www.thornwalker.com/ditch/lights156.htm
October 27, 2007
Strakon Lights
Up
Global warming:
What if the Left is
right?
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Al Gore keeps scooping up the System's rewards for ringmastering the global-warming
circus, and now the World Authorities have seen to it that he received the Nobel Peace
Prize. My attitude toward the creature Gore has always resembled that of Mary McCarthy
toward the old Stalinist Lillian Hellman, of whom McCarthy said that "every word she
writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.'" Nevertheless, I have to ask a question about
global warming that will really make the polar bears sweat: What if the Left is right?
Right, that is, in claiming not only that global warming exists but also that it is manmade.
The reasons for doubting those claims are legion, of course, but I can sum them up nicely thanks to an old anti-statist friend of mine, who used to warn against political science. He wasn't thinking of academic droners-on about the calculus of consent; he was referring to the mutagenic incest between Big Science and the Big State.
For decades now leviathan has financed much — maybe even most — of the
scientific research in this country, so we are naturally entitled to be skeptical of any of its
findings that have political import, especially when that import takes the form of tax-funded Big Scientists urging a further increase of state power over us ordinary people.
Lovers of liberty and justice (but no others, apparently) understand that it is
impermissible to leap from discovering a scientific "problem" to proposing a government
"solution." That leap is propelled not by science but by ideology; and I'm one ideologist
who's always ready to point that out.
And yet, and yet. What else does the Big State do, besides politicize science? Much else, of course; and we would have to expect that a great criminal organization that attacked our liberty, mind, family, and fortune would have to attack also the physical environment in which we live.
Those of us who paid attention as the established media finally found the cojones to criticize the Soviet Union — in the '80s and onward to the collapse — learned that the Soviets succeeded brilliantly in wrecking the physical environment of their empire. Chernobyl, however terrifying in itself, was only the poster child of an enormous enormity. And all the while, the Moscow leviathan — proclaiming that "the smoke of chimneys is the breath of Soviet Russia" — pretended that its poisonous state industry was creating a utopia for the glorious workers and peasants.
The Washington leviathan proceeds differently, and even more deceitfully. It pretends that it is protecting the environment from poisonous private industry, for the glorious soccerites and iPoders. But the fact is that any leviathan, relentlessly seeking to control all the commanding heights of the society it exploits, exerts a systemwide influence that depends not on economic rationality or justice but on the dark conjurations of political power and the lust for power.
The libertarian ruling-class analysts Walter Grinder and John Hagel have investigated the implications of government control of
money and credit, in light of the fact that money, as the lifeblood of an economy, exerts a
pervasive influence on its entire structure. Leviathan's regulations, subsidies,
confiscations, and prohibitions outside the financial realm exert a pervasive influence,
too. In terms of the present topic, we must not neglect the long-standing policies of
leviathan that hobble the development of private ownership of natural resources and
block the natural operations of the common law, which would recognize air pollution as
a tort. But the environmental wreckage extends far beyond that.
As I write, the Southeast suffers from a drought — and the statist response is typical. Leviathan has suppressed a freely operating price system in an environment of "private" (i.e., actual) ownership of natural resources, which would draw extra water into the region to meet demand, so we are treated instead to a political struggle among the Pharaonic wizards of the Army Corps of Engineers and the state governments of Georgia, Alabama, and Florida. And the inhabitants of the region, for their part, are being treated to those notorious weapons of socialist tyranny: rationing and prohibition.
In southern California, government water subsidies have achieved a
similar success, with the aid of fascist war contracts from World
A reader may object that a free market might have called forth sprawling conurbations in unlikely places such as southern California, Arizona, Nevada, and the like, drawing in sufficient water on a long-term basis. I reply, Very well, let us adopt a free market and see what would happen without the taxes and official counterfeiting that burden all of society's taxpayers to support the massive populating of naturally difficult regions. (When a city hammered by disaster quickly rebounds without heavy government subsidies, one grants that there is a genuine economic basis for its existence. The prime example in California is San Francisco and its recovery from the 1906 earthquake.)
The late word, as I write, is that Emperor Bush has promised Central Government aid to
the scorched districts — aid involuntarily extracted from taxpayers in all regions
— in order to further subsidize the artificial settlements by means of state
power.
Perhaps I should consult Prof. Gore before writing this, but apparently the wood smoke rising from California will have no detectable effect on global warming, as it seems to be light on "greenhouse gases." However, just now I am pursuing a more general point — namely, that the unremitting exercise of Central Government power, persisted in decade after decade, has profoundly and pervasively affected the very structure of our society, right down to its population patterns.
If we limit ourselves to chasing headlines about the latest disasters, we neglect the underlying factors that have produced them, and we may fall for leviathan's perpetual claim that it is only here to "help," in the face of calamities that are either acts of an inscrutable God or the result of ordinary people's fecklessness in going about their daily lives. As a thousand other writers have warned, the calamity of global warming — be it fact or fiction — has invited all the world's worst power-lusters to lunge forward, offering to "help" us even more by erecting a totalitarianism that will make the iron grid already pressing down on us look like a minarchist's airy daydream.
The "help" our supervisors have already given us has established the overall environment for our science, technology, and industry. Every politicized society gets no more than the science, technology, and industry it deserves.
It's rash to pronounce too specifically on "what might have been," in the absence of those iron-grid-makers, but seeing the discontents and derangements they have created gives us some room for cautious imaginings. Twenty-five years ago, sober-sounding futurists with a solid technical background were proposing a system of solar-power satellites that would beam energy down to microwave farms on the surface of the Earth. Coal-fired power plants would be a thing of the past, and — so they said — the price of electricity would plummet. They allowed that building such a system posed a few engineering challenges, but claimed that if sufficient financing and space transport were in place, the thing was feasible.
That's a fairly big "if," of course. However, we do know one thing. Thirty-eight years after the Central Government first landed some of its employees on the Moon, there is still no such thing as space-based industry. Government still exerts a near-monopoly over space, and heavily influences the commercial development, mostly involving communications, that it does permit. Where are the solar-power satellites? Where are the perfect crystals and super-strong materials that can be manufactured only in space, where a vacuum and low or zero gravity are easily accessible? Where are the specialized and efficient space-transport vehicles that orbital industry would have called forth? I don't know how economically feasible it would have been to lift inherently polluting and toxic industrial processes from the Earth's surface and segregate them in orbit — another possibility the futurists were broaching — but we will never know, and we will never know the answers to my other questions, so long as the dead hand of the state continues to suffocate space industry.
The entire electrical-generating industry as it now exists depends on companies either operated by local governments or privileged
by them. Alongside formal grants of monopoly, established utilities enjoy important
privileges courtesy of regulation, which discourages innovation and challenge by possible competitors. Central Government regulation helped determine the structure of
the overall grid, and it also definitively molded the nuclear-power industry.
Government-decreed limitation of liability for nuclear plants (through the Price-Anderson Act) gave rise to a particularly dangerous distortion. We may debate whether a
free market would encourage or discourage an expansion of the nuclear-power industry,
and a corresponding reduction in the emission of "greenhouse gases" — but we can
never know until the iron grid of statism is lifted, and the insurance industry is permitted
to function freely, along with the ordinary tort proceedings of the common law.
Government has also exerted a dreadfully mutagenic
influence on our continental transport industries. In the
It is questionable how well a free-market transportation industry would satisfy the Green Stalinists and their "carbon footprint" mumbo jumbo. But we may be sure that such an industry would reflect a different mix, an advanced degree of innovation, and an economic balance that was truly responsive to market demand, again including the demands of the insurance market and the market for protection from tortious invasion.
A true sci-fi maven would ask, at
this point, Where are the 1,500-mph underground cross-country vacuum trains? —
but I, as a solemn and responsible commentator, will refrain. Instead I will cite something
that Ronn Neff, TLD's senior editor, wrote for TLD 18 in
Our difficulty in detecting the mutagenic power of leviathan over everything around us rests largely on the fact that we, too, are its mutants, even if we didn't turn out Green.
October 27, 2007
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