April 22nd - Lenin's birthday - is also Earth Day, a day to ponder what we hard-hearted right-wingers regard as the ultimate Milf. It was, oddly enough, thinking about eco-alarmism that got me started on the road to America Alone. This National Post column is from 2002:
In 1968, in his best-selling book The Population Bomb, scientist Paul Ehrlich declared: "In the 1970s the world will undergo famines - hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death."
In 1972, in their influential landmark study The Limits to Growth, the Club of Rome announced that the world would run out of gold by 1981, of mercury by 1985, tin by 1987, zinc by 1990, petroleum by 1992, and copper, lead, and gas by 1993.
In 1977, Jimmy Carter, President of the United States incredible as it may seem, confidently predicted that "we could use up all of the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade."
Now, in 2002, with enough oil for a century and a half, the planet awash in cut-price minerals, and less global famine, starvation and malnutrition than ever before, the end of the world has had to be rescheduled. The latest estimated time of arrival for the apocalypse is 2032. Last week, the United Nations Global Environmental Outlook predicted "the destruction of 70% of the natural world in 30 years, mass extinction of species, and the collapse of human society in many countries ... More than half the world will be afflicted by water shortages, with 95% of people in the Middle East with severe problems ... 25% of all species of mammals and 10% of birds will be extinct ..." Etc., etc., for 450 pages. But let's cut to the chase: As The Guardian's headline writer put it, "Unless We Change Our Ways, The World Faces Disaster."
Ah, yes. The end of the world's nighness is endlessly deferred but the blame rests where it always has. With us - with what the UN calls "the current 'markets first' approach." Klaus Toepfer, the UN Environment Program executive director, believes that "under the 'markets first' scenario the environment and humans did not fare well."
Really? The "markets first" approach was notable by its absence in, say, Eastern Europe, where government regulation of every single aspect of life resulted in environmental devastation beyond the wildest fantasies of the sinister Bush-Cheney-Enron axis of excess. Fortunately in Communist Romania there was very little clear-cut logging because Ceausescu had the tree. But in Iraq, the report points out, 30% of arable land has had to be abandoned because of bad irrigation practices. Those crazy speculators on the Baghdad Stock Exchange with their Thatcherite economics will kill you every time, eh?
But what's this? "In richer countries water and air pollution is down, species have been restored to the wild, and forests are increasing in size." So the environment's better in rich countries? Rich countries with ... market economies?
Thirty years after the first doom-mongering eco-confab in Stockholm, it should be obvious even to the UN frequent-flyer crowd: Markets aren't the problem, but the solution to the problem. The best way to clean up the neighbourhood is to make people wealthier. To do that, you need free markets, democracy, the rule of law and public accountability. None of those things exist in the Middle East, which is the real reason they'll be taking communal showers once a month in 2032.
Since 1970, when the great northern forest was being felled to print Paul Ehrlich best-sellers, the U.S. economy has swollen by 150%; automobile traffic has increased by 143%; and energy consumption has grown 45%.
During this same period, air pollutants have declined by 29%, toxic emissions by 48.5%, sulphur dioxide levels by 65.3%, and airborne lead by 97.3%. For anywhere other than Antarctica and a few sparsely inhabited islands, the first condition for a healthy environment is a strong economy. President Carter and the other apocalyptic prognosticators of the Seventies made a simple mistake: In their predictions about natural resources, they failed to take into account the natural resourcefulness of the market. The government regulates problems, but the market solves them. So if, as Kyoto does, you seek to punish capitalism in the West and restrict it in the developing world, you'll pretty much guarantee a poorer, dirtier, unhealthier planet.
I'd like to be an "environmentalist," really I would. I spend quite a bit of my time in the environment and I'm rather fond of it. But these days "environmentalism" is mostly unrelated to the environment: It's a cult, and, like most cults, heavy on ostentatious displays of self-denial, perfectly encapsulated by the time-consuming rituals of "recycling," an activity of no discernible benefit other than as a communal profession of faith.
Think globally, act locally, they say. But, in fact, environmentalists, like most cultists, are crippled by tunnel vision. "As long as we believe that our biggest threat is terrorism, we will never be truly prepared," wrote Carl Russell of Bethel, Vermont, to The Valley News after September 11th. "Humans are behaving like all living organisms whose habitat becomes depleted of necessary resources. Global warming, pollution, soil depletion, plant and animal extinction etc., are all signs of environmental degradation, too complex for most of us to agree on, let alone find solutions to. Our subconscious reflex to this lack of control is anxiety. Anger, intolerance and violence, however inappropriate, are common expressions of anxiety." Osama bin Laden might have thought he was ordering his boys into action because he hates America, but subconsciously he was merely acting out, however inappropriately, his anxieties about plant extinction.
"We are going through a maturing process for the human species, and for the Earth," concluded Mr. Russell. "Human lives have been lost and devastated, but our connections go deeper than that. Think of our Earth." So September 11 was about soil depletion? Wow. That's what I call a root cause.
In fact, the eco-cultists and the Islamofascists share the same Year Zero: 1492, the year not just of the "tragedy of Andalucia" - the fall of Moorish Spain that Osama's always boring on about -- but also of the most cataclysmic setback for the global environment. As Kenneth Branagh solemnly intoned, narrating the documentary The Last Show On Earth, "It was Columbus, 500 years ago, who heralded the modern age of discovery and environmental destruction." Hmm. Remind me again what was it he discovered.
And who knows what the Columbuses of tomorrow are planning to wreck? This weekend, Professor Rick Steiner proposed that the moon be designated a UN World Heritage Site, even though, technically, it's out of this world. But the point is: Think globally, act lunarly. As far as I know, there's not a lot of development planned for up there, though a British men's magazine recently announced plans to screen a giant image of Jennifer Lopez's bottom on the surface of the moon. J. Lo's butt would be visible from anywhere on earth without a telescope. So what's new? But, if Professor Steiner has his way, this sort of commercial exploitation would be forbidden. As Nick Denton commented on his Web site, "The moon is an airless, lifeless, pockmarked ball of rock. I would far rather industrial development took place off-planet, or in Antarctica, for that matter. English meadows, or California redwood forests, are far more valuable to me than a wasteland that most human beings will never visit. And, if anyone is worried that development will spoil the view of the full moon, we can always put the industrial zone on the far side."
Well, here's my prediction for 2032: Jean Chretien will be the oldest serving Prime Minister in Commonwealth history. Other than that, I'm inclined to be cautious. But, at the risk of scaremongering, let me say this: unless we change our ways the world faces a future ... where things look pretty darn good. If we change our ways along the lines advocated by the UN, all bets are off. As the great Australian wag Tim Blair puts it, "If the UN's doomsday scenario turns out to be correct, I'll donate every single thing I own in 2032 to the UN and Secretary-General Chelsea Clinton-Mathers. If the UN turns out to be wrong - man, what are the odds of that? - I get France. Deal, Kofi?"
Personally, I'm inclined to be more charitable. Looking back on all the doomsday extrapolations of 30 years ago, the economists Charles Maurice and Charles Smithson pointed out that, if you were to extrapolate from 1970s publishing trends, there would now be 14 million different doomsday books, or more than half as many books as in the entire Library of Congress. But there aren't. The Seventies doomsday book went the way of the trolley car and the buggy whip. So we should cherish these 450 pages of apocalyptic UN eco-guff. Like the peregrine falcon, despite all the odds, the doomsday book is still hanging in there.
Well, I've changed my mind a bit since that breezy penultimate paragraph: The world faces a future that looks pretty darn bad - not for any of the reasons touted by the eco-crowd but by the one problem no progressive soul gives a thought to: the self-extinction of the civilization that's done most for human progress and prosperity. As for the climate-change cult, my sense is that it's waning. But not before having done an awful amount of damage. Here's my column from Earth Day last year:
Last week, Time magazine featured on its cover the iconic photograph of the U.S. Marine Corps raising the flag on Iwo Jima. But with one difference: The flag has been replaced by a tree. The managing editor of Time, Rick Stengel, was very pleased with the lads in graphics for cooking up this cute image and was all over the TV sofas talking up this ingenious visual shorthand for what he regards as the greatest challenge facing mankind: “How To Win The War On Global Warming.”
Where to begin? For the last ten years, we have, in fact, been not warming but slightly cooling, which is why the eco-warriors have adopted the all-purpose bogeyman of “climate change.” But let’s take it that the editors of Time are referring not to the century we live in but the previous one, when there was a measurable rise of temperature of approximately one degree. That’s the “war”: one degree.
If the tree-raising is Iwo Jima, a one-degree increase isn’t exactly Pearl Harbor. But General Stengel wants us to engage in preemptive war. The editors of Time would be the first to deplore such saber-rattling applied to, say, Iran’s nuclear program, but it has become the habit of progressive opinion to appropriate the language of war for everything but actual war.
So let’s cut to the tree. In my corner of New Hampshire, we have more trees than we did a hundred or two hundred years ago. My town is over 90 percent forested. Any more trees and I’d have to hack my way through the undergrowth to get to my copy of Time magazine on the coffee table. Likewise Vermont, where not so long ago in St Albans I found myself stuck behind a Hillary supporter driving a Granolamobile bearing the bumper sticker “TO SAVE A TREE REMOVE A BUSH.” Very funny. And even funnier when you consider that on that stretch of Route Seven there’s nothing to see north, south, east, or west but maple, hemlock, birch, pine, you name it. It’s on every measure other than tree cover that Vermont’s kaput.
So where exactly do Time magazine’s generals want to plant their tree? Presumably, as in Iwo Jima, on foreign soil. It’s all these third-world types monkeying around with their rain forests who decline to share the sophisticated Euro-American reverence for the tree. In the Time iconography, the tree is Old Glory and it’s a flag of eco-colonialism.
And which obscure island has it been planted on? In Haiti, the Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis was removed from office on April 12. Insofar as history will recall him at all, he may have the distinction of being the first head of government to fall victim to “global warming” — or, at any rate, the “war on global warming” that Time magazine is gung-ho for. At least five people have been killed in food riots in Port-au-Prince. Prices have risen 40 percent since last summer and, as Deroy Murdock reported, some citizens are now subsisting on biscuits made from salt, vegetable oil and (mmmm) dirt. Dirt cookies: Nutritious, tasty, and affordable? Well, one out of three ain’t bad.
Unlike “global warming,” food rioting is a planet-wide phenomenon, from Indonesia to Pakistan to Ivory Coast to the tortilla rampages in Mexico and even pasta protests in Italy.
So what happened?
Well, Western governments listened to the eco-warriors, and introduced some of the “wartime measures” they’ve been urging. The EU decreed that 5.75 percent of petrol and diesel must come from “biofuels” by 2010, rising to 10 percent by 2020. The U.S. added to its 51 cents-per-gallon ethanol subsidy by mandating a five-fold increase in “biofuels” production by 2022.
The result is that big government accomplished at a stroke what the free market could never have done: They turned the food supply into a subsidiary of the energy industry. When you divert 28 percent of U.S. grain into fuel production, and when you artificially make its value as fuel higher than its value as food, why be surprised that you’ve suddenly got less to eat? Or, to be more precise, it’s not “you” who’s got less to eat but those starving peasants in distant lands you claim to care so much about.
Heigh-ho. In the greater scheme of things, a few dead natives keeled over with distended bellies is a small price to pay for saving the planet, right? Except that turning food into fuel does nothing for the planet in the first place. That tree the U.S. Marines are raising on Iwo Jima was most likely cut down to make way for an ethanol-producing corn field: Researchers at Princeton calculate that to date the “carbon debt” created by the biofuels arboricide will take 167 years to reverse.
The biofuels debacle is global warm-mongering in a nutshell: The first victims of poseur environmentalism will always be developing countries. In order for you to put biofuel in your Prius and feel good about yourself for no reason, real actual people in faraway places have to starve to death. On April 15, the Independent, the impeccably progressive British newspaper, editorialized: “The production of biofuel is devastating huge swathes of the world’s environment. So why on earth is the Government forcing us to use more of it?”
You want the short answer? Because the government made the mistake of listening to fellows like you. Here’s the self-same Independent in November 2005:
At last, some refreshing signs of intelligent thinking on climate change are coming out of Whitehall. The Environment minister, Elliot Morley, reveals today in an interview with this newspaper that the Government is drawing up plans to impose a ‘biofuel obligation’ on oil companies... This has the potential to be the biggest green innovation in the British petrol market since the introduction of unleaded petrol…
Etc. It’s not the environmental movement’s chickenfeedhawks who’ll have to reap what they demand must be sown, but we should be in no doubt about where to place the blame — on the bullying activists and their media cheerleaders and weathervane politicians who insist that the “science” is “settled” and that those who query whether there’s any crisis are (in the designation of the strikingly non-emaciated Al Gore) “denialists.” All three presidential candidates have drunk the environmental kool-ethanol and are committed to Big Government solutions. But, as the Independent’s whiplash-inducing U-turn confirms, the eco-scolds are under no such obligation to consistency. Finger-in-the-wind politicians shouldn’t be surprised to find that gentle breeze is from the media wind turbine and it’s just sliced your finger off.
Whether or not there’s very slight global cooling or very slight global warming, there’s no need for a “war” on either, no rationale for loosing a plague of eco-locusts on the food supply. So why be surprised that totalitarian solutions to mythical problems wind up causing real devastation? As for Time’s tree, by all means put it up: It helps block out the view of starving peasants on the far horizon.
from The New York Sun, April 28th 2008
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