Power to the Escalades!!!

1. More on Bush’s proposals here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/01/washington/01prexy.html?_r=1&ref=us&oref=slogin (“Bush Proposes Goal to Reduce Greenhouse Gas”)
http://environment.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,,2093055,00.html (“Bush kills off hopes for G8 climate plan US recognises global warming danger but wants to lead response outside UN”)

2. On the non-statist side, a startling 31% of ExxonMobil’s shareholders voted yesterday in favor of a resolution that would have required the company to “adopt quantitative goals, based on current technologies, for reducing total greenhouse gas emissions from the Company’s products and operations; and that the Company report to shareholders by September 30, 2007, on its plans to achieve these goals”. http://www.nrdc.org/media/2007/070530a.asp
http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/34088/000119312507078537/ddef14a.htm

In proxy materials (above link), Exxon offered the following as some of the reasons to vote no:

“ExxonMobil worked to establish and is providing $100 million to Stanford University’s Global Climate and Energy Project – a pioneering climate and energy research effort – to accelerate development of commercially viable energy technologies that can lower GHG emissions on a broad scale. Current research areas include biofuels, solar, hydrogen, advanced combustion, and CO2 capture and storage. Our involvement enables the Corporation to readily assess new technologies for commercialization, and investment as appropriate, to improve shareholder value.

“Emissions of greenhouse gases from ExxonMobil’s customers’ use of our products is determined both by the need for energy and by the efficiency with which the energy is consumed. The Company has active research efforts under way to identify technologies that can improve the efficiency of the use of our products. Besides efficiency gains, another step to reduce GHG emissions involves more widespread use of natural gas, rather than coal, to produce electric power – an area in which ExxonMobil is well-positioned to enhance supplies.”

What…and give up the rent-seeking profits from carbon credits that their CEO is setting them up for?

Why don’t we hear more about the positive effects of global warming?

Why is there no mention of the positive effect higher CO2 levels have on photosynthesis? Some estimates have crop yields increasing by over 1/3rd from the increased CO2 level alone!

Furthermore, higher CO2 levels cause plants to retain more water, as their stomata do not have to be open as often.

If CO2 levels actually caused an increase in temperatures, or the increased yields didn’t reduce CO2 levels, large tracts of land in the Northern Hemisphere would become open to more robust agriculture.

With C3 crops (like wheat) and C4 crops (Corn and Sugar) standing to benefit the most from increased CO2 levels, Canada, Russia, and the northern half of the United States would benefit enormously.

Via libertarian law prof Jon Adler, perhaps this is as good a place as any to mention that that leftist rag The Wall Street Journal is running a piece (“Capitalism Against Climate Change”) by that radical enviro misanthrope R. Glenn Hubbard, former Chairman of President Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors, by which he supports the recommendations by the National Commission on Energy Policy for an emissions trading program:

http://www.volokh.com/posts/1180618101.shtml
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118057946335919651.html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries

Doesn`t this guy know that prominent scientists like David Evans and Alexander Cockburn have conclusive established that the evidence is inconclusive, and George Reisman says that if things get bad, it`s nothing that free individuals without coercive bureaucratic hindrance can`t handle through the private market for open-air testing of atom bombs?

Or maybe we can just make some straightforward arguments that even if Hubbard has the science right, his policies are all wrong.

That sneaky enviro,

TT

This is the same Bush administration that campaigned for limited government and against nation building.

In keeping with Libertarian political philosophy, as I have said several times before, politicians and those in their employ are the last individuals that I would turn to for the truth. For quite sometime, the political landscape has seen very, very few true statesman.

Sorry, but I forgot to mention that this is the same Bush administration that LIED the U.S. into war in Iraq, supported by a Congress that does not have the integrity to live up to its constitutional responsibility (and has not since WW II) to issue a formal declaration of war.

Nick Bradley’s description of low-cost and effective co2 removal through dumping iron into the ocean provides still more evidence–if such were needed–that global warming greens have embarked on a naked quest for coercive power. For one can safely bet that the iron-dumping idea will never enter public discourse. Greens are not interested in removing co2 from the atmosphere, thereby (according to their unproven and incoherent “science”) solving mankind’s Greatest Current Crises. What the greens really want is unlimited power, for the purpose of imposing a regime of central control and punitive taxation on free enterprise. If such regimentation leads to widespread poverty, or perhaps even starvation in some areas, that’s not of concern to HARD-CORE enviros. For theirs is essentially a misanthropic ideology.

Greens are inspired by a primitive and logically absurd premise–rarely ackowleged yet essential to their outlook–that nature “unspoiled” by man’s supposedly hideous footprint is morally valuable; and that therefore, man’s productive activities, far from being virtuous, are vicicous and ought to be curtailed. The absurdity of this premise is revealed by the question it leaves unanswered: of value to whom and for what?

Given their peculiar ethos, environmentalists invariably project tragic consequences from productive enterprise. Show hard-core greens evidence that falsifies some aspect of their phoebic fear of environmental crises, and they’ll be unimpressed. They’ll talk past or around it, ignore it, or simply move on to another “crises” congruent with their feelings about what they consider to be man’s unsavory nature.

Why do greens believe that man, and all his works, are naturally wicked? The answer, I suspect, lies in what can only be described as a profound mistrust of reason–man’s characteristic means of acquiring knowlege.

The exercise of reason is volitional, a matter of individual choice and effort; and subject to error. The overwhelming consensus among thinkers today, and going back probably 200 years, is one of epistemological skepticism, which holds: conceptual understanding is fundamentally flawed and misleading. I suspect that Greens tend to be people who have uncritically absorbed this mistrust of reason, and like most people today, consider their mistrust as evidence of their intellectual sophistication.

To Greens, man’s flawed and unnatural attempts to “impose his reason” on the world stand in sharp contrast to the “wisdom” of “nature” (outside of man). For nature operates smoothly and automatically: plants automatically integrate elements from their environment to sustain life; animals operate instinctively, essentially on automatic pilot. True, plants don’t get to party, and animals hunt and kill other animals. But at least under the regime of Mother Nature, living entities are not required, as a condition of life, to endure the agony of trying to make choices in a world that seems incomprehensible and, well, threatening. Plants and animals “know” what to do…”automatically”, “naturally”.

In “Capitalism”, his magnum ophus, George Reisman comments extensively on the ideas touched on above, and explains that hard-core Greens tend to retain bitter disappointment in the widely acknowleged failures of socialism. From Green perspective, man is a moral abomination whose reliance on reason betrayed his most “noble instinct” of sharing. Man’s wickedness corrupted his most “noble” attempts at creating a social edifice in which everyone is safe, in which everyone can simply obey orders and receive according to his needs. But this attempt at creating Heaven-on-Earth according to the dictates of “reason” and “scientific socialism” produced only mass murder, starvation, and entrenched terror. If such depravity is the product of “reason”, hard-core greens implicitly believe, who needs that? “To hell with reason!” If man is the creature that must live by reason, then man is at odds with nature, with no hope of moral redemption.

Like other destructive and often vicious ideologies, the Green world view is essentially a reaction to widespread contemporary confusion about philosophy. Surely the most neglected and least respected of intellectual disciplines today, philosophy has been a casuality of our Age of Nihilism.

For ours is the age in which we’ve all been taught that nothing is as it appears, and so what looks like a solid physcial object is really mostly space; that no one can objectively know anything, and that pretensions to knowlege are “unreasoning certainty”; that free will is nothing more than a naive illusion, in which thinkers only imagine that they objectively choose; that objective knowlege is impossible because thinkers merely project their subjective ideas onto unsympathetic reality; that moral philosophy, like all other knowlege, is meaningless. Tragically, most people have uncritically absorbed aspects of this intellectual poison.

Their ranks include hard-core greens–notwithstanding their current infatuation with “science”–who tend often to exhibit hostility to reason. For example, Tokyo Tom’s approving quote in an earlier thread about (paraphrasing) how no one really thinks because the thinking is the subjective product of the “I” who is the thinker. Nothing changes if TT, after approving of such an idea, then insists he really has only the highest respect for reason; for words have meaning that one cannot escape. With time and effort, one could unearth many other green quotations revealing epistemological skepticism (and emotional sympathy to socialism). No doubt, most such quoted greens would claim devotion to reason, yet with little understanding of why their philosophical nihilism undercuts that claim.

This belief in man’s inability to acquire lasting knowlege is, of course, logical chaos; for the same thinkers who proclaim that knowlege is ultimately a mirage, insist that they (somehow) know all of this to be true. Epistemological skepticism is both logically absurd and profoundly influential today. Its frightened believers, often without conscious reflection, judge themselves incapable of understanding anything abstract on a “first-hand” basis; too often, they seem to believe themselves capable only of receiting “received wisdom” handed down by “experts” and “authorities”. That epistemological skepticism, if true, would destroy all knowlege at its base never seems to clearly register with these people. They continue to seek knowlege, but from “experts”.

> it’s not a good idea because the increase in
> phytoplankton may alter the oceanic food chain!

Yep. It will provide far more food for marine organisms up the food chain, all the way up to dolphins and whales, causing their populations to soar, thus making environmental activism look unnecessary and alarmistic (as if it isn’t already). That’d cause the crash in population of the pests parasiting on death and suffering of cute animals – the greens.

No wonder they oppose it.

“Post an intelligent and civil comment.”

So much irony here, it`s hard to begin …

Maybe later.

From Mark Humphrey:

Its frightened believers, often without conscious reflection, judge themselves incapable of understanding anything abstract on a “first-hand” basis; too often, they seem to believe themselves capable only of receiting “received wisdom” handed down by “experts” and “authorities”

Exactly! This is one of the most consistent themes in the entire debate on this and other issues.

Larry N. Martin,

You’re missing the true threat of global warming:

1. As CO2 levels rise, crop yields will go up.

2. As they rise, food becomes more affordable.

3. As food becomes more affordable, people will eat more.

4. When people eat more, obesity will rise.

Hence, global warming is responsible for the “obesity epidemic”, and any further global warming will kill even more people. 8^)

Just a little demonstration of the absurdity of the environmentalist argument.

Of course, we all know obesity is caused by the perverse agricultural incentives provided by the government. After all the subsidies come in to play, a highly processed twinkie is cheaper than a fresh carrot.

Mark, you make some good points, but in your eagerness you seem to think that everyone who is concerned about what is happening to unowned and unprotected resources around the world must be a reason-hating enviro. And here I`ve been thinking that Austrian economics tells us that this just ain`t so. I see your hostility, but where is your reason?

“Tokyo Tom’s approving quote in an earlier thread about (paraphrasing) how no one really thinks because the thinking is the subjective product of the “I” who is the thinker.”

How interesting that you would take my Anais Nin quote that way, when I consider it to be obvious that I was tring to make another point that we have long known and cognitive SCIENTISTS (for Pete`s sake) have been telling us – as vital as our reasoning faculties are, they are very flawed and vulnerable to persistent and predictible error.

We evolved to pass on our genes, not to perfectly understand the world, so evolution left us with any number of generally useful predilections and shortcuts. These all present consistent stumbling blocks to reason – and help explain how easy it was for you to reflexively misinterpret me.

Rgeards,

TT

Mark, unless you are a supercomputer, you use an evolved apparatus – much like that used by other members of the human race – for your thinking efforts. Some might find it “reasonable” to study how it works, on top of recocognizing that it does not work perfectly. Do you really deny this?

Perhaps I don’t understand you well, but it sounds like you are philosophically opposed to understanding HOW we think and perceive. If so, why does this not itself exhibit an hostility toward reason, leading towards hostility toward toward man?

TT

PS: You can swim all day in the Sea of Knowledge and still come out completely dry. Most people do. ~Norman Juster

It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in argument. ~William G. McAdoo

A person is never happy except at the price of some ignorance. ~Anatole France

History shows that there is nothing so easy to enslave and nothing so hard to emancipate as ignorance, hence it becomes the double enemy of civilization. By its servility it is the prey of tyranny, and by its credulity it is the foe of enlightenment. ~Lemuel K. Washburn

Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe. ~Frank Zappa

Nick Bradley, thanks for the Wired article about seeding the oceans with iron. It’s an idea worthy of exploring. Who knows – maybe it’ll be the idea that winds Branson’s $25 million prize! But the article points to risks, and it’s clear that the developers are waiting for governments to create a market for CO2 sequestration. But maybe some wealthy misanthropists might step to the plate and spring for more testing and releases. I am certainly in favor of finding out more, and would be happy to chip in, even while you and others may mock the effort (as being individually irrational).

Did you notice that John Martin, the man with the original idea, said the following:

“”I will never advocate shoot-from-the-hip iron fertilization without the detailed research to understand it,” he wrote one critic, just before his death. But, he said, a little iron in the ocean might be preferable to a warmed climate. “I agree that the ideal would be to have the average American get out of his car; have the Chinese not develop their coal resources; have the Brazilians not cut down the rain forest,” he wrote. “However, we don’t live in an ideal world.” ”

TT

Yancey
Isn’t this what you would expect for a religion? Also, the opinions of experts are not supposed to be questioned. Hence, the hysterical effort to judge the issued as “closed”.
On a different note, it would also appear that Environmentalism is Axiomatic-
Polluo, ergo sum. (Or more correctly, “Sum, ergo polluo.” Thus in addition to the Axiom – Humans Act,
there is a second Axiom – Humans Pollute. Since the very essence of human life involves, by the Environmentalist definition pollution – humans respire, urinate and defecate, human life is detrimental to the environment. Any argument against this accepts the
Axiom, since you can’t think or reason without metabolizing, and thus producing CO2.

Tokyo Tom,

Mine is a perfectly valid question, especially considering how all the AGW detractors in the field of science have to answer the same question, over and over.

Pointing out that the political expression of enviromentalism is conjoined with communism and socialism is important and blatantly obvious. One only need examine the non-environmental politics of enviromentalists themselves. It is no accident that they are well to the left of the political divide. Because of this, it is necessary to examine how their politics informs their environmental beliefs. I will make a prediction: if carbon dioxide sequestration ever is demonstrated to be feasible and cheap relative to other alternative methods of energy generation, the environmental movement will not support it, and will find other objections for such opposition. We are already going down this exact road with regards to nuclear power- it has the capacity and profile to supply all of our energy needs without generating carbon dioxide, and yet the environmental movement is almost monolithically opposed to it.

As for you, you do seem a bit odd when compared to other environmentalists. At least you seem to be more rational. My main objection to your ideas is that they are fundamentally non-libertarian, and that they are designed for a problem I am unconvinced exists. In addition, the proposed solutions are going to create misery for lots of people if the solutions are ever implemented in an effective way. I am open to finding ways to assign ownership to the commons of the atmosphere, but your solutions are state ownership.

Yancey:

Good job rationalizing a question that was logically unnecessary. Why the hostility?

I’ll admit that it’s interesting to hear about all ideologically leanings of enviros, but there is simply NO monolithic enviro movement – rather we know that concern about the environment increases with the wealth of a society. Moreover, I really am pressed to understand its relevance in motivating anyone else – from scientists, to politicians, to corporations around the world. Focus on ideology is a distraction, and unhelpful even to understanding “enviros”.

I completely disagree with you a bout sequestration or carbon removal. If either technology works, it will be welcomed by virtually all who are concerned – even as some enviros might not be satified, meaningful approaches are all that others want. In addition, can’t you see the difference from nuclear power? CO2 ain’t radioactive and doesn’t present the same problem of nimbyism.

“My main objection to your ideas is that they are fundamentally non-libertarian, and that they are designed for a problem I am unconvinced exists. In addition, the proposed solutions are going to create misery for lots of people if the solutions are ever implemented in an effective way. I am open to finding ways to assign ownership to the commons of the atmosphere, but your solutions are state ownership.”

I suppose that we can disagree about whether there is a problem and the size. But I am a bit puzzled as to what you think are the big differences between “my” proposals (?) and your own carbon taxes and other proposals, which you have failed to lay out. I am all in favor of minimizing the role of the state, but how would you propose that international negotiatons take place? And how do you plan to collect taxes without a state?

And this is confused: “finding ways to assign ownership to the commons of the atmosphere”. Management of common propoerty rights does not REQUIRE an individual assignment of rights, but rather cooperative management, a means of excluding others and ways to ensure compliance by insiders.

Regards,

TT

Jeff, a new Rolling Stones article makes it clear that you can breathe easy about Bush:

“Even when Bush proposes what looks like a plan, it’s designed to stall real progress on global warming. In May, America’s allies in the G8 unveiled an ambitious proposal: Member nations would cut planet-warming pollution in half by 2050, accepting mandatory caps on carbon emissions. But the administration flatly rejected the plan, which it called “fundamentally incompatible with the president’s approach to climate change.”

“Instead, at the G8 summit on June 6th, Bush pushed what he touted as his “new initiative” for combating climate change. For the first time, the president acknowledged that “long-term goals for reducing greenhouse gases” are needed. But his solution, in essence, is to take his do-nothing strategy global, turning our allies into a Coalition of the Warming. Under his proposal, mandatory caps on emissions would be replaced with “aspirational goals” to be met through voluntary cuts and futuristic technology.”"

The Article, entitled “The Secret Campaign of President Bush’s Administration To Deny Global Warming”, provides a glimpse into some of the rent-seeking shenanigans that have guided the Administration. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/15148655/the_secret_campaign_of_president_bushs_administration_to_deny_global_warming

Rgeards,

Tom