sad, but true

• ...just as democracy has not guaranteed rationality in economic policy, it will also be a poor protector of personal liberty. The democratic masses are now sufficiently conditioned to believe that politics and state action are the solution to every problem, and when the crisis intensifies and anxiety levels rise, the majority will happily sign away the remaining bits of individual freedom and property rights in a desperate but entirely counterproductive bid to stem the tide.

The quote above is from the latest in a fine series of posts subsequent to his book on Paper Money Collapse by Detlev Schlichter.  In contrast to the current US President, Schlichter appears to have a clear grasp on economics, capitalism and the basis for prosperity.

For example:

•  On the basis of economic theory and historical experience, the life expectancy of a societal model with 50 percent or more government control over the economy does therefore not look promising. The taxing, resources-consuming state-parasite must constantly weaken and sooner or later kill the productive and wealth-creating market-host. When does this happen? Well, we are about to find out, as we are now all part of some gigantic real-life experiment, bravely conducted by the current policy establishment in Europe and elsewhere at our own expense and that of our children. Across the EU, the share of government spending in the economy is already around 50 percent, depending whose numbers you believe. If we could account for regulation and interventionist legislation, the state’s grip on economic decision-making is certainly larger. To call such an economy capitalist is a joke, albeit perhaps not as cruel a joke as the one the economy itself, with its persistently anaemic performance, is playing on the Keynesian economists and their ridiculous clamour for ever more government spending to boost ‘aggregate demand’.
• Anybody with any knowledge of economics should feel uneasy at the sight of a country where half of recorded economic activity is conducted by the state.

Rather than a sense of unease, the mass herd of mainstream media appears to be doing its best effort to rationalize and legitimize the ideology of state control over the economy.  Find one example in all of human history where this has been a sustainable success.

When ever the answer is given as "state control over the economy", you know one of two things:

• the wrong questions have been asked, or
• someone is seeking to exert power and control using the state as their instrument of personal aggrandizement.

Sad but true.

becoming a green hero....

As a follow up to an improvised chat I had with a student in the coffee line, I want to share a scenario for you to ponder:

• You land your spaceship on Earth but know nothing about the planet or its inhabitants, armed only with superior technology (you are after all an inter-galactic space/time traveler) and a well-intentioned desire to assist if possible.
•  You ask your on-board computer for a print out of the key data on the planet and its peoples: you get data for "countries" listing income per capita; annual death rate, birth rate and infant mortality; life expectancy; some trends for the last 200 years for 200 countries;  an index of political freedom; and then some data on pollution levels, which includes per capita levels of "waste" -- being from another planet you have no idea what this last item is, but what the heck, computer lists it, must have some relevance.
• Being of superior intellect you ask the computer to run a quick correlation analysis to help you determine what to do and how you can help.  
• You can see from the data that over 200 years the planet has been steadily improving in all areas, in all countries but some parts still lag and could be classed as "less developed" "under developed" or just in an earlier stage of development -- note, have to learn the language these people use, don't want to offend anyone from the get-go! (Hmmm, wonder if these people still use violence?)
• Anyways your data show that prosperity and waste are highly correlated: light-bulb!  You can bring more "waste" or even better help the poor places generate greater amounts of waste and, according to your data, their incomes will rise, their life expectancy will increase, infant mortality decrease and malaria disappear -- and you will be a hero.  
• And as a tiny green alien, you would,of course, be a "green hero".

Now you still don't know cause from effect, but hey, who's perfect anyways?

Part 2: denouement

The point is not that waste is by definition worthless and useless, it is the conditions that create that value that are significant and meaningful.

A weakness of capitalism is it generates waste.  A strength is it generates prosperity.

So, if we educate concerned and active young people that waste is bad and should be curtailed, we have just focused on an answer based on flawed presumptions: fear and guilt -- based on an incorrect presumption about limits.  We then take their energy and enthusiasm and direct them to address waste.  Great. Even if they significantly reduce waste for the wealthiest 1 billion (which has not proven possible), what difference have they made to the lives of the lowest 1 billion?

Conversely, if we focus on strengths and hope, we challenge their education to ask the right questions as to how do we create prosperity for the lowest 1 billion -- implementation of sustainability that is actually transformative.  Poverty is antithetical to sustainability.

The first construct is stasist and does not significantly alter anything: the second is inherently dynamist and does: wealth is a necessary condition for sustainability whereas poverty is what kills people and degrades the planet.

So why does convergent thinking in education stigmatize wealth?  Rather than inspire or encourage any graduate work on waste, education should be inspiring and facilitating the examination of creative wealth creation contextualized and "in country" for those places most in need of development and wealth creation.

If waste management is the presumptive answer, the wrong question is being asked.

it's all politics...

Most people still assume that resource management and environmental decisions depend upon sound science, rational policy making and human values of progress.  In fact, they reflect a fixation on political winds of convenience and contrivance.  Too often, the results are an act of "national insanity".  The latest example is the delay and apparent "rejection" of the Keystone pipeline by the Obama Administration, which even the mainstream media recognizes as stupid and ideological from a policy perspective, perhaps the worst political mistake of his entire presidency.

• It isn’t often that a president makes a decision that has no redeeming virtues and — beyond the symbolism — won’t even advance the goals of the groups that demanded it. All it tells us is that Obama is so obsessed with his reelection that, through some sort of political calculus, he believes that placating his environmental supporters will improve his chances.
• This seems like a truly simple determination. Iran is threatening to blockade the 20 percent of the world’s oil supply that flows through the Strait of Hormuz. The American economy is struggling from high unemployment. The volatility of oil prices, reflected in periodic spikes at the gas pump, is a threat to productivity. A privately funded pipeline project that would create tens of thousands of jobs while helping stabilize America’s energy supply clearly seems to be in the national interest.
•  The Keystone XL pipeline would have single-handedly carried more energy to the United States than the sum of all the green energy projects funded by the Obama Administration.  And it would have done so entirely with private  funds rather than the Administrations increasingly ill-fated and ham-handed attempts at venture capitalism with taxpayer funds.

Stupid is, as stupid does.  Perhaps this will be the re-election slogan for the Obama Administration.

death of a delusion

Dateline Durban: the final death throes of the AGW climate delusion.

• A week ago, the annual climate change diplomatic cycle convened here in Durban. Global interest in COP-17 goings-on can be gauged by the fact that the media contingent is half what it was in Copenhagen and only 12 heads of state—mostly from Africa—are planning to drop by. Even the activist contingent seems dispirited. When nobody important is paying much attention and nothing significant is likely to be at stake, then, as the Durban draft negotiations documents show, even diplomats can and will say any silly thing that they’d like.

•  Delegates from 190 countries have gathered in this seaside resort town to see if they can salvage anything from nearly 20 years of climate change negotiations. The prospects are dim. A review of the amalgam of draft negotiating texts [PDF] released this past weekend at the half-way mark of this 17th Conference of the Parties (COP-17) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), suggests that few delegates are even trying to pretend that these negotiations are going anywhere. Some countries are making demands for greenhouse gas emissions cuts that are about as credible as Soviet Five-Year plans.

And of course, without China, nothing is possible and China is not remotely interested in the AGW delusion:

• ...Xie’s statements at the Durban press conference on Monday amount to a kind of octopus ink cloud of diplo-speak designed to confuse credulous activists and over-eager negotiators about its real intentions and goals. If it works China hopes to escape Durban without being blamed for its "failure." The Chinese have no intention of agreeing to an international treaty that would limit their greenhouse gas emissions any time soon. 

Watch the media very closely.  Sometime in the next year a brand new eco-catastrophe is going to be discovered.  It may be a mutation of AGW hysteria, it might be a modification of green energy fetishism but it most certainly will be the coming of Armageddon.  Again.

politics not process

How far and how systemic is the fraud of green energy?  This report on the findings of Ontario's Auditor General offers both insight and depressing clarity:

• The Auditor-General leaves little to the imagination in his incisive dissection of the government’s top-down, to-hell-with-economics power trip. Even the Cabinet appears to be an after-thought. 
• In a pointed note at the beginning of comments on renewables, the AG highlights the wilful neglect that continues to dominate electricity policy. “We did not rely on the Ministry [of Energy]’s internal audit service team to reduce the extent of our audit work because it had not recently conducted any audit on renewable energy initiatives.
• No economic analysis or business case had been prepared.
• In the belief that politics can defy economics, politicians all over the world are making the big bet that they can overturn the hard rules of supply and demand, the role of prices and the limits of innovation by pushing the right policy buttons. 
• For a decade to come, Ontario will likely have surplus electricity. Under contracts signed with green-energy producers and others, the government will pay electricity generators billions of dollars to not produce electricity.

Ideology and political manipulation of scientific data are mainstays of ecomyths.  A certain absence of transparency also is common.  But the green energy fraud has reached new heights in the abuse of due process and concomitant assertion of dogma:

• Mr. McGuinty’s green dream has rapidly become an $8-billion nightmare for Ontario taxpayers and electricity users. Almost no new net power will be generated by all the green-energy projects hastily funded since the bill was passed, but the average residential consumer will see more than $400 a year added to his power bill for a decade to pay for all the bad contracts with and subsidies to eco-friendly power suppliers.
• ...the whole scheme was largely designed by environmentalists and green-industry lobbyists — “stakeholders” in the government’s euphemistic rhetoric.

Ontario recently had an election.  The perpetrators of Ontario's green energy commitment were re-elected.  On the surface this would suggest a political mandate in support of their ideas and program.  This is not the case.  Not only did the majority of the electorate not vote for the party that "won" the election, a problem arises from the fact that the use of the franchise is only one check and balance that presumes the government is already in compliance with it's own rules, procedures and processes.  As the Auditor's report spells out, in Ontario at least, the government is completely by-passing even its own cabinet, the house and the party to assert the dictatorial fetishes of an inner elite headed by the Premier.  This is not democracy, it is eco-fascism alive and assertive.

Update:  
Rex Murphy discusses how the situation in Ontario happened.  He concludes:

• Green is the easiest virtue. All it takes in most cases for politicians is simply to say the word often enough and whatever they propose — for a time — gets a pass.
• ...that’s where this green obsession leads. It promotes a policy on its moral virtues, not on its real-life impact. 
• It also has one other feature that politicians are totally unable to resist: Being totally green, they are able, for once, to posture as forward thinking, daring, innovative — even risk-taking — leaders, champions of the Earth, saviours of “the children.” They get to play Superman and Boy Scout at the same time.

And this picture was published showing a windmill bursting into flames as a result of high winds:

Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words.

the inherent contradiction of stasism

This quote of the day from Samizdata is both accurate and pithy: 

• "“Green” will never be quite the same after Obama. When Solyndra and its affiliated scandals are at last fully brought into the light of day, we will see the logical reification of Climategate I & II, Al Gore’s hucksterism, and Van Jones’s lunacy. How ironic that the more Obama tried to stop drilling in the West, offshore, and in Alaska, as well as stopping the Canadian pipeline, the more the American private sector kept finding oil and gas despite rather than because of the U.S. government. How further ironic that the one area that Obama felt was unnecessary for, or indeed antithetical to, America’s economic recovery — vast new gas and oil finds — will soon turn out to be America’s greatest boon in the last 20 years. While Obama and Energy Secretary Chu still insist on subsidizing money-losing wind and solar concerns, we are in the midst of a revolution that, within 20 years, will reduce or even end the trade deficit, help pay off the national debt, create millions of new jobs, and turn the Western Hemisphere into the new Persian Gulf. The American petroleum revolution can be delayed by Obama, but it cannot be stopped." Victor Davis Hanson.

Once more we see an example of progress despite stasis intervention and interference from government.  How much better off and how much quicker would prosperity extend to all if government was more dynamist and undertook to get with the program, instead of always needing to be the program  and/or to curtail the very engine of innovation that drives progress?

At this juncture one of my more engaged and educated students would usually chime in with the perceived central flaw of my question, which is of course the presumption of an inherent contradiction within capitalism.  Supposedly, capitalism is incapable of compassion and is inherently doomed to contradict itself into demise and failure.  Theory, not practice mind you but a good polemic nevertheless.

Those that hide behind this canard are also those that fail to see the even more glaring inherent contradiction of stasist governance, in practice, namely:

• It takes a capitalist country to afford a communist government. For communism’s best results, the country it rules should be free enterprise. Wealth that hasn’t been created cannot be redistributed, no matter how much a government needs it.

Consequently:

•  All governments are communist. Please, relax. What I mean is that all governments expect to be recompensed, not according to the value of their contributions to society, but according to their needs.

Moreover:

• For a government to derive maximum benefit from the communist formula “to each according to his needs,” it’s better for the economy not to be communist. If it is, it might not be able to meet the government’s needs.

Once again, the difference between theory and practice is larger in practice than in theory.

climategate 2.0

So the timing is either suspect or very carefully planned, but either way the morass that is Climategate was given a new lease of media fame this week with the release of a second round of emails further damaging the reputations of the climatocacy, the Universities of East Anglia and Penn State in particular and those in the media who were so obsequious for so long to the cadre of climate conspirators.

This is not a story that will blow over quickly nor easily.  AGW hysteria is already on the wane. Politically, climate is no longer a sexy topic for upwardly mobile politicos.  For the public, energy, and especially rising energy costs, has supplanted the nebulous possibility of climate change with an immediate policy concern that has tangible cost and lifestyle implications: windmills are done, dusted and stigmatized; solar has been Solyndra-ized and exposed as a fraudulent waste of taxpayers money, and; the opportunities afforded by shale gas will burn the last bridges of the limits crowd.  Globally, poverty and political freedom, not weather, remain the main challenges facing humanity.

Climategate 2.0 will finally elevate the whole sorry debacle out of the confines of the climate wars and into a broader consideration of:

• the role of the academy in policy formulation
• peer to peer review as a logical alternative to the nepotism and expert politics inherent in the exclusivity of refereed journal peer review
• the changes needed for science to regain public trust as an honest broker
• the future of environmentalism
• creative empowerment in the implementation of sustainability as change

Update:
as might be expected, the plethora of indictment within Climategate2 has eviscerated the remaining shreds of credibility of many climate activists and revealed the personal doubts several had about the public mantra of alarmism and certainty.  

Stupidly, some political activists insist on asserting what is now a very disgraced narrative.  For this, they are being called into account.  This example from Delingpole was too good to bypass:

• Have you noticed that whenever our beloved Energy and Climate Change Secretary Chris Huhne speaks his lips never move, only his butt cheeks? It was the same again on BBC Question Time last night. "But Huhne, this is just arrant nonsense," you kept wanting to scream at the TV. "And either you know it's nonsense in which case you're a liar. Or you don't know it's nonsense, in which case you're more incredibly stupid, more badly informed and more ill-advised than any Minister of the Crown has any decency to be."
• Delingpole then goes on to present the much more polite but even more dismissive letter to Huhne from Lords Lawson and Turnbull.

life, liberty and social change

Ever since my first exposure to the writings of Virgina Postrel, one of my favorite reads is the magazine Reason, not so much in its print version but certainly its on line manifestation.  Along with being home to Postrel for a while, Reason also acts (or has acted) as host to insightful posts by John Stossel, Ronald Bailey and Nick Gillespie amongst others.

One of the contributing editors at Reason is Radley Balko, a worthwhile read in his own right and an editor with an astute sense of proportion and justice. Here is Balko in response to an interview published by the Economist (h/t Samiizdata quote of the day)

•  In theory, libertarians share about half of our positions with the right, and about half with the left. Broadly speaking, we're social liberals and fiscal conservatives. The problem is that once in power, neither side pays much heed to the issues they have in common with libertarians, because that would require them to voluntarily put limits on their own power. And politicians don't generally seek higher office for the purpose of limiting what they can do when they get there. So the libertarian stuff is where they're most willing to compromise. And it's what they're least willing to spend political capital defending. 
•   I think there's reason for some optimism for libertarians. The generations raised on the internet will be more educated, aware, and informed than any before them, and I think that has instilled in them some naturally libertarian instincts, particularly when it comes to issues like government transparency, accountability, censorship, and police power.
• George Orwell wrote of government power, "If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever." He may still be right, but there's now a decent chance someone will be there with a cell-phone camera to post it on YouTube. And exposing abuse of power is half the battle.

One of the staple exam questions in my 3rd year course on sustainability and change, is to ask " what are the prospects for widespread adoption of dynamism?".  Balko's remarks give me cause for optimism that the firmament for continued progressive change is intensifying.  And, that in an era of globalized information accessibility, empowerment and personal publishing, a libertarian dynamic is in the ascendency.  Hopefully so, because there is precious little sign of it within the halls of academia.

Reforming the money system

Much of the furor over ecomyths gets conflated with -isms: capitalism, corporatism, consumerism, etc. . Environment becomes an emotional sub-set of a larger, ideologically constructed narrative within a stasist prescription necessitating greater levels of increased governance.  The most recent incarnation is the Occupy Wall Street event and its affiliated franchises. 

Which leads to the central question of fiscal reform and the world's banking industry which is patently no longer suited to the globalized reality of today's economy.  So the question that arises is: how to address the failings of the system and the systemic inflation, under-employment and lack of economic sustainability of many nation states?

Here is one voice who seems to know what to do and, more importantly, what not to do.

Matt Ridley on heresy

Very happy to assist in disseminating this excellent talk by Matt Ridley.   One of the most erudite public speakers on environmental issues, Matt is speaking about scientific heresy, which naturally enough leads him to discuss climate.

He states:

• let me be quite clear. I am not a “denier”. I fully accept that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, the climate has been warming and that man is very likely to be at least partly responsible.

• So what’s the problem? The problem is that you can accept all the basic tenets of greenhouse physics and still conclude that the threat of a dangerously large warming is so improbable as to be negligible, while the threat of real harm from climate-mitigation policies is already so high as to be worrying, that the cure is proving far worse than the disease is ever likely to be. Or as I put it once, we may be putting a tourniquet round our necks to stop a nosebleed.

• I’ve looked and looked but I cannot find one piece of data – as opposed to a model – that shows either unprecedented change or change is that is anywhere close to causing real harm.
• A theory so flexible it can rationalize any outcome is a pseudoscientific theory.
• So to say there is a consensus about some global warming is true; to say there is a consensus about dangerous global warming is false.

• We are below even the zero-emission path expected by the IPCC in 1990*

• Does it matter? Suppose I am right that much of what passes for mainstream climate science is now infested with pseudoscience, buttressed by a bad case of confirmation bias, reliant on wishful thinking, given a free pass by biased reporting and dogmatically intolerant of dissent. So what?

His "so what?" conclusion is that, yes, it does matter a great deal.  Stasism relies upon the perpetuation and indoctrination of conformity.  Politicization of science is conducted to provide the desire for stasist control of society with a sheen of compelling logic and self interest.  The present climate debate is fraudulent in that it less about the integrity of the sconce and more about the manipulation of society for the purposes of elitist social engineering.