In keeping with all millenarian movements, the extinction-obsessed green cult reserves its priestly fury for ordinary people. Even when it is putting pressure on the government, it is really asking it to punish us. It wants tighter controls on car-driving, restrictions on flying, green taxes on meat. That these things would severely hit the pockets of ordinary people – but not the deep pockets of Emma Thompson and the double-barrelled eco-snobs who run Extinction Rebellion – is immaterial to the angry bourgeoisie. So convinced are they of their own goodness, and of our wickedness, that they think it is utterly acceptable for officialdom to make our lives harder in order to strongarm us into being more “green”. People complaining about Extinction Rebellion disrupting people’s lives in London over the past few days are missing the point – the entire point of the green movement is to disrupt ordinary people’s lives, and even to immiserate them. All in the jumped-up name of “saving the planet”.
And now the green cult has pushed Ms [Greta] Thunberg into the position of its global leader, its child-like saviour, the messiah of their miserabilist political creed. What they have done to Ms Thunberg is unforgivable. They have pumped her – and millions of other children – with the politics of fear. They have convinced the next generation that the planet is on the cusp of doom. They have injected dread into the youth. “I want you to panic”, said Ms Thunberg at Davos, and the billionaires and celebs and marauding NGOs that were in attendance all lapped it up. Because adult society loves nothing more than having its own fear and confusions obediently parroted back to it by teenagers. They celebrate Thunberg because she tells them how horrible they are: it is an entirely S&M relationship, speaking to the deep self-loathing of the 21st-century elites.
Brendan O’Neill, “The cult of Greta Thunberg: This young woman sounds increasingly like a millenarian weirdo”, Spiked, 2019-04-22.
May 27, 2019
QotD: The Green death cult
May 22, 2019
Climate change, no, climate crisis, no, climate catastrophe, no, we mean climate APOCALYPSE!!!
The official marching orders for journalists now insist that the language to use around what was formerly “global warming” or “climate change” will now be described in starker, more frightening terms. Canada’s Liberal Party, under Justin Trudeau, has been virtue signalling for pretty much its entire term in office on the climate issue and with a fall election coming into view, the rhetoric will become more extreme and shrill. Jay Currie discusses climate change and the Canadian election:
I suspect this divide between people who think “doing something” about climate change (no matter how futile) and people who do not accept the urgency of dealing with something they really don’t believe in will inform politics in the West for the next few years. Most particularly, it will inform the next Canadian federal election.
The Liberal Party of Canada has been going all in on its “tax on carbon pollution” (a fine bit of wordsmithing managing to attach “carbon” to “pollution”). Led by the remarkably scolding Catherine McKenna, the Libs seem to think that purporting to “do something” about climate change is a vote winner. So McKenna tours the country speaking to uncritical school children and assorted environmentalists about how important having a “carbon tax” is. The Liberals tax will save the planet, ensure sea level rise stops (easy because sea level is not actually rising), save the Arctic ice cap (already saving itself, thank you), keep polar bears from extinction (also easy because virtually all polar bear populations are growing) and reduce or eliminate climate change “caused” weather events. Plus, Canada will honour its Paris Accord commitments (we won’t) and serve as a beacon to lesser nations like China and India in their efforts to combat climate change (as if).
The Liberals think that the fact that a carbon dioxide tax in Canada will have a rounding error effect on worldwide emissions and no detectable effect on world temperature does not matter politically. What matters politically is that the Liberals believe that there is a large constituency out there which urgently wants to “do something”.
The NDP is fully on board and, of course, the Greens have been banging the climate change drum forever. Andrew Scheer’s Conservatives seem to be on the fence. Like the Coalition in Australia, the Conservatives endorse the “climate change is a problem” line and very few are willing to challenge the underlying science or economics for fear of being branded uncool “climate change deniers”. But the Conservatives seem to be, prudently in my view, dragging their feet on “doing something” about CO2.
Political virtue signalling on the climate file is the easy part. All that is really required is the abandonment of any sort of scientific judgement (easy when you are told that all the scientists agree that climate change is real and primarily human caused) and policy skepticism (we don’t need a cost benefit analysis, this is an emergency!). The hard part occurs when you try to “do something”. Because doing something means that people are going to see their expenses rise without actually seeing (in any tangible way) any actual benefit. In fact, as Ontario’s wonderfully disastrous adventure in wind energy demonstrated, tax dollars can be wasted and consumer prices increased all without making any difference at all to the climate.
April 25, 2019
QotD: “Science”
Ah, science. If you’re even loosely engaged in the wild and dark art that is politics these days, you know by now that “science,” as a word, has taken on an almost mystical meaning. “Science,” in many of its modern incantations, now serves as a form of code, as vague and fuzzy as a Wiccan chant. For a growing number of political activists, the meaning is simple: Science, you see, is a lively mix of standard progressive hobbyhorses, tossed wild-eyed and cranky into one cantankerous bag.
Heather Wilhelm, “The Left’s New Cure-All: ‘Science’”, National Review, 2017-04-12.
April 2, 2019
The not-so-ancient extinction of Madagascar’s megafauna
At The Conversation, Nick Scroxton, Laurie Godfrey, and Stephen Burns discuss their new theory on the megafauna extinction in Madagascar just over a thousand years ago:
Giant 10-foot-tall elephant birds, with eggs eight times larger than an ostrich’s. Sloth lemurs bigger than a panda, weighing in at 350 pounds. A puma-like predator called the giant fosa.
They sound like characters in a child’s fantasy book, but along with dozens of other species, they once really roamed the landscape of Madagascar. Then, after millions of years of evolution in the middle of the Indian Ocean, the populations crashed in just a couple of centuries.
Scientists know that over the past 40,000 years, most of Earth’s megafauna – that is, animals human-size or larger – have gone extinct. Woolly mammoths, sabre tooth tigers and countless others no longer roam the planet.
What’s remarkable about the megafaunal crash in Madagascar is that it occurred not tens of thousands of years ago but just over 1,000 years ago, between A.D. 700 and 1000. And while some small populations survived a while longer, the damage was done in a relatively short amount of time. Why?
Over the last three years, new investigations into climate and land use patterns, human genetic diversity on the island and the dating of hundreds of fossils have fundamentally changed scientists’ understanding of the human and natural history of Madagascar. As two paleoclimatologists and a paleontologist, we brought together this research with new evidence of megafaunal butchery. In doing so we’ve created a new theory of how, why and when these Malagasy megafauna went extinct.
Many of the forests that originally existed on Madagascar are now replaced by more open, human-modified landscapes, like this palm savanna at Anjohibe.
Laurie Godfrey, CC BY-ND
February 23, 2019
How a statistical error became the key argument in the “everyone must turn vegan” movement
At The Conversation, Frank M. Mitloehner explains how a flawed statistic — comparing numbers derived from non-parallel bases — evolved into one of the most widely quoted arguments for governments forcing people to give up meat in their diet:
As the scale and impacts of climate change become increasingly alarming, meat is a popular target for action. Advocates urge the public to eat less meat to save the environment. Some activists have called for taxing meat to reduce consumption of it.
A key claim underlying these arguments holds that globally, meat production generates more greenhouse gases than the entire transportation sector. However, this claim is demonstrably wrong, as I will show. And its persistence has led to false assumptions about the linkage between meat and climate change.
[…]
Global livestock production by region (milk and eggs expressed in protein terms).
Source: United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.Setting the record straight on meat and greenhouse gases
A healthy portion of meat’s bad rap centers on the assertion that livestock is the largest source of greenhouse gases worldwide. For example, a 2009 analysis published by the Washington, D.C.-based Worldwatch Institute asserted that 51 percent of global GHG emissions come from rearing and processing livestock.According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the largest sources of U.S. GHG emissions in 2016 were electricity production (28 percent of total emissions), transportation (28 percent) and industry (22 percent). All of agriculture accounted for a total of 9 percent. All of animal agriculture contributes less than half of this amount, representing 3.9 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. That’s very different from claiming livestock represents as much or more than transportation.
Why the misconception? In 2006 the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization published a study titled “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” which received widespread international attention. It stated that livestock produced a staggering 18 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. The agency drew a startling conclusion: Livestock was doing more to harm the climate than all modes of transportation combined.
This latter claim was wrong, and has since been corrected by Henning Steinfeld, the report’s senior author. The problem was that FAO analysts used a comprehensive life-cycle assessment to study the climate impact of livestock, but a different method when they analyzed transportation.
For livestock, they considered every factor associated with producing meat. This included emissions from fertilizer production, converting land from forests to pastures, growing feed, and direct emissions from animals (belching and manure) from birth to death.
However, when they looked at transportation’s carbon footprint, they ignored impacts on the climate from manufacturing vehicle materials and parts, assembling vehicles and maintaining roads, bridges and airports. Instead, they only considered the exhaust emitted by finished cars, trucks, trains and planes. As a result, the FAO’s comparison of greenhouse gas emissions from livestock to those from transportation was greatly distorted.
No matter which “global crisis” they cry up, their answer is always “more government”
Alex Noble on the remarkable consistency of the proffered solution to any and all “global” problems:
Climatechangers are really just watermelons – green on the outside but red on the inside. You’ll notice that none of their ideas about how to prevent climate change involve anything other than bigger government.
For them, climate change is just a pretext – an irrefutable argument (“if you disagree that we need to save the planet you must want people to die!”) that enables them to demand more taxes and more power for them and their friends so they can set the world to rights.
And out here in the real world, they have their army of useful innocents – voters fearful of tackling the real world on their own without help from a cosseting State, all too ready to swallow any argument for bigger government.
Climate change largely consists of menacing them with stories about rising water and melting ice and starving polar bears, so they will allow our civil rights to be ridden over to keep us all safe. They demand it, in fact.
As H.L Mencken said, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary”
February 9, 2019
QotD: The global utility of a national carbon tax
James Griffin [of] Texas A&M’s Bush School of Government […] is a carbon-tax advocate who begins by acknowledging what everyone knows but hardly anyone says: that, absent subsidies and mandates, renewables and so-called green energy could not begin to compete with oil and coal, and the market would be entirely dominated by fossil fuels.
The carbon tax is one of those policy ideas that is largely sound in theory but runs up hard upon the shoals of reality. I am not convinced that a national carbon tax would change U.S. consumer behavior to such an extent that it would have positive effects on what is after all a global phenomenon, nor am I convinced that the U.S. government would use the revenue from a carbon tax to invest in real climate-change mitigation. That makes the carbon tax a very expensive way of demonstrating good intentions, which does not seem to me like a very fruitful way to work. And compared to more direct programs, such as clearing the way for the development of new, modern, nuclear-power facilities, a carbon tax is even less attractive.
Kevin D. Williamson, “The Case for a Carbon Tax”, National Review, 2017-03-08.
February 6, 2019
The “Green New Deal” of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won’t work
Tim Worstall predicts — well in advance of hearing any details of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal — that it won’t work:
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speaking at the Reardon Convention Center in Kansas City, on 20 July 2018.
Photo by Mark Dillman via Wikimedia Commons.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is to reveal the details of her Green New Deal in the next few days – the one thing we absolutely know about this being that it won’t work. This isn’t a commentary upon climate change nor the desirability of doing something about it. This is just a simple statement of fact about the universe we inhabit. As with the climate the economy is a complex, even chaotic, thing. Plans to substantially reform it therefore don’t work, no matter how egghead the planners nor pure in motive the instigators.
All of this being why the very reports which tell us we should do something about climate change – say, the Stern Review – tell us that we shouldn’t try to have those detailed plans for what we’ll do and how we’ll do it. Instead we’ve got to use the only management technique we’ve got for something this complex, markets and prices. Which is why near every economist who has even thought about the problem advocates either cap and trade or a carbon tax.
This is, of course, just a rerun of Friedrich Hayek’s point in his Nobel Lecture, “The Pretence of Knowledge”. That universe out there is a complicated place. There’s just no manner that the planner can gain enough information about it, in anything like real time, to be able to plan it. We’ve thus got to use other methods to bend that reality to our will. We can jam a crowbar into prices with a carbon tax for example, but we can’t start planning who should be taking how many car journeys in what sort of vehicles powered in what manner.
So, the Green New Deal from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortex, it fails at this first and basic hurdle. She’s using the wrong method to try to solve the agreed upon problem. Central planning just doesn’t work.
[…]
The reason we want cheap solutions to climate change is that this justifies producing more of a solution. Again, the justification of doing something about climate change is that it will be expensive. So, we should spend up to the amount of the damage to prevent it. Say it will cost $100, then we’re willing to spend up to $99.99 to stop it. This makes us one cent better off. We’re not willing to spend $200 to stop those $100 damages, that would make us poorer.
And more – we should spend that $99.99 as efficiently as we can because that means we’ll stop more climate change for our dollars. That also makes us richer.
Don’t forget, we’ve all already agreed that we’re going to have some climate change. Our arguments are over how much and how much are we willing to do to stop how much of it?
January 12, 2019
The role of tyche in the fall of the Roman empire
Williamson Murray posted this review at The Strategy Bridge back in August, but I don’t recall seeing it linked anywhere. He emphasizes the role of tyche both in the small events and the greater flow of history (tyche is a Greek word meaning luck, chance, or random events that change the course of human activity). In his review, he makes it clear that he feels earlier historians have failed to emphasize just how much tyche impacted the Roman world:
The approximate extent of the Roman empire circa 395AD, when the empire was formally divided into eastern and western zones with joint emperors in Rome and Constantinople.
In The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease & the End of an Empire, Kyle Harper has presented us with a case study, namely the collapse of the Roman world in the period between the third and sixth centuries CE. Here tyche, in the largest sense, created a perfect storm of disastrous natural events and happenings that brought about the complete collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century CE, and eventually the ability of the Eastern Roman Empire to control much of the Mediterranean world after the seventh century. These natural events created conditions the Roman world was incapable of understanding, but which nevertheless brought about the collapse of one of the greatest, longest lasting empires in history. What Professor Harper’s book underlines is that the military difficulties that Rome’s generals and soldiers experienced in the period from the third century on were only the surface manifestations of far deeper systemic changes that could not be predicted, but which in combination created a perfect storm. Thus, fate, or more accurately tyche, undermined the best efforts to prevent what turned out to be a disastrous collapse.
The slide to catastrophe began after a period of unparalleled prosperity that had seen the population of Rome grow from approximately 60 million under Emperor Augustus in 33 BC to 75 million in 165 AD. The historian Edward Gibbon would describe the period in the following terms: “If a man were called to fix a period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would without hesitation, name” that period. Significantly, archeological and scientific evidence indicates the period from 200 BCE through the mid-point of the second century CE was extraordinarily favorable in terms of its climate for agriculture and the development of an extensive and expansive civilization in the Mediterranean and Western Europe. Combined with the favorable weather was a period of general peace under the empire that, for the most part, removed the generally disastrous role played by war throughout history. Except for one short period of civil wars between the claimants to Nero’s throne (70-71 CE, the year of the three emperors) and the two Jewish rebellions (66-71 CE and 135 CE), Rome fought its wars on the frontiers: the Rhine, the Danube, and Syria.
All that changed in the midst of the rule of the emperor Marcus Aurelius. The traditional narrative suggests that in 165 CE Roman soldiers returning from the campaign against the Parthians in Mesopotamia brought a plague. In fact, the pathogen most probably came through the Red Sea, brought by traders. In the great urban centers of the empire, all closely linked, it found an ideal environment. Given the extent of trade among these urban centers, the smallpox pathogens spread rapidly from urban center to urban center. As Professor Harper points out, “[i]n one sense, the Antonine Plague was a creature of chance, the final unpredictable outcome of countless millennia of evolutionary experimentation. At the same time, the empire — its global connections and fast-moving networks of communications — had created the ecological conditions for the outbreak of history’s first pandemic.” We have no way of knowing how many died, but it was substantial, on the order most probably of what was to occur in the Black Death of the fourteenth century.
Had the Antonine Plague been the only major problem besetting the Romans, the empire would likely have weathered the initial storm without catastrophic results. It was, however, not the only major factor that would affect the long-term health of the empire, based as it was on the slight surpluses that subsistence agriculture produced. Almost concurrently with the Antonine Plague, the weather patterns across the Mediterranean and Europe, reaching into central Asia, began a slow, steady shift that resulted in an average drop in temperature and rainfall. That decline would continue through to the mid-fifth century, which was to see the beginning of an even colder period, what climatologists are now calling the “Late Antique Little Ice Age” — one that was even less favorable to agriculture.
November 18, 2018
New research shows 536AD to have been the true annus horribilis
There have been bad years in human history. There have been worse days in human history. But according to a recent study summarized in Science magazine, the worst year in recorded history was 536AD:
Ask medieval historian Michael McCormick what year was the worst to be alive, and he’s got an answer: “536.” Not 1349, when the Black Death wiped out half of Europe. Not 1918, when the flu killed 50 million to 100 million people, mostly young adults. But 536. In Europe, “It was the beginning of one of the worst periods to be alive, if not the worst year,” says McCormick, a historian and archaeologist who chairs the Harvard University Initiative for the Science of the Human Past.
A mysterious fog plunged Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia into darkness, day and night — for 18 months. “For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during the whole year,” wrote Byzantine historian Procopius. Temperatures in the summer of 536 fell 1.5°C to 2.5°C, initiating the coldest decade in the past 2300 years. Snow fell that summer in China; crops failed; people starved. The Irish chronicles record “a failure of bread from the years 536–539.” Then, in 541, bubonic plague struck the Roman port of Pelusium, in Egypt. What came to be called the Plague of Justinian spread rapidly, wiping out one-third to one-half of the population of the eastern Roman Empire and hastening its collapse, McCormick says.
Historians have long known that the middle of the sixth century was a dark hour in what used to be called the Dark Ages, but the source of the mysterious clouds has long been a puzzle. Now, an ultraprecise analysis of ice from a Swiss glacier by a team led by McCormick and glaciologist Paul Mayewski at the Climate Change Institute of The University of Maine (UM) in Orono has fingered a culprit. At a workshop at Harvard this week, the team reported that a cataclysmic volcanic eruption in Iceland spewed ash across the Northern Hemisphere early in 536. Two other massive eruptions followed, in 540 and 547. The repeated blows, followed by plague, plunged Europe into economic stagnation that lasted until 640, when another signal in the ice — a spike in airborne lead — marks a resurgence of silver mining, as the team reports in Antiquity this week.
H/T to Blazing Cat Fur for the link.
October 26, 2018
Economist Jack Mintz dis-claims credit for the Liberals’ carbon tax scheme
Everybody likes to be recognized for their work, but Jack Mintz wants to delineate where his original plan and the actual carbon tax scheme implemented by the federal government diverge:
I continue to maintain, as I have all these years, that the best way to implement carbon taxes is to use the revenues to reduce harmful corporate and personal taxes (I’ve since added land-transfer taxes to the original list). This includes removing anti-competitive levies while also providing support for low-income households to cope with higher electricity, heating and transportation costs.
However, what was unveiled Tuesday by the federal Liberal government in its carbon-pricing plan fails to achieve what I would have argued to be an ideal carbon policy. What is being advertised as a climate plan for provinces that fail to follow Ottawa’s carbon-tax directives — currently New Brunswick, Ontario, Manitoba and Saskatchewan, but they’ll likely be joined by others — instead comes across as a grand redistribution scheme administered by an expanding government bureaucracy.
While the federal carbon tax is almost uniform (electricity is not yet included), it provides special exemptions for certain sectors such as farmers, fishers, aviation, power producers in the North and greenhouse operators, although not the ones growing recreational cannabis.
But the departure from uniformity is marginal and not nearly as concerning as the Trudeau government’s continuing commitment to existing and even new regulations and subsidies to promote “clean energy,” each with their implicit carbon price. While economists repeatedly argue for a carbon tax precisely because it means we can forgo these high-cost interventions, somehow that has all been lost. While plenty of the economists behind the carbon-tax lobby were cheering Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s new plan yesterday, I somehow missed their demands that we now must eliminate clean fuel and renewable electricity standards, subsidies for electric vehicles and ethanol — all of which have carbon costs well in excess of the $50-a-tonne carbon tax planned for 2022.
Another failure of the federal plan is to pass on carbon taxes in the form of Justin Bucks — or, to use the more laborious official name for these tax rebates: Climate Action Incentive Payments. So, rather than include carbon taxation as part of a comprehensive tax reform to make the tax system simpler, less distorting and fair, these Justin Bucks will be paid to households, small businesses, municipalities, universities, colleges, hospitals, non-profit and Indigenous populations.
A fatal flaw in federal pricing plan is a major shift in taxes from individuals to businesses. The average per household rebate — $1,161 in Saskatchewan in 2022 for example — is more than the cost per household of $946 (not including GST or HST on any energy bills). Even though the document states that business taxes are fully shifted forward to households, something is amiss here. How can household rebates average more than costs?
October 25, 2018
It’s not a “bribe” … it’s an “incentive”!
Terence Corcoran explains why the federal government’s promised “incentive” isn’t in any way, shape, or form any kind of bribe:
Step right up, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome aboard the all-new Canadian Cynical Circular Carbon Circus, the amazing Liberal climate control spectacle that will send you on a great environmental ride into the future.
Come on in! We will pay you to not consume fossil fuels — as individuals and as industries. It’s an economic revolution that takes us beyond blockchain and cryptocurrencies and cannabis into a brave new universe in which money goes round and round and everybody wins. We will pay Canadians with their own money — more than $20 billion over five years in carbon taxes that will raise the price of gasoline by 11 cents a litre by 2022, and ever higher thereafter if not sooner. Everybody pays and everybody wins, except for those who don’t. And some people win more than they pay. It’s better than a lottery!
For the people of Ontario, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and New Brunswick, the federal carbon circus cash comes via a new “Climate Action Incentive Payment.” An Ontario family of four will receive $307 for this year, the amount to be claimed on 2018 income tax returns. A Saskatchewan family will get a Climate Action Incentive Payment of $609.
What’s the Climate Action Incentive Payment for? The Liberal plan unveiled by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Environment Minister Catherine McKenna Tuesday doesn’t specify. What are taxpayers in the four provinces being incented to do, exactly, with this new wad of free cash? There is only one explanation: Vote Liberal in 2019!
The payments are based on a 2019 carbon price of $20 a tonne, rising to $50 by 2022. As the carbon tax goes up, Ontario families will receive $718 in 2022 and Saskatchewan families $1,459. And there will be more to come, presumably, since the latest doomsday scenario from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — the font of all speculation and data manipulation on climate issues — warned that by 2030 (only 12 years from now) a carbon price of somewhere between $135 to $5,500 per tonne would be needed to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius.
October 20, 2018
Barley, beer, and climate change
There was a “study” recently released proclaiming the end of beer … or at least a huge hike in beer prices coupled with a drop in availability due to climate change. Tim Worstall explains why the report is — at best — misleading:
Barley (Hordeum vulgare) at the United States National Arboretum.
Photo by Flikr user “Cliff” via Wikimedia Commons.
You’ll have seen the various reports over the past few days that climate change is going to do terrible damage to the beer industry. The mechanism is that drought and heat will reduce the barley yield, this will then reduce the amount of beer that can be made. What follows is the explanation from the actual researchers of what they’ve done. It is, to put it mildly, nonsense. For their assumptions are wrong. Let us say that climate change does reduce barley yields on those lands currently planted to it. But we do know that as this happens then other, more polar, regions open up to being suitable for the growing of barley. So the initial worry is just untrue.
They then go on to insist that we’ll feed the cows on the barley that’s left rather than make beer from it. Thus the shortfall in beer is greater than that in barley. Nonsense upon stilts. Humans don’t work that way. We started this agriculture thing because we wanted the beer after all. Feeding the animals came later – and often enough the cows are fed on the barley after we’ve made the beer from it anyway. We’d put our minimal supply into booze not beasts.
Finally, they tells us that Irish beer prices would double. No, really, given the level of taxes there upon the stuff it’s really not true that even their 30% reduction in barley supply is going to double the price.
October 13, 2018
It’s always TEOTWAWKI, and the demands are always the same
Sean Gabb on the message and tactics of the alarmists — whose chosen fixation shifts over time, but whose demands are always the same:
Once you cut through their verbiage, the enemies of bourgeois civilisation have two demands. These are:
- Put me and my friends in charge of preferably a one-world government with total power over life and property; or, until then, or failing that,
- Give us a lot of money.
When I was younger, the occasion for making these demands was something to do with poverty or economic instability, and the alleged need was for a bigger welfare state, or state ownership of the means of production, or playing about with money to “move the aggregate demand curve to the right.” The nice thing about these claims and their alleged solutions was that they all had to be debated within the subject area of Economics. Because most of us knew a lot about Economics, we could always win the debates.
By the end of the 1980s, winning was so easy, the debates had become boring. Since then, the alleged need has shifted to saving the planet from some environmental catastrophe. The resulting debates are now harder to win because most of us are not that learned in the relevant sciences. Though I am more than competent in Economics, my main expertise is in Ancient History and the Classical Languages. Much the same is true for most of my friends.
Take, for example, the latest occasion for making the two demands stated above. This is that the sea is filling up with waste plastic, and that this looks horrid, and is being eaten by the creatures who live in the sea, and that they are all at risk of dying – and that this will be a terrible thing of all of us. For the solution, see Annie Leonard, writing in The Guardian: “Recycling alone will never stem the flow of plastics into our ocean. We must address the problem at the source.” You can take her last sentence as shorthand for the usual demands.
What response have I to this? Not much directly. Give me half an hour, and I will explain with practised ease that the Phillips Curve is at best a loose correlation between past variables, and that there is no stable trade-off between unemployment and inflation. But search me how most plastics are made, how long they take to degrade, or what harm they do if eaten.
A short search on the Web has brought up some useful information. There is, for example, an essay by Kip Hansen, published in 2015 – “An Ocean of Plastic.” He says, among much else:
- That the Great Garbage Patch said to be floating about the Pacific is a myth, and that the main alleged photographs of it were taken in Manila Bay after a storm had washed the rubbish out of the streets;
- That the amount of plastic waste floating in the sea is very small per cubic metre of water, and that it is invisible to the uninformed eye in the places where this Garbage Patch is said to be floating;
- That plastic waste quickly breaks down into tiny chunks that are then eaten by bacteria, who are not harmed by it;
- That larger chunks eaten by fish and birds are easily handled by digestive systems that have evolved over many ages to cope with much worse than the occasional lump of polystyrene foam.
His conclusion:
The “floating rafts of plastic garbage”-version of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a pernicious myth that needs to be dispelled at every opportunity.
October 12, 2018
Carbon taxes may be efficient, but let’s not rush into it quite yet…
Terence Corcoran says we shouldn’t jump at the chance to kill our economy just because carbon taxes are efficient:
It didn’t take long for federal Environment Minister Catherine McKenna to tweet out the news implying that the Nobel committee supported the government of Canada’s carbon-price scheme. The Montreal-based carbon-taxing NGO, the Ecofiscal Commission, hailed Nordhaus for having “demonstrated” that a universal price on carbon was the most “efficient” way to curb climate change.
Before jumping aboard the Nordhaus bandwagon, however, carbon-taxing politicians and all Canadians might want to take a closer look at what they are being led into.
[…]
Nordhaus and his co-winner of this year’s Nobel in economics, former Stanford economist Paul Romer, are great believers in “incentives.” As Romer said in a post-Nobel interview (tweeted by McKenna, naturally): “I believe, and I think Bill (Nordhaus) believes, that if we start encouraging people to find ways to produce lower carbon energy, everybody’s going to be surprised at the progress we’ll make as we go down that path. All we need to do is create some incentives that get people going in that direction, and that we don’t know exactly what solution will come out of it — but we’ll make big progress.”
But why a tax? If all we need to do is deploy the price mechanism, why impose a tax? Let’s ignore for a moment the dubious assumption that the science and economics of climate change are sound and settled. Would it still not be better to have the government set the carbon price, require the energy companies to charge it, but allow the revenue to flow not to government but through to energy companies and their shareholders, and others in the supply chain? That’s where market forces and the above-mentioned miracle price mechanisms — rather than government planners — would determine where to invest and what energy alternatives are best. (No gas retailer could possibly eat the cost of a 90-cent-per-litre carbon tax, so they’d have no choice but to pass at least most of it along to the customer).
One of the ironies of carbon taxation is the enthusiasm for “market mechanisms” and “prices” among politicians who otherwise abhor and resist market pricing of everything from roads to health care to rental housing to public transit to education to broadcasting and telecom and the internet and the price of cannabis, not to mention the Canadian price of milk and chickens. With carbon, market pricing is suddenly a great idea, no matter how fanciful the analyses and speculative the projections.
