Thursday, March 22, 2007

Skip this post if you're bored with the global warming topic

An anonymous commenter, responding to an earlier set of musings about global warming, asked:

2. What good does it do to deny it? Does it help reduce pollution, increase renewable energy - which would increase reliablilty in energy sources, increase understanding in sciences and education, help increase research into better cars, etc.?
In a follow-up post, I tried to make clear that the measures proposed by folks like Al Gore -- which are not necessarily the measures my commenter would support -- would do a great deal of harm, especially to people whose lives are far harder and far less blessed than the wealthy (by global standards) Westerners who make most of the noise about global warming. As an example, I pointed out that the post-haste construction of cheap and reliable fossil-fuel-powered generators throughout Africa would certainly increase mankind's carbon footprint, but would also have an immediate and dramatic positive impact on the woefully high child mortality rates and woefully low life expectancy of the millions of Africans living in electricity-deprived poverty (a particularly relevant example, I thought, since one of my commenter's examples of why we should stop global warming was how severely inconvenient (s)he had found it to have to go a couple of days without electricity).

Then either the same commenter or a different anonymous commenter gave his own tongue-in-cheek partisan-snark answer:

Answer:
Ignoring global warming is good for the republicans politics.

Easy as 1,2,3.
Not that I have any particular objection to partisan snark -- I indulge in it gleefully myself from time to time, and indeed I enjoy it so much that every so often I even snark against what my anonymous commenters probably consider to be my own side. Cheerful and affectionate mutual snarking is one of the spices of life, IMHO. (This is assuming that said commenter wasn't deadly serious, in which case one merely feels pity for the person imprisoned in such a constrained and insular mental and emotional landscape, and moves on with as little rubber-necking as possible.)

I could obviously have responded in kind, something like:

What, and fanning the flames of global warming hysteria doesn't play right into exactly what Democrats want to believe anyway?
But I think actually there's a valid point underlying the snark, albeit one that goes both ways. So I'll take that comment a bit more seriously than I was meant to and run with it a bit.

Here's the thing: I personally believe that increased meddling by the government in ordinary citizens' economic decisions, and wholesale attempts to head off the decisions of the free market, almost always have bad results (usually on people whom those pushing the increased meddling don't really give a damn about); and therefore if you're going to do that you'd better have a bloody clear case that the benefits are going to be worth the costs. The global warming crowd doesn't come close to meeting that standard -- they carry on about people who are theoretically going to suffer fifty years from now and in the process, it seems to me, ignore the very real and immediate suffering of extremely non-hypothetical people right now today. And by one of modern politics' more ludicrous ironies, they prioritize this hypothetical future suffering over the very much non-hypothetical present-day suffering in the name of -- get this -- empirical science. Um, it's pretty hard to get less empirical than to prioritize hypothetical future suffering five decades in the future over real live suffering that you can fly to Africa and touch with your own hands tomorrow -- at least, you can if you have a sufficiently sizable bank account, and if you have no more compunction about pumping jet fuel emissions into the atmosphere than Al Gore does. So, insofar as you say this "fits into Republican politics" -- well, ignoring for a moment the fact that I'm not much of a Republican, I would agree that a skeptical attitude toward the apocalyptic claims of the Al Gores and IPCC's of the world is in line with the conclusions that experience and study have led me to adopt about what is best for the ordinary common man, and what is most in line with the claims of justice. This doesn't mean that global warming isn't happening -- it just means that when a person from the Left says, "What harm does it do to try to stop global warming?" my answer is, "If you're trying to stop it by government regulation and violence, a whole helluva lot; so you're going to have to really show me something to convince me that the benefits you think you're going to get are worth the price you intend to impose."

On the other hand, if you're someone who has grown up thinking that industry is generally speaking a bad thing, and that only the intervention of noble and selfless politicians and bureaucrats keeps the selfish and power-hungry and callous Big Businessmen from making slaves of us all, and that it's a good thing for Democratic governments to impose their values on dissenting citizens (though of course it is the height of Hitleresque evil for Republicans to impose their values when the political tables are turned), and if your environmentalism has already convinced you that we should be taking public transit rather than driving cars or whatever, why then global warming is a perfect excuse to insist that the government force everybody to do the things you want them to do anyway -- but that they stubbornly keep not doing. And therefore you will feel that the bar for proof of global warming should be set very low, because even if global warming turns out not to be true it will have been a very useful mistake -- we'll all be better off for having believed this useful, even if untrue, theory.

Obviously I'm taking my turn to be cheerfully snarky (no offense or real disrespect is intended, I assure you), but there's a serious point underneath it. And perhaps I'm not being fair here even when you take the snark out. So let me ask those of you who think that global warming is a looming disaster a seriously-meant question, and I promise I will listen to your answer with an open and inquisitive mind.

Let's say I go to a random one hundred people who believe that global warming is going to bring down the Apocalypse upon us and that Action Is Called For Now Before It's Too Late, and I ask them, "What do you think we should do to stop it?"

1. Isn't it true that the answer of the overwhelming majority is going to be a list of things that Democrats have been trying to convince us we should all do anyway, ever since the Baby Boomers collectively decided that John Lennon was a wise and profound Deep Thinker?

2. Isn't it true that the list of things we're supposed to do To Save The Planet From The Wrath To Come, is a bunch of things that Republicans and libertarians think -- not from selfish calculation, but from sincerely held philosophical and empirical convictions -- are extremely destructive to the public welfare? And don't those Republicans and libertarians generally think that the destructive consequences of those policies fall disproportionately on those who can least afford them?

3. Isn't that agenda an agenda that the Democrats have pretty much failed to sell to the American people on other grounds? I mean, Hummers and Suburbans sell really well in America and mass transit (especially in the West) has hardly been eagerly embraced. So, without the rhetorical ammunition that global warming provides, wouldn't the odds that Americans would adopt the environmentalist agenda be awfully low?

It is, therefore, natural that Democrats will be eager to rush to embrace the idea that there is bearing down upon us a global apocalypse that very conveniently happens to support precisely the agenda they have tried in vain to sell to the American public. I don't for a moment mean to suggest that Democrats know that global warming is a fraud and are cynically pushing it anyway. I mean that the Democrats sincerely believe that those measures are necessary on other grounds, and therefore even if global warming isn't true, it ought to be -- and it certainly will do no harm to act as though it is. "What good does it to to deny it?" seems to me to be pretty much the same as, "What does it matter whether it's actually true or not?" And if you think everything global warming tells us to do, we oughta be doing already, I can see the temptation to react that way. (To switch to a different context, I know lots of evangelical Christians who think that it's better for a person to accept Jesus as a result of illogical and silly arguments than for him to see through the b.s. and decline to be convinced. And of course I can see their point, given the things they believe are true about what are one's choices in eternal destination and how that choice gets made.)

But it is just as reasonable -- and no more hypocritical or "political" -- for Republicans to say in their turn that the bar of demonstration needs to be set pretty damned high before we impose upon tens of millions of free citizens a set of measures likely to be very destructive of the well-being of America's and the world's least fortunate people.

But you can call principled disagreement with your own views "Republican politics" if it makes you feel better or if you like teasing me. It won't hurt my feelings in the slightest.

4 Comments:

At 9:13 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I am going to start by saying that your free markets have failed the poor and starving in Africa. What has big business done for them? Nothing, nada, nunca. It is not for profit groups, religious groups, and other groups that really aren't in it for the money that are doing something about it.

Then I am going to ask a clarifying question back.

Do you really think that the only solution to Africa's problem is building a centralized power infrastructure based on 1950s technology of coal and oil?

Aren't there really many alternatives to providing power to communities that don't have it? Why do you say that the only solution is fossil fuels?

 
At 10:05 PM, Blogger Ken Pierce said...

[chuckling] You aren't REALLY trying to argue that Africa -- a continent that has suffered from colonial exploitation and then became even WORSE off under native dictators, a continent that still has a slave trade, a continent that is wracked by never-ending chaos and genocide (not much is more of the antithesis of a free market than hacking a village full of people to death with machetes) -- is a land of free markets, are you? Or that the wretchedness of Africa is to be laid at the door of big business????

I suppose you could be trying to say that big cartels like DeBeers have exploited the African people. But then it that case it is precisely because those particular big businesses have managed to circumvent the free market by getting African governments to collude with them in brutally and callously enforcing by violence the inviolability of those businesses' monopolies; without the support of corrupt governments those monopolies could not have been maintained. Blaming the actions of those businesses on the free market makes about as much logical sense as...hmm, I can't seem to find an adequate simile.

Africa is an absolute textbook of the way in which the absence of a genuinely free market leads to poverty in the very midst of abundant natural resources. If I say, "Allowing people to use violence to deprive others of the right to make their own choices, even when the violence is committed by a government, leads to misery," and you say, "Well, here's a counterexample: look at Africa" -- I mean, it's hard imagine a sequitur more non than that.

Now, as to your second point:

Do you really think that the only solution to Africa's problem is building a centralized power infrastructure based on 1950s technology of coal and oil?

Not at all. Considering how much uranium there is in Africa, I think nuclear power might well be an even better idea.

You seem to me not to grasp the single most fundamental of all principles of economics: you can't have everything. And therefore the more you pay for one particular thing you need, the more other things you have to go without. Furthermore, the poorer you are, the fewer things you can have, and the more critical it is not to pay more than you have to for one necessity, lest you have nothing left with which to procure the other necessities. If you force poor people to pay an unnecessarily high price for one necessity, you ipso facto deprive them of other things that you yourself would never consider going without.

I don't care whether oil or gas generation is a "1950's" technology. Frankly, I haven't the slightest interest in being up-to-date; I'm interested in engineering and economic efficiency. My interests are far more pragmatic: burning fossil fuels is by far the most efficient way to generate power in areas of the world where hydroelectric power is not feasible, except for nuclear generation. Could you give everybody in Africa a solar panel? Sure, if you were infinitely wealthy. But Africa isn't infinitely wealthy. It's brutally poor. And the generation of electricity from fossil fuels absolutely spanks solar or wind power in terms of efficiency -- that is to say, in terms of how much it costs to produce each kilowatt of electricity. To put it in its crudest terms: people from Africa have so many unmet needs that they can hardly imagine a world in which a person has the luxury of feeling unacceptably inconvenienced by a 48-hour power failure, or where a person has nothing more pressing to worry about than whether the sightseeing he and his family did on their summer vacation was facilitated by adequate air clarity. If you tell them that they have to use solar or wind power rather than fossil fuels to generate their electricity, then you are telling them that they have to forfeit all the necessities (modern drugs, spare clothing, a refrigerator) that they could have bought with that extra money you forced them to spend. (I suspect, by the way, that you consider that a clear sign of our government's failure is how much medical care costs here; you might compare the health care that even poor people in America get to the health care that the average inhabitant of Kenya or Rwanda or Nairobi gets.)

Solar power and wind power are luxuries for rich countries. That, not the decade in which the technology was first developed, is the relevant factor here. I mean, to take an example from a different field: sure, the space shuttle is fancier and more up-to-date technology than old-fashioned, simple rockets; but that doesn't change the fact that it was a REALLY stupid idea to build the space shuttles -- because the 1960's Saturn technology was much more efficient and effective, and incomparably safer, than the space shuttle. We'd be much farther along in our space program, and would have gotten far more for our money, if we hadn't gone down the snazzy, up-to-date, modern-technology dead-end of the space shuttle. Plus we wouldn't have as many unnecessarily dead astronauts.

And if you insist on making Africa incur the extra expense of using solar and wind rather than fossil fuels, then you'll have a bunch of unnecessarily dead Africans. Because -- as I feel I have to point out again -- Africa, unlike America (where the most widespread health problem among our "poor" is obesity), is POOR.

Now, if you want to propose that we put lots of nuclear power plants in Africa, why then I'll give you the thumbs-up on that. After all, Africa has lots of uranium, too; and nuclear power generation is about as much more efficient than fossil-fuel generation as the latter is more efficient than solar and wind power. Plus nuclear power doesn't emit carbon. So on that we can be allies: get those nuclear power plants built!

And in the meantime: the sooner we can get Wal-Marts installed throughout Africa, the better off Africa's poor will be. (Wal-Mart has done more for America's poor than all the government poverty programs and all the charity groups in the world since William Wilberforce's anti-slavery campaigns.) But of course that means we first have to make sure that African dictators won't nationalize Wal-Mart's African assets, or even tax away all of Wal-Mart's profits, as soon as the assets get built -- which is to say, if you want the benefits of Wal-Mart then you have to have free markets.

Long answer to short questions; I apologize, but the coffee shop is about to close and I don't have time to go back and cut out the fat. Sorry about that, really and truly.

 
At 12:18 AM, Blogger Ken Pierce said...

By the way, my point about Big Businessmen was NOT to say that big businessmen are not often evil, greedy, selfish, and willing to exploit others if given the opportunity. I entirely agree. To repeat a phrase I used not long ago in a different context, the only thing I think you have wrong is your scope: people, not just businessmen, are generally evil, greedy, selfish, and willing to exploit others if given the opportunity. I don't think you're being silly to have a low opinion of Big Businessmen. I just think you're silly if you don't have an equally low opinion of politicians, bureaucrats, and United Nations careerists. And if I'm going to turn a bunch of greedy people who are in it for themselves loose on Africa, I'd rather send them a bunch of foreign businessmen who are constrained by the profit motive within a free market, than send them a bunch of foreign politicians and bureaucrats who are constrained only by the putative wisdom and generosity of those on whose gullibility demagogues have, since the earliest democracies, always feasted, and who run no risk of personally sharing any bad consequences that Africa's poor might suffer due to said politicians' and bureaucrats' folly. At least stupid and incompetent businessmen usually go out of business. Stupid and incompetent politicans, on the other hand...well, if I may muse idly for a moment, I wonder what is your opinion of Dubya, or, say, Trent Lott?

 
At 10:33 AM, Blogger Jim r said...

Kenny, meet Arnie....

http://arniesresponse.blogspot.com/

 

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