If you’d prefer to be cool rather than suffer in the heat, what you need to do, according to the environmental movement, is smash your air conditioner, refrigerator, and freezer. That will help to cool the planet—someday. If you want to be secure from hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, and other natural (according to it, manmade) disasters, what you
For years, the environmentalists have been trying to have it both ways, claiming that in the midst of the global warming that they allege, Europe might suffer an ice age. According to this scenario, ships would sail through an ice-free Arctic Ocean but be unable to unload their cargos in the ice-bound ports of Northern Europe. What was alleged to
Forty-Five nations joined France in calling for a new environmental body to slow global warming and protect the planet, a body that potentially could have policing powers to punish violators.— AP, Feb. 5, 2007 AP reports that the French effort was “led by French President Jacques Chirac,” after the release of the report on global warming prepared
It is customary for old-fashioned religion to threaten those whose way of life is not to its satisfaction, with the prospect of hell in the afterlife. Substitute for the afterlife, life on earth in centuries to come, and it is possible to see that environmentalism and the rest of the left are now doing essentially the same thing. They hate the
The environmental movement has been doing its utmost to sabotage energy production since the 1960s, long before it was able to latch onto the prospect of global warming. Its opposition to atomic power has nothing to do with global warming, nor does its opposition to the construction of dams to provide hydro-electric power. Indeed, if global
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently released the summary of its latest, forthcoming report on global warming. It’s most trumpeted finding is that the existence of global warming is now “unequivocal.” Although such anecdotal evidence as January’s snowfall in Tucson, Arizona and freezing weather in Southern California and
The Free Market 19, no. 3 (March 2001) The state of California has experienced a meltdown in its electric power system. For months, the system has repeatedly run at or near the overload point, necessitating brownouts and even rolling blackouts. Incredibly, the fiasco has been blamed on deregulation and the free market. Economist Paul Krugman,
I Environmentalism is the product of the collapse of socialism in a world that is ignorant of the contributions of von Mises—a world that does not know what he has said that would logically explain the collapse of socialism and, even more importantly, the success of capitalism. Because of ignorance of the contributions of von Mises, the great
This article is the original, full version from which three previous articles that have appeared on this blog were excerpted. Those articles were “The Environmentalist Noose Is Tightening” (February 9, 2007, “Global Warming Is Not a Threat But the Environmentalist Response to It Is” (March 12, 2007), and “Global Warming: Environmentalism’s Threat
In his July 1, 2007, New York Times Op-Ed piece, “Moving Beyond Kyoto, “ Al Gore states: Consider this tale of two planets. Earth and Venus are almost exactly the same size, and have almost exactly the same amount of carbon. The difference is that most of the carbon on Earth is in the ground — having been deposited there by various forms of life
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.