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.

Why Politics Will Always Be With Us

Image credit.

In contrasting economists Pigou and Coase, Steven Landsburg's essay reminds us, in my reading, that there can never be an end to politics, and freedom should not be conceived as being a blissful end state void of politics, but ought to be regarded - much in keeping with the motto of our blog - as little more than a reversible episode on a scale of imperfect approximations -- see also my post Why the State Persists:

Writing in The New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert illustrates the power of analogy:

A man walks into a bar. He orders several rounds, downs them, and staggers out. The man has got plastered, the bar owner has got the man’s money, and the public will get stuck with the tab for the cops who have to fish the man out of the gutter.

…..

The man pulls into a gas pump. He sticks his BP or Sunoco card into the slot, fills up and drives off. He’s got a full tank; the gas station and the oil company share in the profits. Meanwhile, the carbon that spills out of his tailpipe lingers in the atmosphere, trapping heat and contributing to higher sea levels. As the oceans rise, coastal roads erode, beachfront homes wash away, and, finally, major cities flood. Once again, it’s the public at large that gets left with the bill.

In both cases, Kolbert endorses the “fair and logical” solution: The man should be taxed to incorporate the costs that his choices impose on the rest of society.

I like this game. Can I play too?

A man chooses to build his house on the oceanfront instead of 100 miles inland. This makes him especially vulnerable to rising sea levels and therefore leads him to lobby for a carbon tax. The man gets his house; the builders and contractors share in the profits, and the public at large bears the consequence of higher gas prices.

Or even:

Some people want to burn a lot of carbon, which raises global temperatures, imposing costs on owners of oceanfront property. Other people want to protect their oceanfront property, imposing costs on the people who want to burn a lot of carbon. A journalist at the New Yorker convinces her readers that the only “fair and logical” solution to this conflict of interests is to come down entirely on the side of the property owners, leading to the implementation of suboptimal policies. The journalist gets paid, the magazine editors congratulate themselves on the influence of their writers, and the general public suffers the consequences.

Should the property owner and the journalist be taxed for exerting their malign influences?

[...]

Coase’s key insight is that all of these externality problems are fundamentally symmetric. The question is never “how do we stop A from harming B?” but instead “should we let A harm B, or should we let B harm A”? A consequence of that symmetry is that no abstract principle [...] can possibly be used to guide policy. Any purely abstract argument for preventing harm from A to B is an equally good argument for preventing harm from B to A.

[...]

Should we tax the man who comes out of the bar and passes out in the gutter? Maybe. But if your only argument is that the man should not be allowed to harm the rest of us at no cost to himself, then your argument also shows that we should not be allowed to harm the man (by taxing him) at no cost to ourselves. Should we tax the man who drives a gas guzzler? Maybe. But if your only argument is that gas guzzlers cause harm to others, you’ve got to face the fact that taxes also cause harm to others.

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.

 

Oil

image credit

I have always argued in this blog that waging war to secure oil does not make sense. Those who do it nonetheless succumb to an illusion, or they are using a pretext to justify a war to be fought for (many) other reasons.

In No War for Oil, Ivan Eland shows, it is much cheaper, and indeed operationally more sensible and feasible to buy oil on the market than to fight for it.

I use the occasion to create a list of links to some of the posts that I have written on the subject-matter of oil.

War on Oil - Unfounded Cliché,

Oil and Energy Independence ...,

War on Oil - What You See and What You Do Not See,

Libya - Is It the Oil?

The Myth Junkie Society,

The Obsolete Economics of Peak Oil,

Peak Oil ...

The Courage to Think - More Julian Simon.

 

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.

The Ambivalent Nature of Conservancy

[Guest Post from Ed Stevens]

A while back I had the opportunity to visit The Cather Prairie, a restoration project just south of Red Cloud intended to re-create the prairie as it existed in Willa Cather’s time. It is impressive in physical scope (several hundred acres), as well as in the obvious depth of commitment of those involved in the effort. Even in the early spring, the rolling swards of grassland, the pastoral springs festooned with Cather's beloved cottonwoods and a jangly profusion of wildflowers offer balm to the most calloused soul. But even as I soaked up the prairie lusciousness on that breezy Saturday morn, questions, like the springs in the canyons, bubbled up in my mind. I am generally reluctant to allow my enjoyment of beauty, order and symmetry to be disturbed by ontological bickerings, but a certain lack of metaphysical clarity implicit in the situation pesters me.

Consider...

By what spurious aesthetic do we value a "virgin" prairie, by which we mean one that existed in, say, 1875, over one which exists now - in 2012? What standard gives us license to consider a sweep of prairie grass, unsullied by tree, bush or plowshare to be more valued than some other green stretch, this one liberally punctuated with small red cedars, plum thickets and gawky goldenrod?

Is not the current state (or any state) of the land an equally authentic element of the Gaean creation story - our earth's story? Is bluestem more deserving of a place on the prairie than musk thistle? Does the cow deserve to drink at the spring, or must she walk half a mile to quench her thirst at a stock tank filled from an artificially drilled well - just to satisfy some arbitrarily defined sense of epochal legitimacy?

Biological evolution can best be understood when viewed as "analog" in nature, that is, as moving more or less smoothly from one state to the next, rather than as "digital" - jumping from one level of development to another, quantum-style. If this is so then it seems likely that all those intermediate states should be equally valued or justified. So, logically, it is difficult to see why certain of those states should be designated more desirable than others, based solely on the forms of flora and fauna currently extant upon them. Put another way, should we make judgments that only the ecosphere itself has the right to make? It makes decisions based on a couple of hundred million years’ worth of evolutionary experience - compared to our paltry one or two millennia.

I do not suggest that making sensible use of the resources provided to us by a loving Maker is not a good idea; indeed, efficient utilization of relatively scarce resources is not only a good geo-strategy, it is the only one I can think of that has demonstrable long term survival value. But I do submit that we must be careful about confusing stewardship with conservation, preservation or re-creation; to do otherwise is to find ourselves, to steal Buckley's marvelous phrase, "in diligent pursuit of the irrelevant."

So why do we do it? Why do we expend so much of our time and energies lusting after the existential architectures of yesterday? I wonder if there is another, more subtle dynamic at work here. Perhaps we seek the world of Cather (and others), search for the flowing source of her genius, not solely, or even primarily, in her written works, but by trying to physically re-create the world after those images she has left us through her words.

Extending the analysis further, isn't it possible that perhaps we are simply responding to some limbic desire to dwell, even temporarily, in a world that today exists only in dream and legend, yet has been so purely and powerfully evoked by Cather and others? Are we really just trying to build the "Good Old Days" into our own internal geographies? In our efforts, for example, to restore the "shaggy prairie" that she extolled, maybe all we're doing is hearkening to a primal need to seek the comforting swaddle of the known - the already experienced - or, to call it by its more familiar name, the past? Maybe conservancy, either actual or intellectual, is just another of our artful, and ultimately futile, attempts to go home again.