George Monbiot of the left-leaning British newspaper The Guardian has a must-read column in which he admits that because of a whole series of intellectual mistakes, the global green movement’s policy prescriptions are hopelessly flawed.
Read the whole piece for a thoughtful and brutally clear expose of the intellectual bankruptcy of the green movement from one of the smartest people in it. This is what I’ve been getting at for more than a year here: regardless of what is happening to Planet Earth, the green movement does not have coherent and workable solutions.
Greens like to have it both ways. They warn darkly about “peak oil” and global resource shortages that will destroy our industrial economy in its tracks — but also warn that runaway economic growth will destroy the planet through the uncontrolled effects of mass industrial productions. Both doomsday scenarios cannot be true; one cannot simultaneously die of both starvation and gluttony.
George Monbiot (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
Monbiot gets it, and furthermore concedes one of the main arguments of the anti-green case. The ‘problem’ is not a shortage of carbon rich non-renewable futures. The problem is the abundance of these fuels. We are not running out of hydrocarbons; shale natural gas, tar sands and coal offer enormous reserves that can cover our needs for the foreseeable future. We have an abundance of fossil fuel. Moreover, it seems likely that for a very long time to come, fossil fuels will be substantially cheaper and more abundant that expensive renewables. (One should also note that these new fuel sources are found in places like Canada and the United States rather than Saudi Arabia and Iran.)
More, Monbiot also acknowledges the contradictory and inconsistent nature of the green solutions. He acknowledges that there is no prospect for democratic politics to impose the draconian limits on consumption and economic activity that green dogma requires. Every ‘solution’ the greens have come up with has a fatal flaw of some kind; none of it works, none of it makes any sense. As Monbiot concludes,
“All of us in the environment movement, in other words – whether we propose accommodation, radical downsizing or collapse – are lost. None of us yet has a convincing account of how humanity can get out of this mess. None of our chosen solutions break the atomising, planet-wrecking project. I hope that by laying out the problem I can encourage us to address it more logically, to abandon magical thinking and to recognise the contradictions we confront. But even that could be a tall order.”
This is an awesome admission of categorical intellectual, political and moral failure. For two decades greens have arrogated to themselves the authority of science and wrapped themselves in the arrogant certainty of self-righteous contempt for those who oppose them. They have equated skepticism about their incoherent and contradictory policy proposals with hatred of science and attacked their critics as the soulless hired shills of the oil companies, happy to ruin humanity for the sake of some corporate largesse.
Monbiot has worked his way through to a cogent description of the dead end the global green movement has reached, but he has not yet diagnosed the cause. In particular, he remains a staunch Malthusian. In his view, humanity is good at creating new ways to destroy itself, but not at finding solutions to the problems we create. Our ingenuity is magically good at finding new fossil fuels, but we have no skill whatsoever at managing the consequences of our discoveries. The unknown technologies of the future will create horrible new disasters, but they will offer no new ways to contain or manage the disruption they cause.
Thomas Malthus (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
Economic growth is a cancer, in this view. Its bad effects are permanent and cumulative, its blessings are evanescent and ultimately trivial.
Malthusianism is a religious conviction that desperately needs to think of itself as a science. From Thomas Malthus and his mathematical certainties to Paul Ehrlich with his famine timetables and the Club of Rome with its ‘scientific’ predictions of resource exhaustion, Malthusians have made confident predictions about the future and claimed scientific authority for statements that turned out to be contemptibly silly. That is the brutal fate that often awaits people who can’t keep the boundaries between science and religion straight.
It is happening on a massive and humiliating scale to the world’s greens today. Monbiot’s sober assessment of the consequences is dead on; when the greens digest his analysis and go a bit further to ask how they got into this mess, they will be ready to join something that the world truly and urgently needs: a serious and grownup conversation about how to conserve the beauty and viability of our glorious home as the human race continues to develop the extraordinary intelligence Mother Nature has seen fit to give us.
I’d love to find a middle ground between green wilderness worship and the worship of conspicuous consumption and gluttony. Prudent stewardship and restraint used to be considered virtues that conservatives could get behind. Today’s conservatives have by and large bought into a consumerist mindset that has no room for restraint or prudence and only will support rabid consumption. I consider myself a Burkean conservative and have been so turned off by the unquestioning embrace of consumer culture by the right of today, I’ve contemplated becoming a “green” and feel more at home with progressives than my old political home.
WRM, sans scientific expertise, I find that environment movement/Monbiot both grapple with humanity’s technological and commercial progress since ascendancy of “Walrus and Carpenter.” That ascendancy affords inquiry by greens as to the proper balance between nature and man; Monbiot all but concedes greens ,despite their dogmatism, yet don’t know. Similarly, on-going discussion vis-a-vis earth’s ecosystem and human commerce warrants 21st century leadership priority.
For the scientific issues related to global warming I rely on Lubs Motl. He’s a theoretical physicist (former Harvard Fellow) who has taken on this issue as a sort of hobby horse. He knows his science, writes well, and has an irascible attitude that I personally find refreshing. If you are going to loose your temper over something, contemporary climate science is as good a reason as any.
http://motls.blogspot.com/
http://motls.blogspot.com/
Monbiot: “None of us yet has a convincing account of how humanity can get out of this mess.”
As Freeman Dyson suggested, it may not be such a mess. Global warming, on balance, may be good for mankind. The total carrying capacity of the earth will likely increase and the temperate areas will expand (there is a lot of real estate in Canada and Siberia). Doomsday scenarios depend on the idea that the earth’s climate is inherently unstable, that tipped a little the effect will multiply (“positive feedback”). But nature tends to prefer negative feedback loops leading to equilibrium and stability. Life could never have evolved otherwise.
Malthus’ model of population growth in the face of resource constraint is just that: a model. Mathematical models are not oracles, they’re tools – and speaking as a professional mathematician, they’re a damn poor basis for religious belief, I would add. There is nearly always a better model to be had. Malthus’ model is very good example because it based on the assumption of a very simple uniform population and a homogenous resource base.
One of the great demographic mysteries is beginning to be understood: the enormous secular decline in mortality that took place in the twentieth century. Demographers, historians, economists, and medical researchers are realizing that the green revolution, developments in public health and medicine do not account for as much of the decline as assumed. A nice account of this is found in Nobel economist, Robert Fogel’s “The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700 – 2100: Europe, America, and the Third World” whose subtitle might have been, “Malthus was Wrong”.
Brynteson, perhaps you should actually learn what conservatives believe before condemning them. They do not “worship” consumerism.
Liberty, perhaps. But that means people are free to do things you find ugly, including live in comfort.
Monbiot: “None of us yet has a convincing account of how humanity can get out of this mess.”
When you’re having difficulty solving a problem, it’s often becuse you you haven’t defined the problem correctly.
Monbiot’s conclusions and the above analysis have been easily apparent to the most ignorant, uneducated grease-monkeys and rednecks for decades. Why is it taking this long for the “smart-set” to catch up? The average person is aware (albeit, probably unconsciously) that most intellectuals are infected with a species of autism that inhibits their ability to see outside models, memes, and narratives that they have constructed for themselves. I think it would be helpful for society as a whole if this class of people would undertake some kind of mass confession stating that this is true and then go back to a more monkish practice of exercising their minds.
The last sentence of the article shows the flaw in enviro zealot thinking. Mother nature did not give us this world, God gave it to us and until they admit that they are indeed lost.
When the 2nd and 3rd world start to starve,
the 1st world is likely to receive some very
negative feedback.
Anyone ever consider that the ultimate goal among the most rabid of the environmental movement is not improving the environment but rather increasing their power and ability to dictate the lives of their fellow men? What else would explain their penchant for demonizing anyone who disagrees with them? Or their willingness to “adjust” the facts to fit their narrative? The latest narrative I am hearing has gone from: “We have to control CO2 levels to prevent global warming from killing us”, to “We have to control CO2 levels to prevent acidization of the oceans from killing us”. The end goal for them is always control. The reasons are just means to that end.
WHat kills me is when these guys acknowledge some glimmering of being wrong, of course they are being intellectually courageous, insightful, etc, etc.
But they can never bring themselves to acknowledge that knuckle dragging conservatives and libertarians were right all along — or if they were they were somehow right but for the ‘wrong’ reasons. They ludicrously act like they had some *new* idea.
We saw this with Monbiot’s awakening on nuclear power.
Bah.
A good start would be for greenies to acknowledge the tremendous progress we’ve made on clean air, clean water in the last few decades. You might say they always see the glass as half-empty.
They’re like the boss who scolds his workers all the time, but never praises them. It gets old…fast.
If Monbiot recently came to this self-professed conclusion, that is not a strong argument for his intelligence. The entire environmental argument is tainted by an anthropomorphic assessment of the earth. Given that the earth is over 4 billion years old, replete with mass extinctions, climatic upheavals, impact events, geologic instability, etc. it is safe to say that the earth does not have a vested interest in human beings. In other words, the belief that the earth has been some sort of park, beautiful, and serene until the industrial age of humans is misplaced at best or an irrational belief at worst. A grown discussion of energy and economics is long over due.
Well,all that Moonbat is really doing is acknowledging what has been pretty much axiomatic to the rest of us for a long time….that the entire AGW theory and subsequent political movement was born of a pseudo-scientific lust for political power and a malignant desire to stifle individual freedom and economic growth…all in the name of some pagan Luddite reactionary belief system that,by rights,shouldn’t even be able to survive the intellectual rigors of a 9th grade debate class
All one has to do is read through the slew of leaked “ClimateGate” e-mails to see that the scientific facts are not what truly matter the most to most of today’s left-leaning government/academic crowd.
At it’s core, the so called Green Movement is all about top-down, total bureaucratic government control over every aspect of individual life, even to include what we will be allowed to eat and drink.
M Report sez :When the 2nd and 3rd world start to starve,
the 1st world is likely to receive some very
negative feedback.”
EXCEPT they haven’t – save for the diminishing threat of war, which creates famine, and aren’t now save for eco-wacked ‘biofuels’ mania in developed nations that is pushing up grain prices to penurious levels. Solution? STOP biofuels (NO THANKS to Al Gore in the US).
“Monbiot’s conclusions and the above analysis have been easily apparent to the most ignorant, uneducated grease-monkeys and rednecks for decades. Why is it taking this long for the “smart-set” to catch up?”
One word: narcissism. Leftism is basically the politics of narcissism and the other Cluster B personality disorders — borderline, histrionic, antisocial. The leftists’ need to think of themselves as inherently superior beings is so powerful that it overrides all other considerations, including their own sensory inputs. Something that’s as plain as day to you and me is completely opaque to them, if it doesn’t reinforce their preconceived notion of their place in the world.
This also explains why leftists consistently view all resources as a Malthusian zero-sum game. Leftists see themselves as deserving of the largest slice of the fixed pie. But if the pie can grow, then it’s possible for other people to live as well as they do. Leftists find this idea intolerable because it denies them their specialness. Thus, they have a strong need for the pie to be fixed, and if the game isn’t zero-sum, they will work to make it so.
It’s about power, control and an amazing number of useful idiots. I think the term “Watermelons” describes the environmental movement perfectly.
@T Brynteson 3:39 pm:
Oh, so you are the Burkean conservative I’ve been hearing about who’d love to find a middle ground between green wilderness worship and the worship of conspicuous consumption and gluttony.
Have you already figured out what you are going to worship or are you still working on it?
The environmental policies of today are not the same as those in the past.
They are more in tune with the policies of socialism.
he Malthisian dilemma for the greens is that virtually all modern industialized and westernized countries have a birth rate that is at or below replacement. Only in tribal and feudal societies, mainly in Africa and the Arab world is population racing out of control.
For the non-greens the answer to bring everyone up to the comfort levels of westernized societies, and the world’s population will stabilize. For the greens reducing the amount of carbon is prime, without addressing the population bomb other than through draconian, non-democratic means. It also means driving the world into an impoverished third world economic disaster.
Despite what the greens want, democratic societies won’t accept it.
Greens like Monbiot are addicted to the idea of social engineering. They see the earth itself as their partner in an endless dance of co-dependent nonsense.
The cure is to lock them up in comfortable cells with a laptop and a copy of SimEarth and let them play out their fantasies safely and unhindered.
Nice of Moonbiot to admit to the internal contradictions among the envirologues. Even better of WRM to make their intellectual bankruptcy so apparent. May I also add a link to a very interesting video site setting out the startling intellectual dishonesty of the most prominent keepers of the environmental data and proponents of the dangers of supposed anthropogenic global warming? I have posted it in these columns before, but it is far more apropos here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BQpciw8suk
This Berkeley professor is a serious scientist quite concerned about global warming – and fortunately, about scientific fraud.
One last point to reiterate: We have had global warming for some 10,000 years now, since the end of the last Ice Age. Whatever has been causing it for ten millennia is far more likely to be the culprit now, and it was not all those power plants, factories and SUVs operated by Stone Age cavemen while chipping arrowheads out of bits of flint.
I think the primary problem with the environmentalist movement today is that the leftists that have taken it over dont really care about the environment. They are merely using environmental concerns to advance their real goal, imposing one world socialism, or Malthusians who hate humanity and technology.
In the early days, many environmental organizations had members who liked hunting, fishing, birdwatching, sailing, farming, logging, and camping. But those people, who were capable of intelligently balancing long term preservation with intelligent sustainable use, were edged out by the leftists, who only want to control us.
The environmentalist movement needs to purge the leftists, and get the people who really love nature, more than socialist/malthusian idealogy, back in charge.
Greens need to do the following:
1. Lose the misanthropy. Nearly every green elevates empty “nature” over environments containing humans and their works. Learn to like actual humans, not just “The People”.
2. Lose the aristocratic instincts. You’ll never be elected God-Emperor, so quit wishing you were, and more importantly, quit advocating policies that demand godly powers.
3. Lose the hypocrisy. Globe-trotting greens flying to AGW shindigs in the world’s swankest resorts doesn’t exactly impress. Nor do billionaires arguing that everyone else should wear greenie hairshirts while they fly their private jets between their dozen 10,000+ square foot mansions.
Well, finally: an intellectually honest assessment by a Green figure. That’s a big step. Now, if Greens are serious about determining who they really are and what they really want, they would do well to honestly assess how much of the Green movement is simply the use of environment as a means to achieving the political end of what is essentially a Communist state.
to continue Foobarista’s list:
4. Lose the God Complex. Those environmentalists think they can understand the complexities of existence on this planet in it’s entirety. Anyone remember the Yellowstone Wolf debacle? How’d that work out?
5. Lose the partisanship. I’ve seen at least two comments where conservatives were demonized. Stereotypes are the last resort of someone trying to make themselves seem better than others, but to no good end. My conservative family does not, nor will not fit into someone else criteria. The goal is to work TOGETHER not divide.
6. Lose the idea that the next ‘AHA!’ invention can be coerced. For some reason, every developed country thinks that the next new innovation can be forced into existence. It cannot. The next new fuel source will be found eventually, but in it’s own time. Until then, use what we have wisely, clean up after ourselves and be good to one another.
There’s nothing wrong with being prudent with resources. There’s nothing wrong with being frugal and reusing materials when and where we can. That all being said, we can’t do it with every material and we can’t do it with every human action. Instead of using the heavy hand of the EPA to restrict trade and banish jobs, how about we start working together to come up with solutions using current technology-not technology that is thirty years away. For example, the US has ample supplies of coal. Yet the combined stressers of mining and emissions has led it to be banned. What if, instead, we found ways to mine coal and then turn back the land afterwards? What if we found new and better and cleaner ways to use coal? But no, the EPA in their wisdom only wants to ban things, not fix them. For all their angst driven striving for the new technology, the various brands of electric cars are not worth the money to save only a couple of hundred dollars a year. When I talk to students about art, I tell them that art is produced by societies that are successful. We know this because these cultures have the time and materials beyond mere survival standards. That concept applies to technology as well. If our economy could be more balanced, more people would willingly engage the new technology. Instead most of us are struggling just to make ends meet. And that is the eternal struggle that will doom the green agenda for the next election.
Ellen Kay: “There’s nothing wrong with being prudent with resources.”
Or in the words of Benjamin Franklin: “some Political Arithmetician, that if every Man and Woman would work four Hours each Day on something useful, that Labour would produce sufficient to procure all the Necessaries and Comforts of Life, Want and Misery would be banished out of the World, and the rest of the 24 Hours might be Leisure and Pleasure. What occasions then so much Want and Misery?”
For my take: https://sites.google.com/site/lukelea2/introduction
The answer to how we’re going to get out of this mess is right in front of our noses. It takes only a cursory glance around the world to see that not only are the poorest places the filthiest and the richest places the cleanest, but across the world environmental quality correlates with wealth across the entire wealth curve.
World to Monbiot: ENVIRONMENTAL QUALITY IS A LUXURY GOOD. Poor people don’t protect their environment; they eat it. The slash it to provide marginal crop lands to work, and they burn it in their cooking fires. Wealthy nations on the other hand, with their citizens mostly freed from such existential concerns, have the time and wherewithal to examine their relationship with the environment and decide what level of environmental protection they want. The wealthy also have the means necessary to actually pay the costs of environmental protection that the poor simply do not have. Environmental quality is just like any other desirable good or service: attaining it has a cost that must be paid.
The answer to the problem of environmental quality is to make the world as rich as possible as quickly as possible.
It’s consistent to say: “there’s a problem” and “we have no solution”. That’s my summary of climate change. I’m thinking that’s what Monbiot is also saying.
I’m enough of an optimist to think that we will be rescued either by serendipity (aka R&D + capitalism) or by “desperate measures in the nick of time at unimaginable human and financial cost”.
one cannot simultaneously die of both starvation and glutton
Not quite true. A glut of ‘food’ with no nutritional value will kill, if only indirectly. Whether death comes directly or indirectly doesn’t matter so very much…
“”"T Brynteson says: Today’s conservatives have by and large bought into a consumerist mindset that has no room for restraint or prudence and only will support rabid consumption. “”"
Let me guess, you skipped the article and went straight to the comments.
Because you obviously didn’t even read it. If you did manage to read it, then the only conclusion is that you’re not very smart.
Spot-on article, by the way. Monbiot gets it. He’s still a bit more radical, environmentally, than I’d like, but not by much. Where could the left and the right meet on this issue? Somewhere between a guy like Monbiot and a guy like me.
Alas, his voice is drowned out by those the author mentioned
(…They have equated skepticism about their incoherent and contradictory policy proposals with hatred of science and attacked their critics as the soulless hired shills of the oil companies, happy to ruin humanity for the sake of some corporate largesse…)
Again, great article. This one gets spammed everywhere by me.
The article by Monbiot you build on at one point states: “In east Africa, for example, I’ve seen how, when supplies of paraffin or kerosene are disrupted, people don’t give up cooking; they cut down more trees. History shows us that wherever large-scale collapse has occurred, psychopaths take over. This is hardly conducive to the rational use of natural assets.” From this sentence, one is given the impression the people who cut down trees to obtain fuel to cook food are “psychopaths”. If this is truly how those in the Green movement REALLY SEE LIFE, there will be no reasoning with them. What WOULD be “the rational use of natural assets” in the minds of the Greens when there is no other fuel to be had to cook food than the trees in the area? People should starve? People should eat their food raw ? These people claim to be concerned about “all the deaths” (see Monbiot article) that arise from the unbridled growth of economies. What about the deaths that would occur from the diseases people would be likely to encounter from eating raw, uncooked meat ?
These people (the Greens) are the true psychopaths. They must hate humanity.
The solution to CO2 in the atmosphere isn’t to tax people to death. CO2 isn’t a poison, it’s a byproduct.
The solution is to re-forest and de-concrete. Hold the CO2 in a sink.
It’s really very simple: Waste not, want not. The answer is conservationism, not environmentalism (whatever that is). (OK, here’s what it is: a false religion.)
The thread of understanding of the mea cupla is that the ‘green’ movement isn’t about the environment. Its a cover for government (and thus their) control people and the economy. The new hydrocarbon technologies that have uncovered massive amounts of them scare them as their prescriptions for our redemption are no longer needed. All of the ‘science’ is now a historical artifact and they have nothing to replace it. Ah, how sweet it is!
Richard40, you are correct. Many good comments here. I am glad to see that Monbiot realizes his goals, like that of many leftists, are out of touch with human behavior.
One must remember that in this competative world, our products, whether naturally grown grain or a manufactured item, must be affordable to our trading partners to buy from us.
Fuel, whether carbon related or wind/sun must be part of this competative pach=kage.
You have done a great service here in forwarding these ideas from a liberal perspective. Here and in previous such articles. This comes the closest to my ever-evolving POV on this issue, which is that it’s their very solutions–though they barely qualify as such–that are so far off base. Not to mention the stubborn arrogance with which they have been put forth. Without coherent solutions, it’s all a moot point. With stunning levels of arrogance behind it, it’s a moot and deeply offensive point, and as such has alienated so many potential allies to their cause that one can only come to the conclusion that these arguments are made more out of spite than of the hope that anything will be done to combat it.
But only a liberal who can put this argument forth in a civil and reasoned manner could ever get traction among other liberals, and that’s what is so helpful with this and other previous pieces on this subject.
Good job!
It is ironic that they very things the Greens hate most are the very things that will achieve their goal of a clean and green Earth – technology (energy), growth, capitalism and liberal democracy. I feel that a flow chart would be useful here, but I’ll try to describe my thinking:
1. Capitalism and Liberal Democracy, with respect for individual and private property rights and the fair application of the rule of law, set the stage for individual empowerment and risk taking – starting a business, expanding the farm, innovating, experimenting, and creating.
2. This enables technology growth and the development and of more efficient, more abundant energy sources. With abundant affordable energy, you get economic and societal growth.
3. As the economy and society grows and becomes more (classically) liberal, girls enter the education system and the workforce, which results in a sharp decline in birth rates. Overpopulation problem solved without draconian totalitarian solutions. Over a few generations the problem actually becomes *underpopulation* as we see in many European countries and Japan.
4. As the overall population prospers and becomes more wealthy, they can afford to make “green” decisions about things like demanding cleaner air and water, stricter safety standards, less pollution, creating park systems and “open spaces,” requesting “greener” products, etc. Poor people are too busy scrabbling for survival to worry about energy efficient appliances or hybrid cars – only a wealthy society has the time and resources to do so.
5. At the same time, given fair and open market competition (again, coupled with reasonable regulations applied evenly by Government) there is a natural drive towards efficiency by companies – the more efficient, nimble and productive will succeed more often than the wasteful and less productive companies.
6. And the application of technology can replace certain animal derived and farmed products with other solutions (synthetic fur means fewer dead baby fur seals) that lead to more food stuffs (GM crops that can increase food production with fewer resources and chemicals, and be more nutritious in many cases), medicines and products available at lower prices.
But all of this will be the result of free people making decisions freely, with Government enabling and supporting rather than as the result of a small subset of self-appointed elites dictating and controlling people through the power of Government.
OH REALLY….????
I agree with earlier posters on the control issue. I’m a reasonably intelligent conservative person educated at a prominant private University. I run a business and employ several people. And, I HATE being controlled. In fact, I sometimes go out of my way to “waste” resources, just to spite the green philosphy.
Case in point, I went to Home Depot yesterday to buy a replacement showerhead. When I realized that federal law prohibits the sale of “water wasting” nozzels, I went out of my way to fabricate my own showerhead. Now, I have so much water coming out of the showerhead, I can’t heat enough hot water.
Admitedly, I don’t need to use so much water. Had the “greenies” permitted me to buy any adjustable showerhead, I might reduce my consumption. But they revel in their power of telling me how much water it takes to get me clean. My reaction–screw ‘em all. I’m gonna use as much water as I want.
Ditto on my fuel-hogging 1985 Ford F-250….screw ‘em all.
There is little logic in my approach. Likewise, it’s foolhardy to outlaw effective incandescent light bulbs in favor of Mercury-filled versions that rot our landfills. The balance between control and freedom can only be tempered by wisdom. Currently, neither side exhibits the latter.
Great article but I think you should not use the word “religion” for belief in Malthusianism. It is an entrenched belief that is resistent to reason and evidence. But in this it resembles communism more than Buddhism. Religions make far fewer testable claims than these ideologies. That is what is so odd about their claims to science: empiricism is their enemy.
I noticed this some years ago from the rank and file – a simultaneous claim that we’re overpopulating the planet with dire predictions of the demise of humanity.
Unfortunately, Monbiot will be run out of the Green community on cold, cold rail and nailed to a cross because rationality was never integral to the movement.
Well, ya dummies. If you weren’t so paranoid about litter, you could have tied strings to the trees to find your way back! Old Boy Scout trick you know. Now that you’re lost without even a clue or sign, guess you’ll have to resort to prayer.
I left the environmentalists and Greens after they purged everyone from their groups that advocated less immigration and a stable population.
Current levels of immigration in the USa will grow our population to a half a billion in a few decades, for no good reason other than to increase profits to those that profit from immigration while passing all the social,economic and environmemtal costs onto the communities.
Immigration is a racket and the environmentalists and greenies are in it up to the hilt.
we are not a natio of immigrants, we are a nation of American citizens that have wanted less immigration for decades and have gotten the opposite from our weasels in washington, along with a smear campaign from the media that equates anyone that wnts less immigration as anti immigrant, racist or worse.
This is and always has been about controlling their less-enlightened neighbors. With their left hand they oppose every form of domestic energy production that does not meet their standards, and with their other left hand they tell us to give up our freedoms in order to save energy.
I hope the GOP will make the Democrat’s decades-long war on domestic energy production a major issue in 2012. An adult conversation seeking a reasonable balance between environmental and economic needs is long overdue, and having been unmasked by the abysmal failures of their prophecies and their technological solutions, the green absolutists may be less able to shout down those with different opinions.
Peter Jackson nails it. All I would add is that if Greens would focus on “pollution” rather than “environment” they might in fact find themselves on a winning team.
Dear Mr. Mead,
As someone from the opposite end of the political spectrum, allow me to make a few points. First of all, anyone who seriously contends that they “know” when peak oil is going to be reached, that they “know” the extent to which we have been effecting the tempo, and in what ways, of climate change. In this, I think we would agree.
However, you have done a mischief in talking about Malthusianism not having any scientific precedent. Populations must be sustainable in their environmental contexts. Animals have mechanisms that control the rate at which they reproduce. When animals (humans included) are placed in scarce environments, they respond by having fewer children. Of course, humans are more complex than many animals because things like economic and political systems are also part of our environment. I am not equating this to Malthusianism, but I am saying that when populations grow to a size that their local environments cannot support them, members die off fighting over scarcer resources. I think it is important to understand that human beings are biological organisms intimately linked to their environments. I think humans in general have conceptualizations of humans acting upon the surrounding environment, rather than acting within their environmental context.
Now, as to the inability of enacting “green” reforms democratically, I absolutely agree. That is not the purpose of government. Legislating human behavior by fiat is not an effective (or wise) policy. What governments need to do is begin making it easier and more attractive for people to utilize green technologies. When the economic cost-benefit analysis favors walking over driving, or using public transportation, then more people will utilize that then not. But I believe firmly that in a democratic society, the choice of the individual must be preserved.
Allow me, if you will, to give a few examples. I believe that the construction of a reliable system of high speed rail would greatly reduce fuel costs, and, if ran efficiently (meaning if we actually invested in the system), it could prove a wonderful alternative to air travel. Cities also need equally reliable transportation. Ride a bus in a US city and compare that horrible experience with riding one in Germany. The goal of environmentally-conscious policies should be to reward companies that begin making sustainable products (eliminating designed obsolescence would be nice) and making it easier for citizens to make environmentally conscious decisions. I have a few ideas about the agricultural system as well. Environmentalists ignore this problem far to much, but our agricultural system is in need of drastic repair. Any ways, I enjoyed your analysis, and I always enjoy seeing people point out the absurdity of doomsday predictions, from wherever they may come. I hope that eventually the environmentalist movement will begin creating positive messages that focus on real, practical, and locally oriented solutions to these problems.
What problem? Twice as many scientists have weighed in that there is no climate problem as signed that document Gore used to tout. Many scientists are taking on the green zealots when it starts to pollute their area of science – witness how the tornado experts shredded those saying climate change drove the recent spate of twisters. Each of us must take the zealots on in our area of expertise.
In his article, Monbiot says:
“The same probably applies to almost all minerals: we will find them, but exploiting them will mean trashing an ever greater proportion of the world’s surface. We have enough non-renewable resources of all kinds to complete our wreckage of renewable resources: forests, soil, fish, freshwater, benign weather. Collapse will come one day, but not before we have pulled everything down with us.”
A 1 km metallic asteroid (90th percentile iridium richness), mined at a rate of 1 million cubic meters per year, could provide us with the following minerals (as a multiple of our nation’s annual consumption, according to USGS):
Semiconductors –
Gallium: 8x
Germanium: 36x
Selenium: .7x
Precious Metals:
Ruthenium: 8x
Rhodium: 3x
Platinum: 2x
Iridium: 70x
That asteroid, at that specified level of consumption, would last us 500 years.
… and that’s just from what we can see from the ground and predict from the few samples we have. It is tremendously unlikely that asteroidal material should have significantly *less* strategic metal content than the crust of the Earth.
(Honestly, this is the new “route to the Spice Islands”. I fully expect a relatively minor nation of today, that is starved for strategic raw materials, to be the Spain or England of this new phase of exploration. If we’re lucky we will play the part of Italy, who provided such expatriate explorers as Giovanni Caboto (John Cabot) and Cristoforo Colombo (shame on you if you need a translation!), and slid from its Renaissance heights to the third-rate status it “enjoys” today.)
But if, instead, the US continues to follow the upward path — thirty times our 2010 consumption of the semiconductor Germanium, in space, could be used to create space solar power stations. These would be functional near 100% of the time (rather than less than 50% of the time, for most solar), could be used as “peaker” plants around the world, and would have none of the negative “Not In My Back Yard” resistance currently facing greentech.
There will come a point where space mining / space solar efforts will be more economical than fossil fuel recovery. That point will come much, much sooner, if as much as 1% of entitlement program money is redirected to programs like NASA and ESA.
Europeans don’t want to give up the fruits of industrial society any more than Americans do. The rising 3rd world is not going to put up with being told it cannot have a Western standard of living, if it works as hard and effectively as Westerners do. Earthbound Greentech cannot support both our industrial society and our aspirations for preserving Earth as a wilderness, a garden, or at least a well-tilled countryside. We have to look outside the box, outside the gravity well, for our future.
The greens don’t want to save the planet for the human race; they want to exterminate the human race. They truly believe the planet is a better place without us. (Though query, what does “better” mean in the absence of a life form that is capable of assigning meaning to the term?)
That is why they wind up with the contradictory theories described in this column. They don’t have a unifying theory for saving humanity, because they don’t want humanity saved.
Anybody else tired of these folks who continuously imagineer crises that require the demise of western civilization to “solve” them?
This article should be printed in every MSM outlet in the USA. It is time for Pubs to point out these facts and to demand, not ask, that Obama start the drilling of American resources which we have in….for oil, gas, shale oil, coal(the most in the world) and the safe building of nuclear plants. We need energy now. Europe needs energy now not in the dreams of some left wing socialist who hates profit, capitalism and free enterprise.
Malthusian principals may make a lot of sense for a petri dish of bacteria or a vessel of yeasts, but it should be apparent that thinking animals, especially humans are able to change the course of events and are therefore not subject to those same mechanism that occur on tha petri dish mentioned earlier. We have been demonstrating this since at least the industrial revolution. Furthermore, the more prosperous is a given society, the more readily it can counter Malthusian mechanisms that bacteria and yeast find themselves subject and even these life forms sporulate when conditions become in order to come back another day to start the process anew.
George Monbiot is indeed smart enough to understand that the reality known as There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch just snatched the wallet out of his pocket and ran down the street with it. What’s truly frightening is commentary following the column. Talk about your Dickensian reduction of the surplus population! Do the UK’s leftists understand the extent to which they appear to have become Ebenezer Scrooge’s descendants?
My word, some actual common sense in this post, even among the comments. Let me just talk about mining for a sentence or so. All the mines and all the digging for this and that has disturbed less than one tenth of one percent of the earth’s surface. Mining is not destroying the planet. Fly over Africa, or Australia or Canada, or the Western US, or Alaska. Unless you know exactly what you’re looking for you won’t even notice the mines. One of the Greens’ favorite targets is a straw man, only noticeable if you happen to live next door to a mine. Mines don’t raise dust, they raise living standards and provide raw materials we need so much. Monbiot, knows in his heart he’s been wrong, wrong, wrong and now he’s looking for an easy way to admit mea culpa.
I believe this piece is a bit of sophistry. I’m not sure the Greens have any Malthusian philosophy. You foist that on them. I also believe the interpretation of the Green’s raison d’etre is also exaggerated. Sure, we yell and scream that we need to change our ways. I’m not sure any thinking human being with a conscience can think otherwise. Our seas are polluted, our water is undrinkable, and we’re in the West, that is so advanced, supposedly.
I believe the shrill of the Green’s voice is merely to make those of you who sleep while the world grows old; to awaken to the need for some reforms. Period. And they’ve done their part. And God Bless them. How do you solve the problems of the world? Let nature takes its course. And it is, and it will take a lot of us with it, before our time.
The religiosity that you foist on the Greens is better applied to yourselves, you who believe that the seas will get cleaner by themselves, the winds will die down by themselves, and, somehow, those dry areas of the earth that see no water, will one day be rivers of clean water, upon which you will float–to your perdition. Is it so wrong to yell or beat a drum? Or do you only await the bell that tolls for thee? You leave a great legacy for your progeny… see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. They’ll make it somehow, and they’ll have the doubters to thank for the mess you’ll leave them.
Sae the Earth, [call for violence deleted -- ed] yourself.
“fossil fuels”–the great myth. Abioligical carbon– a most abundant category and a virtually limitless source of energy. Natural gas, now admitted to be abundant in the US, needs to be our fuel of choice. No refiners, no payments to despots, low polution. However, it provides no profits for the existing power brokers. Fierce independent leaders are needed to lead us out of the wilderness!!!
Predictions of catastrophes come and go. Remember the “Population Bomb” of Paul Erlichman? Today, the UN projects a “demographic winter” in a few hundred years. The winter is already here for most of Western Europe, Russia, and Japan. Their replacement rate is about 1.2 or 1.3, far below the desired one of 2.1 where population balances out. Russia is in an acute stage now, because of its high death rate due to alcoholism and a high rate of abortion. Take all these predictions, however, with a grain of salt. There seems to be a relation between religion belief and high birth rates. Who knows? The world may undergo a huge religious revival. The future is open and not absolutely predictable.
When they were touting a trolley system where I live in San Diego, I performed a little study. Cost, Time, Convenience.
Regarding cost, there was no savings, and you better have the right combination of funds to buy a ticket.
Regarding time, I would have had to get on a but a 0530 to get to the trolley by 0545. Then get on the trolley. At approximately, 0630, I would have to change trolleys. Finally, arriving “close” to my office at 0650, I would be dumped out a mile from my office.
This compared to a 28 minute commute down the freeway to an assigned parking spot in my office parking lot.
Do I care about the environment? Sure, but this would be ridiculous. Well, they built the trolley. I don’t use it, and when it passes by, I notice that very few people do.
WRM,
Monbiot has truly outdone himself this time. What a blathering epic, but almost-honest.
The reaction Monbiot is sure to get from his camp — heresy — should confirm the hypothesis that yep, environmentalism is at bottom a pseudo-religious cult.
Snrk.
I’m not sure if VLT realizes that his/her reply epitomizes everything that is so wrong with the Greens. Hilarious! Doom and gloom, arrogance, moral righteousness and self serving condescension and disdain for those of other inclination, all rolled into one perfect illustration of the Green movement’s flaws.
It’s interesting that while Mr. Mead encourages “[keeping] the boundaries between science and religion straight,” he concludes his comments with his religious belief in a “Mother Nature” (note the capital letters) that has given us “extraordinary intelligence” that we can then develop and employ to “conserve the beauty and viability of our glorious home.”
@Micheale Wells:
You are making two fundamental errors.
Error 1#: You presume that animals are somehow involved in a voluntary cooperative complex ecosystem. Poppycock! It is imposed on them, often against their will. Yes, ecosystems often involve extremely complex interactions between a large matrix of predator-prey-parasite-disease and reclaimative organisms… But none of them picked it or agreed to it, they merely sought their own interested.
Error 2#: You speak as if humans weren’t ontologically different that animals. We are. Humans wrestle with concepts like preserving and maintaining wealth and beauty. When we see economi value in the wild we seek to domesticate it and maximize that value.
Error 3#: As determinstic rubes, people don’t develop efficiencies to offset scale problems. No animal population of 35,000,000 could even fit on the island of Japan, let alone one city…Tokyo.
We are ontologically other from animals. We are creators. We don’t merely follow instincts but novel approach that we self-conceive. At a million souls, ncient Rome was at the maximum threshhold of population density. The world would see nothing like it for over 1500 years. But today there are over 500 cities larger than 1,000,000.
We are good at problem solving. We do not intend to starve ourselves out like bunnies with no wolf.
There is a rock-solid place where greens could stand, if they really thought clearly about it. That place is a systematic, principled opposition to externalities of all types. Externalities are real, they cause real harm to people and to the planet, and they are something that free-market classical liberals and modern libertarians should oppose if they are consistent with their theories. Nobody should get a free ride at the expense of others, but that is exactly what externalities are all about: privatizing profits while socializing costs.
The environmental benefits that could be realized by a thorough systematic internalization of all externalities would be breathtaking. It may not create ecotopia, but it would certainly be a very promising way forward. It also would actually make the economy more efficient in the long run, because externalities powerfully distort free markets and cause great inefficiencies. Those who benefit the most from externalities of course have the most to lose, and would fight tooth and nail against their internalization. However, the losses of these few does not mean a net loss for the economy as a whole, because the victims of their externalities would gain, and the greater economic efficiency that would follow would result in a net non-zero-sum gain in the long term.
My people perish for lack of a vision…Figure out how to store hydrogen cheaply and effectively and you’ll see the economy switch over to solar technologies. First cars would start switching to hydrogen using fuel cells and electric motors. The cost of a ‘Hybrid’ is in the mix of technology. Electric motors are cheap, fuel cells could quickly become cheap…AND,,,the combination would weigh a lot less than a gasoline engine. Next you would see people fueling their hydrogen cars from home. Hydrogen generation only requires electricity and water, something EVERY home has. Then you wouls see people using solar cells to suplement their hydrogen generation, perhaps even using fuel cells in the home to generate electricity. In this manner solar techonologies would begin to advance faster and faster because the demand would increase and costs would go down…my people perish for lack of vision
I would also suggest that ‘centrally planned’ solutions like space solar stations rest on the foolish premise that government can solve the problem…the free market can solve it, and will…once somebody figures out they could make a lot of money if the figure out how to store hydrogen. People are working on it…and somebody will be succesful..
On the one hand, it is really refreshing to see a Greenie ‘fess up to the irrationality of the Green position. However, what I find remarkable about Monbiot’s article is that it is darker than the idea of blowing up school children. Consider the following:
“And even if there were an immediate economic cataclysm, it’s not clear that the result would be a decline in our capacity for destruction. In east Africa, for example, I’ve seen how, when supplies of paraffin or kerosene are disrupted, people don’t give up cooking; they cut down more trees. History shows us that wherever large-scale collapse has occurred, psychopaths take over. This is hardly conducive to the rational use of natural assets.”
Monbiot is quite willing to consider economic cataclysm as a partial solution of humanity’s “capacity for destruction” [of the environment]. Monbiot does not reject pursuit of economic cataclysm because it would be, well, cataclysmic for humanity, but because it would be ineffective; that is, that awful humanity stuff would just squish out elsewhere and continue its destruction. Has there ever been a darker vision of humanity? Given this vision, mitigation of humanity’s impact on the environment cannot be the goal of the Green movement. On this view, mitigation is comparable to installing a breathalyzer in the automobile of an enthusiastic, happy, binging alcoholic. The alcoholic will find another car. It is the alcoholic that must be eliminated, not the probable threats posed by his drunken behavior. Monbiot is considering eliminating humanity and its potential for destruction of the environment.
Monbiot concedes that within the Green movement there is a radical faith darker than anything outside of Pol Pot’s faith in his Maoist transformation of Cambodia. This concession should be communicated in clear and stark terms to everyone. Everyone should understand what these ideas portend.
@Sid Vicious:
“What’s truly frightening is commentary following the column. Talk about your Dickensian reduction of the surplus population! Do the UK’s leftists understand the extent to which they appear to have become Ebenezer Scrooge’s descendants?”
Behold, the “Humanists”!
@Michael Cox:
“Let me just talk about mining for a sentence or so. All the mines and all the digging for this and that has disturbed less than one tenth of one percent of the earth’s surface.”
The question is not what percent of the world’s square footage is affected, but what percent of the world’s fresh water supply is affected?
Space-oriented extraction keeps externalities external.
George Monbiot has awakened from a bad dream. Like myself at UCS, and Patrick Moore at Greenpeace, he has realized the environental movement exists to provide lucrative rice bowl for a collection of cynical parasites, whose program makes no sense.
VTL doesn’t know what he is talking about. The USA is close to having a National Celebration celebrating the achievment of pritsine Air, Waters and Land use, all across the continent.
Our rivers are no longer public sewers. Fish and wildlife can and do live in them again. The Air over the entire United States is clean by the standards in place and earnestly wished for on Earth Day in 1970.
By our more rigorous standards there are only a few counties not yet having the even cleaner air of today’s standards.
Certainly there are and will continue to be technical violations. If your neighbor’s house is burning down, the air on the block will be smoky, and unhealthful until the fire is extinguished.
The air quality alarmists must count these violations to be able to declare the Air is still polluted and dirty.
1) Monbiot should be renamed Moonbat.
2) Stas Peterson has said it best: ” … the environental movement exists to provide lucrative rice bowl for a collection of cynical parasites, whose program makes no sense.”
And paraistes they are — deranged ones at that.
It might seem critically important, but Monbiot’s “Come to Jesus” frank encounter with reality is completely irrelevant. The entire movement could suddendly switch to “drill drill drill” and it would make no difference whatever.
Why? Because the UN is not about to follow suit. Because the nations and firms that squander economic growth money on bizzare fantasies like carbon trading, carbon sequestration, subsidies for non-competitive energy myths, grants for research by both universities and businesses, are not about to stop. At last count their combined assets showered on this nonsense approached $1 Trillion. The forces trying to stop the madness have about $20 million.
Nobody should look at Climategate or the odd epiphany and say, “The movement is dead.” As long as governments and businesses squander precious assets on the Utopian fantasy, it’s not dead.
The answer isn’t to stop finding cleaner ways to make (fill in the blank). My point when discussing this has never actually been about global warming. The real issue is that air and water is being destroyed and people are refusing to think that it matters. Lakes that my parents frequented when they were children are now not swimmable. Air quality in major cities is so bad that children and adults are developing asthma.
Consider someone who smokes multiple packs of cigarettes every day. Eventually their skin will start degrading, their blood pressure will worsen and they may eventually develop cancer and die. However, if the same person decides to change his or her habits and starts exercising, eating well and stops polluting their body, the negative effects will start to reverse. The planet is a living breathing organism too. Unless you’re a master of many –ologies, the scope of that statement is almost unimaginable. But continuing to just believe that pumping trillions of cubic feet of pollutants into the air and water will not have (or rather are not having) a negative effect is to deny not some PhD+ level scientist but a basic elementary level concept of how things work.
If people want to continue to deny that pollution is destroying this planet, that’s fine. Although there is so much evidence showing it is. And if people do not want to make a concerted effort to change than they are simply robbing future generations of the joys and necessities of the planet. We do not inherit the earth; we borrow it from the future. It’s a lot like the budget debate in that sense. And here’s the doomsday side of that bubbly tree hugging mentality. Mankind is certifiable if it thinks it can withstand the ravages a dead planet. Look at Japan with all its modern capabilities. They were swatted like a fly against a fly swatter. After all the planet’s life sustaining resources perish, people will stand no chance. Then after millions of years, the planet will heal itself and as they say, life will find a way. It just will not be life as we know it. That is why I believe in a green solution.
Theo Goodwin comes closest.
Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy are all the same story, some power arises and wants to take control of everything.
Why do our story tellers keep telling this story? Because it keeps happening. The Greens are using the bogey man of global warming/climate change to seize control. They want power pure and simple, and they really don’t care who gets hurt.
Several posters mention controlling externals, an area that could provide real benefit, but no gravy train to ride.
Katherine
Notice the lack of patience exhibited by many of the commenters. Witness the remarkable degree of development and adaptation that has taken place during our lifetimes. As a child I saw horse-drawn milk wagons. Now I see jet aircraft. Haven’t technological advances kept up with the needs of society? Haven’t the squeaky wheels been tended to as we advanced?
Could things be better? Of course, but they could also be far worse.
Glorifying war is sick.
Actually the world can die of both starvation and gluttony. Note that over a billion people are starving as I write. And a significant number are overfed and undernourished.
This article is really disheartening, but extremely revealing. It’s true we are lost. The truth is people don’t want to change and don’t care if we see change. I agree with the article and with James, people are starving and overfed and undernourished. It’s a sad reality.