We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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A second “No shit, Sherlock” moment for the day Seriously, I mean man, SERIOUSLY Asia doesn’t give a fuck about your white, western, self flagellating, puritanical eco religion.
– commenter ‘twostix‘ on this Catallaxy thread
As someone who has lived in the rapidly developing part of Asia for the best part of four years thus far, I cannot stress how strongly the above is true. Oh, sure, people worry about Climate Change (in fact, I would say they are less skeptical about it than the average westerner), but virtually no one would sacrifice development in its name.
I have said it before, and the greens really need to get it through their thick skulls – if global warming is real, it is now inevitable. For the reason so eloquently stated above.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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“if global warming is real, it is now inevitable.”
Cool, I’ll pop out and buy a new pair of sunglasses.
In the first comment in the link, from 2007:
Since in all likelihood we’d be the one’s manufacturing said [solar] panels, we’d make bank quite nicely.
LOL. It’s inevitable, but let’s make a few bucks off those gullible Chinese anyway.
On the subject of climate change, we are having an unseasonably early start to Winter, with more snow on our Snowy Mountains. Is it true, though, that Europe is hotter, with more fires?
And how are the greenland glaciers going? does anyone know?
As the previous commenter mentioned, the east coast of Australia has been cold. But just across the Tasman, we in New Zealand have just had the warmest May in a very long time and a lot of things are acting as if it’s spring already. (real winter is of course July and August)
I have just spent a couple of weeks in Australia, and I was struck by just how much Australian politicians talk about climate change. Seriously, they make the British ones appear relatively unspoken on the subject. (Australian politicians also spend a lot of time on pointless state funded National Broadband Networks and bogus scares about asylum speakers arriving on boats. It is really quite depressing).
Given that there is nothing whatsoever that Australian politicians can do about climate change, regardless of how much climate is happening, this strikes me as a sign that the politicians there are starting to get some deep down understanding of their own impotence. Australia today is very rich, and that wealth comes from digging stuff up from the ground and selling it to the Chinese, basically. (When China goes, so does Australia, but that hasn’t happened yet). The politicians have nothing to do with this, but some vague understanding that they should leave this alone and let it happen, which leaves them nothing to do other than rant pointless drivel that they think appeals to some of the population. They do of course spend money (the aforementioned broadband network, a silly “stimulus package” in 2008-10 that turned every school in the country into a construction site) but they are the closest thing I have seen to a political class aware of their own uselessness.
I’m not sure I totally agree. For the uninitiated, the Labor Party leads a minority government with the support of two independents and one Greens MP. Combined, they have a majority of one. If one of these three walks, the government falls. The two independents aren’t going anywhere – they represent conservative rural electorates and have had to make politically suicidal compromises in their alliance with the Labor Party. They will be flung out of office by a wide margin at the next election for certain, so they are trying to hang on for as long as possible. I guess they think delivering lots of federal pork to their electorates will save them. It won’t.
The Greens MP, however, is in a much more secure position politically in his inner city seat of Melbourne. He’s definitely a contender at the next election, and he may well depart the government if it doesn’t conform enough to the Green agenda. Which is only the complete phase out of coal exports. Soon. Coal is a massive, massive industry in Australia that the Greens simply want to shut down. Imagine that a British political party decided that the finance sector in London must be eliminated. That’s not far off what the Greens have in mind for the Australian economy. They hold a dagger to the government’s throat and must be appeased. They are, and this is not an exaggeration, very dangerous.
So what the government says they’re going to do about carbon is no idle threat. Furthermore, I don’t think they’re banging on about carbon because they’re trying to distract people. I think they really truly believe this stuff. OK, Rudd didn’t have the political stones to go to the mat for his Emissions Trading Scheme, but now Gillard can’t afford not to sing from the Greens songbook to at least a significant extent. They will impoverish people at the behest of the Greens.
Furthermore, this current mob running the country are so epically incompetent (everything – and I do mean everything, again without exaggeration – they have touched has turned to shit. I cannot think of one significant or even not-so-significant programme or reform enacted by them that they have not made worse in varying degrees of severity) and out-of-touch that they actually believe that carbon is an important issue to the greater unwashed. It isn’t. Taxes, and in particular, tax increases, are. The carbon tax isn’t controversial because of the carbon aspect – it’s the tax, dummies! And, of course, the price increase on just about everything that the tax will cause.
OK, I think Tony Abbott is a fairly smart political operator, so you may well be right about him and his group of stinkers (I’m not a big fan of the Australian “conservatives”), however I think the Labor Party has its collective head stuck so far up its own arse that it speaks through its navel. I credit those people with absolutely no awareness of political reality whatsoever. If this government goes the full term, I think they will face an unprecedented electoral wipeout that could split the party or, at the very least, throw it into opposition for a generation.
I’ve lived in Vietnam for 10 years, and that’s totally right–people just want their lives to be better, and they could care less about environmentalism. Things here are going very well, so why rock the boat?
They seem to more or less accept global warming, but they certainly don’t blame themselves. America and Europe ought to do something about it, but they will not. They don’t seem to have a lot of faith that little Vietnam can change the world all on its own.
So, no, don’t expect major environmental concessions to happen here, or bold new environmental ideas to emanate from this place. If it is going to screw with commerce and cost them money, they ain’t interested.
How’s that “Communism” for you? 🙂
But isn’t it the Green agenda anyway?
A question I want to ask global warmenists:
You believe that reducing CO2 emissions to [draconian level X] is necessary to avoid catastrophic “climate change”.
China’s CO2 emissions from coal burning are already very large and increasing rapidly as China becomes an industrial economy. Suppose China’s emissions (by themselves) exceed [draconian level X], and China refuses to reduce emissions to less than [DLX], since doing so would require the shutdown of most Chinese industry and power generation. Negotiations have failed. Sanctions have failed. Internet sabotage has failed. China continues to burn coal and emit more CO2 than [DLX].
Would you support a nuclear attack on China to stop coal-burning there?
An all-out nuclear strike on a country that size would be unkind to Gaia. Many species of rodents, spiders and other endangered populations would be placed in jeopardy.
However, a similar effect could be achieved by putting Gordon Brown in charge of the Chinese economy. The Greens haven’t yet figured out a way to do this, but I expect they’re working on it.