Give Me Liberty

We have now celebrated our 39th Earth Day, and we’re still waiting for the environmental disaster. What happened? Most of us were supposed to have starved to death by now, died from air pollution, or frozen in the Ice Age. As predicted, the population has increased, and industrial output has increased. But instead of starvaton, we’re worried about obesity. Air pollution is still a problem in the Third World, but only due to rapid economic growth and rising standards of living. And instead of an Ice Age, we now obsess about global warming.

Most people alive today weren’t even born for the first Earth Day. For those of us who were, hopefully we’ve matured enough to take claims of impending disaster with a grain of salt. After all, we’ve survived two nuclear disasters, at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, which together killed fewer people (about 50) than die in traffic accidents every day in America. (Michael Crichton has some interesting observations here.)

For those who are younger and smarter than we are, perhaps a history lesson would be helpful. The Washington Policy Center has compiled an interesting list of predictions made around the first Earth Day. With only minor wording changes, many of them could be mistaken for predictions being made today about the supposed impact of global warming. Reflecting on those, hopefully we’ll all think twice before blindly demanding that governments around the world “do something”. Especially if those actions will likely have minimal impact on the climate, but do major damage to the economy.

Here is a sample of some of the items compiled.

• “…civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind,” biologist George Wald, Harvard University, April 19, 1970.

Okay, how about 40 years?

• By 1995, “…somewhere between 75 and 85 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.” Sen. Gaylord Nelson, quoting Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, Look magazine, April 1970.

But by 2008, the polar bear population will have increased five-fold.

• “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich, interview in Mademoiselle magazine, April 1970.

Obviously obesity should never be a problem.

So next time you read a terrifying headline, remain calm. Such terrifying predictions have been around for hundreds of years, and hundreds of years from now, our gullible offspring will still be around to worry needlessly about them.

The global warming hysteria is truly amazing to anyone who steps back and views the issue objectively. We all learned in childhood that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”, but when did it become mandatory that the government “do something” about every issue that comes along? I’m sure most of us have heard the chain of causation whereby a single butterfly flapping its wings over the Rocky Mountains might trigger a hurricane over the Atlantic. It’s an interesting mental exercise, but I doubt that anyone would seriously suggest government regulation of wing flapping by every butterfly in the world. Far fewer resources would be much better spent preparing for the inevitable hurricanes which would strike even if butterflies were eradicated. But this is America. We let our federal government provide subsidized flood insurance in places where no private insurance company would write coverage, encouraging people to build in harm’s way and maximizing damage when the inevitable occurs.

Getting back to global warming, many people are convinced that the government must “do something” about that too. The big villain is supposedly carbon dioxide, and we are supposed to “cut emissions” regardless of the economic cost. One recent study concluded that if we reduced emissions to ZERO, it would reduce global warming by a fraction of one degree Fahrenheit over the next hundred years. The people calling for such drastic reductions have no idea what they are asking for. We are already paying dramatically higher prices for food and energy, but that is nothing compared to what they are asking for. Zero emissions would essentially return the economy to living in caves, BEFORE the discovery of fire. If we do that, we’ll need a lot more global warming!

Damaging the economy to “do something” is not just giving up our SUVs, or drinking fewer lattes at Starbucks. We are condemning hundreds of millions of the world’s poorest people, those most at risk of the predicted dire consequences of warming, to remaining in abject poverty and unable to adapt if any of those predictions actually come true. Is that the socially responsible thing to do?

Objective risk-benefit analysis is almost completely lacking from the entire debate. Skeptics are vilified as flat earthers, Holocaust deniers, or believers in the stork bringing babies. Projected consequences are grossly exaggerated, while the economic costs are minimized. Even Al Gore and the IPCC admit that the “20 foot sea level rises” of An Inconvenient Truth are well beyond the realm of probability. Yet they persist, apparently in the belief that people must be terrified into demanding action.

But why? What is it about global warming that exempts it from rational, factual discussion and resolution? Could it be - a hoax? Most people with facts on their side welcome debate. Certainly on an issue as serious as they say this is, we need all of the ideas and input that we can get. Yet the alarmists want no part of debate. Apparently they think they not only have all of the facts, they have all of the solutions. Even if I had no skepticism on the science, I would have to be skeptical of anybody who thinks that they know how to control the weather. Not even the weatherman is that arrogant!

Why must we use “the environment” to justify every argument under the sun? The New York Times invoked the environment this morning to argue against the border fence to stop “illegal” immigration. (Editorial, Michael Chertoff’s Insult) I happen to oppose the fence, because I believe in open borders. I believe that sovereignty of the individual trumps national sovereignty. If you want a “liberal” argument, the fence is racist. And experience has shown that fences keep more “illegals” in than out. So why does the NYT have to resort to the environment? I’ve been to the Mexican border. It runs through some of the most desolate wasteland in the world. Frankly, an atomic bomb along most of it wouldn’t constitute an “environmental disaster”. So why can’t we just debate the issue on its merits? The environment is not a justification for immigration any more than global warming is a justification for fascism (Al Gore notwithstanding).

Just as the great global warming hoax appears to be unraveling (and I watch the snow piling up outside on the second day of Spring), the business community decides to jump on the bandwagon. Did you read about the Wall Street Journal conference last week? From what I’ve read, it sounded like hundreds of environmentalists and big business types getting together to figure out how to use big government to milk this fraud for all it’s worth.

The mainstream business community almost certainly realizes that the facts do not justify the catastrophic economic consequences being proposed. Yet some of them are all too willing to exploit the situation, in hopes of profiting from gullible politicians and government mismanagement. I spent thirty years in corporate America, fighting government regulation and taxation. Yes, government regulations do benefit some companies some of the time, but in the big picture, all companies, with the possible exception of defense contractors, are net losers to government regulation, as are we all as individuals, and the economy as a whole. The time for business to stand up to government, instead of getting in bed with it, is long overdue.