“Today’s debate about global warming is essentially a debate about freedom. The environmentalists would like to mastermind each and every possible (and impossible) aspect of our lives.”
Vaclav Klaus
Blue Planet in Green ShacklesThe Greens’ cheers were echoed by young Australians who have been taught nothing about the fossil fuel age except that it began with dark satanic mills and ended up dooming the planet to climatic meltdown. But before we consign them and their children to a “clean energy future”, we should spare a moment to count the legacy we inherited from those dark polluting fuels.
Our ancestors had hunted and gathered for hundreds of thousands of years, then farmed for thousands more before they started burning coal and oil to power industries. During those interminable pre-industrial millennia our numbers increased slowly, haltingly, vulnerably, until there were a billion of us spread across the planet. That milestone was reached about two hundred years ago – soon after James Watt invented his steam engine. Now there are seven billion of us, and most of us can expect to live longer, less painful, more enjoyable lives than our ancestors ever dreamed possible.
Consider for a moment what kept the world’s pre-industrial population below one billion. It wasn’t that the general population abstained from sex or used contraceptives; population growth was constrained by low fertility and high mortality due to poor health and nutrition and periodic plagues and famines – i.e. by human misery. Such was life when we relied on some “renewable” power (from firewood, waterwheels and windmills) but mainly on muscle power (animal or human including that of slaves). Then James Watt and “big polluters” discovered how to release energy stored under the earth to power the industry and technology that so dramatically increased the productivity and quality and quantity of human life. But according to some Greens the productivity is “rape”, the quality is “affluenza”, and the quantity is a “cancer”.
Consider the life preserving and life enhancing benefits of the fossil-fuelled age: the comfort that envelops us, the treatments that heal us, the knowledge at our fingertips, the power at our feet, the music at our ears, the world in front of our eyes. These marvels weren’t the product of central planners or inter-governmental panels or government imposed penalties and subsidies, but of individuals who were free enough to think for themselves and decide the best way to work, produce, trade, invest and live. But to those who learnt nothing from the collapse of the dirty command economies of last century a free market is an anathema – if they can’t beat it they are driven to manipulate or cripple it. Greens senator Lee Rhiannon, who is proud to have been a propagandist for the Soviet Union, wants coal mining banned within a decade – not to be replaced with uranium; her planned economy would be powered by windmills.
Even if trillions of dollars are invested in wind and solar industries they still won’t be able to supply more than a fraction of the power supplied by fossil fuels – and the reduced power supply will be less reliable and much more expensive. Greens, however, are imbued with the “political will” to eliminate fossil fuels in order to create the unspecified “green jobs” of a postmodern economy powered by these “renewables” – the reduced productivity, living standards and populations implied will cure our afluenza and the earth’s cancer. Greens have progressed beyond sacrificing individual people’s interests to “the people” – they now consider it virtuous to sacrifice people to what Tim Flannery calls the “Gaia system”, which is to be served by a “human superorganism”, a Star Trek Borg controlled no doubt by the world parliament advocated by Senator Bob Brown.
The “inconvenient truths”, hockey-stick histories and apocalyptic prophesies are pseudoscientific cover for a Green religion with an Orwellian liturgy. Carbon pollution is not carbon or pollution, it’s CO2 that we breath out and plants breath in; they are not “big polluters”, they are people who keep us warm, fed and alive; it’s not “hate press” it’s free speech; it’s not “regime change” its an election we want; and we are not holocaust “deniers”, we are all the people who can’t be fooled all the time. If the case for a “carbon” tax was scientifically and economically sensible its advocates wouldn’t have to rely on newspeak, demonization and alarmism of biblical proportions.
An ABC documentary portents a meltdown that will return the world to Jurassic park; Robert Manne pontificates that our step into the fossil fuel age was “the most fatal misstep in the history of humankind”; Clive Hamilton intones a “requiem for [our] species”; Tim Flannery crusades to save “life on the planet”; James Lovelock preaches that man made global warming will kill ten billion people this century – now that’s a scare campaign! And yet even in Lovelock’s apoplectic book of revelations more people are left on the planet than it could sustain before the “big polluters” made our “most fatal misstep”.
Consider the improbability of computer models and UN panels predicting the effect we will have on the climate centuries ahead, when they can’t get it right a decade ahead. But shouldn’t we curb emissions just in case, as insurance? Since we cannot be sure what form future catastrophes will take, let alone how best to deal with them, the most prudent insurance is economic and scientific progress that will equip us to deal with whatever problems eventuate, be they man or nature made. Of all the complex conjecture involved, only one thing is certain: curtailing the emission of CO2 will reduce our prosperity, impede progress, and leave us more vulnerable.
The first step towards the new Green world order is a carbon tax designed to rob five hundred demonized Peters to pay favoured Pauls and bribe millions of voters. But the tax will have no measurable effect on CO2 in the atmosphere let alone on global warming, not even if the rest of the world follows suit, which it won’t.
As usual, I’ll take the contrary view. The debate is, or at least should be, about an externality caused by CO2 emissions. I’ll grant that more extreme members of the environmental movement want to push this to silly levels, a prime example being the ban on incandescent light bulbs. I believe there is a role for government with respect to externalities, commons, market failures, and natural monopolies. This is, IMO, one of those situations. Taxing carbon emissions is one of the simplest and cleanest responses – it beats the heck out of having government pick winners and losers in the alternate energy space, ethanol subsidies that may have even more negative environmental effects, and on and on.
Even if you don’t believe CO2 is a problem despite mountains of evidence, you can’t deny that our fossil energy resources won’t last forever. Unfortunately, we do have a market failure here, because OPEC countries control most of the world’s petroleum. So, while it’s true that market forces will ultimately cause an adjustment away from dwindling fossil resources, the adjustment may come in the form of a shock. We’ve seen that once before in the 70s, and got a whiff of it again in 2008, and the economic damage is enormous. We’d be wise to take steps to move away from this now, for our economic and national security. Developing our own resources is IMO a no-brainer, and the sooner we start, the better. But we need to be realistic that, at least for oil, it will only help at the margin, and we’ll still need to undergo a switch of some sort to solar, nuclear, and, at least as a transition, natural gas.
Nice way to try to frame the debate. There is considerable evidence that CO2 isn’t even all that bad. Other gases, they say, are contribute far more, if you believe them. Of course, I don’t.
Then you turn around and say fossil fuels won’t last forever. And then again, they just may. There’s growing skepticism about “fossil fuels” coming from “fossils”. They are finding oil in old wells that were once pumped dry. It can be explained in only one of two ways. The first is that a vacuum was created pulling more oil into that well. It’s certainly a possibility.
There’s another theory. This theory says that oil is not a result of decaying plant matter but of a by-product of the heat from magma. This abiotic oil would certainly deal with any of those “peak oil” issues, would it not?
The point is, show me one “green” energy source that is long term sustainable without peak and valleys in generation. Hydrogen? Maybe. Wind? Nope. Wave Generators? No, still variance. Sunlight? Clouds and a daily event called night affect it. Magic Unicorns with never ending power? Haven’t seen one working yet.
I am of the mind that technology will advance at the pace it advances. Therefore, we should be willing to invest in current technologies that we know will produce energy: Nuclear, Coal, Natural Gas, Oil. And if the “green” technology ever comes of age, then the switch can be made.
But our political environment will never allow it to happen organically. A posting on Digg.com a couple years ago, I posted, tongue in cheek, that if they developed large solar arrays in death valley they would have to study the affects on the earth to see the impact of the lack of sunlight and heat hitting the sand. I was ridiculed. Funny, I read they were running those exact studies about a year ago.
So, I ask you, if oil is abiotic and not a fossil fuel, are you still against it?
@chipset:
Chipset, you make an excellent point about ”peak oil.”
On the one hand some people believe that oil is the result of dead plants.
Did plants STOP dying at any time?
No.
They die all the time, from the eras in prehistory where there were only ferns and palms to now, when there are pine forests, jungles and woods.
Keep looking in more places and more oil gets found, pushing back the day when we reach ”peak oil.”
On the other hand, there is a great deal of new evidence pointing to pressure creating oil whether dead plants are present or not.
If this is the case there is no such thing as ”peak oil,” only more oil that has not yet been drilled up.
Now that we realize how far off the computer models were (GI,GO) and that our planet releases heat out of its atmosphere, maybe we’d better heat things up lest we get too cold!
The abiotic oil theory is junk science. There’s as much evidence for the fossil origin of petroleum as there is for gravity. But even if this crackpot theory were correct, the rate of abiotic formation can’t be very high, can it?
Re. the “green energy” sources, I agree, they are diffuse and intermittent, and IMO the greens are ignoring these blindly obvious problems. The average member of the public, who can’t do the math, is easily sold on the idea of a pain-free solution. In reality, we’d have to cover enormous land areas to get sufficient energy from solar, and we still won’t have any way to store enough juice to carry the grid overnight with any known scalable technology. Greens throw out fantasies like a continental super-grid to smooth out wind power, or storing power in the batteries of electric vehicles – zoinks! This is why I’m convinced that despite some risks that IMO are overblown by the greens, we need nuclear power. I’m willing to try some solar just to get the green lobby off our backs; solar thermal can be used together with nat gas, a fossil resource we seem to have plenty of, in “hybrid” plants to get around the intermittency problem.
Back to CO2, almost no one says it isn’t a problem. Even some infamous “deniers” are not, in fact, deniers at all – they acknowledge the science but dispute that the worst-case effects, which rely on positive feedback loops and are only demonstrated in computer models, will not occur. I’d rather not chance it – think of the cost of protecting our coasts from inundation as sea levels continue to rise.