RedStateEclectic

Against Political Biology

Lysenko, one of the masters of political biology.

Following up on my Scientists Not Interested in Science, find below a level-headed reminder of some facts of basic, depoliticised biology.

In his summary, Luboš Motl writes:

The basic theme of the [below] article is simple and most of us learned it as fifth-graders: CO₂ is primarily the plant food while its other implications for nature are negligible in comparison. Humanitarian organizations should work hard to help the mankind to increase the CO₂ concentration and it's surprising that virtually all of them are failing to do so.

Thus, ex-moonwalker Harrison Schmitt and physics professor Will Happer of Princeton argue:

Of all of the world's chemical compounds, none has a worse reputation than carbon dioxide. Thanks to the single-minded demonization of this natural and essential atmospheric gas by advocates of government control of energy production, the conventional wisdom about carbon dioxide is that it is a dangerous pollutant. That's simply not the case. Contrary to what some would have us believe, increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will benefit the increasing population on the planet by increasing agricultural productivity.

The entire brief article.

Despicable Optimists

For German intellectuals, optimism is a sort of American mental illness.

Read more in this post at NoTricksZone, the blog of an admirable American living in Germany.

Eco-Theocracy

Image credit.

Theocracy: a system of government by priests claiming a divine commission

It looks as if we are being increasingly ruled by an eco-(hypocracy)-theocracy:

They represent a rapidly expanding, increasingly powerful government class that is determined to control what we eat, say, do and buy.

In the environmental arena, these would-be czars and czarinas want to regulate what kinds of energy we can produce and use, cars we can drive, and jobs and living standards we can have. They are the vanguard of a dangerous alliance of eco-imperialism and vulture environmentalism.

[...]

Driven by utopian, Deep Ecology and global governance ideologies, elected and unelected ruling elites pass laws, promulgate regulations and issue edicts, based on faulty to fraudulent science and unsupported proclamations about dangerous manmade global warming, resource depletion and sustainable development. They seek to radically and fundamentally transform the energy, economic and social fabric of our nation and world – in the name of “social justice” and “saving the planet.”

They operate with little or no transparency or debate, often with vague or minimal legislative or constitutional authority, and with virtually no accountability for the false pretexts they use to justify their intrusive actions, or the harm they cause to people and wildlife. Their attitudes and actions often reflect a callous disregard for environmental values and people’s property, civil rights, jobs, health and even lives.

Our courts give them almost limitless discretion to impose laws and regulations, select pseudo-scientific “facts” to justify them, and ignore both the imaginary benefits and substantive harm they cause. They allow and encourage sweetheart “sue and settle” legal actions between regulatory agencies and activist groups, capricious agency inaction on mineral leases and permits, and arbitrary bureaucratic waivers of endangered species and other environmental laws for gigantic wind and solar projects.

Make sure to read the entire article.

The Economics of Lushness

In a strand of his argument, Matt Ridley seems to imply that man-made global warming is of a significant magnitude. Which puzzles me, as the evidence available to me seems to suggest that anthropogenic contributions are minute compared to non-human drivers of CO2 emissions. Be that as it may, I like the gist of the presentation:

 

The source is the excellent PERC - Property and Environment Research Center.

Greenpeace Urging Obama To Ban Cats

Image credit.

No, no, not quite.

However, following up on Who Is Going to Kill Those Cats, I ask our readers to note:

The review estimates that if Keystone is not built, oil sands production will be only 0.4 to 0.6 percent less that if the pipeline is built, or less than 0.83 million metric tons of CO2-equivalent emissions annually. This difference equates to less than two hours of U.S. emissions, a negligible amount. Seventy-four million US housecats annually cause an estimated 196 times this emissions volume. Why isn’t Greenpeace urging President Obama to ban cats?

The full article.

See also The Cat in Me.

Who Is Going to Kill Those Cats?

The stricture! My vet-friend G. keeps scolding me about letting Lucky run free in purely natural environments. When I tell her that Lucky is a sniffer and pointer and doesn't care about hunting and killing game (he does run after game, with little persistence, however, for the fun of the sprint and devoid of any concept of predation), she comes up with all sorts of horror scenarios of Lucky potentially belying my conviction - including the shocking notion that game may have to undergo stress of the type they have evolved to cope with (i.e. hiding from or running away from a seeming or real predator). Today, Lucky and I chanced on a dead deer. Predictably, Lucky wasn't interested. 

At any rate, being owned by someone is a good way to have a protecting lobby. In America, Buffaloes became nearly exterminated, cattle thrived.The former had no owners, the latter did. Most birds, unlike cats, aren't owned by anyone, so they are, as we say in German, literally "vogelfrei" (bird-free), free as birds, meaning: outlawed, not protected by the law.

My dear vet-friend, who is running a practice for small animals, is devoting a large percentage of her working time to the opposite of what she considers herself to be doing: she nurtures a vicious mass killer, our sweet predacious pet, the cat.

The house cat -- that cute, furry feline beloved the world over -- is also one of the world's most destructive predators, killing for kicks and hunting rare species into extinction. Cats thrive because people protect them -- but should they?

The full article.

PS

In the interest of full disclosure: I'm a dog-type; I like cats only if I have to, under social pressure. Instinctively and only as an observer (for I do not ever attack cats or treat them badly), I'm rather sympathetic to the reactions usually shown by dogs to cats. Though, of course, I'm careful to avoid conflictual encounters between dogs and cats. It might hurt the dog.

How Much Destructiveness Can Man Afford?

Were man what 'greenish correctness' makes him out to be, a net destroyer of resources, our species would have become extinct a long time ago. In actual fact, man is a massive net creator of resources, as I explain here:

[T]ake berries, which you may call "resources provided by nature", much liked by hunters-and-gatherers. The berries have no way (a) to appreciate that they might be liked by human beings nor do they have the ability, of their own accord, to make themselves (b) useful to human beings. What Zimmermann and later Simon call a resource is brought into existence when humans do (a) and (b) for the berries and other resource candidates. While there may be natural phenomena that do us a welcome service - consider the warmth and light provided by the sun - we cannot survive by passive enjoyment of those resources. In fact, the human mind has to figure out in a given situation if it is wise to move into the sun or, to the contrary, if one should move into the shadow. Moving into the shadow is already an act of creating a natural resource, i.e. recognising something as potentially useful for the satisfaction of a human need AND utilising this potential successfully. Hence, the most important final conclusion: man is a net resource producer, quite naturally, rather than a destroyer of resources, including natural resources.

As analogous, there is a limit to the extent to which men can behave in destructive ways among one another.

This is why the state evolves, and why it evolves in such a way as to have a limited potential for destructiveness and as well as a large potential for constructive functions. As an ambivalent instrument capable of destruction as well as support of socially useful outcomes, the state, at least on the level of man's history, must produce a positive net margin of constructive outcomes over destructive ones.

As small human groups grow larger, owing to productivity increases from sedentary agriculture, and larger groups increasingly trump smaller groups, a new destabilising factor gains in prominence.

Small groups are capable of providing vital public goods by way of voluntary contribution by their members, being structured to monitor and avoid free riding as well as offering advantageous cost-benefit ratios for the individual that induce individuals to participate in the provision of public goods.

Larger groups lose that capacity, the more so the larger they become. They get caught in impasses of the Prisoner's dilemma type and minefields of multiple game theoretic equilibria. Groups survive and prevail who evolve Structures of Maximal Power (SMP) effective enough to enforce generally binding rules that make cooperation feasible in larger units: the state makes its appearance. In future posts, I shall have more to say about the ideas roughly outlined in this last paragraph.

Concerning Legitimacy

Good luck to liberty when a leading libertarian qualifies as 'sensible' an article by another leading libertarian that is based on the author's inability to tell the difference between government under the law and a criminal organisation.

I was in two minds, whether or not to post the following comment in response to Legitimacy by Bob Higgs at The Beacon. I decided against publication, so as not to open yet another front - and my experience is, at any rate, that one does not learn nearly as much from the emotional, knee-jerk, regurgitating responses of anarcho-capitalists than from one's own continued (often painfully insightful but also liberating) research. And RedStateEclectic is a safe place in that comments are hardly to be expected, at least not in (a) large numbers or (b) uncivil or downright stupid manner (as most comments are from my esteemed fellow-bloggers).

One of the most important hallmarks of a regime under which it is possible to express judgements of legitimacy or lack thereof is the freedom to express opinions such as that of the author [Bob Higgs in his article] and the possibility to influence the political order to bring it in closer alignment to policies that substantially augment desired claims to legitimacy (legitimacy being always an asymptotic and contestable category). Both conditions are fulfilled in my country, Germany. (I strongly, presume, in the USA, too).

For instance, the Green Party (which I as a libertarian do not support at all) was completely unacceptable to the prevailing political parties in Germany in the 1970s/80s, yet managed against the severest resistance of the powers that be to enter the national Parliament (Bundestag) in the 1980s. Today, the Green party sets the tone for important themes of political correctness in the country.

Similarly, much of the political thrust of the German students’ movement of the 60s - then utterly unacceptable to the state and much of public opinion - has become a dominant theme in German political thinking and practice nowadays, with Joschka Fischer (a militant leader of the students’ movement and later head of the Green party) ending up as Secretary of State.

Outsiders and underdogs, the Greens ("die Grünen") - unlike anarcho-capitalists - were willing to enter the political process and shape the state according to their notions.

Hence, and for a number of other reasons that I cannot go into here, I disagree with the author's assessment that defining legitimacy is a matter of state fabrication, as if the state were an autonomous being, immunised against influences from and perfectly opposed to the population.

Anarcho-capitalists are dogmatically disabled to comprehend that it is perfectly rational for a state to protect personal and property rights/institutions of liberty, and that states like the contemporary German state derive much support from their ability to enforce such rights, notwithstanding equally extant policies adverse to liberty; a mix of liberty-promoting and liberty-adverse policies will be inevitable in any complex and free society, a prospect that anarchists abhor in their simplistic taste for contrasts of black and white, while (classical) liberals ought to be aware of and prepared to deal with this most difficult challenge.

Of course, if the political struggle is left to those of differing views, and morbid moping (about the evil, evil, evil state) is chosen as the default position, it is inevitable that the task of defining legitimacy will be largely assumed by one's opponents.

If legitimacy is framed to be a self-serving concept such that its credible presence in a political system depends on the personal assessment of an anarchist with a preconceived agenda of discrediting (the legitimacy of) the state and the present political order, then, of course, it is practically a foregone conclusion that there can be no such thing as legitimacy, and hence, to all intents and purposes, there appears to be no difference between the state and a criminal organisation.

As a classical liberal I insist, like Ludwig von Mises, however, there is such a difference, and to lose sight of it, is to lose sight of liberty.

It is possible and important to determine the difference between the state and a criminal gang according to criteria that exist independent of the separate question whether the state is thought to be considered legitimate in the views of such and such percentage of the population.

Knowledge and defence of this vital difference and the criteria by which it can be ascertained used to be the essence of (classical) liberalism.

The struggle for “liberty” has become much more convenient these days than it used to be. Just complain about the state and you’ve done your job.

In upcoming posts, I shall try to demonstrate that there are rigorous evolutionary limits to human destructiveness (man cannot go beyond a certain point of destructiveness if he is to survive), and that in this regard there is an analogy between

(a) the alarmism of environmentalists, who overlook that man has evolved to become, of necessity, a net resource-increaser/protector, and

(b) the one-sided anti-state hype of anarcho-capitalists, who entirely fade out the fact that state structures have competitively evolved to support survival on the group level, and therefore, of necessity, comprise elements of self-interest on the part of the state that make it rational for it to foster greater freedom and welfare, irrespective of whether the state is (regarded as being) capable of benevolence or not. 

In fact, it is just as compelling for the bandit state to enhance its wealth base as it is for a state consisting of saints.

A Richard Feynman Quote

                         Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.

"What is Science?", presented at the fifteenth annual meeting of the National Science Teachers Association, in New York City (1966) published in The Physics Teacher Vol. 7, issue 6 (1969)

The source.

See also The Cult of Experts, The Myth Junkie Society, Scientist Not Interested in Science, Socrates - Science and Politics, and The Socratic Mind (2/2).

Scientists Not Interested in Science

Richard Lindzen commenting on a speech given by president Obama at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology:

On the one hand, he was calling for sound science and critical analysis, on the other he was calling for the marginalisation of naysayers concerning global warming. It is, as an aside, an appalling feature of the present environment that this kind of abuse of scientific integrity is conducted to cheers at universities. Universities as such provide virtually no defense against this kind of behaviour by important officials.

(See time mark 22:00 of the below video)

The field is corrupt, without any question. I would say most scientists don’t believe this and didn’t believe it 20 years ago. But for young scientists they know they're in trouble if they say it, and so they don’t.

You created a community of scientists who are not interested in the science.

(See time mark 47:20)

On potential converts to the cause of veracity amongst scientists knowledgable enough to see through the politically correct travesty of climate science:

How do you describe these people 'for' or 'against'. It's meaningless. They're opportunistic.

(See time mark 49:20)

 

See also one of my earliest posts (from January 2008): The Sun Queen of Germany, and the very recent Tangents of Wisdom - Dürer and Popper.