Environmental Myths

Copyright © 2001 Tim Daneliuk (musings@tundraware.com).  Permission to freely reproduce this material is hereby granted under the following conditions: 1) The material must be reproduced in its entirely without modification, editing, condensing, or any change. 2) No fee may be charged for the dissemination of this material.  Commercial use such as publishing this material in a book or anthology is expressly forbidden. 3) Full attribution of the author and source of this material must be included in the reproduction.

Author's Preface...

This document came about as a result of an email conversation I had some time ago in a photo related forum.  As a photographer, I am constantly amazed by nature's splendor.  I grew up in Alaska and have seen the glories of nature writ large.  But as a thinking human, I'm even more amazed at just how foolish my fellow humans can be. Environmentalism has become very trendy over the past 20 years or so.  Most people assume it is a "Good Thing" - then again, most people haven't looked under the cover of what the hardcore environmentalists are saying.  Well, I have and it is really horrifying.  I wrote this so that you would have some intellectual ammunition in front of your City Council, State Legislature, Church, or School.  This stuff is important because the weirdos are dictating the discussion.  As you'll see below, they don't know much about science, nature, economics, history, or culture, but they do know how to grind a political axe to a very fine edge.  You need to read this and fight back.  Feel free to pass this along to other people you know (just observe the copyright restrictions above).  Have your spouse, your  kids, your parents, your colleagues read it.  If we do not seize control of our culture from the fractional minority that is attempting to dominate it, we will surely get what we deserve.

Let's make a distinction from the very beginning here. - I am not opposed to "environmentalism" per se - that is, the thoughtful, rational discussion of how to responsibly interact with our physical  surroundings. I am opposed, however, almost without exception, to the "Environmental Movement" and its member "Environmentalists" who have a deeply flawed philosophy of life, a general disregard for the scientific method, and promote a particularly virulent form of economics. To the extent that man's impact on the planet is well understood  and is objectively known to be damaging and a realistic alternative can be found, I am fully supportive of acting to change things. That said, there is more myth to the current environmental debate than fact. It is these myths to which I would like to address myself.

Just in case you're wondering, and in the spirit of revealing my biases, I am by no stretch of the imagination a 'Conservative' politically. I am what has become known as a 'Classical Liberal' in the tradition of John Locke, Adam Smith, and Thomas Jefferson. In the American lexicon of politics, I am known as a 'Libertarian'.  I find Conservatives and Liberals equally annoying and ideologically bankrupt. My intellectual and philosophical grounding point is this: I have only one real "right" as a human - the "right" to myself: my mind, my body, the work I produce, the ideas I express and so on. This "right" is bounded by the equivalent right of other fellow humans. In particular, I am never free to initiate force or act with fraud against another. When, for example, someone does pollute the air, since they are polluting the air I breathe (they cannot usually just pollute their own air), this is an act of force and I am free to seek redress and/or stop them.

Finally, let's be clear:  Utopia is never possible. As humans, our choices are not (usually) between good and bad, but between a set of choices which involve tradeoffs.  None of these tradeoffs will ever give us Utopia, but better and worse conditions when measured in the aggregate. Would you give up fossil fuels if it meant that no ambulance could rush your seriously ill child to the hospital? Would you give up semiconductor manufacturing (and the attendant chemistry) if it meant no internet, no medical technology, no medicine, no science? Would you give up electricity if it meant no  heat in the winter, no air conditioning in the summer, and living by the sweat of your brow just to grow enough food on your own just to survive? We humans (need to) make tradeoff decisions like this all the time. The Environmentalists proceed as if there was a clear, simple, choice which leads to perfect solutions. This almost always means that they get to be in charge of the tradeoff, not that their answer is particularly better.

The point is that my positions below are not some reflexive political axe grinding, but the product of a lot of reading and thinking in this area. I do not want a planet despoiled, the air dirty, and land raped - that's why I cannot abide the Environmentalists - their philosophy and actions almost guarantee that the very mechanisms which lead to environmental  improvement (free markets, open borders, tort liability, private property...) get blamed for the problems we see.

Tim Daneliuk
musings@tundraware.com
April, 2001

Note:  I paint with a pretty broad brush below.  Obviously, there is no single point-of-view which captures the Environmental Movement.  Clearly, there are people of good will and good intentions in the various Environmental groups.  But, the stuff below is not a Straw Man - I have heard and read every one of the positions I  am refuting in this document and these are the heart of much of the arguments from Environmentalists of all stripes.  They may differ in degree or specific remedies they want enacted, but in my reading and observation, this stuff is a common thread.  That's why it's so dangerous.  That's why it needs to be refuted.
 

Mankind Is Just Another Animal Enjoying No Special Status

What you think about these issues revolves around your view of mankind, which is why I begin this analysis with a discussion of the place of humans on the planet, rather than a pure discussion of Environmentalism.

What you accept as legitimate human behavior as regards to the planet (or anything else for that matter) is profoundly shaped by your view  who we are and how we fit into the world around us. Many Environmentalists argue that we as humans are not entitled to any particular special position of privilege viz. other living things and that all creatures from amoeba to human are morally 'equal'. The more fringe elements of the Environmentalist community come right out and declare humans to be a 'virus' or 'cancer on the planet', in effect declaring we should have less privilege than other living beings.

So, for example, if I argue that man's inventions such as air conditioning have improved and extended our lifespan, many will say "So what? Why is this desirable, especially if (it is argued) this is at the expense of other living things?" After all, if we're all just critters, why do we have a right to do what we want?

Refuting this would be a book unto itself - a number have been written - but I would propose that there are a number of very clear reasons why we are not just all critters; why humans are, in fact "special", and why our (responsible) conquest of nature is entirely appropriate.  Indeed, we are 'wired' to run the planet by the very nature of having certain abilities which no other living creature demonstrates in any significant measure (small bits of these are evident in some of the higher primates and marine mammals, but it is elementary at best):
 

• We have the capacity of fully formed language pretty much from birth
• We have the capacity for moral choice
• We have the capacity for abstract expression (philosophy, math, art...)
• We have the capacity to remember (history, artifacts...)
• We have the capacity to make, use, and refine tools with a very high degree of sophistication
• We have the capacity to aggregate our work upon which others can build in the future (books, buildings, science, religion...)
• We have the capacity to improve our circumstances
• We have the capacity to make or to cease making war (This is different than killing to survive, which animals do)
• We are able to anticipate our own inevitable demise

And so on...

I am irrevocably led to the conclusion that humans are different than other living beings. A lot different. This difference gives us the means and the tools to shape nature as we see fit.  It has the downside that we can do great damage in so doing and that places our own survival at risk. "As we see fit", by the way, does not mean anything more than those things which promote our comfort and survival. The legitimate argument for environmental action is that some things we do threaten both our comfort and survival - this is quite different than arguing that we need to 'live in harmony' with nature because we have a moral responsibility to everything from single celled animals to the Canadian Moose. It's a subtle point, but very important. You'll see more of this below, but responsible action by humans to serve their own self-interest is the only mechanism by which we can make sustainable, healthy, and morally appropriate judgments about the environment, economies, public policy, and so forth. The real debate we ought be having is about what activities best serve our self interest, not how warm and fuzzy we feel when we kiss a tree.

If you do not see things this way, you can skip the rest of this epistle. If you truly believe that mankind is nothing more than a random evolutionary fluke entitled to nothing more than he bare survival a retrovirus enjoys, we have no dialogue. I simply cannot accept that the attributes described above were evolutionarily selected (or created, if you prefer) to be left unused and unrequited.

However, if you take the latter position, consistency demands that you immediately cease making use of any of the trappings of human work products (including computers and email!) As a 'critter' you are entitled only to critter like survival behaviors. Either your gifts as described above entitle you to additional privilege (and responsibility) or you are obligated to live in the most primitive of states.

This is why I declare that Environmentalism is, at it's core, frequently anti-human. This idea that we're not special, different, or well suited for conquering our natural surroundings is almost always at the philosophical core of a great many Environmental crusades. I think it's nonsense, and more importantly, it flies in the face of observable facts of how we do, in fact, differ from the rest of the natural world.  Incidentally, there is also a philosophical problem (a big one) if you declare humans to be nothing more than critters. If you take this position:

- What evidence supports it?
- How do you refute our special gifts? Are they evolutionary appendages? Imaginary?
- How do you hold any person morally accountable for their actions, especially as regards to their fellow humans?
   (If I'm just a critter, then stronger always wins, even if violence is involved.  Critters have no basis for, nor need for, a moral code - they seek only to survive.)


Nature Is Beautiful, Manmade Is Ugly/Unnatural

Quite commonly, you will see Environmentalists argue that "natural" is better/more aesthetically pleasing/more valuable than "manmade".  There's no particular rational basis for this assertion and it is readily refuted by contradiction:

Examples Of 'Ugly' Natural Phenomena

 
• Lightning induced forest fires (necessary, but ugly)
• Hurricanes
• Volcanoes
• Earthquakes & Tidal Waves
• Mental retardation
• Profound physical handicaps
• Bill Clinton & Rosie O'Donnell

 
All of these kill critters and leave a path of devastation behind and all are natural acts.

Examples Of 'Beautiful' Manmade Constructs

 
• The music of Bach
• Gothic Cathedrals
• The Sydney Opera House
• Monet's Paintings
• A Ferrari 250 GTO
• Incubators for premature babies
• My family gathered around a decorated Christmas tree


If you stop and think about it for a moment,  the goal is not to make everything as "natural" as possible. The goal is to make things as good as possible.  In this context, "good" means those things which best serve human self interest (by the definition given above).   "Good" will inevitably involve some combination of naturally occurring things, manmade constructs, and human creativity blending them together. A Bach Cantata requires an orchestra - you need wood to make violins, a violin maker with tools to build them, and skill to play them well.  The reason we shouldn't pollute isn't because the earth is 'sacred' - it's because uncontrolled pollution is bad for us.

One more time: 'Nature Good, Manmade Bad' is rooted in philosophical drivel and is in no way even remotely a valid argument for environmental action. Unfortunately, it has been used as such and really stupid action as been taken, like... trying to introduce predators into overpopulated deer and elk communities instead of letting them be hunted to reasonable levels. Like... preserving swamps as "endangered wetlands" which are lovely breeding grounds for mosquitos which are known to carry diseases. Like... declaring the multi-million member population of prairie dogs "endangered".
 
 

Pollution Is Mostly A Consequence Of An Under Regulated Private Sector
 

Not true. Never has been, probably never will be. Pollution primarily occurs when private property is not taken seriously.  Think about it, if the Big Bad Polluter knew that you had an excellent chance of whooping them in a court of law because they were polluting your land, your air, or your water, would they be so quick to do it?  It is noteworthy that pollution is especially rampant when the government chowderheads are involved. The worst pollution, by far, in the the U.S., is on public land - the government owns about 1/3 of all U.S. property, much of which has been abused with government help. The abominations we see in South America are a direct consequence of government structures which cannot enforce a reasonable rule of law or even significantly inhibit corruption in high places. Even when corporations pollute, they almost never do it on their own property. It stands to reason - who cares more about a house, the owner or the renter?

Privatizing the land would create a natural affinity for doing the right thing by the owner. Moreover, if they were to pollute excessively and thereby damage other, surrounding  properties, they could be held legally liable for their actions as a matter of civil liability under the law - something which is almost impossible to do when the land is 'public'.

But it gets even worse. One frequently sees remedies like the "Superfund" as a laudable example of how to fix things. Nothing could be further from the truth. Superfund guarantees that the people who did the environmental damage don't actually pay for the cleanup (and thereby pay for their sins) - No, Superfund guarantees that you and I and all our fellow taxpayers get to pay for it. It effectively lets the bad guys off the hook... all because people do not grasp the essential and fundamental importance of private property ownership and the rule of law.

Even where the private sector misbehaves, regulation is the worst possible way to solve the problem.  As many have observed, the current regulatory situation is such that it is often cheaper to pay the fines than stop polluting.  No, what we need here is some thoughtful rewriting of law and its enforcement which rationally holds corporations and individuals responsible for what they do to others (not themselves). Some mechanisms to do this already exist insofar as corporate executives can be held personally liable under criminal law for gross acts of pollution. This is the way to prevent excess - not more proactive  government fiddling with regulatory devices like the EPA.
 

The Planet Is At All Time Lows In Environmental Health
 

This bit of Environmentalist Theology is implicit in almost everything written by the Greens. Somehow, in an era of unprecedented lifespan, health, medicine, comfort, and so on, we are supposed to believe that things, on average, are getting worse and especially so the environment! Huh? By what measure?  Let's examine reality for a moment, shall we:
 

• Medieval Europe was a filthy, disease ridden pit wherein untold millions died from the Plague.  Even in most of the undeveloped world, such a mass infestation of disease is almost unheard of today.

 
• Is the air today actually dirtier than it was, say, in the 19th century when coal and sulfur fumes shaded the skylines of every big industrial center?  Today, we use both cleaner burning  techniques and nuclear power generation which vastly reduces air pollution.   The fact that we cannot reach some imaginary threshold for pollutants and fuel efficiency that  dunderheads like Al Gore make up when they feel like it does not diminish the enormous progress profit motivated corporations have made in these areas.

 
• At least one recent study (The Satanic Gasses, by Michaels & Balling) demonstrates that we are at nowhere near all time highs in CO2 levels. That happened many thousands of years ago.  (Then again, they make a pretty good case that high CO2 levels may well not be bad at all, but that's a different discussion...)

 
• The air in major US cities like Chicago and Los Angeles is measurably cleaner today than it was even 30 years ago.


These few counter-examples are but a few of dozens I could probably dredge up, but they point to a larger issue that is rarely discussed: The people who hold that things are "going to hell in a handbasket" almost invariably do so because they do not look at a big enough picture. We can all name particularly vile examples of pollution like, say, Love Canal, the Exxon Valdez oil spill, or the music of Kenny G.  However, in each such case, we are looking at a very short lived event in the larger scheme of things.

Consider, for a moment, the Exxon oil spill. At the time, the event was a horror show. Critters were dying, industry suffered, many thought the ocean wouldn't recover for perhaps hundreds of years.  Yet only 10 years later, the habitat was largely back to normal (see http://www.valdezscience.com for the details).  This doesn't make the spill a good thing, it just demonstrates how wildly over reactive we are told to be in the face of such events.

The point is that natural phenomena (good or bad) is too complex to assess simply by looking at the particular. To the degree possible, one has to look at the whole. Among the many reasons this is so is because there is a big difference between statistical significance and causality, something which all scientists understand, and very few tree huggers ever seem to get. For example, is is highly significant (statistically speaking) that the sun is typically setting when the street lights go on. However, the sun does not set because the street lights went on.

In general, statistical significance (where it exists) is quite a bit easier to find than causality. In other words, you often find the case "when x happens, so does y", but figuring out why this relationship exists and what causes it can be extremely complex.  We can say that there has been some global warming observed since the Industrial Revolution, but that does not mean that industry is causing the warming.  Often, causality can just barely be established if at all. The reason it is wise to look at the larger picture (over hundreds of years, millions of acres, billions of stars) is that you get a big enough data set so that single, oddball events don't skew your conclusions about what causes what. This, by the way, is the premise of Julian Simon's book, "Hoodwinking The Nation."  As an economist, he was used to dealing with the measure of things over decades and centuries. He was horrified to see public policy being made on the basis of single events, because they are (statistically and scientifically) meaningless.

But, consider the discussion of the environment we typically see and hear.  Global Warming, for example,  has been blamed for weather that's too warm, too cold, too stormy, and so on all on the basis of a single year's weather activity (see Michaels & Balling for some examples).  The popular media trumpets the coming environmental apocalypse as if it were a matter of established fact, yet seems rarely to ask about statistical significance, correlation, or causal relationships.

Nope, as you look at the Big Picture, you realize that things are getting better not worse.  (In fact, that's true about a lot of things, not just the environment.  See, http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-364es.html)
 

Animal Rights Come First
 

One of the most commonly cited examples of environmental decay is the loss or threat of loss of particular animal species.  The physical record of the planet is quite clear - animal and plant species have been coming and going long before humans were around. This is a normal part of the ecosystem as it adapts to change. Species best adapted to planetary change survive, others don't.  It is virtually certain that more species have come and gone before us than are currently on the planet.

What is particularly maddening about this argument is that it rarely has any rational basis.  It does have an emotional basis - most of us would agree that it would be very nice to be able to see spotted owls in the future.  The problem is, that we do not stop to ask the question, "At what cost shall we preserve the spotted owl?"  Recall that there is no utopia.  Decisions involve compromise and tradeoff.  What we typically see, though, is a polarized discussion led by the Environmentalists claiming cataclysm and the only answer (of course) is to immediately decide in favor of the animal at almost any cost.

One of the most egregious examples of this nonsense is in regard to the deer populations in the US.  Recently, there was a huge hue and cry in the suburbs North of Chicago because the decision had been made to thin the deer herds in the district (see this for details).  These Children Of Disney seem unable to understand that "Bambi" was a movie, not reality... and these animals aren't even close to endangered!

This is another topic that is often flogged without looking at a big enough picture.  Is the King Crab season in Alaska lousy?  Must be those rotten fishermen who've overfished the fishery.  (Never mind the fact that the indigenous people of Alaska will tell you that there has always been a cycle to the crab fishery - when King Crab is bad, certain kinds of bottom fishing is good and vice versa.  By the way, this takes place, it is claimed, over many years.)  What is frequently lacking in the public discourse is an appeal to science and reason.  No rational person wants to see any food source depleted.  But the answer does not lie in scare tactics and hyperbole, but in serious science and research.
 

Hunting Is Evil And Bad For The Environment

It is fascinating to listen to the Environmentalists on this topic.  It is somehow OK for a wolf to kill and eat a deer, but not for a human hunter to do the same. In the more extreme Environmentalist formulations, humankind is just "virus" preying upon the rest of the beautiful, pristine planet. - This is not an exaggeration, this position is held seriously by any number of the Green Goofs. Hmm, let's see now - It is noble for a zebra to be ripped to shreds by a hunting lion and then die in agony over a period of minutes. It is, however, evil for a human hunter to feed his family by putting a bullet through the heart of an elk who dies seconds later. Who are they kidding? (And some of them wear leather shoes too!)  Once again, we see the anti-human bias of the Environmentalist peeking out on this issue, but especially here, they are desperately inconsistent:
 

• If we're just critters, not different than any other animal on the planet, why aren't we entitled to survive by our base instincts just like the lion killing the zebra?

 
• If we are more than just critters, further up to food chain, than killing them to feed ourselves seems like it ought to be OK.


What you discover, of course, is that Environmentalists opposed to hunting hold neither of these positions.  If you dig a little, it's not hard to discover that what these folks believe, (either implicitly or explicitly, it doesn't matter), is that we humans should enjoy even less privilege than a critter.  We're not special and we have no predatory rights to the other animals on the planet.  If you think this overstates the case, lookup your favorite anti hunting environmentalist, and pose the question.

Unfortunately, policy makers are taking these people seriously. As I mentioned in the previous myth, we see the deer populations swelling out of control all over the country.  These large populations often cannot be supported by the land on which they live, and the herds become ill, the animals die by inches from starvation, and in many instances humans die or get hurt when the animals, desperate for food, wander onto roads or into people's back yards. So, who's doing evil here - the hunters who have mostly been very responsible stewards of the animals or the Green Gasbags whose policies routinely cause misery and suffering for the animals they are "protecting". But, this shouldn't surprise us - these people are terrific at handing out misery to everyone and everything around them.
 

Humans Are The Cause Of Global Warming And It's A Bad Thing
 

I will be brief here because I already said it above - the Global Warming Goons are not looking at a big enough picture. It is impossible to tell (at this time) whether the warming we are  seeing is due to natural climatic change or being induced by hydrocarbon emissions. It is one of those barely measurable causalities I mentioned before. In other words, every evidence is that, human connection to Global Warming is tenuous at best, and slight at worst.

This position is one of several in the scientific mainstream.  Even the scientists who disagree and who believe warming is a big deal, concede that their models have vastly overstated the severity and impact of warming.  Moreover, a recent analysis shows that there is a deep flaw in how temperature data has been gathered for the past 20+ years.  From the perspective of scientific method, this blows a giant hole in the Global Warming Is A Really Big Problem theory of things.

That paragon of public works, Al Gore, wrote a whole book flailing away at the huge danger we are bringing upon ourselves.  What is most important, is why he wrote the book.  He did so as a matter of furthering his political interests, not, as near as I can determine, in the spirit of discovering the truth.  This is the worst kind of intellectual pornography, but it gets repeated without question by the Fourth Branch Of Government (Media) to the point of being accepted as fact. The next time someone tells you that Global Warming is bad and we're causing it, ask them for their sources - they almost surely will not have any, or the sources will be out of date, or will be scientists  with a funding agenda rather than pure science in their hearts. (For a serious and rational analysis of this topic, first burn Gore's book in the fireplace, then go read the Michaels and Balling book.)

It may turn out that we are causing Global Warming and it is bad. But in the mean time we are making public policy as if we knew this to be true. Many argue that we should do so, "just in case". (This is a terrible way to make decisions and I take it up in the last part of this document.) It is more likely to be the case that, when you look at the big picture, and evaluate all the benefits of fossil fuels and weigh them against the negatives, the net is good for planet earth and the creatures who live there.
 
 

Why Do They Do It?

So, why do these myths persist? Are Environmentalists as a group more stupid, less ethical, or less educated than the the population as a whole?  Obviously, this is not the case.  To understand "why", you have to realize that there are broadly three major forces in the world of Environmentalism. We have the Concerned Citizens being "informed" by the Professional Environmentalists typically by means of the Media.   I believe that each of these actors has their own distinct motivations for acting as they do.

By and large, the  Concerned Citizens are sincere and genuinely believe that action must be taken now or the planet they live on will be horribly despoiled, probably before lunch tomorrow.  These well intentioned folks are typically not too scientifically sophisticated so they do not have the tools to distinguish the bull from the cowpatties.  This is not meant to be condescending.  Make no mistake about it, these topics are tremendously complex.  Climate study, for example, is right on the "bleeding edge" of modern mathematics such as chaos and complexity theory.  Even a very well educated person is unlikely to have the specialized skills to be able to discriminate what's real and what's not.

The Professional Environmentalists come in many flavors, but I've seen and read at least the following kinds:
 

• Serious Scientists trying to figure out how the planet actually operates.  There are actually lots of these.  You just don't hear a lot from them, because they are quietly doing their jobs.  I admire these people because they bring us new knowledge.

 
• Funding Hungry Scientists.  In our government run research climate, Fear=Funding:  "Scare 'em, and they'll pay you to fix the problem."  A move to pure private sector funding would make these people either sing for their supper or go away.  I ignore these people because they are irrelevant.

 
• The Earth Worshippers.  As traditional religions have declined in importance in the popular culture, newer, trendier forms of theology have been invented.  It is no exaggeration to say that I have found the majority of rabid Environmentalists in this camp.  The Earth is their god, Environmentalism their theology, and Environmental Activism their search for meaning.  Like religious zealots of all stripes, the first thing to go is reason, and like religions (almost) universally they a) Want to tell everyone else what to do and b) They want the government to help them enforce it.  For the record, I am not opposed to religion (my parents were Christian missionaries).  I'm opposed to the use of  force to foist belief systems on other people.  I have contempt for these people because of their irrational intellectual method, their shrill presentation, and their membership in the We Know What's Good For You Society .

 
• The (Not So) Closet Marxists.  For some reason, the blessings of over 200 years of free markets and personal liberty seem to not ring true with some people.  Even in the face of the Soviet disaster of the 20th Century, there is a group of people who insist on believing that living in a society requires central control.  In my observation, a disturbingly large number of Environmentalists exhibit some or more of the following hallmarks of Marxism: A distrust of free markets; Antagonism to the private sector and "Big Business" especially; A belief that government "control" (i.e., force of arms) will make things better;  A belief that we have too much already and should be willing to do with much less; An entirely mechanical view of who mankind is; A belief in a net-sum-zero universe, in every discipline, natural or manmade.  I despise these people, because what they proclaim is truly evil and immensely destructive.

The Media is the least complex and most easily understood of the bunch. Contrary to all the grumbling you hear, the media are not particularly "liberal" or "conservative" - they're in it for the money.  To make money, you have to have viewers/listeners/readers.  Nothing sells better than Bad News, so part of their standard fodder is the Environmental Fear Of The Month Club.  Mostly, I tolerate these people, because our society is better with the media in it than not. I just wish more of them would get some class and some imagination and find ways to make truth telling exciting and interesting.  Any number of successful media outlets have proven that there is a societal hunger for serious reportage'.

 
 

But... Shouldn't We Be Careful, "Just In Case?"
 

People of good will often hear these arguments and say, "Just to be on the safe side, shouldn't we be careful, and stop animal despeciation, reduce fossil fuel emissions, etc.?" In other words, since we don't know everything, let's be "conservative" in how we interact with the planet.

I started this epistle with the observation that utopia is never possible. We make decisions as tradeoffs - there is no such thing as being "conservative" or "careful" without real, immediate consequence.  Let's take just one simple example, in closing.

Suppose we said, "Since causality between fossil fuels emissions and global warming and pollution, and disaster might just exist, we need to reduce fossil fuel consumption X percent." (This, by the way, is roughly the logic used by that Great Scientific Thinker, Al Gore, to try to hoodwink the US into signing the Kyoto treaty.)  Now, no one on any side of this issue questions that if "X percent" is large enough to make a difference in emissions, it is also large enough to have real and negative economic consequences. In other words, reducing fossil fuel emissions will certainly have a corresponding reduction in GDP and economic health for the nations involved.

Now, the Tree Smoochers generally are fine with this. You hear amazing things like "It's just money." and "We're talking about human life here - money is a comparatively trivial matter." I have a big newsflash for them - when you trash an economic system, you trash life itself.  So, before we go on, let's take a quick look at just what it is that "wealth" actually buys us.  (Once we've established that, it will be pretty clear why "Just In Case" strategies are deadly and destructive to human well being.)

The US is a relatively young country. It does not have thousands of years of history, tradition, and practice at its disposal. What the US  does have is an underlying political and philosophical grounding that enabled the fastest path to the greatest aggregate wealth in recorded human history. So, we'll look just at the US for a moment (noting, for the record, that other Western democracies share many of these attributes). Here's (some of) what our wealth buys us:

• The longest lifespan ever known to mankind

 
• The best medicine ever known to mankind

 
• All time lows in per capita child-bearing deaths

 
• All time lows in child mortality

 
• An overabundance of food  (The US produces enough food annually to feed the entire planet at subsistence levels, and this is done by  the lowest percentage of the population ever using less land than ever before - we aren't running out of farm land - there's plenty to be had, we just don't need it.)

 
• More per capita leisure time than ever. This means we have more time time for our families, to write a book, to paint a picture, compose some music, improve our professional skills, watch Jerry Springer...

 
• The lowest crime rates in history - if you think the US has a lot of crime, read through the history of medieval Europe, or 20th Century Russia or China and take a look at what the ruling classes alone did to the people, never mind the additional common street crime.  The only reason that crime in the US is so newsworthy is that we Americans come from an intellectual tradition that expects crime to be the exception not the rule, and we yell loudly when it is not.

 
• The ability to produce more than we consume - by a lot! The whiners of various stripes like to point their trembling fingers at the US and decry the fact that a small percentage of the globe consumes a disproportionate amount of resources. They forget that we also produce a lot more per capita than most of the rest of the world. And... the rest of the world thus benefits. When one of those Greedy Drug Companies comes up with some miracle drug, that medicine eventually makes it to other parts of the world, no matter how screwed up their political and social infrastructure might be.

 
• Wealth buys you tools, and tools make you productive. Do you think someone barely surviving in sub-Saharan Africa is seriously concerned about replanting the trees and bushes they cut down for firewood, for example? We cut a lot of trees down (to make a lot of  houses and furniture), but we also plant a lot of them as well.

 
• Unprecedented levels of personal comfort and convenience. One of  the reasons I have such unrelenting contempt for most Environmentalists is that they grouch at the rest of us about our environmental insensitivities while they themselves benefit from the very things they decry. Just once, I'd like to meet an Environmentalist who uses no technology of any kind, consumes no manufactured goods, lives off the land, and doesn't expect someone  else to pick up the tab for their life. Hint: they do not exist, at least I've never met one.

 
• Lower and lower per capita birth rates (Thomas Malthus was WRONG, WRONG, WRONG) - As people get richer they have fewer children mostly because they can afford not to - they don't have to farm to survive - this is the main reason for large families in the 3rd-world, for example. If you are deeply worried about global overpopulation, become a free market Capitalist.

 
• The ability to live comfortably in places previously thought to be uninhabitable, like the desert around Phoenix, thereby lowering the net population density. If you want to reduce population density and move society to a more traditional rural form, become a free market Capitalist.

 
• New technologies which make "live one place, work someplace else, and don't travel" possible. With the internet and wireless we are about to see an explosion in out ability to tailor our work around our personal lives, not the other way around. This is what really scares the elitist gnostics in the Sierra Club - they might have to share their Federally Funded private parks with other people who now have the time to visit! If you want to improve quality of life and find better work-life balance for everyone, become a free market Capitalist.

 
In other words, there is a direct, inevitable, and immutable correlation between wealth and Really Good Things needed by human beings.  It's not "just money" - it is the very fabric of our safety, our comfort, our productivity, and our future we are talking about...

Now, back to our example. Which one of these things shall we give up "just to be on the safe side". Shall we eliminate the backup diesel generators on the roof of the hospital? Should we  go back to manual farming and live in families with a half dozen or more children who live a short and brutish life? Should we eliminate cars, airplanes, trains, and buses thereby guaranteeing that we have to live close to where we work and return to city conditions of medieval times?

Even if we just "scale back" rather than stop these things, there is a direct and statistically predictable consequence for any such decision. Say we decided to enforce a rule that no home could be cooled below 88 F during the summer to save on energy used for air conditioning. This means that more people would die from overheating in the summer.  Our noble social experiment "just in case fossil fuel emissions might be a problem" KILLS PEOPLE. (Even though, to date, no one has established that Global Warming kills people. Quite to the contrary, Michaels & Balling show that there is evidence that Global Warming - whatever causes it - possibly reduces human mortality in several important ways.)

The Dirty Little Secret of the hardcore Environmental movement is that they know this and THEY DON'T CARE. So long as they aren't the ones overheating, and they still get free  access to Federal Parks, and they get to tell the rest of us what to do, they are quite content to let everyone else live with the miseries they want to inflict.

The great tragedy of the 21st Century is that we, the children of Reason and  Liberty, with all the manifest blessings these ideas brought us, continue to allow the Environmentalist messengers of death and misery to dictate the terms of the discussion.