Amid all the talk of an imminent planetary catastrophe caused by emissions of carbon dioxide, another fact is often ignored: global greening is happening faster than climate change. The amount of vegetation growing on the earth has been increasing every year for at least 30 years. The evidence comes from the growth rate of plants and from satellite data.
CO2 Is Plant Food
In 2016, a paper was published by 32 authors from 24 institutions in eight countries that analyzed satellite data and concluded that there had been a roughly 14 percent increase in green vegetation over 30 years. The study attributed 70 percent of this increase to the extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The lead author on the study, Zaichun Zhu of Beijing University, says this is equivalent to adding a new continent of green vegetation twice the size of the mainland United States.
Global greening has affected all ecosystems—from arctic tundra to coral reefs to plankton to tropical rain forests—but shows up most strongly in arid places like the Sahel region of Africa, where desertification has largely now reversed. This is because plants lose less water in the process of absorbing carbon dioxide if the concentration of carbon dioxide is higher. Ecosystems and farms will be less water-stressed at the end of this century than they are today during periods of low rainfall.
So less land is needed to feed the human population and more can be spared for wildlife instead.
There should have been no surprise about this news. Thousands of experiments have been conducted over many years in which levels of CO2 had been increased over crops or wild ecosystems and boosted their growth. The owners of commercial greenhouses usually pump CO2 into the air to speed up the growth of plants. CO2 is plant food.
This greening is good news. It means more food for insects and deer, for elephants and mice, for fish and whales. It means higher yields for farmers; indeed, the effect has probably added about $3 trillion to farm incomes over the last 30 years. So less land is needed to feed the human population and more can be spared for wildlife instead.
Yet this never gets mentioned. In their desperation to keep the fearmongering on track, the activists who make a living off the climate change scare do their best to ignore this inconvenient truth. When they cannot avoid the subject, they say that greening is a temporary phenomenon that will reverse in the latter part of this century. The evidence for this claim comes from a few models fed with extreme assumptions, so it cannot be trusted.
Ice Ages and Dust Storms
This biological phenomenon can also help to explain the coming and going of ice ages. It has always been a puzzle that ice ages grow gradually colder for tens of thousands of years, then suddenly warmer again in the space of a few thousand years, at which point the huge ice caps of Eurasia and North America collapse and the world enters a warmer interlude, such as the one we have been enjoying for 10,000 years.
Attempts to explain this cyclical pattern have mostly failed so far. Carbon dioxide levels track the change, but these rise after the world starts to warm and fall after the world starts to cool, so they are not the cause. Changes in the shape of the earth’s orbit play a role, with ice sheets collapsing when the northern summers are especially warm, but only some of these so-called “great summers” result in deglaciation.
Enjoy the lush greenery of the current world and enjoy the fact that green vegetation is changing faster than global average temperatures.
Recent ice cores from the Antarctic appear to have fingered the culprit at last: it’s all about plants. During ice ages, the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere steadily drops, because colder oceans absorb more of the gas. Eventually, it reaches such a low level—about 0.018 percent at the peak of the last ice age—that plants struggle to grow at all, especially in dry areas or at high altitudes.
As a result, gigantic dust storms blanket the entire planet, reaching even Antarctica, where the amount of dust in the ice spikes dramatically upward. These dust storms blacken the northern ice sheets, in particular, making them highly vulnerable to rapid melting when the next great summer arrives. The ice age was a horrible time to be alive even in the tropics: cold, dry, dusty, and far less plant life than today.
As Svante Arrhenius, the Swede who first measured the greenhouse effect, said:
By the influence of the increasing percentage of carbonic acid in the atmosphere, we may hope to enjoy ages with more equable and better climates.
Enjoy the lush greenery of the current world and enjoy the fact that green vegetation is changing faster than global average temperatures.
An Earth scientist’s recent article making the rounds on social media highlights a terrifying conversation he had with “a very senior member” of the IPCC, which is the UN’s body devoted to studying climate science. The upshot of their conversation was that millions of people will die from climate change, a conclusion that leads the author to lament that humans have created a consumption-driven civilization that is “hell-bent on destroying itself.”
As with most such alarmist rhetoric, there is little to document these sweeping claims—even if we restrict ourselves to “official” sources of information, including the IPCC reports themselves. The historical record does not justify panic, but instead should lead us to expect continued progress for humanity, so long as the normal operation of voluntary market interactions continues without significant political interference to sabotage it.
The Conversation
Here is the opening hook from James Dyke’s article, in which he grabs the reader with an apocalyptic conversation:
It was the spring of 2011, and I had managed to corner a very senior member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) during a coffee break at a workshop…
The IPCC reviews the vast amounts of science being generated around climate change and produces assessment reports every four years. Given the impact the IPPC’s findings can have on policy and industry, great care is made to carefully present and communicate its scientific findings. So I wasn’t expecting much when I straight out asked him how much warming he thought we were going to achieve before we manage to make the required cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.
“Oh, I think we’re heading towards 3°C at least,” he said.
…
“But what about the many millions of people directly threatened,” I went on. “Those living in low-lying nations, the farmers affected by abrupt changes in weather, kids exposed to new diseases?”
He gave a sigh, paused for a few seconds, and a sad, resigned smile crept over his face. He then simply said: “They will die.”
Putting aside the creepiness of someone smiling as he predicts millions of deaths—sort of like a James Bond villain—we must inquire: How plausible are these warnings? Does the climate change literature actually support such bold projections?
As it turns out, the answer is “no.” It is certainly true that there are many particular dangers regarding climate change, which could have deleterious consequences on human welfare (broadly defined). But in order to conclude that millions—or even billions, as the author of the article states in his concluding remarks—of deaths hang in the balance, we have to grossly exaggerate all of the various mechanisms and scenarios, and we have to assume that humans do nothing to adapt to the changing circumstances over the course of decades.
In reality, it is much more likely that humans will adapt to whatever changes the climate brings them in the coming decades, and that various measures of human well-being—including not just GDP but also life expectancy and declining mortality rates from various ailments—will continue to improve. The voluntary market economy is an excellent general-purpose solution to the challenges facing humanity, including the handling of whatever curveballs climate change might throw.
IPCC’s Summary of Climate Change Damages
Unfortunately, it is difficult to come up with a statistic such as, “How many excess deaths does the IPCC predict from climate change by the year 2100, if governments don’t take further action?” If you consult the AR5, which is the latest IPCC report, and look at chapter 11 (Working Group II) on the impacts of climate change on human health, you will see various trouble areas and figures concerning at-risk populations, but nothing so crisp as to allow us to evaluate the casual claims of millions of deaths.
However, the IPCC chapter does tell us upfront:
The Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) pointed to dramatic improvement in life expectancy in most parts of the world in the 20th century, and this trend has continued through the first decade of the 21st century (Wang et al., 2012). Rapid progress in a few countries (especially China) has dominated global averages, but most countries have benefited from substantial reductions in mortality. There remain sizable and avoidable inequalities in life expectancy within and between nations in terms of education, income, and ethnicity (Beaglehole and Bonita, 2008) and in some countries, official statistics are so patchy in quality and coverage that it is difficult to draw firm conclusions about health trends (Byass, 2010). Years lived with disability have tended to increase in most countries (Salomon et al., 2012).
If economic development continues as forecast, it is expected that mortality rates will continue to fall in most countries; the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates the global burden of disease (measured in disability-adjusted life years per capita) will decrease by 30% by 2030, compared with 2004 (WHO, 2008a). The underlying causes of global poor health are expected to change substantially, with much greater prominence of chronic diseases and injury; nevertheless, the major infectious diseases of adults and children will remain important in some regions, particularly sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia (Hughes et al., 2011). [IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, Working Group II, Chapter 11, bold added.]
Later in that same chapter, we see the following table, which is illustrative of the general pattern when it comes to long-term projections about climate change harms to humanity:
As the table indicates, the absolute number (let alone the percentage of the population) of undernourished children in all developing countries, even with climate change, is projected (with certain assumptions) to drop by 9.4 million from the year 2000 to 2050. It’s true that the number increases in sub-Saharan African, but it falls in every other region. (It also rises in sub-Saharan Africa even without climate change.) We should also keep in mind that UN projections assume the populations in 26 African countries will at least double by 2050, meaning that the percentage of children who are malnourished still drops even in sub-Saharan Africa and even with climate change, according to the UN’s estimates.
As I have explained—most recently in this article—when it comes to climate change, the big projected damages don’t occur until many decades into the future. But for those people, standard economic growth will have raised their baseline standard of living by so much, that even if the UN-endorsed best-guess projections of climate change are accurate, those humans will still be much better off than we are today.
“It’s Getting So Much Better All the Time”
To see more evidence of this pattern, consider the following chart depicting mortality from various causes, created by Our World in Data using data from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), 2018:
As the chart indicates, the death rates from various types of causes have fallen sharply around the world, particularly those from communicable diseases, and all within the last 20 years—when climate change was ostensibly becoming a deadly problem for humanity that only “deniers” could ignore.
For another line of evidence, let me show you a table where the UN did give us some measures of “aggregate” damages from climate change. Specifically, in chapter 10 of the AR5 we see the following table summarizing the climate change economics literature on the subject:
Source: Table 10.B.1, IPCC AR5, Working Group II, p. 82.
As the table summarizes, even for warming of three degrees Celsius, all but one of the studies predicted non-alarming amounts of damage. (I discuss the table more in this article.) Now I should emphasize that although the impacts are measured in GDP terms, these damage estimates include things like impacts on human health and mortality. It isn’t simply a measured reduction in the flow of TV output because some of the factories are under the sea.
In any event, it should be clear from the table that—contrary to James Dyke—we should not expect millions, let alone billions (!), of people to die from climate change. Even if climate change proceeds as the peer-reviewed literature assumes in the most pessimistic emissions scenarios, it will probably merely mean that people in the year 2100 will only be a lot richer than we are, as opposed to a whole lot richer.
What About the Catastrophic Scenarios?
Now it’s true, nobody can guarantee that there won’t be a climate change catastrophe. But we must realize that at least several of the featured studies warning of huge negative impacts are based on obviously flawed assumptions.
Oren Cass provides us with some examples. One study looked at the increase in mortality in a cold, northern US city during a particularly brutal summer, and then extrapolated to show a staggering number of excess heat deaths decades down the road, when such “bad summers” were more common. Yet in the projections, the northern cities were no hotter than southern US cities are right now, and yes these southern cities don’t have nearly the same heat death rate as is projected for the northern cities decades down the road.
What is happening here should be obvious after a moment’s reflection: A northern city like Philadelphia is not adapted to hot summer the way Houston or Las Vegas is. But if climate change did indeed make such temperatures the norm—over the course of several decades —then the residents of the northern cities would adapt. The most alarming of the projections of climate change damages rely on naïve assumptions about human adaptability.
They would install more air conditioning, and the people born in the year (say) 2080 would be much better able physically to cope with higher temperatures in 2100 than the people alive today.This is also the general response I would give the issue of sea-level rise. I think that much of the rhetoric here is overblown, but even to the extent that it is true, we don’t need to worry about millions of people literally dying. Even if true, this is a problem that will manifest itself over several generations. If certain coastal regions are truly threatened, then in the worst case humans will stop building (and eventually even repairing) the houses and businesses near the rising seas. Humans can gradually move out of these (sinking) neighborhoods and go further inland, through a process of attrition rather than mass migration in the face of a tidal wave.
The climate change alarmists are given a free pass to throw out the most absurd rhetoric, such as a recent author’s warning that potentially billions of people could die because of human-caused climate change. Yet despite their claimed fidelity to the “consensus science,” such claims are not supported by the UN’s own climate change reports.
The most alarming of the projections of climate change damages rely on naïve assumptions about human adaptability. Even if we stipulate the basic projections made in the most recent IPCC assessment, what “unchecked” climate change will probably mean is that our great-grandkids will see a smaller increase in their standard of living than they otherwise would have, if some of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could have been costlessly removed. Such a possible outcome is no reason to panic, and it doesn’t justify massive government intervention in the energy or transportation sectors.
Fascism, Communism, Nazism — all gifts to the world from Europe. Now it’s nonsensical worries about climate change resulting in deliberately built-in inefficiencies in everything from household appliances to transportation methods.
Compared to the U.S., Europe’s love of control-down economics leaves it in the dust:
“The US GDP is five times that of Germany, seven times that of France and UK, 10 times of that of Italy, and 14 times of that of Spain in 2018.” And when the UK leaves the EU as I predict it will, the gap will be much larger.
Still, the control freaks of the left are determined to copy the European model and hamstring us in ways that make us easier to control.
I’ve spent a great deal more time overseas than juniors on their semester abroad in Avignon have, and I can tell you that everything from working mothers to GDP are beset by control economies. It takes forever to do the laundry in Europe. The machines may save energy and water but it leaves housewives having to spend much, much longer to get the family laundry done. So much time it takes to accomplish normal household chores that full-time working mothers are rarer there than here.
When comparing employment statistics between the United States and the EU, we find that:
Women are more likely to be managers in the United States than in the EU.
Labor force participation for women is lower in the EU than in the United States.
Part-time employment among women is greater in the EU than in the United States.
The gender wage gap is larger in the EU than in the United States.[snip] In EU countries, women are also more likely to hold part-time jobs than in the United States. This suggests that EU policies have not helped women remain in full-time positions and advance their careers, opting instead to pursue jobs with fewer hours and more flexibility.
In recent years, motivated by bugaboo claims — first about depleting supplies of energy and then about climate change (“the social cost of carbon”) — the Department of Energy regulated home appliance efficiency. The net result was reduced efficiency and product performance.
Do homeowners really want to wait two hours (twice what it once took) to get these dishes done? This administration thinks not.
Like many other Obama-era DOE standards, the marginal energy and water savings were likely not worth the added cost to consumers, but what really set the dishwasher standard apart was its impact on product performance. It added significantly to the time it takes to do a load, which at more than two hours was about twice what it took before federal regulators got involved.
However, the underlying statute, the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975, contains provisions protecting consumers from efficiency standards that reduce product features and performance, so on March 21st, 2018 the Competitive Enterprise Institute petitioned the agency to set a new standard. DOE granted the petition last week and has formally begun a rulemaking to determine whether a new efficiency rule is warranted that would permit dishwashers that can do the job in an hour.
DOE should be applauded for righting this regulatory wrong. But even better than fixing bad regulations is preventing them from happening in the first place, and towards that end DOE is considering a number of useful process reforms that would discourage anti-consumer efficiency standards in the future. The agency should also consider excluding the social cost of carbon from appliance rulemakings so that this program can’t again prioritize climate activism over consumers.
After undoing the ridiculous appliance standards, I’d hope the administration takes a look at the policies trying to force us out of cars by reducing, instead of increasing, traffic lanes for cars — providing reserved bike lanes already severely choke traffic as population grows. Regardless of how many people bike around Amsterdam to the delight of visiting college juniors from America, it doesn’t fit most of the U.S. or its people.
Let me posit this hypothesis, liberalism is the new secular Puritanism. Instead of believing in a just and almighty God they believe in government. Instead of basing their beliefs and religion on the Bible they base it on their own – ever-expanding — belief system: the principles of government. The Puritan ideal of living a life of pious, consecrated actions translates for the new Puritans to insisting that YOU live a pious life, consecrated to THEIR principles. Because you were born too stupid to determine what’s best for you. Hence the need for social engineering; here’s an example of that at its finest:
Portland City Council approved a plan Wednesday to study short-and-long-term strategies to charge people to use city streets, an effort intended to reduce congestion and curb carbon emissions as the region expects as many as 500,000 new residents by 2040.
The city will create a Pricing for Equitable Mobility task force to study and recommend potential road user fees — such as cordons, where drivers are charged to use certain streets in the city center or potentially more robust freeway tolls in the area…
Commissioner Chloe Eudaly, who oversees the transportation bureau, said the city must take bold steps to try and get people out of their cars. “We are going the wrong direction on transportation,” she said.
In other words, they are going to pursue (taxpayer-funded) ways to manipulate you to do what we want you to do, which is “get out of your cars.” No matter how they attempt to package and sell it, it’s always about control. And it’s always them, controlling you.
Contrary to the claims of those who want to get us out of our cars and into public transportation, cars make increased productivity, less dense population, housing, and work opportunities possible. People are not, as they often are in European urban centers, confined to living close to work on bus and metro lines or in biking distance, shopping in the same corridors, and schooling their children in the same paths. It makes them easier to control and limits their choices. Near me, it is not unusual for people to work in Virginia, drop their kids off at school and after-school activities in D.C., and shop and live in Maryland. Using public transportation or bikes would make this quite impossible in any reasonable amount of time.
It’s of a piece with the Left’s wish to control dialogue through Facebook and Twitter, YouTube, and such, and through the censoring of contrary opinion by deeming it not “politically correct.” But there, too, I see a ray of rising anti-totalitarianism .We do not like this nonsense.
Among the general population, a full 80 percent believe that “political correctness is a problem in our country.” Even young people are uncomfortable with it, including 74 percent ages 24 to 29, and 79 percent under age 24. On this particular issue, the woke are in a clear minority across all ages.
Youth isn’t a good proxy for support of political correctness — and it turns out race isn’t, either.
Whites are ever so slightly less likely than average to believe that political correctness is a problem in the country: 79 percent of them share this sentiment. Instead, it is Asians (82 percent), Hispanics (87 percent), and American Indians (88 percent) who are most likely to oppose political correctness. [snip]
The one part of the standard narrative that the data partially affirm is that African Americans are most likely to support political correctness. But the difference between them and other groups is much smaller than generally supposed: Three quarters of African Americans oppose political correctness. This means that they are only four percentage points less likely than whites, and only five percentage points less likely than the average, to believe that political correctness is a problem.
It’s always about control and the left thinks they should control all the levers. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ chief of staff admitted it this week, telling a crowd: “The interesting thing about the Green New Deal, is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all. Do you guys think of it as a climate thing? Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”
I can’t imagine American voters opting to put idiots like this in charge. Neither does Tom Maguire.
I remain shocked (in a totally non-shocked way) that Dem “strategists” seem to be seeking a progressive Presidential candidate whose coattails should let them sweep Congressional districts in Brooklyn, Manhattan, San Francisco and a few other urban enclaves while losing most of the country.
Do they understand “swing districts”? Do they understand that winning Brooklyn with 85% of the vote doesn’t send more people to Congress than winning with a mere 75%?
As activists around the world recently celebrated Earth Day with warnings about the awful state of our planet, now seems like the right time to share the good news that actually — contrary to countless dire predictions — we’re not running out of resources. In fact, the late economist and scholar Julian Simon was right: People again and again have innovated “their way out of resource shortages.”
As Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute reminds us in an article about “18 spectacularly wrong predictions made around the time of first Earth Day in 1970,” back in 1969, Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich wrote that “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born.” He added that by 1975, “some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions.” In 1970, he revised his prediction for the worse to warn us, as Perry writes, that “between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the ‘Great Die-Off.'”
In 1972, a group known as the Club of Rome made similarly apocalyptic predictions.
In response, Dr. Simon, who at the time of his death in 1998 was an economics professor at the University of Maryland, argued that these predictions were wholly unwarranted. There would be no extinction from starvation. Simon recognized that people are the ultimate resource and would innovate their way toward greater abundance.
Ultimately, Simon challenged Ehrlich to a wager. Ehrlich believed that population growth meant increased scarcity and, hence, higher commodity prices. Simon believed that “more people meant more brains,” which means better extraction technologies, more efficient methods of production and the more efficient use of commodities — all of which lead to lower commodity prices.
The bet itself was meant to determine whether commodity prices would rise or fall over the period from 1980-1990. If they fell, that would mean that the commodities became more abundant. If instead they rose, that would have signaled that commodities became scarcer. Simon was willing to bet that over any number of years, inflation-adjusted commodity prices would fall.
Simon won that bet. During the 1980s, the prices of the commodities in the Simon-Ehrlich bet decreased. Ehrlich’s dire prediction thankfully never came to pass. Some have argued that had they picked the following decade, Ehrlich may have won. That said, the consensus is that when looking at an index of all commodities over a 100-year period, there’s a clear decline in prices with a few short-lived periods of increase.
This failure didn’t stop Ehrlich and others from continuing to issue similarly apocalyptic predictions up to this day. In response, two scholars have picked up the Simon torch to, once again, closely study the issue. The true heirs of the great humanist and optimist Simon, Marian Tupy from the Cato Institute and Gale Pooley from Brigham Young University-Hawaii have launched The Simon Abundance Index, which offers a new and better way to measure resource availability “using the latest price data for 50 foundational commodities” (as opposed to five in the Simon-Ehrlich wager).
They base their measure on three original concepts:
1. The time-price of commodities, or “the amount of time that an average human has to work in order to earn enough money to buy a commodity.”
2. The price elasticity of population, which is a measure of whether population growth indeed increases the availability of resources.
3. The Simon Abundance Index, which “measures the change in abundance of resources over a period of time.”
Based on their measurements, Pooley and Tupy confirm Simon’s admittedly counter-intuitive thesis — the faster a population grows, the greater the availability of natural resources. As they beautifully conclude, “The world is a closed system in the way that a piano is a closed system. The instrument has only 88 notes, but those notes can be played in a nearly infinite variety of ways. The same applies to our planet. The Earth’s atoms may be fixed, but the possible combinations of those atoms are infinite. What matters, then, is not the physical limits of our planet, but human freedom to experiment and reimagine the use of resources that we have.”
So, cheer up! And stop freaking out about predictions of our imminent demise.
Veronique de Rugy is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.
According to the official, USA approved belief system, we are all equally intelligent and reasonable people, who are confronted with the same “harsh reality” and are bound to the same facts and truths. Of course, it is true, that even in the age of the American empire, in the USA, people do not live in the best of all worlds. There are many more problems to be solved. Though with the American system of a democratic state, humanity has found the perfect institutional framework which makes the next step in the direction of a perfect world possible; and if only the American system of democracy would take over worldwide, the way to perfection would be clear, smooth and free.
The single legitimate form of government is democracy. All other forms of government are worse, and any government is better than none. Democratic states like the USA are of the people, by the people and for the people. In democracies no one rules over the other; instead, the people rule over themselves and are thus free. Taxes in democratic states are therefore contributions and payments for governmentally provided services; accordingly, tax avoiders are thieves, who take without paying. To provide shelter for fleeing thieves is thus an act of aggression against the people, from whom they are trying to escape.
There are still other forms of governments around the world. There are monarchies, dictatorships, theocracies, and there are feudal landowners, tribes, and warlords. And for this reason, democratic states often must necessarily deal with non-democratic states. Eventually, all states must be converted to the American ideal, because only democracy allows for a peaceful and continual change for the better.
Democratic states like the USA and its European allies are inherently peaceful and do not wage war against each other. If they must fight any wars all at, then these are preventive wars of defense and liberation against aggressive and undemocratic states, that is, just wars. All countries and territories that are presently in war with or occupied by American troops or its European allies – Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Sudan, Somalia and Yemen – were therefore guilty of aggression and the war waging and occupation on behalf of the democratic West were an act of self-defense and liberation. However, there is still much to be done. Especially Russia and China still pose a huge threat and must be liberated, in order to make the world finally safe.
Private property, markets, and profits are useful institutions, but a democratic state must ensure that with the appropriate legislation, private property and profits are acquired and used in a socially responsible manner and that markets function efficiently. Moreover, markets and profit-seeking entrepreneurs cannot produce public goods and are thus incapable of satisfying any social needs. And they cannot take care of the truly needy. Only the state can take care of social needs and the less fortunate. The state alone can, through the finance of public goods and aid to the poor, increase the public welfare, and diminish poverty and the number of the needy, if not completely eliminate them.
The state has to put the private vice of greed and the pursuit of profit under control. Greed and the pursuit of profit were the leading causes of the most recent large financial crisis. Reckless financiers generated an irrational exuberance among the public, which ultimately had to crash into reality. The market was wrecked, and only the state stood ready to save the day. Only the state, through appropriate regulation and supervision of the banking industry and financial markets, can prevent such a thing from happening again. Banks and companies went bankrupt, yet the state and its central banks held ground and protected the money and jobs of the workers.
Advised by the leading and best-paid economists in the world, states and especially the USA have discovered the causes of economic crises and realized that in order to get out of an economic mess, the people must simultaneously consume more as well as invest more. Every cent under the mattress is a cent withheld from consumption and investment, which in turn impairs future consumption and investment expenditure. In a recession, spending must first of all and under all circumstances be increased; and when the people do not spend enough of their own money, the state has to do it instead. Prudently, states have this option, for their central banks can produce any necessary liquidity. If billions of Dollars or Euros are not enough, then trillions will do; and if trillions do not meet the goal, then surely quadrillions will. Only massive state expenditure can prevent an otherwise unavoidable economic meltdown. In particular, unemployment is the result of low consumption: people who do not have enough money to buy consumer goods; this problem must be remedied by providing them with higher wages or higher unemployment benefits.
When the last financial crisis is finally overcome, the democratic state can and must devote itself once more to the really urgent remaining problems of humanity: the battle against inequality, the elimination of all unjust discrimination, and the control of the global environment and the global climate in particular.
In principle, all people are equal. Differences are only apparent, shallow and meaningless: some people are white, some brown, some black, some are big, others are small; some are fat and others thin; some are male, and some are female; some speak English and others Polish or Chinese as mother tongue. These are accidental human traits. It is a coincidence that some people possess these and some do not. But accidental traits like these have no influence whatsoever on and do not correlate with mental properties like motivation, time preference or intellectual abilities, and they do not contribute to the explanation of economic and social success, especially of income and wealth. Mental and psychic properties have no physical, biological or ethical basis and are limitlessly malleable. In this regard is everyone, except for a few pathological individual cases, equal to the other, and every nation has made in the course of history a contribution to civilization of equal value or would have done so, if only it would have gotten the same chance. Seemingly obvious differences are solely the result of different external circumstances and education. All differences in income and achievements between Whites, Asians, and Blacks, women and men, Latins, Anglos-Saxons and Thais as well as Christians, Hindus, Protestants, and Moslems would disappear, if only equality of opportunity would be established. If instead it will be discovered, that all these different accidental groups are unequally represented in and distributed across different levels of income, wealth, or professional status, some are richer and more successful than others, then this demonstrates unjust discrimination; and such discrimination must be counterbalanced through appropriate, targeted affirmative action on behalf of the state, in which the discriminators have to compensate the unjustly discriminated.
And the studies of the leading and best paid social scientists have clearly shown, who, above all, are the discriminators. The people in question are first and foremost white heterosexual males and the institution of the traditional, patriarchal organized family. It is, therefore, most notably this group of people and this institution which must compensate all other groups and apologize to all other forms of social organization.
But this would not suffice. The reparations to all disadvantaged, to all victims of inequality and discrimination, require likewise strong governmental support of multiculturalism. The highly developed and white male dominated countries of the Western world have obtained their wealth at the expense of the inhabitants of all other regions of the world and are caught in a disastrous and prejudiced particularism and nationalism. This situation lends itself to be overcome through the promotion and systematic incentivization of immigration of people from different, foreign countries and cultural environments, in order to ensure that the foreign immigrants could finally unleash their full human potential and simultaneously replace the Western parochialism with an authentic cultural diversity.
And with the victory over the disastrous particularism and nationalism through a systematic policy of multiculturalism is one finally able to turn to the crucial stride toward a solution to the undoubtedly biggest global, borderless and world-encompassing problem of climate change. Divergent particularistic and nationalistic interests have thus far led to the fact that the production and the consumption of non-renewable energy sources were left mostly unregulated and uncoordinated worldwide. And that is why, as the leading and best-paid climate researchers have undoubtedly proven, the whole globe is threatened by unimaginable catastrophes: floods, suddenly rising sea levels and the emergence of fatal ecological disequilibria and instabilities. Only through a worldwide, concentrated action by all states, and ultimately the establishment of a supranational world government under the leadership of the USA and an enforced systematic regulation of any production and consumption activities, can this life-threatening danger be avoided. “The common good comes before the individual good” – this is, above all, what the problem of climate change shows, and it is on the states and especially on the USA to permanently implement this principle.
Now, I tell you no secret when I admit that I hold all this for a massive pile of rubbish, for complete nonsense and a highly dangerous one at that.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe via lrc. Lightly edited for length and translation from the German.
Well, at least they’re now being honest about it. A headline this week in The Guardian reads: “Ending climate change requires the end of capitalism. Have we got the stomach for it?”
The article, by Phil McDuff, goes on the discuss the “Green New Deal” currently being peddled in the US Congress, and declares a radical turn toward socialism is really at the heart of saving the planet from climate change:
The radical economics isn’t a hidden clause, but a headline feature. Climate change is the result of our current economic and industrial system. GND-style proposals marry sweeping environmental policy changes with broader socialist reforms because the level of disruption required to keep us at a temperature anywhere below “absolutely catastrophic” is fundamentally, on a deep structural level, incompatible with the status quo.
The “status quo,” we have now is a form of capitalism that is highly regulated by states, manipulated by immensely powerful central banks, and distorted by global NGOs like the World Bank. Nevertheless, this system contains enough of a semblance of market-based freedom that many leftwing ideologues regard it as a type of radical laissez-faire capitalism marked by unrestrained and fossil-fuel powered consumption.
Not surprisingly, they think this system must be abolished.
Unfortunately for the billions of human beings who have benefited from what market freedom exists, the new green-socialist global state imagined by McDuff will undo decades of gains against grinding poverty — gains enjoyed by the world’s most at-risk and poorest populations.
The Decline of Poverty — and Its Effects — In the Developing World
Quality of life indicators have been consistently moving upward in recent decades.
Global life expectancy is increasing, especially in the poorest parts of the world. Child mortality is going down. Malnourishment is down. Access to clean water and sanitation is increasing. Literacy is increasing. Extreme poverty is rapidly declining. Access to electricity has grown.
The biggest gains tend to be in Africa and South Asia where the world’s worst poverty has been historically found.
Moreover, we have yet to observe evidence that these trends will be reversed due to climate change.
This doesn’t stop advocates for climate-change socialism like McDuff from predicting disaster. Indeed, in a July 2018 article, McDuff predicts the effects of climate change will be so disastrous that not even oil companies will benefit from their rapacious fossil fuel mongering.
Hazy Disaster Metrics
But what exactly will this global disaster look like? McDuff can point to no details or examples. He can only predict the coming disasters will be measured in “the lives lost, the homes flooded, the farms wasted away to drought.”
Yet, the observed trends suggest this simply isn’t happening. Moreover, McDuff can’t even point to rising deaths from natural disasters, which we are so often told are the chief currency of the coming climate apocalypse.
In reality, deaths from climate-caused natural disasters have gone into steep decline. This is why efforts to predict coming natural-disaster-fueled doom rely on dollar amounts and property damage, which naturally grow over time as homes and machines become more complex and more expensive.
But any growth in human casualties simply can’t be found, and this is largely a byproduct of the wealth surpluses fueled by what moderate amounts of market freedom we have. Thanks to centuries of capital accumulation in market societies, even ordinary people increasingly have access to better medical care, infrastructure, and disaster aid undreamed of in previous generations.
Do What We Say: Or Face Total and Utter Extinction
“So what?” proponents of carbon taxes and climate regulation will say. “Sure, the standard of living may decline, but what’s that compared to total global destruction?”
This sort of hyperbolic language, isn’t an exaggeration on my part. Advocates for climate-change regulations routinely rely on this sort of language precisely because they know the cost of implementing their policies comes at a very high cost. Thus, the choice between their policy and alternatives must be framed as a choice between climate socialism or total extinction.
Indeed, when we examine the proposals in more detail, such as October’s report released by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), we find that the costs of implementation are immense.
After all, the fundamental premise behind most climate-change-prevention schemes is to regulate energy production, reduce access to cheaper forms of energy, and then replace part of that lost capacity with subsidized new forms of green energy. These subsidies require pulling wealth out of the productive economy and funneling it into special government-favored “green” industries which will receive subsidies — after the state bureaucracy takes its cut, of course. The more expensive products offered by these industries would not have been purchased without the subsidies, and without the coercive regulations designed to reduce choice in energy consumption.
We’re told this sort of extensive state control of one of the economy’s most fundamental resources — i.e., energy — must happen because the only alternative is the total destruction of planet earth.
One does not need to be some sort of hard-core laissez-faire libertarian to see the problem. Even economist William Nordhaus, who has been hailed as a champion of climate-change policies, found that recent carbon-tax and regulatory schemes were so costly, that it would be better to do nothing.
It’s also important to remember these costs are not mere aggregate numbers on a spreadsheet somewhere.
Declaring War on Rising Standards of Living
The effects of these climate-control schemes would come down hardest on people in the poorer parts of the world. Energy consumption is high in the rich world, but the demand for growing access to electricity, personal transportation, and heating-and-cooling technologies are highest in the developing world.
Access to these technologies will be increasingly important as climate change occurs. People the world over will need heating and air conditioning. They’ll need water filtration technology. They’ll need better insulated homes. They’ll need appliances that improve sanitation and free human beings to engage in higher-productivity labor.
But the new green socialism is an immense obstacle to all of this.
Moreover, people in the developing world are still in the process of gaining access to labor-saving and life-changing machines like washing machines. Electric devices such as these improve daily life — an improvement felt especially by women — in ways modern westerners forgot about long ago. Yet, manufacturing and powering machines such as these is costly, and the more affordable energy is available, the more people will gain access.
First-World Chauvinism
This is why statistician Hans Rosling saw a fundamental conflict between well-meaning first-world activists and ordinary people in the developing world.
When speaking to environmentally-conscious audiences, Rosling noted many in the audience insisted that “No, everybody in the world cannot have cars and washing machines.” For these activists, the imperative of lowering energy usage simply demands it.
But, pointing to a photo of a low-income women slaving over a wash basin, Rosling asks: “How can we tell this woman that she isn’t going to have a washing machine?”
It’s a good question, and it’s also a reminder that much of the talk over carbon taxes and climate regulations smack of first-world chauvinism. The rich world already has its cars and its washing machines. Sure, a global climate scheme would reduce the wealth of people in the rich world, but the impact in China, India, Africa, and South America — where most live closer to subsistence levels —would be far more devastating.
For many environmentally-minded suburban upper-middle class people in North America and Europe, this is just tough luck and bad timing for everyone else.
Ryan McMaken (@ryanmcmaken) is a senior editor at the Mises Institute.
On November 26th, 2018, NPR released a dire headline: New U. S. Climate Assessment Forecasts Dire Effects On Economy, Health. The co-author of the assessment, Katherine Hayhoe, a long-time Union of Concerned Scientists activist, clarifies the assessment’s conclusion in her interview with NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday by saying: “Climate change is happening here and now.” It must be a new thing.
And it must be true, because the Climate Assessment is daunting, according to NPR it is, “the culmination of years of research by the country’s top climate scientists. It’s well over 1000 pages touching on a daunting range of topics.” Conveniently, the NPR article makes no mention of the years that were studied, the methods used to accumulate and analyze the data, or the reliability of the forecasting models.
But there are two things we know for sure. First, that the Assessment cost untold millions of taxpayer dollars, thanks to the lobbying efforts of John Podesta, Tom Steyer and George Soros’ Center for American Progress (their senior fellow Andrew Light served as a review editor). And second, blame for the economic damage the Assessment predicts will fall squarely on, drum roll please, greenhouse gas emissions.
Greenhouse Gases
The most abundant of all greenhouse gases is water vapor, and by this logic, the most insidious. Heck, its invisible, and once it metastasizes in the hydrosphere, it triggers convection currents, and these lead to clouds! When clouds become saturated with water vapor, condensation occurs, and they explode! And it rains. According to the assessment, if rainfall increases, agricultural production will fall, coastal flooding will “threaten” billions in property damage, and local governments will destabilize. Yikes.
The next most abundant greenhouse gas is carbon dioxide (CO2), which of course is the villain according to greenhouse gas police. You know, the most virtuous among us who have voluntarily decided stop exhaling (after everyone else does). According to Wikipedia:
CO2 is produced by all aerobic organisms when they metabolize carbohydrates and lipids to produce energy by respiration. It is returned to water via the gills of fish and to the air via the lungs of air-breathing land animals, including humans. Carbon dioxide is produced during the processes of decay of organic materials, or their combustion (wood, coal, petroleum and natural gas).
And it is the combustion of organic fuels that is blamed for global warming. The NPR article goes on to predict dire consequences such as wildfires, tick and mosquito infestation, harmful ozone levels, air pollution, drought, heat waves, and hurricanes.
Examples of recent headlines include: Death Toll Mounts to 60 in U. S. Storms, Tidal Wave Ruined Norway Fishing Towns, Earth Growing Warmer – Swiss Glaciers Reveal, Cuban Malaria Increases, Midwest Hopes for Relief from Heat – 602 Killed, Famine Faces 5 million in Drought Area, 7 Lives Lost as Tropical Storm Whips Louisiana, and Antarctic Heat Wave. In geologic time, this is very recent; the year of these headlines was 1934, before significant CO2 emissions began, according to Alex Epstein in his book The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels.
The third most prevalent greenhouse gas is methane, and according to the climate crowd, it is also a global warming culprit. Thankfully, methane emissions caused by bovine flatulence in Ireland and Denmark are finally under control. Right now, Danish bovine herders are being taxed $110 per head because the cows don’t have any money, yet.
Complex Systems Defy Modeling
For most objective observers, any climate research funded by government is suspect. Has there ever been a climate study funded by government that used forecasting models whose variables could not be manipulated? This happens all the time in the world of economics and finance with their econometrics and faulty use of mean variance optimizers.
For example, did any econometric model include variables like AAA ratings assigned to subprime mortgage pools, or Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac buying these mortgages with less than 2% capital reserves, and thereby predict the housing crisis of 2008? Did any mean variance optimizer include mark to market accounting rules for bank stocks, or the unreliability of alternative asset class data sets, to predict the financial meltdown that began in 2007? The complexity of the systems being studied, whether they are economic, financial, or earth’s climate, have far too many co-dependent variables to be subject to reliable modeling.
Regarding our atmosphere, did the Climate Assessment’s models include the output of the sun in relation to earth’s orbit? Changes in sunspot activity? Urban heat island effects? The volcanic activity of earth’s 700 active volcanoes? Landfills and wastewater plants? One data point that was certainly ignored comes from NASA, and it tells us that Earth’s outer atmosphere has been getting cooler. I guess that’s why they call it climate change now, and they’ll blame human economic activity anyway.
It’s commonly known that Earth’s average surface temperature has not increased in the last three years. What is not commonly known, and was recently reported by Martin Armstrong in LewRockwell.com, is that the Earth’s average high temperatures over the last 200 years are below the highest temperatures recorded during the Medieval Warming Period (900 to 1300 AD). And, back then, it lasted twice as long. Must have been the bovine flatulence.
Earth Calling Environmental Globalists
Lets just keep it simple. The Earth has stopped warming, at least for now. The outer atmosphere is getting cooler, and not because of carbon and methane flatulence. For today’s globalist political elites to claim that global warming threatens developing regions the most is nothing but political pandering. The greatest threat to developing countries is their lack of political and economic freedom, such as in the Middle East and North Africa. And this is precisely why Israel is despised and attacked so vehemently. Israel’s high tech economy is an amazing success story, and it is their economic reforms that unleashed innovation that made it happen.
So why the hoopla over the Climate Assessment? According to Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore, the report is “tripe.” But environmentalists continue to lobby for the eradication of human economic activity, aka life. The Heartland Institute‘s John Dunn calls it a “400 page pile of crap.” But politicians need to find new excuses for raising taxes. And according to Eric Worrall of wattsupwiththat.com it is “baseless scaremongering.” But for the media, its whatever it takes for the progressive movement to control the levers of government.
In human history, the last three periods of above average temperatures roughly coincided with the rise of the Roman Empire, the onset of the Renaissance (1300 – 1600), and the Age of Enlightenment. Yet now, maybe global cooling is the greater risk. Fortunately for humanity, Western Civilization has survived and ultimately thrived through periods of global cooling that include the fall of Athens, the Dark Ages, and the Little Ice Age (1600 – 1800). Human ingenuity has, does, and will continue to overcome the challenges posed by the scaremongers.
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