Quotulatiousness

August 11, 2012

Environmentalism versus ecology

Filed under: Environment, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:09

An interesting interview with Dr. Patrick Moore:

Cotto: One of the gravest concerns you have cited with the modern environmentalist movement is its increasingly ideological nature. Some might say that this, in fact, is a positive development. How would you beg to differ?

Dr. Moore: Ideology is negative in so far as it tends to divide people into warring camps with no possible resolution. My late Greenpeace friend Bob Hunter suggested early on that in order for environmentalism to become a mass movement, it would have to be based on ideology, or as he called it “popular mythology,” because “not everybody can be a Ph.D. ecologist.” I have never accepted organized religion and note all the evils perpetuated in the name of “God is on our side” I do believe in just wars such as the armed struggle to end apartheid. But that was not based on religion but rather on human rights.

For example it has become part of environmental ideology, as stated by Bill McKibben in the current Rolling Stone, that the fossil fuel industries are “Public Enemy Number One.” Oil is particularly vilified as evidenced by high-profile campaigns to stop pipelines, drilling, tankers, oil sands, and anything else to do with producing or transporting oil. Oil is responsible for 36% of global energy and is therefore the most important source of energy to support our civilization. If it is the aim of “environmentalists” to stop fossil fuel production and use, end fracking, end coal mining, end the use of oil, then they are promoting a policy that would have disastrous consequences for human civilization and the environment. If we stopped using fossil fuel today, or by 2020 as Al Gore proposes, at least half the human population would perish and there wouldn’t be a tree left on the planet with a year, as people struggled to find enough energy to stay alive.

[. . .]

Cotto: In the past, you have said that human activity is not the only cause for climate change. What do you believe is the greatest contributing factor?

Dr. Moore: First, we don’t know precisely how the many factors affecting climate contribute and interact in producing the earth’s climate at any given time. The cause of the onset of Ice-Ages, one of which we are presently experiencing, is a puzzle we don’t fully understand. I explain in my presentations that as a scientist who is fully qualified to understand climate change, I seem dumber than the people who say they “know” the answers because I do not profess to know the future, especially of something so complicated as the global climate.

One thing is certain, there is no “scientific proof” as the term is generally understood, that human emissions are the main cause of climate change today. Even the IPCC only claims that it is “very likely” (a judgement, in their own words, not a proof) that human emissions are responsible for “most” of the warming “since the mid-20th century” (1950). Therefore they are not claiming that humans caused the 0.4C warming between 1910-1940, but they are claiming that we are the main cause of the 0.4C warming between 1970 and 2000. Yet they provide no opinion as to what did cause the warming between 1910-1940. There is a logical inconsistency here that has never been addressed. It is also important to note that the IPCC does not speak of “catastrophe”, that is left to the fanatics and perpetual doom-sayers.

August 3, 2012

Chris Selley: Ideology is anathema to Harper’s Conservatives

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:38

Prime Minister Stephen Harper cast out the libertarians several years ago. He’s more recently stamped out the last of the actual conservatives. So who’s left in the Conservative Party? Harperites and devoted non-ideologues:

It is time to retire the word “ideological” from Canada’s political lexicon. It doesn’t seem to mean anything anymore. In recent weeks, Tony Clement, a Conservative cabinet minister, has chided NDP leader Thomas Mulcair for “taking an ideological approach” to oil-sands development; Prime Minister Stephen Harper has deplored the New Democrats’ “ideological aversion to trade”; various New Democrats have accused the Conservatives of being “ideological” for their plans to contract out post-office services, eliminate Canada Revenue Agency counter service, cut funding for scientific research and limit health-care benefits for refugee claimants, which Liberal critic Kevin Lamoureux also deplored as “ideological.” Interim Liberal leader Bob Rae denounced the Conservatives’ entire “wrong-headed ideological agenda” — which is apparently “hidden” in various places around Ottawa, though he and Mr. Mulcair seem to have no difficulty discerning how awful and ideological it is.

I wonder how evocative the word “ideological” is to people who aren’t political junkies. Is it so bad, so uncommon, to have — as the Oxford dictionary defines it — “a system of ideas or way of thinking” that one regards “as justifying actions, especially one that is held implicitly or adopted as a whole and maintained regardless of the course of events”?

Among political junkies, the term is sometimes — though not always (see above) — meant to imply pigheaded rigidity. For a Canadian politician, that’s very bad. Weirdly, it’s also very bad when a Canadian politician changes his mind — the dreaded “flip-flop.” But is there any politician in Ottawa anywhere near power who can usefully be described as consistently ideological? Since the Reform days, Mr. Harper and his mates have been on a public policy magical mystery tour. Now they say whatever they need to say on Friday, contradict it completely on Monday, and think nothing of it. To call them ideological is to miss an opportunity to call them shameless hypocrites.

July 13, 2012

A more accurate title would have been The Locavore Delusion

Filed under: Environment, Food, Health, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:58

Rob Lyons reviews the new book by Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu:

The fundamental question underpinning both those earlier papers and The Locavore’s Dilemma is this: if local food is so great, why did a globalised food system develop at all? The answer, as Desrochers and Shimizu argue, is that the creation of a worldwide trade in food reduced prices, increased variety and improved security of supply. If there is a problem with this world market in food, they argue, it is that it is not open or far-reaching enough.

The online eco-magazine Grist ran an interview with Desrochers earlier this month. In a follow-up piece, readers came up with responses to the interview. One of these responses provides such a neat summary of the arguments in favour of local food that it is worth repeating in full.

‘I am a local-food advocate for many reasons: Taste: An heirloom tomato picked that morning runs circles around a hybridised tomato picked two weeks ago in Florida and gassed so it turns red en route; Quality: the better the soil and the farmer, the better the food; Nutrition: food sheds nutrients after it is picked. The longer it takes to get to market, the less nutritional value it has, comparatively; Transparency: I like knowing how my food is grown and harvested. I visit my meat producer; try that at a CAFO [concentrated animal feeding operation]; Environmental: A minimisation of the use of chemicals that wash into waterways, creating algae blooms, choking out life, or killing beneficial insects, including honey bees; Sane stewardship: I like to support farmers who create more naturally fertile soil, which is better able to resist pests, floods, and droughts; Pleasure: I buy local food at my farmers’ market because it’s more pleasant to do so than going into an air-conditioned grocery store. I see neighbours, chat with farmers, taste before I buy. Economic: I want my food dollars to support my local economy; Humanity: Animals and humans are treated better on the small farms I know than they are on the large ones; I value green open spaces: Supporting local farms with my money encourages those farmers to maintain those green open spaces rather than selling off to developers.’

As Desrochers and Shimizu explain, these ideas are either not necessarily true, are matters of personal taste or, more often, are completely wrong. Instead, the authors argue, ‘the available evidence convincingly demonstrates that long-distance trade and modern technologies have resulted in much greater food availability, lower prices, improved health and reduced environmental damage than if they had never materialised. Indeed, more trade and ever-improving technologies remain to this day the only proven ways to lift large numbers of people out of rural poverty and malnutrition.’

Let’s take those arguments for local food, one by one, using (though not exclusively) the arguments in The Locavore’s Dilemma.

April 4, 2012

The authoritarian High-Modernist recipe for failure

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, History, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:37

Charles Stross linked to this older post at Ribbonfarm discussing “how to think like a state”:

James C. Scott’s fascinating and seminal book, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, examines how, across dozens of domains, ranging from agriculture and forestry, to urban planning and census-taking, a very predictable failure pattern keeps recurring.

[. . .]

Scott calls the thinking style behind the failure mode “authoritarian high modernism,” but as we’ll see, the failure mode is not limited to the brief intellectual reign of high modernism (roughly, the first half of the twentieth century).

Here is the recipe:

  • Look at a complex and confusing reality, such as the social dynamics of an old city
  • Fail to understand all the subtleties of how the complex reality works
  • Attribute that failure to the irrationality of what you are looking at, rather than your own limitations
  • Come up with an idealized blank-slate vision of what that reality ought to look like
  • Argue that the relative simplicity and platonic orderliness of the vision represents rationality
  • Use authoritarian power to impose that vision, by demolishing the old reality if necessary
  • Watch your rational Utopia fail horribly

The big mistake in this pattern of failure is projecting your subjective lack of comprehension onto the object you are looking at, as “irrationality.” We make this mistake because we are tempted by a desire for legibility.

[. . .]

Central to Scott’s thesis is the idea of legibility. He explains how he stumbled across the idea while researching efforts by nation states to settle or “sedentarize” nomads, pastoralists, gypsies and other peoples living non-mainstream lives:

    The more I examined these efforts at sedentarization, the more I came to see them as a state’s attempt to make a society legible, to arrange the population in ways that simplified the classic state functions of taxation, conscription, and prevention of rebellion. Having begun to think in these terms, I began to see legibility as a central problem in statecraft. The pre-modern state was, in many crucial respects, particularly blind; it knew precious little about its subjects, their wealth, their landholdings and yields, their location, their very identity. It lacked anything like a detailed “map” of its terrain and its people.

The book is about the 2-3 century long process by which modern states reorganized the societies they governed, to make them more legible to the apparatus of governance. The state is not actually interested in the rich functional structure and complex behavior of the very organic entities that it governs (and indeed, is part of, rather than “above”). It merely views them as resources that must be organized in order to yield optimal returns according to a centralized, narrow, and strictly utilitarian logic.

It’s a long post, but it is well worth reading. In a couple of throwaway examples, it rather cleverly ties the Indian caste system (as made “legible” by the Raj) and the entire Roman empire to Scott’s failure model.

December 16, 2011

Reason.TV: Christopher Hitchens – Bah, Humbug on Christmas

Filed under: Humour, Liberty, Quotations, Randomness — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:34

Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011.

I’m saddened to write that the great essayist and writer Christopher Hitchens is dead at the age of 62. He had been weakened by the cancer of the esophagus that he disclosed publicly in 2010 and the treatments he had undertaken to fight his illness. Reason extends its condolences to his wife, family, and friends.

As is clear to anyone who has read even a sentence of his staggeringly prolific output, Hitchens was the sort of stylist who could turn even a casual digression into a tutorial on all aspects of history, literature, and art. As a writer, you gaze upon his words and despair because there’s just no way you’re going to touch that. But far more important than the wit and panache and erudition with which he expressed himself was the method through which he engaged the world.

The Toronto Star has a small collection of quotations which do give a sense of the man’s range and wit:

5. About Sarah Palin: “She’s got no charisma of any kind, [but] I can imagine her being mildly useful to a low-rank porn director.”

6. “If you gave [Jerry] Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox.”

[. . .]

8. About Mother Teresa: “She was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.”

9. “Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that’s where it should stay.”

[. . .]

12. About Michael Moore: “Europeans think Americans are fat, vulgar, greedy, stupid, ambitious and ignorant and so on. And they’ve taken as their own, as their representative American, someone who actually embodies all of those qualities.”

October 25, 2011

QotD: Tax policy

Filed under: Economics, Government, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:00

One of the reasons I despise tax policy is that it so rarely turns on the utilitarian aspects of taxes and instead focuses on political and social issues (a tax “rewards” one group or “punishes” another). Liberals fret about how “progressive” a tax regime is because their main concern is that the wealthy pay more than the poor; conservatives fret about “punishing success” by taxing the creators and makers higher than the cheats and deadbeats. The problem is that the word “fair” is interpreted differently depending on where you stand in the ideological spectrum: to me, “fair” means that I pay the same tax rate for my place in this Republic as any other citizen; to a liberal, I suspect that “fair” involves overtones of social justice and victim-hood and so on. But regardless of where you come down on taxation, I think it is important that every person pay at least some amount of taxes, just to provide a reminder that government isn’t free — and that the more government you have, the more it costs.

“Monty”, “DOOM: I’m tore down, I’m almost level with the ground”, Ace of Spades HQ, 2011-10-25

October 20, 2011

Brendan O’Neill: Occupy movement is the death rattle of the old Left

Filed under: Economics, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:46

For a self-described man of the left, Brendan O’Neill is not afraid to critique leftist movements:

In the increasingly whiffy camp outside St Paul’s Cathedral, amid placards declaring ‘The End is Nigh’, apparently a new kind of politics is being born. Young women talk about ‘politics starting again’. The media cheerleaders of the Occupy movement claim it represents ‘a substantive change not just to the nature of modern politics, but to the way in which it is done, demanded and delivered’. From New York to Madrid to Tokyo, the inhabitants of the so-called tent cities proudly declare themselves ‘citizens of a new world’.

Is all this occupying really the start of something new? No. And not only because on the rare occasion when the protesters issue a coherent demand they end up echoing ideas we’ve heard a thousand times before. (Their call for tougher independent regulation of the financial industry was pilfered from the Financial Times.) More fundamentally, their globally contagious protest represents the death agony of something old rather than the birth pang of something new. What we’re witnessing is the demise of the progressive left, but — and here is the Occupy movement’s twist — that demise is dolled up as something good, something positive, where instead of addressing the vacuum at the heart of modern left-wing thinking, the occupiers make a virtue out of it.

Around the world, the occupiers are adapting to the decayed state of radical left-wing thinking, moulding themselves around the organisational and political disarray of the left. All the negative things about the left today — the lack of big ideas, the dearth of daring leaders, the withering of organisational structures — are repackaged as positives. Leaderlessness is transformed into a virtue, the enabler of a fairer, more consensual form of politics. The absence of overarching ideology is sexed up as ‘liberation from dogma’. Even the thoughtlessness of the Occupy movement, both in terms of its lack of deep thinking and the way it has spread across the globe in a fairly thoughtless, meme-like fashion, is turned into a good thing: this is ‘unthought’, declares one observer, where creeds emerge ‘without much articulation of why they’re necessary, [almost] as reflexes’.

July 2, 2011

“I remained somehow reluctant to conclude that the Communist Party of China would flat-out lie”

Filed under: China, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:10

A tale of naivete about the Peoples’ Republic of China through the eyes of an American sympathizer:

The first time I tried to go to China was in 1967, the year after I graduated from college. My father was a radical leftist professor who admired Mao Zedong. And that influence, along with the Vietnam War protests — a movement in which I was not only a participant but an activist — led me to look at socialist China with very high hopes.

I was living in Hong Kong and wrote a letter to Beijing. A few months later I received a charming reply on two sheets of paper that looked like they had been labored over for days by a Red Guard with little English and a faulty typewriter. The letter explained that the Chinese people had nothing against me, but that I was from a predatory imperialist country and could not visit the People’s Republic. Before I left Hong Kong I bought four volumes of “The Selected Works of Mao Zedong,” and, rather grandiosely, ripped the covers off of them so that I might carry them safely back to the imperialist US.

In May, 1973, however, I got another chance. A year earlier, in April 1972, the Chinese ping-pong team had visited the US to break a twenty-three year freeze in diplomatic relations, and I had served as an interpreter. I made a good impression on Chinese officials on that US tour, in part because I led four of the six American interpreters in a boycott of the teams’ meeting with President Richard Nixon at the White House. (Nixon had ordered the bombing of Haiphong just the day before; to me, small talk in the Rose Garden just didn’t seem right.)

H/T to Tim Harford for the link.

September 25, 2010

QotD: The price of locavorism

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Food, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:53

The local-food movement’s ideological parochialism would be dangerous if it were somehow enacted into law. But as persuasion, it tends to focus on the positive: the delights of local peaches and fresh cider, not the imagined evils of Chilean blueberries and prepeeled baby carrots. In this regard, it resembles the English Arts and Crafts movement of the late 19th century. William Morris, who is remembered today more for his wallpaper and book designs than for his social theories, didn’t manage to overturn the industrial revolution. But he and his allies left a legacy of beautiful things. Pleasure is persuasive.

Virginia Postrel, “No Free Locavore Lunch”, Wall Street Journal, 2010-09-25

« Newer Posts

Powered by WordPress