By Alan
Caruba
I confess I have always been wary of
intellectuals. They love arcane theories that often have little to do with real
life and this is particularly true of eco-intellectuals who have embraced a
panoply of lies and claims about the “environment”, “fossil fuels”,
“sustainability”, and other notions that permit them to bloviate without once
addressing reality.
This has been a week of eco-propaganda
on a global scale. On Sunday there were “Climate Marches.” On Tuesday there will
be a UN “Climate Summit”, and there will likely be an avalanche of nonsense in
the media intended to make us believe we have control, influence, or impact on
the climate when it is obvious to the rest of us that we—the human race—have
none.
In the past nearly two decades we have
all been experiencing not a warning, but a cooling of planet
Earth. It has nothing to do with us and
everything to do with the Sun that has been in a low cycle of radiation—less
heat!
A friend alerted me to an article in
the August 22nd edition of
the New Republic, a famously liberal
magazine.
“Global Warming Is Just One of Many Environmental Threats That Demand Our
Attention” is the title of Amartya Sen’s article. He is a Nobel laureate in
economics, a winner of the National Humanities Medal, an author, and teaches at
Harvard University.
There were two immediate red flags
that caught my attention. First was that he is an economist and the second was
that he was writing about “global warming” as of it was happening.
In early September I had written about
another economist who had an opinion published in The Wall Street Journal. It was
ludicrous in terms of his complete lack of even the most basic science he was
either addressing or ignoring as he too warned of horrid environmental portents
to come. Economists should stick to
economics.
If you suffer from insomnia or have a
fondness for reading sentences filled with words rarely used in common
communication, you will find that Sen’s article will either put you to sleep or,
more likely, give you a migraine headache. The article is an insufferable
platform for him to demonstrate his Nobel certified intellectual brilliance,
while possessing very little understanding of science or what we ordinary people
call common sense.
“Our global environment has many
problems. If the high volume of carbon emission is one, the low level of
intellectual engagement with some of the major environmental challenges is
surely another.” That’s how Sen began his article and, in the very first
sentence, he reveals his ignorance by referring to “carbon emissions” instead of
“carbon dioxide” (CO2) emissions.
The latter is a so-called “greenhouse”
gas that the Greens keep telling us is trapping huge amounts of heat in the
Earth’s atmosphere that will surely kill us all. CO2 is about 0.04% of the
entire atmosphere, the least of the gases of which it is composed. It doesn’t
trap heat, but it does provide the “food” that all vegetation requires to grow.
We carbon-based humans exhale CO2 after we breathe in oxygen. It is part of the
natural cycle of life between animals
and the vegetation that releases oxygen; a perfect balance of
nature.
Suffice to say that Sen’s very lengthy
article is typical of the eco-intellectual disdain for virtually any form of
energy to serve humanity except for the two least reliable, wind and solar
energy. There’s a reason why mankind turned to coal, oil and natural gas. It was
vastly abundant and released large amounts of energy for transportation and
other benefits that include the production of
electricity.
There was a time not that long ago
when people used whale oil to light their homes. And wood was used to heat them.
Walt Whitman, a famed poet who lived in Lincoln’s time, never turned on an
electrical switch in his life. It didn’t exist 150 years ago. There were no
autos, no telephones, et cetera. If you define a generation as 25 years, that’s
only six generations ago. And Sen wants us to abandon “fossil fuels” because he
fears “the dangers of global pollution from fossil fuels…”
He’s no fan of nuclear power either.
(I guess we should all go back to whale oil, only we won’t because we love the
whales.) “There are at least five different kinds of externalities that add
significantly to the social costs of nuclear power” writes Sen, but who else
refers to “externalities” of nuclear power? Okay, why not just say there have
been two bad accidents, Chernobyl and Fukushima, and leave it at that. That
still leaves a lot of safely performing nuclear plants here and
worldwide.
We do not live in a world without risk
or trade-offs. For lack of enough pipelines, a lot of oil is being transported
by rail and there have been accidents. Around the world there are coal mining
accidents. Even solar farms literally sizzle birds to death that fly over them
and wind turbines chop them into little pieces.
Mother Nature does not care what
happens to us when she conjures up a volcanic eruption, a flood, a wildfire, a
hurricane or blizzard.
Humans have learned to either flee
these things or wait them out in the safety of their homes. That’s what modern
life is all about and it is a hundred times better than in the past when people
were lucky to live to the age of sixty. Many died much younger from plagues of
disease and we are watching that occur with Ebola in Africa. Even simple
injuries caused death a scant time ago.
“There are empirical gaps in our
knowledge as well as analytical difficulties in dealing with the evaluation of
uncertainty.” Huh? What? This is intellectual gobbledygook, a substitute for
saying that much of the time we don’t know what the future holds.
What we do know is that the Earth is
4.5 billion years old and that we humans have developed what we call
civilization over the past 5,000 years, a blink of time in eternity.
We should know by now to accept the
Earth, the Sun and the galaxy in which we live for what it is and stop bothering
to embrace idiotic notions that we have any control or that we are causing so
much “pollution” the Earth cannot exist much longer.
You know what we do with the mess of
stuff we produce and throw away? We burn it or we bury it. We even recycle some
of it.
This keeps archeologists busy as they
examine the garbage our not-too-distant ancestors left behind in their caves.
Thankfully, none of them were economists.
© Alan Caruba, 2014
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