Comment Sense

Two excellent comments today from the National Post.  Lots of journalism is for effect, much of it sensationalist.  Much comment is political opinion and as laden with as much rhetoric as the best spin.  But some, some, offers comment that reflects regular common sense: what I shall call comment sense. 

 

The first is from Lawrence Solomon, continuing his series on "green" energy alternatives, a topic he has followed for longer than the topic has existed.  His latest words of comment sense concern the future prospects of coal in a "de-carbonized" society:

 

• We can be confident that coal use will keep on growing for decades to come, in line with official projections that show worldwide demand soon doubling —without coal for electricity production, most jurisdictions will be unable to keep the lights on.
• We can also be confident that communities will successfully fend off many if not most of the carbon storage schemes that threaten them and their environments.
• Finally, we can be confident that governments, after spending tens of billions on carbon storage schemes of dubious benefit, will conclude that the safest place to store today's relatively high levels of carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere, where it now resides.

The second snippet of comment sense is courtesy of Peter Foster, who discusses the ramifications of disputing the politically correct consensus on global warming: which in certain social circles is a dubious, if not heinous, sin:

• We rely on authority for the vast majority of what we believe, but global warming theory does not rank as knowledge of the same order as whether Iceland exists or the moon is made of green cheese. My reason for believing in the existence of Iceland is that a conspiracy to conjure it out of geographical thin air is passing unlikely. But anthropogenic global warming is different. Far from being an established fact, it is a hypothesis whose allegedly disastrous consequences will occur sometime in the relatively distant future. It also comes attached to considerable psychic satisfactions and political advantages for its promoters.
• It conforms to a broad view — long and fondly promoted by fans of Big Government — that capitalism is essentially short-sighted and greed-driven (just look at the subprime crisis!). This stance is not merely appealing to activist politicians and bureaucrats, it is pure gold for the vast and growing army of radical NGO environmental lobby groups, whose raison d'être — and fundraising — are closely related to the degree to which nature is seen to be "endangered." It is also appealing to rent seeking businessmen who see the profit potential in the vast array of controls and subsidies.
• However, once you get people believing in "authority," then you're pretty much home and dry. Authority relieves us of the anxiety of uncertainty and the pain of thought. If the issue can also be portrayed as "moral" (millions of poor people dying from biblical droughts and floods!) then to question it is not merely cause for rejection but censure. Skeptics must be either crackpots or in the pay of Big Oil or Big Coal.

Comment sense reminds us that, despite the dogma peddled in the name of environmentalism, skepticism is scientific and consensus is political. 

 

Pockets of sanity getting more prevalent

One advantage of taking a hiatus from daily scrutiny of world events, environmental ideology and policy implementation, is that one realizes the virtue of patience.  Eventually this too shall pass.  The world may be largely an insane entity with only pockets of sanity, but eventually those pockets of sanity are revealed both to those who seek them, and by the excesses of those who prosper from the perpetuation of global insanity: common sense is humanity's saving grace in its quest for sustainability. 

 

Some recent examples of emerging sanity:

• What America has today is government by lawyers, ideologues, social engineers and rent seekers. Congress has nary a real engineer, and precious few members with any business background or ability to figure out basic cradle-to-grave energy, resource, economic and pollution equations. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi thinks natural gas is an "alternative to fossil fuels.
• The sad truth is that global warming scare was nothing less than a hoax. Much like the "ice age" scares of the 70's, it was a ginned up "crisis" that socialists in the environmental movement used in an effort to destroy capitalism. Fortunately, the world is watching their theories fall apart due to the current cooling trend.
• Three cheers for Jairam Ramesh! India at last has an environment minister who is willing and able to denounce the hypocrisy and immorality of the West in twisting the arms of India and China to curb their carbon emissions. He is right to make it clear that India has no intention of signing the new 'climate change' treaty in Copenhagen in December, which would put curbs on the carbon emissions of the Third World.
• Those development economists and sundry celebrities, who on the one hand, want to see the end of world poverty and on the other, to curb Third World carbon emissions, should be ashamed of themselves for advocating the latter path which will make the former goal impossible to achieve.

In the coming months we are set to be inundated with a full-court press of hype ahead of the next climate conference in Copenhagen.  One fact remains indisputable, what the developed economies of the world do or don't do no longer determines the fate of the world by themselves:

•  ...each year the increase in Chinese CO2 emissions alone is greater than those produced by the entire British economy. On the fashionable assumption that climate change is entirely driven by CO2 emissions, the effect on global temperatures of Britain closing every fossil fuel power station would be much smaller than the statistical margin of error: in effect, zero.

So when you are exhorted to panic and run around like a chicken with its head cut off because the end of the world is nigh, as doubtless the rhetoric of the coming months will imply, resist the urge, reflect quietly and serenely on your world this past year or so and commit to doing your part to being a little happier, a little more tolerant and a little more involved: be empowered, be engaged but don't be dictated by dogma into irrelevance, poverty and serfdom. 

 

Remember, "the greatest story teller ever" spun fairy tales from Denmark.  Good place for a climate conference.

 

When the student is ready: the teacher will appear

I have recently begun reading again. I underwent back surgery in January, and, during my recuperation, I found I had neither the physical capability nor the mental desire to read. Subsequently, the dearth of postings on the blog for the last couple of months.

This was the longest period of my life since I learnt to read without reading. Normally, I am a voracious reader, with two or three books on my active list, another couple lined up and daily consumption of websites, news and sports. It was odd but strangely enlightening to be not reading anything substantive. I thought, I reflected but did not feel any compulsion to read. Moreover, aside from sports, I found that most of what was on the web was a repeat of previous crises, events and history: that which we do not learn from, we are condemned to repeat.

This past week, I started to read Len Deighton's examination of the Second World War, Blood, Tears and Folly, and Paul Theroux's Fresh-Air Fiend, a collection of his travel writings.

Travel writing is a new genre for me. Usually I travel and make up my own mind about places but as I am teaching a course on Tourism next academic year, I was intrigued to read Theroux.

Strange how these things work. When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. The book you are reading, is the book you need to read now in your life.

Theroux writes in his introduction that he finds the information age

...misleading, creating the illusion of knowledge, which is in fact the most profound ignorance.

Connection has made people arrogant, impatient, hasty, and presumptuous...in many ways connection has been disastrous. We have confused information (of which there is too much) with ideas (of which there are too few).

We are awash with information, most of it a cacophony of white noise, which people struggle to tune and filter into something relevant to their own daily lives and well-being.

What we lack are ideas.

Particularly ideas that benefit people's daily lives and positively affect their well-being. That is:

• ideas that have information that substantiates them, rather than invalidating them
  
• ideas that empower the individual, rather than making them subservient to authoritative dictate, and
  
• ideas that sustain life and prosperity, rather than impoverishing and constraining choice in the realisation of socially engineered dogma.
  

Understanding energy options post AGW dismissal

Another in a fine series of articles by Lawrence Solomon contains these wise words:

• Yes, it's important to identify the correct problems, and the non-problems, not just on global warming but on energy policy.
• More nuclear, wind and solar as a solution to high fuel prices and oil imports? Not a chance, at least not anytime soon.
• First, nuclear, wind and solar cannot today substitute for oil, which primarily fuels cars and is a feedstock for plastics. Nuclear, wind and solar are primarily used to produce electricity
• In large part, nuclear, wind and solar are uneconomic for the same reason: They are inflexible technologies that cannot be dispatched.
• Unlike other methods of generating electricity — from fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas or from falling water — nuclear, wind and solar systems cannot moderate their output to meet society's fluctuating demands for power.
• ...the world's oil reserves have increased by 36% over the past two decades, excluding the massive unconventional reserves in Canada's tar sands and America's oil shale.
• As for American dependence on hostile countries, this is more myth: America's only suppliers that could be considered hostile are Venezuela, which meets about 6% of U.S. needs, and Russia, which meets 2%.
• The entire Persian Gulf meets only 12% of U.S. needs, and that 12% comes from three allies: Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Kuwait.
• ...decades of environmental pressure has led to immense improvements in coal and other fossil fuel technologies, making them no less virtuous than many renewable fuels.

Pesky things, facts.  Totally get in the way of a perfectly good ecomyth.

Where's Walden?

An ugly illness that afflicts liberalism is:

• ...the patronizing puritanical attitude of those who think that material prosperity is a dead end and that they know better than people who do seek prosperity.
• This is the Luddite snobbishness that leads liberals to shut down opportunities for those in need, barring the trade that third world countries need for their economic improvement, and preaching self-destructive anti-materialistic nonsense that ends up hurting everyone in the service of allegedly higher goals

And the wellspring of much contemporary liberalism is the seminal work of Thoreau: much revered but seldom actually read by those who embrace his environmentalism and ideology.

Thoreau, whose name is invoked as part of the essential catechism of liberalism, is thoroughly critiqued in this recent essay:

• I thought I would delight in the eloquent prose of a journey of self-discovery and celebration of life.

• Instead, it turns out to be ... pseudo-sophisticated claptrap; a merciless collection of false profundity and Puritanism.

• Thoreau's ignorance of economics is absolute. His hostility to material prosperity and spiritual invocations to "simplify" are nothing more than the old asceticism of Savonarola transplanted into a quaint country cabin.

• Not just ignorant, but ignorant in that colossally self-righteous way reserved only for youths.

• He routinely utters the most sophomoric riddles and paradoxes designed to infect us with his reactionary preference for the allegedly more meaningful life of savages and rural villages, while ignoring the ravages of poverty, disease, illiteracy, ignorance, loneliness, monotony, hierarchy, and darkness that such a life actually represents.

• There is no doubting that materialism can be a cause of spiritual emptiness and no doubt there are a lot of people who "starve for want of luxuries."

• But it is always easy to regard another man's things as superficial and another man's pursuits as greedy, while one's own belongings have sentimental value and one's own pursuits are profound (or at least harmless indulgences).

• It is even easier for self-righteous 30 year olds to regard older men with families as leading lives of desperation, while impressing themselves with the depth of their spiritual access.

Ecomyths persist and propagate not out of pure ignorance but from the imposition of dogma that is inherently ignorant is its composition and construction (e.g. see this manifestation which is a direct translation of Thoreau ideology in a contemporary setting).

Thoreau and Rachel Carson are emblematic of a presumptive moral superiority within contemporary environmentalism: their continued status as revolutionary icons underscores the intellectual poverty of environmentalism as an ideology of real change.

Dearth Day, Illustrated

Several sites have posted this image (or provided links to it): it provides a graphic illustrating of the relative effects of ideology on prosperity.

Korea is one country culturally, in language and geography. All that divides poverty in the North, from prosperity in the South, is prevailing ideology.

Poverty is the default condition of all societies. It is wealth that must be created.

Without wealth, there is no environmental protection, no social justice, no sustainability. We can manage and alter the software of capitalism, but its hardware is non-negotiable, a fact that eludes many ideological environmentalists.

Belief in utopian tyrannies

There is common sense environmentalism, the kind most people practice and identify with:

• don't waste things unnecessarily
• value wildlife and nature
• practice conservation to lower your own bills
• don't litter or pollute but dispose of waste safely
• seek a healthy environment, especially for your kids

This is environmentalism characterized by an awareness and appreciation for the natural world balanced with the practical economics of survival and personal security. It is an environmentalism enabled by the general wealth and well-being of the society that practices a responsibility for its own lifestyle.

In contrast, there is ideological environmentalism. The environmentalism of Earth Day, of AGW advocacy and as a political movement. This is environmentalism as an ideological alternative to capitalism, an ideology of believers, of moralism and social engineering to achieve a vision of low carbon, low consumption, conformity with strict stasist regulations developed and enforced by the "enlightened" elite to save the planet.

This is the ideology of the believer:

• The believer...begins with an acute sense of alienation from his own society. A secularist, he nevertheless yearns for redemption, so finds a "secular shariah" in any totalist world... "where no individuality exists, and where human estrangement is thus impossible."
• The believer does not seek truth, he seeks submission to a movement.
• The price for this cultural orphan's acceptance in his adoptive "vast community" is the amputation of residual emotional ties to his own. Henceforth, the believer must see the flaws of his own society as the keys to all the world's evils. Once inducted, losing membership in the community becomes unthinkable.
• And so he stops thinking. Logical and moral contradictions disappear. For now he needn't "know" what is plain to see about the ever more oppressive real-world effects — the suffocation of free speech, the arbitrary imprisonment, gulags, terror bombings and stonings — of the utopian system he commits to.

Zealotry is a universal trait of all stasist ideologies. Dogma, the corruption of education and the use of mass media to inoculate the moral pre-determinism of key constructs are the tools of all totalitarian ideologies. Sadly, contemporary environmentalism fits this description.

Warning Signs: The Annual Green Orgy

When somebody writes something and you can't think how to paraphrase or supplement it in a manner that would improve on their words, it is better to just quote them, cite the source, and enjoy their words:

• On Earth Day we will have been engulfed by the avalanche of "Green" propaganda that preceded it, fills the day, and then continues relentlessly thereafter.
• Much of the foundation of the environmental movement is pure lies, mind boggling distortions of questionable "science", and a thin veneer for the entire purpose of environmentalism, the imposing of a one-world agenda for the enrichment of a few who dream of a monopolistic control of the world's resources and its human work force.
• It would be managed for the uber-wealthy—an unelected group of elites, selected "world leaders" and politicians, plus a vast diplomatic corps backed up by the coercive might of police and armies answering not to sovereign nations, but the "new world order" exemplified by the United Nations.
• The real problems in the world are largely tied to poverty and the oppression and corruption that facilitate it, but the United Nations is mostly composed of the very nations responsible for poverty, racism, sexism, and other ancient ills of mankind. It is a useless global doppelganger.
• On Earth Day you will hear all manner of claims that the Earth is in severe environmental danger due to the human population, but what you won't hear or read about is the 2009 Index of Leading Environmental Indicators...
• This year's report notes that no American or Western European city ranks among the top 50 cities in the world for air pollution....
• Earth Day is a lie from start to finish.
• It seeks to limit access to more and more land and ocean areas, removing their vital resources of coal, oil, and natural gas from use by a human population that depends on the energy they generate.
• The Earth Day orgy of lies will come and go, but the battle with this insidious movement, directed from the citadel of hatred called the United Nations, goes on.

Next!

What the Tea Parties Represent

Since the mainstream media in North America has sought to either (a) ignore or (b) mis-represent the wave of Tea Parties that took place this past week, I thought it would be useful for those both inside and outside of North America to get a little heads up on the transformation of politics that has started and will gain increasing momentum as stasist edicts continue to vex people's common sense:

• The protests were about prohibitively high tax rates, yes. But they were also about exponentially increasing debt; the punishment of hard work and success through confiscatory government policy; the replacement of age-old American equality of opportunity by government-mandated equality of outcome; and — perhaps most importantly — the current attempts by liberal politicians to inject government into the daily life decisions of ordinary American citizens.

Stasis is all about equality of outcome: doesn't matter what you do or who you are, everyone gets the same result.  Which history shows is varying degrees of poverty.

 

Dynamism is all about equity of opportunity: each person deserves the opportunity to maximize their abilities and efforts and enjoy the fruits of their labor.  Some will, some won't: society as a whole prospers, wealth accumulates differentially, but wealth does accumulate.

why serious and persistent doubts remain

One of the aspects I respect most about Richard Lindzen's many articles on climate is his ability to transcribe the science into terms accessible to all. This feature forms the central premise for one of his latest papers:

• In science, there is an art to simplifying complex problems so that they can be meaningfully analyzed. If one oversimplifies, the analysis is meaningless. If one doesn't simplify, then one often cannot proceed with the analysis.
• When it comes to global warming due to the greenhouse effect, it is clear that many approaches are highly oversimplified. This includes the simple 'blanket' picture of the greenhouse effect .... We will approach the issue more seriously in order to see whether one can reach reasonably rigorous conclusions. It turns out that one can.
• ...we present a physically correct view of the greenhouse effect, and show how this view enables us to use modeling results and observations in order to estimate a bound on the greenhouse contribution to recent surface warming of about 1/3.
• This is, indeed, somewhat less than the iconic claim in the IPCC Summary for Policymakers of Working Group 1 which
  claimed that it was likely that most of the recent warming was due to man. The present estimate is more constrained, and thereby suggests a lower climate sensitivity than is commonly found in current models.
• Section 3 discusses the origin of the contradicted claim as well as its relation to claims of high climate sensitivity. It turns out that far more than the iconic claim is needed for the sensitivity required for alarm.
• The main point of this paper is simply to illustrate why serious and persistent doubts remain concerning the danger of anthropogenic global warming despite the frequent claims that 'the science is settled.'

Often when I give presentations on climate change as a pre-dominant ecomyth, I am asked for referrals to sources and readings, especially on the supposed "settled" science enveloped by the ideological dogma. This paper by Lindzen offers an excellent study point for anyone interested in either AGW theory and/or the skepticism it fosters.

While this paper, also by Lindzen, puts the issue of climate change into the larger perspective of environmentalism and ideology.