
Best regards
knirirr writes, I think with some modest cause:
However, I could not resist repeating the following, courtesy of Numberwatch Feb 2007:
The point is that my scepticism is based on a lack of science adequate to justify the action suggested (rejigging the world economy, CO2 quotas, etc). The fact that the hole in which sits this lack of science is then filled my megawords of spin is surely just necessary for the uber-green purpose: to persuade people to their view. That shit smells, to my scientific nose at least, worse than the gap it fills (and so draws attention to itself) is, quite definitely, not my fault.
Best regards
Nigel:
Your comments about the models (link to Englishman’s Castle, above) are quite reasonable, I think. SquanderTwo has some interesting remarks on computer models here, and correctly points out that they are indeed imperfect (as you would know).
…based on a lack of science adequate to justify the action suggested…
This is indeed the problem. There might well be some truth in the models, but when they are taken as 100% accurate and justification for all manner of dodgy political schemes then we have a problem. The data should be seen for what they are.