GlobalWarming.org

Climate scare-mongers love to hide behind the alleged scientific “consensus” that man-made carbon emissions are an imminent threat to the planet.  But to paraphrase Bertrand Russell, the number of scientists who believe a theory is irrelevant to its truth.  In fact, scientific consensuses have a long history of coming to ignoble ends, as I discuss in my column for the Washington Examiner today:

Once it was the unshakable belief of experts that the Sun revolved around the Earth.

This Ptolemaic model of the solar system, so-called after the 2nd century A.D. Roman astronomer who cemented the hypothesis in the Western mind, was for centuries considered so obvious and uncontroversial that to even suggest otherwise was to be accused of insanity, stupidity or heresy.

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Following the failure in Copenhagen and Cancun, no one expected much from the UN’s seventeenth year of climate talks that took place during the past two weeks in South Africa. However, the sluggish conference got a jolt of excitement when China teased that they might agree, after sixteen years of disagreement, to sign a legally binding deal for reducing emissions.

China’s softening position escalated enthusiasm at the United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP17) with news coming out stating that negotiators “were steps closer to an agreement on combating climate change” and “Agreement on emissions reduction appears near.”

COP17, according to The Economist, was “more about saving the circus” than “saving the planet.” Regarding the event, the Wall Street Journal declared that it “appeared destined to end as a well-advertised convention of environmental officials and activists swapping strategies on creating new national parks and shuttering old coal-fired plants.” But that was before China’s changing rhetoric—and rhetoric it was.

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“To maintain our Nation’s competitive edge,” President Obama said this summer, “we must ensure that the United States has fast, reliable ways to move people, goods, energy, and information. In a global economy, where businesses are making investment choices between countries, we will compete for the world’s investments based in part on the quality of our infrastructure.” The president is absolutely right, and yet his environmental zeal stands in the way of American infrastructure growth.

At a news conference with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper yesterday, Obama told reporters that he would reject any Congressional deal that tied a payroll tax cut—something he has pushed for over the past couple months—to an approval for Canada’s Keystone XL, a 1700 mile pipeline that would deliver up to 830,000 barrels of oil a day from the Alberta tar sands to America’s refining hub along the Gulf of Mexico.

“Any effort to try to tie Keystone to the payroll tax cut, I will reject. Everybody should be on notice. The reason is,” he explained, “because the payroll tax cut is something House Republicans and Senate Republicans should want to do regardless of any other issues.” In other words, it’s his way or no way.

The logic behind the payroll tax cuts, as explained by Obama, is that “it will spur spending.  It will spur hiring.” Yet the pipeline will create $7 billion in investment and will create upwards of 13,000 private sector jobs without spending a single public dollar. In tough budgetary times, Congress and the president should be open ways to create jobs without more debt-financed stimulus.

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“Wall Street and corporations have corrupted the political process,” says one Occupy Wall Street sign. It’s a common refrain from progressives, but their criticism is one-directional. The accusation is only leveled when Giant Corporations oppose government intervention. When big business supports the intervention, because it stands to reap windfall profits, industry reports are suddenly valid sources for information about the legislation. During the debate about the incandescent light bulb ban, this attitude was rampant, and still is. Consider this excerpt from a recent piece by Washington Times’ Blogger Catherine Poe. She writes:

[W]hile sitting on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, [Rand] Paul railed against government plans to transition from the incandescent light bulb to more energy saving light bulbs, citing Rand’s 1937 novel Anthem. The similarity, according to Paul, is that “individual choice is banned and the collective basically runs society.”Just for the record: The companies making light bulbs were all for this change. [Emphasis added]

Her closing comment is remarkable because it demonstrates complete deference to corporate interests on this issue. It’s not just Poe. The Washington Post editorialized in favor of the light bulb ban in July, citing a study by light bulb manufacturer Phillips that said the ban “would save a household $160 in energy costs over its life.” According to the Post, “The law has had an impressive effect: Light bulb manufacturers have invested heavily in developing new bulbs that use much less electricity, turn on immediately, work with dimmers and produce soft white light.” It’s like reading the back of a GE box.

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In Monday’s excerpt, Julian Simon argued that pollution has been in steady decline and living standards have improved over time if you include the ancient pollutants like bacteria and viruses spread by polluted water. In Tuesday’s post, Wilfred Beckerman echoed the point. He argued that economic development improves standards of living, even today. Today’s post from Daniel Yergin’s new book The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World demonstrates how the post-Soviet Russian state rediscovered energy privatization and market forces improved the lives of average Russians.

Natural resources–particularly oil and natural gas–were as critical to the new Russian state as they had been to the former Soviet Union. By the middle 1990s, oil export revenues accounted for as much as two thirds of the Russian government’s hard currency earnings…. Yet the oil sector was swept up in the same anarchy as the rest of the economy. Workers, who were not being paid, went on strike, shutting down the oil fields. Production and supply across the country were disrupted. Oil was being commandeered or stolen and sold for hard currency in the West.

No one even knew who really owned the oil. Individual production organizations in various parts of West Siberia and elsewhere were busily trying to go into business for themselves. The industry was suddenly being run by “nearly 2000 uncoordinated associations, enterprises, and organizations belonging to the former Soviet industry ministry.” Amid such disruption and starved for investment, Russian oil output started to slip, and then collapse. In little more than half a decade, Russian production plummeted by almost 50 percent–an astonishing loss of more than 5 million barrels a day.

One person with clearly thought-through ideas about what to do was Vagit Alekperov… deputy oil minister. On trips to the West, Alekperov visited a number of petroleum companies. He saw a dramatically different way of operating an oil business. “It was a revelation,” he said. “Here was a type of organization that was flexible and capable, a company that was tackling all the issues at the same time–exploration, production, and engineering–and everybody pursuing the common goal, and not each branch operating separately.”

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In yesterday’s excerpt, Julian Simon pointed out that “the worst pollutions of the past were diseases caused by microorganisms, and spread by contaminated drinking water and by airborne germs and insects.” Today’s excerpt from Wilfred Becherman’s Through Green-Colored Glasses: Environmentalism Reconsidered shows how this is still true today in the Third World, and why it should be ignored by so many environmentalists.

In the richer countries of the world, it is at least understandable that important sections of the community should question whether priority should be given to further increases in the output of goods and services. But for the vast majority of the world’s population it does not require much imagination of knowledge of their terrible poverty to rule out the question of whether further economic growth is desirable for them. Nevertheless, it is often argued that the developing countries should not make the same “mistakes” as were made by the now advanced countries. They are advised not to pursue economic growth in spite of its adverse social or environmental effects, and not to fall into the trap of “rising expectations.” Furthermore, we often hear that if the developing countries seek to achieve standards of living comparable with those now enjoyed by the advanced countries there simply will not be enough resources to go around.

One conclusion that might appear to follow from these pessimistic doctrines is that, because the rich countries of the world can hardly be expected to reduce their levels of material prosperity, the poor countries must not be encouraged to believe that they too can aspire to such levels of prosperity. They must therefore accustom themselves to the idea of giving priority to environmental preservation rather than economic growth. Of course, it is bad luck for them that the point at which economic growth has to stop should just have arrived near the end of the 20^th century, when other countries have already achieved a certain affluence but before they have had the opportunity to do likewise themselves.

This view, not surprisingly, has always been rejected by the developing countries. As far back as 1972, the so-called “Founex report,” drawn up by a group of experts convened by the United Nations to prepare a report on Development and the Environment for the 1972 UN World Conference on the Human Environment, pointed out that, although “the developing countries would clearly wish to avoid, as far as is feasible, the mistakes and distortions that have characterized the patterns of developmental problems in the industrialized nations… the major environmental problem of developing countries are essentially of a different kind: they are predominantly problems that reflect the poverty and very lack of development of their societies. They are problems, in other words, of both rural and urban poverty. In both the towns and in the countryside, not merely the ‘quality of life’ but life itself is endangered by poor water, housing, sanitation, and nutrition, by sickness and disease.”

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