RedStateEclectic

Extinction by Environmentalism

Image credit, see source.

Concludes conservationist Clive Hambler:

Why is the public not more aware of this carnage [afflicting birds and bats]? First, because the wind industry (with the shameful complicity of some ornithological organisations) has gone to great trouble to cover it up ... Second, because the ongoing obsession with climate change means that many environmentalists are turning a blind eye to the ecological costs of renewable energy. What they clearly don’t appreciate — for they know next to nothing about biology — is that most of the species they claim are threatened by ‘climate change’ have already survived 10 to 20 ice ages, and sea-level rises far more dramatic than any we have experienced in recent millennia or expect in the next few centuries. Climate change won’t drive those species to extinction; well-meaning environmentalists might. [Emphasis added.]

The source.

Also see this post at the superb NoTricksZone which provides the below footage.

See also my Unecological Ecologists and Power-Seeking 'Ecologists' and the Truly Ecology-Minded.

Regulatory Capture

Brevity is its own reward.

 

For more examples:

 

Tax Increase for Everyone But the Favoured Wealthy Few

It has been a constant theme, especially in my earlier writing here at RSE, that America is becoming more and more European, i.e. a social democratic country with an overblown welfare state that - largely unrelated to improving the common weal - is the outcome of the unprincipled compulsion (of our form of democracy) to buy votes and other means of maintaining power. In the meantime, I have come to believe that America has turned European a long time ago, at least in a number of rather crucial issues.

At the same time, I have always supported the Americanization of Europe, i.e. the absorption of America's great tradition of liberty by the peoples my side of the pond. Some of it is happening. Thus, I was made aware of the below article by a German liberty-friendly blog that draws heavily on American sources.

The Wall Street Journal has this to report on "a tax increase for everyone but the favoured wealthy few":

In praising Congress's huge new tax increase, President Obama said Tuesday that "millionaires and billionaires" will finally "pay their fair share." That is, unless you are a Nascar track owner, a wind-energy company or the owners of StarKist Tuna, among many others who managed to get their taxes reduced in Congress's New Year celebration.

There's plenty to lament about the capital and income tax hikes, but the bill's seedier underside is the $40 billion or so in tax payoffs to every crony capitalist and special pleader with a lobbyist worth his million-dollar salary. Congress and the White House want everyone to ignore this corporate-welfare blowout, so allow us to shine a light on the merriment.

The entire article.

While Unwrapping Your Christmas Presents ...

... consider that

[u]nfortunately, recycling consumer-level paper towels wastes far more resources than it saves, so recycling actually costs us twice. Not only does it waste resources in a primary way, because recycling paper uses more energy and resources than virgin pulp to make paper, but it turns out to waste paper in a secondary, consumer choice way: People actually use more paper in the first place, because it's going to be recycled!

Read more here and another brief post on the same issue here.

Power-Seeking 'Ecologists" and the Truly Ecology-Minded

The great irony of our time (pronouncedly visible in Germany, where ecologism and state adulation form a two-pronged "religion") is that people use the term "ecology" to describe and support utterly unecological pursuits; whether in the form of the most unecological alarmist conception of a single factor, CO2, driving the whole complex climate nexus (a simplification required to mobilise support in utter disdain of a truly ecological approach to the issue), or whether failing to understand the ecological nature of human society. While human interaction should be one of the foremost targets of ecological curiosity and research, our approach to the phenomenon of society is woefully mechanistic, hubristic, and anti-ecological. Society is thought to be good to the extent that the political process and government have ordained and constructed it to be good. That is in fatal contradistinction to the natural scientists' ecological approach to nature, which commences by carefully recognising its subject-matter as not being man-made, but as a self-generating order to which one ought to adapt in the most circumspect spirit, always alert to the order's autonomous features.

Political "ecologists" fail as genuine ecologists because they are oblivious to (i) the ecological nature of society and insensitive to (ii) the unecological measures and instruments of political dirigism that they favour to force simplistic and simple-to-sell solutions addressing the apocalyptic figments that they set up to shock people into supporting their ambitions for power.

Not only do they truncate the full realm of the ecological by cutting out the human world from it, they violate the meaning and requirements of ecological analysis even in the narrower field of extra-human nature. For they are given to naively rationalist dreams of political intervention which yield the comfort of feeling righteous and utterly entitled to great power. By contrast, approached in seriousness, ecological issues tend to prove intricate, subtle, and not particularly suitable for propagandistic steamrolling.

Below find a great, brief summary of much of what I have been arguing about the evolving and hence ecological nature of human society in this blog over the past four years - mostly peddling the ideas of better and more original thinkers than my sweet self.

 

The source.

Adam Darwin

Image credit/Jimmy Lawlor

In the below lecture, Matt Ridely enlightens us on why it would not have mattered if adolescent "Albert Einstein had been run over by a tram," why sex is great despite being "a costly and inconvenient business" compared to borrowing genes simply by eating each other like bdeleoid rotifers, who are in good shape and high spirits even though "they have not had sex for 80 million years", how "the conversation between a gastroenterologist and a guided missile designer gave us the pill camera," how rampant capitalism makes people a lot less selfish, and a number of other rather surprising and not so current insights.

Enjoy.

 

The Food Police

Joel Salatin gives a fantastic picture of the problems we face at the mercy of big agriculture.

"We have taken our Western, Greco Roman, reductionist, linear, compartmentalized, fragmentized, systematized, disconnected, individualized, parts-oriented kind-of-thinking to an unbelievable philosophical apartheid." - Joel Salatin

“The only reason that [big ag] is able to enjoy its position at the top is because they’re protected from competition at the bottom.” – Joel Salatin

Wind Farms

The environmental/industrial complex is hurting people in more ways than previously thought:

In December 2011, in a peer-reviewed report in the Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, Dr Carl Phillips – one of the U.S.’s most distinguished epidemiologists – concluded that there is ‘overwhelming evidence that wind turbines cause serious health problems in nearby residents, usually stress-disorder type diseases, at a nontrivial rate’.

… The sleepless nights caused by its humming were only the start of their problems. Far worse was the impact on their health. Aileen, a diabetic since the age of 19, found her blood glucose levels rocketing – forcing her to take more insulin and causing her to develop a cataract, she says. [ “Just on night of missed or inadequate sleep is sufficient to make you as insulin resistant as a type-2 diabetic.” – Robb Wolf; ‘The Paleo Solution’; page 128]

…"In Britain, onshore wind farms are subsidised by a levy on consumer bills at 100 per cent; offshore wind is subsidised at 200 per cent."

…"And newly released Spanish government research claims that each turbine kills an average 300 birds a year (often rare ones such as eagles and bustards) and at least as many bats."

…Aristocratic landowners have done especially well, such as the Earl of Moray (£2 million a year from his Doune estate) and the Duke of Roxburghe (£1.5 million a year from his estate in Lammermuir Hills).
South of the border, the Prime Minister’s father-in-law Sir Reginald Sheffield makes more than £1,000 a day from the eight turbines on his Lincolnshire estates. Even smaller landholdings can generate a tidy profit: around £40,000 per year, per large (3MW) turbine, for no effort whatsoever.
The biggest winners, though, are the mostly foreign-owned (Mitsubishi, Gamesa, Siemens) firms for whom wind was until recently a virtually risk-free investment.

…‘There’s so much money to be made from these things, that’s the problem,’ says Jackson.
‘You’ll talk to the farmers and they’re quite open about it. “I’ve worked hard all my life and this is my pension plan,” they’ll tell you.’ [Read Mencken’s rebuke of the exalted farmer.]

When one ponders how many windmills are scattered throughout the landscape – ruining the picturesque settings in more ways than first thought possible – it can not escape even the simpleminded that their presence is a direct result of government and its cover groups who’ve stolen money and twisted logic to stick them in the ground.

Keeping Dirty Capitalists at Bay

The source.

See also The Red Tape Horse of Australia.

A Bonanza of Green Jobs

 

You will laugh, or you will cry, or maybe both:

 

In the context of today’s political debates, “green jobs” is a pointless concept, as IER’s study from 2009 demonstrated. The government has no business picking winners and losers, whether green, blue, or yellow. One reason is that the government does a poor job of picking winners—just consider the debacles of Solyndra, Beacon Power, Evergreen Solar, Range Fuels, and many other businesses that received special favors from the government because they create “green jobs” but fail in the marketplace.  The market economy will direct resources to their most efficient niches, and jobs will grow in those sectors where labor can be most effectively deployed.

The point of an economy isn’t to “create jobs,” whether green, yellow, or blue. The point is to efficiently allocate scarce resources—including labor—into the appropriate sectors, in order to best satisfy consumers given the constraints imposed on us by nature. Yes, a well-functioning economy will create jobs for workers, but that is a by-product of the more fundamental task.

The government doesn’t help citizens, or even the environment for that matter, by artificially promoting certain jobs that it designates as “green.” As Chairman Issa’s recent questioning makes clear, the entire “green jobs” agenda is built on quicksand.

The source.