Category Archives: Environment

The One Minute Case Against Environmentalism

Environmentalism versus humanity

The premise behind the environmentalist movement is the belief that nature untouched by human influence has inherent moral value independently of its benefit to mankind, and therefore the influence of man, and especially that of industrial civilization, is immoral. What leading environmentalists oppose is not the threat to human life posed by environmental destruction, but man’s exploitation of nature to improve its ability to sustain human life.

In the words of popular environmentalist Bill McKibben, “The problem is that nature, the independent force that has surrounded us since our earliest days, cannot coexist with our numbers and our habits. We may well be able to create a world that can support our numbers and our habits, but it will be an artificial world. . . .” The environmentalist attack on the “artificial” extends to all human manipulation of the environment. While few advocates of environmentalism recognize it as such, the ultimate goal of the environmentalist movement is the total destruction of industrial civilization, and the vast majority of the human race whose existence is made possible by it.

Environmentalism versus the mind

Human beings have evolved over millions of years to survive by using their reasoning mind. There is nothing “unnatural” about this. It is human nature to think and use technology to enrich our lives. We are as much a part of the “natural world” as any other creature. Instead of claws, fangs, or the heightened senses of animals, we have our minds and hands.The difference between our comfortable lives and the short, dangerous, and miserable existence that our ancestors eked out in trees, caves, and caverns is continually made possible by application of reason to the problem of survival.

Shackling man’s mind by preventing him from applying it to improve his condition would ultimately lead to our extinction. The genetic and biochemical tools which made the Green Revolution possible feed billions of people today. Farming machinery feeds billions more. Undoing the industrial revolution would eliminate the vast majority of productivity improvements in agricultural production and distribution. To the extent that we cripple technology, we cripple our ability to exist as human beings.

Capitalism is the solution to environmental destruction

The usual response to environmental destruction is a call for more government controls of industry. However it is the lack of property rights, not capitalism which is responsible for environmental destruction, as the history of socialist states aptly demonstrates.1

According to Roy Cordato2,

Environmental problems occur because property rights, a requirement of free markets, are not being identified or enforced. Problems of air, river, and ocean pollution are all due to a lack of private property rights and/or protection. Since clarifying and enforcing property rights is the basic function of government in a free society, environmental problems are an example of government failure, not market failure.

In a free society, environmental problems should be viewed in terms of how they impinge on human liberty. Questions should focus on how and why one person’s use of resources might interfere with the planning and the decision making abilities of others. Since, legitimately, people can only make plans and decisions with respect to resources that they have “rights” to, environmentalism that has human wellbeing as the focus of its analysis, must center on property rights.

Even if some environmental dangers are real, we would be much better equipped to deal with them by embracing prosperity and technological progress than surrendering to the indisputable danger of nature to those who give up their primary means of survival. As Ayn Rand put it,3

City smog and filthy rivers are not good for men (though they are not the kind of danger that the ecological panic-mongers proclaim them to be). This is a scientific, technological problem—not a political one—and it can be solved only by technology. Even if smog were a risk to human life, we must remember that life in nature, without technology, is whole-sale death.

If a court can make a definitive causal connection between an injured party and a party responsible for a pollutant, it should demand compensation of harms. If it cannot find a responsible party guilty, but punishes an innocent party, it punishes man for his nature as a productive, industrial being and thus makes human life impossible.

References:

  1. Thomas J. DiLorenzo. “Why Socialism Causes Pollution” The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty, March 1992.
  2. Roy E. Cordato. “Market Based Environmentalism vs. the Free Market” June 4, 1999
  3. Ayn Rand. “The Anti-Industrial Revolution,” Return of the Primitive, 282. 1971

Further reading:

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The One Minute Case Against Malthusianism

The origin of apocalyptic overpopulation theory

In his 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population, Thomas Malthus argued that the growth in the food supply is linear, whereas the growth in the population rate is exponential. Whenever the population exceeds the food supply, social turmoil erupts until drastic checks such as famines, wars, and epidemics lowered populations down to sustainable levels. The only way to avoid periodic disaster is to implement strict population controls, which have historically included both voluntary restraints, as well as coercive measures such as limits on family size and mass sterilization of “undesirable groups.”

Malthus was wrong

Malthus predicted a population crash by the middle of the 19th century. In reality, living standards have increased over sixty times since 1820 despite a tripling of the European population in the 18th century.1 Meanwhile, family sizes fell naturally without the need for coercive measures.
Nevertheless, modern Malthusians perpetually extend the date of the inevitable apocalypse to the near future. Faced with the astounding growth of agricultural yields which virtually eliminated hunger in the West, environmentalists are continually discovering new resources to run out of, whether fossil fuels, metals, land, or water.
The discrepancy is explained by two errors in the Malthusian model: the population growth rate is not exponential, while the potential growth in human productivity is.

Family size is subject to individual cost/benefit analysis.

The reason for the natural decline in population growth rates is that children are much more expensive in industrial countries. Increasing productivity levels in the developed world mean higher standards of living, lower child mortality, and a higher opportunity cost of having children. Child labor is no longer necessary for families to survive, and children have become expensive in terms of both direct expenses and lost economic opportunities for parents. Rather than working in farms or factories to keep younger siblings alive, a smaller number of kids can take care of parents in old age. Welfare programs for seniors have actually tipped the balance below equilibrium levels in most developed nations.

Capitalism allows unlimited productivity improvements

Malthusian scenarios assume that the resources available to meet human needs are fixed — that each new human being requires a fixed amount of land, metal, and fossil fuels to live. But human values are ever-shifting, and so are the means to provide those values. Each baby born not only creates new demand for the products of civilization, but also provides new resources and insight for meeting those needs.

Our living standards are rising because we are finding more efficient ways to harvest existing resources, and improving the technology to produce the goods we consume. We are also exploiting new resources to create those goods. Whale oil, rubber trees, and native forests for paper and fuel have been replaced by petroleum, plastics, tree farms, and coal. This is possible because a free society allows a growing capital and knowledge base to be multiplied by entrepreneurs who find new methods to improve human life, resulting an exponential growth in wealth.

Malthus’s model applies to animals and collectivists

The Malthusian population model is not entirely without merit. Charles Darwin realized that it applies to the animal kingdom because animals lack the capacity to volitionally control reproductive rates, and their productivity is fixed by biology. Whereas humans adopt to environmental changes, animal populations can crash rapidly when the carrying capacity of their environment changes.

Human society experiences the same pattern in preindustrial and totalitarian societies. Whether it is the crushing mold of tradition or stagnant socialist states, when the potential of human beings to apply their mind to improve their quality of life is stifled, humans are reduced to survival on the animal level, and suffer similar cycles of periodic famines.

Further reading:

  • Our Techno-Utopian Future: Fallacies and Predictions
  • The Malthusian Trap by Benjamin Marks
  • Wikipedia: Thomas Malthus
  • Andrew Bernstein: Global Capitalism: The Solution to World Oppression and Poverty

References:

  1. Angus Maddison, Phases of Capitalist Development (New York: Oxford University

Press, 1982), pp. 4-7.

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The One Minute Case Against Global Warming Alarmism

The scientific theory of anthropogenic climate change should not be confused with global warming alarmism — the advocacy of drastic political action as a response.

A consideration of both the costs and benefits a warmer world as well as the costs of vast controls on industrial civilization, in addition to the uncertainty of climate and economic predictions suggest that humanity should adapt to a changing climate instead.

Earth’s climate is complex and constantly changing

Earth’s climate is an enormously complex system with thousands of variables in constant flux. Natural cycles of warming and cooling have existed as long as earth has had a climate. We only began to make large-scale measurements in the last 100 years, so this system is poorly understood.

Attempts to manipulate climate are limited by the complexity and inertia of the system. Dr. James Hansen of NASA, the father of the global warming theory, estimates the Kyoto protocol would only affect temperatures by .13°C by 2100, and it would take 30 Kyotos to have an “acceptable” impact on climate change. “Should a catastrophic scenario prove correct”, states Dr. Richard Lindzen, an MIT climate expert, “Kyoto will not prevent it.”

No single indicator can provide proof of a global change. The thinning of the Greenland ice sheet may be due to human causes, natural variations in snowfall, changes in ocean currents, a long-term warming of the planet since the transition from the last glacial period, continued warming since the end of the Little Ice Age following the Medieval Warm Period, or all of the above.

Politicians and the media are eager to embrace the latest crisis

Climate changes during the twentieth century were often accompanied by widespread panic, only to be quickly forgotten when dire predictions failed to materialize. Intellectuals, the media, and political institutions find it profitable to capitalize on emergencies which focus public attention on the issues they champion. Often their predictions go far beyond the most alarmist of scientific bodies. Science writer David Appell, who has written for such publications as the New Scientist and Scientific American believes that global warming will “threaten fundamental food and water sources. It would lead to displacement of billions of people and huge waves of refugees, spawn terrorism and topple governments, spread disease across the globe.” It would be “would be chaos by any measure, far greater even than the sum total of chaos of the global wars of the 20th century.” This doomsday scenario hardly follows from the hesitant estimates of a 1.1 to 6.4°C temperature rise and 18 to 59 cm sea level rise by 2100 predicted in 2007 by the IPCC.

Attempts to halt climate change are not only costly and futile, but ignore the benefits of a warmer climate

Adapting to a warmer climate has many costs, but many benefits as well. According to NASA satellite data, higher levels of CO2 have dramatically increased biomass production and biodiversity worldwide. Global warming may cause Africa to become more arid, but enormous territories in Siberia and Canada might finally be open to settlement, and new resources and shipping routes will become available.

The focus of environmental movements is usually on reversing anthropogenic causes of ecological change. Such attempts are not only futile, but ignore the large scale economic destruction caused by environmental restrictions on human productivity. Free societies and technological innovation have allowed human ingenuity bring about vast improvements in human life. This change has almost doubled the life expectancy and quadrupled the standard of living in the developed world – and is now transforming the developing world. Disrupting the global economy would have a snowball effect on future living standards, as well as retard future technologies will help us adapt to a constantly changing world.

A genuine cost-benefit analysis should weight the costs of wealth destruction and long term inhibition of technological progress against the highly uncertain costs of adjusting to environmental changes. Human beings have never passively resigned themselves to environmental changes, but adapted their society to make optimal use of their environment.

Wealth, technology, and human ingenuity are our most powerful tools for dealing with change

Even the most alarmist of scientists generally agree that there is little humanity can do to influence the global climate for many decades, even if we wrecked an industrial civilization that has allowed billions of people to leave immeasurably longer and better lives. Our resources would be far better spent creating innovative technology that allows us to make the best of a constantly changing climate than crippling industrial civilization (our best tool for dealing with a constantly changing world) in a futile attempt to stop climate change.

Further reading:

  • U.S. Senator James M. Inhofe: The Facts and Science of Climate Change
  • Global Warming on the Objectivism Wiki
  • Channel 4: The Great Global Warming Swindle (2007)
  • CBC:”Doomsday Called Off”: about; Google video
  • CNN: Exposed: The Climate of Fear
  • CEI: Inconvenient Truths for Al Gore
  • Monte Hieb: Global Warming: A closer look at the numbers
  • R. Warren Anderson: “Journalists have warned of climate change for 100 years, but can’t decide weather we face an ice age or warming “
  • GlobalWarming.org
  • “Five strategies for debating global warming and environmentalism” by David Veksler
  • Environmentalism.com: On “Global Warming”

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