At Catellaxy Files, Rafe Champion discusses some of the points raised by Matt Ridley in his recent book:
Essentially, the poor pay for the virtue-signalling of the rich. Dr Matt Ridley opens chapter 14 of Climate Science: The Facts with some blunt claims.
Here is a simple fact about the world today. Climate change is doing more good than harm. Here is another fact. Climate change policy is doing more harm than good.
On top of that he points out that the poor are carrying the cost of today’s climate policy. That is something for the ALP [Australian Labour Party] and the social justice warriors to think about.
This should remind people of another great postwar example of destructive virtue-signalling – massive foreign aid to the developing nations aka the Third World. That did more harm than good for the people of the Third World, apart from the crony criminals in power. The great Lord Peter Bauer was onto that very smartly, starting in the 1940s and his findings have been consolidated lately, notably by William Easterly [in] The White Man’s Burden: Why the west’s efforts to aid the rest have done so much ill and so little good. There are exceptions to the rule such as hands-on medical care and private education.
Ridley mentions in passing some of the cases where apparently smart people have made very bad calls, starting with a prominent and wealthy leftwinger who he debated on TV. Faced with the charge that climate policy was hurting the poor he replied “But what about my grandchildren?”. As though the future wellbeing of the presumably affluent and privileged grandchildren of the talking head might be threatened by policies that help the poor who are with us at present. Ridley also cited a son of Charles Darwin who thought that eugenic breeding programs were essential to save civilization and Paul Ehrlich who in 1972 predicted that millions would die due to over-population (prompting the one-child policy in China).
