Freedom Machines

It's no use talking to Ernest Istook about donkey carts, or velocipedes, or ornithopters. The plain fact is, he's simply wild about automobiles! He likes them so much that he refers to them, rather tautologically, as "great American Freedom machines."

Consider the evidence: As long as you've got enough money to fill your tank, you can use your car to travel from the place where you live to the place where you work. If that's not freedom, what is?

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. In some states, you can also drive your car to a late-term abortion appointment, or a same-sex marriage ceremony (though you filthy perverts may rest assured that Mr. Istook and his colleagues are working on these problems as we speak).

Also, unlike mass transit, transportation by car is not subsidized by taxpayers (so long as you ignore the cost of oil and gas subsidies, and building freeways through residential areas, and treating pavement runoff laden with automotive fluids and heavy metals, and sacrificing parks and agricultural land, and protecting oil tankers and infrastructure, and air pollution, and congestion and crashes, and the billions of dollars that driver fees and taxes fail to cover in any given year).

In NYC, meanwhile, plans are being made to screen every vehicle Freedom machine that visits the island for radioactivity.

The proposal — called Operation Sentinel — relies on integrating layers of technologies, some that are still being perfected. It calls for photographing, and scanning the license plates of, cars and trucks at all bridges and tunnels and using sensors to detect the presence of radioactivity.

A while back, I suggested that purposefully triggering urban radiation sensors would be a cheap and easy way of causing chaos. That was idle speculation, of course, and there's no reason to believe that our pitiless enemies are capable of coming up with a tactic like that (not without dedicating an hour or two to working out the logistics, anyway).

Which is just as well, because if Noah Shachtman is to be believed, the current system is very sensitive indeed:

I spent some time with an NYPD unit, armed with these sensors. Just about anything would set them off -- like a patient getting chemotherapy, for example.

Even assuming they manage to reduce the false alarms to a bare minimum, it sounds as though this extraordinarily data-hungry Emancipation Contraption will cause more problems than it solves:

Data on each vehicle — its time-stamped image, license plate imprint and radiological signature — would be sent to a command center in Lower Manhattan, where it would be indexed and stored for at least a month as part of a broad security plan that emphasizes protecting the city’s financial district, the spokesman, Paul J. Browne, said.

In other news, we need better icebreakers (or Exalted Yankee Liberty Devices, as I prefer to call them) if we're going to keep the goddamn Russkies away from the North Pole:

Russia -- which last year planted a titanium flag under the North Pole, claiming 460,000 square miles of Arctic waters -- "has 20 icebreakers in its fleet, seven of them nuclear powered, including the largest ice-breaking vessel in the world," Homeland Security Today observes. Of the Coast Guard’s three polar icebreakers, two have outlived their originally designed service lives of 30 years.

The third sets sail this week, Reuters notes, "to determine the extent of the continental shelf north of Alaska and map the ocean floor, data that could be used for oil and natural gas exploration." And maybe claim some turf for America, too.

(Illustration at top by Bruce McCall.)

Forgetting About Injustice

Stephen Carter, a professor at Yale Law School, has written an article suggesting that affirmative action programs are merely "a way to pretend to be doing something" about racial inequality.

George Leef at Phi Beta Cons cheerfully assents to this. Where Carter loses him is in calling for a more substantive social commitment to "racial justice." What Carter fails to understand, y'see, is that the persistent human problem of racism is pretty much irrelevant, because the Free Market will fix everything (thanks to the aggregate choices of human beings who may or may not be influenced by racial prejudice, sensationalized reporting on black crime, or what have you).

Sorry, but the troubles of the poor in the United States are not due to any lack of commitment to "racial justice." The trouble (or at least the biggest part of it) is that politicians have been short-sightedly attacking the foundations of our prosperity with all sorts of taxes and regulations that drive away investors.

That's the problem, alright. It's certainly not the collapsing or nonexistent infrastructure and services in our inner cities, nor the perception of their inhabitants as lazy, criminal welfare cheats (problems which politicians of both parties have done much to broaden and implement over the years). Mark my words, investors and businesses would be flocking to East Baltimore and Compton and East St. Louis with wheelbarrows full of cash if it weren't for the high taxes and red tape.

W.C. Fields once said that the best cure for insomnia is to get plenty of sleep. With equal discernment, but much less self-awareness, Leef suggests that poverty could be addressed by giving people steady jobs (he left out the part about a living wage, but I'm sure he meant to include it).

Steady employment is the best anti-poverty program of all time, but politicians (mostly Democrats) have been hostile to capitalism for several generations and we see the consequences in cities such as Detroit and Baltimore.

Yeah, that's exactly what springs to mind when I think about Detroit's woes: the Democrats' multigenerational hostility to capitalism. Never mind ancient history like the building of freeways through historic black neighborhoods, or the redlining and restrictive covenants that encouraged white flight while trapping blacks in crumbling neighborhoods, or the shifting of auto plants to the suburbs, or the half-mile apartheid wall a developer built in 1940, or the segregation of hospitals, or (God forbid) the disastrous decisions of the auto industry, all of which were justified and made holy by the Invisible Hand. What blame could generations of demonstrable racial injustice possibly deserve, compared to generations of imaginary anti-capitalism?

It's lunatic revisionism like this that lets us know, just in case we doubted it, that we're dealing with a political movement that's racist down to its corpuscles.

Beyond that, if the prevalence of Democratic politics can be correlated with poverty, why is it that the flag-burning liberal Northeast has the highest average household income in the nation, while the God-fearing conservative South has the highest level of poverty?

Who knows? Who cares? The important thing is, race doesn't matter, so stop saying it does:

If you want to help the poor, the best thing to do is unshackle the economy. Forget about blaming racism and injustice. Forget about new government programs. Instead work to free up the economy. For upward mobility, emulate the laissez-faire policies of Hong Kong, no part of which looks like the ruined sections of Detroit and Baltimore.

Forget about blaming injustice...excellent advice for the free and the brave! Let the market decide which areas get banks and supermarkets, and which get lead contamination and refineries, and the whole question of "injustice" becomes meaningless.

Which is the whole point, really. The bedrock function of the conservatarian market is not to produce "upward mobility," but to shield the powerful from responsibility while encouraging the poor to blame themselves for not wanting food and shelter and medical treatment badly enough.

As you may know, some prisons used to have a couple of dummy switches in their execution chambers, along with the one that actually activated the electric chair. One man would be assigned to each, so that when the order came to throw the switch, each man could comfort himself with the thought that someone else had the live switch. Multiply that system by a few million people, make all the switches live, and pretend that the entire arrangement is as natural and impartial as the tides or the seasons, and you've got Leef's version of the "free market" in a nutshell.

(Photo: “Detroit, Michigan. Riot at the Sojourner Truth homes, a new U.S. federal housing project, caused by white neighbors' attempt to prevent Negro tenants from moving in. Sign with American flag ‘We want white tenants in our white community,’ directly opposite the housing project" by Arthur S. Siegel, 1942.)

Pull the Pin and Roll

I've daydreamed for years about doing away with interstate trucking, on the grounds that it's stupid, wasteful, dangerous, exploitative, polluting, and a waste of time for all concerned.

Sure, "Convoy" was a great song, and the most cogent defense of libertarianism ever written. And the obscene messages scrawled by truckers in roadside toilet stalls provide the lonely traveler with plenty of food for thought. I also understand that once a sufficient number of maudlin songs have been written about a dull and dangerous job, it becomes a Proud Way of Life that must not be allowed to perish from the earth.

On the other hand, our heroic truckers could simply switch over to workin' on the railroad, all the live-long day. That was a proud way of life before anyone ever heard of 18-wheelers, as you can tell from the vast number of folk songs about being scalded to death by steam, or lying crushed beneath the boiler with your white-haired mother praying by your side.

If truckers became railroad workers, they'd still get to marvel at the beauty of God's own earth while eating three-day-old scrambled eggs, they'd still get to have anonymous sex with transients, and they'd still have the opportunity to go out in a blaze of glory, with nothing to regret but those two last drinks they wanted to try. And they could boast, with Jimmie Rodgers, that they'll eat their breakfast here and their dinner in New Orleans, and get them a mama they ain't never seen.

Best of all, they'd no longer have to suffer indignities like this.

Admittedly, I'm thinking with my heart rather than my head, as leftist sissy-boys so often do. Fortunately, a new study offers a more toughminded rationale for replacing trucks with trains:

Because one intermodal train can take nearly 300 trucks off our highways, shifting freight from trucks to trains reduces competition between commuters, drivers and freight traffic for space on the road," said Wendell Cox, author of the study and principal of Demographia, a market research and urban policy consultancy.

The study claims that if 25% of the volume moved by trucks was moved to rail transport by the year 2026, each American commuter could save, on average, $985 -- and 41 hours of time in their car -- a year. The survey also estimates that each year, a commuter could save 79 gallons of fuel and reduce air pollution by 920,000 tons."

You can find an interesting proposal for making a gradual switch from trucks to trains here; it also discusses the possibility of reducing air freight. Seems reasonable to me, for what little that's worth.

(Illustration at top by David Oram.)

Ice Cream or Oil?

CNBC has posted a helpful slideshow that helps concerned consumers to become better informed -- in a certain sense -- about the price of oil. Its title is revealing: "More Expensive by the Barrel: Ice Cream or Oil?"

As you click through the slides, you learn that Coca-Cola is currently a bit less expensive than light sweet crude, while Perrier comes in at a shocking $300 per barrel.

"Who would have thought water would burn a hole in your pocket?" the caption asks...a sobering question indeed, for those whose vehicles are powered by imported soda water.

Still, it's nothing compared to the horror of the Starbucks latte, at $954.24 per barrel. If our society used these lattes to manufacture and distribute and sell oil, instead of the other way around, we'd really have something to complain about.

And get this: Those hippies Ben and Jerry are always talking about saving the planet...but their ice cream costs $1609 per barrel! Typical liberals, eh? It turns out that perfume is much more expensive than oil, too. You have to admit, it kind of puts things in perspective.

In a better world, a slideshow like this one might ask readers to think about oil's role in creating and transporting and setting the prices of the nonessential goods to which it's being compared. It might even manage to discuss interesting issues like external costs and goverment subsidies. But things being as they are, the slideshow is simply a propaganda piece for Big Oil, and it absolutely drips with contempt for its readers.

It also fails to acknowledge the "mileage" you get from a barrel of, say, Tabasco sauce. Sure, it costs $6155...but that adds up to about 2,789 bottles, which I'd say is an ample, if not generous, supply for most households. I love Tabasco and use it in almost everything I cook; even so, I doubt I've gone through 20 bottles of it in my entire life.

By contrast, $6155 will get you about 1,540 gallons of gasoline at current prices. That's 110 full tanks if you've got a 14-gallon tank, or roughly a year's supply if you're filling up twice a week, as so many drivers do. Perhaps this would be a better basis for comparison, since more Americans buy gasoline by the gallon than crude oil by the barrel?

Then again, doing it that way wouldn't be nearly as much fun. You know what else costs more than oil? Chateau Mouton-Rothschild 1945. So quit complaining, ya goddamn schmendriks, and fill 'er up!

Incidentally, the figures in this slideshow come from John S. Herold, Inc., whose "client base is comprised of virtually every major oil company."

(Photo by Steve Brandon, from his set Nepean, Ottawa suburb of infinite excitement!)

The Road to Hell

If you don't have enough money to fill your gas tank, you might want to consider selling Neil Reynolds the Brooklyn Bridge:

The average public transit bus in the U.S. uses 4,365 British thermal units, a measure of energy, per passenger mile and emits 0.71 pounds of carbon dioxide. The average car uses 3,445 BTUs per passenger mile and emits 0.54 pounds of CO{-2}. Whether you seek to conserve energy or to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, your public policy decision here appears remarkably obvious. Get people off buses and get them into cars.

Reynolds got these numbers from that cornucopian goofball Randal O'Toole, whom he claims has "impeccable environmental credentials." What this means in layperson's terms is that O'Toole is the senior economist at the Thoreau Institute, a Scaife-funded pro-automobile thinktank that he created and heads (which should definitely not be confused with the Thoreau Institute that actually has something to do with Thoreau).

To be fair, naming a pro-sprawl thinktank after Thoreau isn't O'Toole's only impeccable environmental accomplishment. He also rides a bicycle, like all good-hearted people. Perhaps that's why he "has been described as the next Jane Jacobs," presumably by people who thought Bush was the next FDR.

Before we get to the numbers cited above, which you've probably already recognized as flawed, let's have a look at O'Toole's shocking theory that "on the basis of every billion passenger miles...light-rail [public transit] kills three times as many people as cars on urban freeways."

That Reynolds is impressed with this claim is a bad sign, since pretty much anyone can see that there's something weird about limiting auto fatality statistics to "urban freeways," especially when the DoT statistics show automobiles killing more people than all other forms of transit combined in every year since 1960.

O'Toole might argue that limiting his statistics to urban freeways makes sense, if he's comparing autos to commuter trains. Except that plenty of commuters don't drive on freeways, or work in urban areas. Plus, urban freeway commutes tend to be congested; it's hard to get in a fatal accident when you're traveling at 25 mph. It's also possible that O'Toole favors this comparison because light rail takes a higher toll on pedestrians than freeways do.

But who knows? It's not my job to dredge up O'Toole's stats, or figure out his definition of "urban." Ideally, that'd be Reynolds' obligation. I do think it's fair to say that O'Toole's claim is meaningless without these data.

Anyway, back to the bus and car comparison. The first problem with O'Toole's argument, as Reynolds states it, is that "public transit" isn't defined. This is important because there's a huge difference in utilization rates between city and interurban buses, and utilization is crucial to efficiency. Second, O'Toole is perversely using overall underutilization of mass transit (which, I'm willing to bet, includes off-peak hours) as an argument for not riding buses during hours when ridership is at its peak. If you want to increase overall efficiency, it'd be better to use small shuttles during off-peak hours -- and to reroute lines to avoid hills, left turns, idling, and so forth, a la UPS -- than to cut service to people who need it.

Third, you don't usually see people calculating transit efficiency in terms of BTUs, because it begs the question of how the energy is generated. Buses and light rail are often electric, so the BTUs in question can be generated partly or entirely by renewable and low-emissions sources.

Since O'Toole complains that buses aren't as fuel-efficient as they could be, you'd think the logical solution would be to improve them, as so many cities and manufacturers are attempting to do. But O'Toole sees absolutely no need for this, as long as cars and gas are available to those of us who can afford them:

People respond to high fuel prices by buying more efficient cars - and then driving more.

If only every problem were that simple!

Which reminds me...when I was about four, I saw a picture of a starving African family squatting on a bare expanse of parched dirt. It disturbed me, so I asked my parents why these silly people didn't just go to a motel.

Imagine my surprise when they told me.

Willing Buyers

John W. Schoen, a senior producer at MSNBC, has forfeited a few moments of his valuable time in order to help a confused reader understand the workings of the Free Market:

If the feds can help with cutting interest rates why can't they do something that really affects everything? Like high prices of gas. How can a billion-dollar industry still be allowed to make so much and affect so many people?
— Lori H., Dodge City, Kan.

There are measures the government could take to ease the pain at the pump, but it’s hard to see how the U.S. government could directly control the price of a global commodity like gasoline — any more than it could limit what you can charge for that big-screen TV you’re trying to unload on eBay. Gasoline prices — like all market prices — are set by a willing buyer and a willing seller. (You may not be a “happy” buyer right now, but your purchases are still voluntary.)

Absolutely correct. No one's holding a gun to Lori's head. If she doesn't want to buy gas at the current price, she has every right to sit at home in her counting-room, cackling over her doubloons and pieces of eight by the light of a tenpenny candle.

Sure, it's possible that she lives in one of those sprawling suburbs that were designed and sited on the assumption that gas would always be cheap, and that mass transit is a socialistic encroachment on the Liberty for which John Birch bled and died, and that only prostitutes and pedophiles would dream of walking anywhere. But if so, she can comfort herself with the fact that this, too, is the result of a voluntary buying decision on her part. She could just as easily live somewhere else, after all (the expense of moving to the Outer Hebrides is negligible when one considers the easy availability of peat).

So let's leave Lori to her malingering, and move on to bigger and better things. While in an unusually frolicsome mood the other day, I wrote a brief post on food deserts. Apropos of which, it's increasingly hard to find supermarkets in the NYC metro area:

The supermarket closings — not confined to poor neighborhoods — result from rising rents and slim profit margins, among other causes. They have forced residents to take buses or cabs to the closest supermarkets in some areas. Those with cars can drive, but the price of gasoline is making some think twice about that option. In many places, residents said the lack of competition has led to rising prices in the remaining stores.

These shoppers may not be happy right now, but whatever purchases they're able to make are, of course, voluntary. And lest we forget, many neighborhoods that lack supermarkets do have very affordable fast-food restaurants.

Granted, fast food is linked in some studies with poor health, but as Jot Contie of the California Restaurant Association says, "in the end, individuals control what, where and when they eat." People who'd rather have fresh vegetables than catsup packets, for instance, are perfectly free to hop in the the car and drive to the nearest supermarket. (If gas is too expensive, they can always eat invasive weeds...it's a nice way of giving back to one's community.)

There's also the fact that when a supermarket closes, it often creates entrepreneurial opportunities for local residents.

The larger point is that if consumer dissatisfaction were really widespread, multinational agribusiness would hardly be enjoying record profits:

Monsanto last month reported that its net income for the three months up to the end of February this year had more than doubled over the same period in 2007, from $543m (£275m) to $1.12bn. Its profits increased from $1.44bn to $2.22bn.

Cargill's net earnings soared by 86 per cent from $553m to $1.030bn over the same three months. And Archer Daniels Midland, one of the world's largest agricultural processors of soy, corn and wheat, increased its net earnings by 42 per cent in the first three months of this year from $363m to $517m. The operating profit of its grains merchandising and handling operations jumped 16-fold from $21m to $341m.

That's a lot of willing buyers, you'll agree. And given the fact that all this commerce is entirely voluntary, it's easy to see how fixing ADM's prices would be just as unfair as limiting the price you can charge on eBay for the belongings you need to sell in order to afford gas or grain.

You may not be happy right now, but at least you're free.

(Photo: "Food Protest in Mexico," via Treehugger).

The Future Intercourse of Mankind

In a column titled "The Polar Bears Are All Right," Michael Goldfarb argues that although Arctic ice has been melting, it's also increased very slightly this winter, which may not impress climatologists much, but what the hell do they know?

"Nobody has much idea of anything," Richard Lindzen points out, while sawing earnestly at the branch to which he's clinging. Some people say we'll see ice-free Arctic summers in a few years; others say it'll take decades. As for Lindzen, he's not so sure; the world is a labyrinth and a continued dark conceit. But still, the ice does seem to be melting, possibly. Goldfarb will grant you that.

Which to any layman will raise an obvious question: So what?

We don't know exactly what this'll do to that special portion of the climate that hangs above our blessed land like the ceiling of a chapel; the sensible thing, therefore, is to assume that it's going to make us happier, richer, more powerful.

The polar bears may not be all right, after all. But what have they done for you lately? If they were good it would be seen, as Donne says: good is as visible as green.

One thing we're gonna do is put the goddamn Eskimos to work. The way it stands now, Nanook catches a seal, and maybe his dumpy wives and his squalling brats eat for a week or two. What do you get out of it? Nothing, that's what. But teach him to work on an oil rig, and he's working for the benefit of you and me and all mankind:

The Inuit might find better work in the oil and gas sector, as high energy prices and melting ice make the Arctic an increasingly attractive area for exploration.

Things are so very uncertain, you understand. An ice-free Arctic may cause problems, or it may not. But in the meantime, there's oil to be had, and the outcome of that is certain: Comfort, convenience, the rosy glow of contentment on the faces of your golden-haired moppets.

Lindzen says polar bears are increasing in number. How could a population increase, and yet be threatened? It just doesn't add up. Besides, "they're not worried; they can swim a hundred kilometers." Which, in the Arctic, is a very long way indeed. It's almost the distance from Kotlik to Unalakleet.

And mark this: an economist of Goldfarb's acquaintance has challenged our hidebound assumptions about polar bears and ice and stuff. He observes that some animals have thrived in warmer climates, even as you and I. Why shouldn't polar bears? On the other hand, and this can't be overemphasized, so what if they don't?

Can a polar bear's happiness really be allowed to impede the future intercourse of mankind and the commerce of distant nations?

Of course not. What on earth could?

(Photo by Victoria Arocho/Associated Press.)

What Poor Economies Crave

Henry Payne, tanned and refreshed after a cruise in the Caribbean, is ready to apply himself anew to the problems of our time.

Greens, of course, use the world’s islands as poster-children for the destructive effects of rising sea waters, but climate change is the least of the Caribbean islands’ worries. What these poor economies crave is more fossil fuel, not less.

If you know Payne at all, you know that this is his answer to everything. Is your house on fire? You need more fossil fuels! Do you suffer from the suppurating gleet? More fossil fuels! Are you puzzling over the status of diachronic contingency in post-Scotist ontology? Fossil fuels!

Here are the symptoms of the Caribbean's fossil-fuel craving:

Walk the streets of Samana, Dominican Republic or St. John’s, Antigua and you are quickly confronted with families huddled in road-side shacks, small children with no clothes, and stray dogs and chickens everywhere. In Samana, utility poles stop at the small town’s edge, starving its suburbs — much less the countryside — of electricity. In Antigua, Barbados, Tortola, and other Caribbean islands, two-cycle motorbikes are a common form of transportation.

And here's the cure:

And yet these islands are growing thanks to an influx of massive, 3000-berth, 120,000-ton, five-diesel-engine cruise ships (consuming 2,800 gallons of fuel per hour) like the one aboard which my family traveled.

Now, cruise ships have been visiting these islands for many, many years, and they've disgorged tourists by the millions, and these tourists have spent an astronomical amount of money on lodging and food and entertainment and booze and prostitution and what have you. And yet, Payne was jolted out of his tropical reverie by the sight of desperately poor people who were doing without basic amenities.

These are small islands, with small populations; surely the wealth deposited by tourists should at least have paid for reliable island-wide electricity by now. The fact that it hasn't suggests that this is not, in fact, a good way to improve the lot of poor Caribbeans, regardless of whether they're in danger of having their homes submerged by rising seas.

The reason is simple enough: Very little of the money spent in a place like Antigua stays in the country; most resorts are foreign-owned, and most "authentic" souvenirs are manufactured in places like China or the Marianas. The tourist industry doesn't do much good for local agriculture, either; almost all food served to tourists is imported.

Next, Payne explains that cruise ships require a huge amount of fuel:

[I]n order to transport these masses to their diesel ships, other forms of fossil-fuel transportation are also growing — from airplane flights to Miami (the largest port of embarkation), to islands teeming with rental cars, to thousands of boats transporting tourists to beaches and coral reefs, to more coal plants under construction to feed hotels and investment properties....

How this demonstrates that the Caribbean "craves" fossil fuels is no more obvious to me than why Payne imagines that this situation can continue indefinitely. But these mysteries are child's play compared to what comes next:

And who are the tourists driving all this growth? The same rich Baby Boomers that Gore claims support him in his moral mission to dramatically curtail our energy use.

Like Henry Payne and his family, for instance. So there!

To make a long story short, all of this proves that the solution to the Caribbean's problems is more tourism and less fretting over rising seas, and that any regulation of the cruise industry will plunge the world into poverty and chaos.

Next week: Payne visits Saipan, and finds that what contract workers really need is for Big Government to get off their backs!

Prosperous Capitalist Living

In one of the most charitable gestures since George Armstrong Custer offered to accept the surrender of the Lakota and the Northern Cheyenne at Little Big Horn, Rob Bradley of the Institute for Energy Research is giving climate scientists an opportunity to admit that they're wrong and he's right.

In a column headed "if warming is not a burning issue, let's say so," he points out that "dire predictions about the future of prosperous capitalist living remain trendy." For a lifestyle that's supposedly threatened by everything from Islamofascist terror, to the machinations of Hillary Clinton, to new commuter rail lines, "prosperous capitalist living" seems remarkably resilient; you can almost picture it going on forever...growth begetting wealth and wealth begetting growth, world without end, amen.

If you can picture that, give yourself a pat on the back for being a realist. The alternative, after all, is to embrace Alarmism, the shabby pedigree of which Bradley conscientiously sets forth:

Alarmism as an intellectual movement began in 1798 when Thomas Malthus predicted that food supply would fail to keep up with population growth, resulting in human misery and subsistence living.

Malthus was entirely wrong, of course. The food supply did keep up with population growth, from that day to this, and human misery and subsistence living remained rare as hens' teeth (except among those incorrigible types who sought it out and wallowed in it). Today, the only conceivable threat of mass starvation comes from central planning and organic farming.

That was followed in the 1860s by the "coal panic" in England, brought on by an economist who forecast the imminent decline of the British coal industry. But coal, like agriculture, proved far more abundant than expected, and the alarms faded away.

Bradley's referring to William Stanley Jevons' The Coal Question. Whatever else you want to say about Jevons, his forecast was not "imminent"; what he argued was that the supply of coal is not infinite, and that its price would increase as it became harder to extract:

In every kind of enterprise we shall no doubt meet a natural limit of convenience, or commercial practicability, as we do in the cultivation of the land. I do not mean a fixed and impassible limit, but as it were an elastic obstacle, which we may ever push against a little further, but ever with increasing difficulty.

These are gloomy words indeed, and it's not surprising that they shocked a society whose cornucopian assumptions were more or less identical to Bradley's. (I should mention, in passing, that the famous Tower Colliery closed in January 2008, 13 years after its reopening, because "the coal [had] effectively run out." Perhaps Jevons was on to something.)

Next, the history of alarmism takes a great leap forward to Paul Erlich and the Club of Rome. The latter argued that the world would someday run out of mineral resources...but it turns out that the "shortage dates for various minerals" were exaggerated (all you meth freaks can stop stealing copper wire now).

Even if Bradley's account of alarmism were strictly correct, and the premise that natural resources aren't infinite turned out to be wrong (e.g., because it failed to take magic ponies into account), that wouldn't disprove climate change, any more than the boy who cried wolf disproved wolves or politically motivated terror alerts disprove terrorism. But Bradley knows his audience, and he knows that their appetite for logical fallacies is as boundless as their appetite for cheap gas.

Which is not to say that Bradley ignores facts altogether. He correctly observes that if future events were to contradict James Hansen, then James Hansen would be wrong. And that "scientists are deeply divided about whether global warming increases or decreases either the frequency or intensity of hurricanes." I have no quarrel with any of this.

I'm not at all happy with his solution, though:

It is high time for an open debate over the human influence on climate given that the federal government — after nearly 20 years of debate — is still considering whether to enact mandatory limits on greenhouse gas emissions.

Marvelous, isn't it? The lack of progress we've seen after a 20-year "debate" in which industry-fronted hacks like Bradley were allowed to slander honest scientists, and to confuse the public with irrelevant psychobabble about the Club of Rome, is offered here as evidence that more debate - i.e., more industry-funded slander, red-baiting, and psychobabble - is needful if we hope to get at the Truth.

Also, please note that failure to heed Bradley's advice will lead to human misery and subsistence living, and may pose a serious threat to the future of capitalist prosperity.

Don't worry about where this train's headed; the important thing is not to pull the emergency brake.

(Photo: "Stranded Rowboat, Salton Sea" by Richard Misrach, 1983.)

The Politics of Possibility

As the price of oil skyrockets, and we discuss past and future "surgical strikes" on Syria and Iran, the U.S. Energy Secretary asks our Middle Eastern friends whether they've ever considered the advantages of nuclear power:

Gulf Arab oil exporters and countries around the world should look into nuclear power as an alternative to hydrocarbons, U.S. Energy Secretary Sam Bodman said on Monday.

"Nuclear power should be an alternative for Gulf countries and other countries around the world," Bodman said in the United Arab Emirates during a visit.

Meanwhile, in the American Southeast, the ongoing drought may force nuclear plants to shut down:

Nuclear reactors across the Southeast could be forced to throttle back or temporarily shut down later this year because drought is drying up the rivers and lakes that supply power plants with the awesome amounts of cooling water they need to operate.

Utility officials say such shutdowns probably wouldn't result in blackouts. But they could lead to shockingly higher electric bills for millions of Southerners, because the region's utilities may be forced to buy expensive replacement power from other energy companies.

And in the American Southwest, people are falling in love all over again with oil shale, the perennial fuel of the paleo-future. Estimates of how much water it'd take to develop this low-grade oil range from ghastly to staggering; one thing it's fairly safe to say is that a (subsidized, artificial) oil shale boom would result in a massive influx of thirsty new residents, much as the tar sands boom did in Alberta.

With these stories in mind, it's interesting to learn that farmers in California are thinking it might be more profitable to sell their (subsidized) water to cities, instead of using it to grow crops:

In a state where water has become an increasingly scarce commodity, a growing number of farmers are betting they can make more money selling their water supplies to thirsty cities and farms to the south than by growing crops....

"It just makes dollars and sense right now," said Bruce Rolen, a third-generation farmer in Northern California's lush Sacramento Valley. "There's more economic advantage to fallowing than raising a crop."

All of which can only mean one thing: it's time to transcend the politics of limits, and embrace the politics of possibility.

(Photo: Ship stranded in Aral Sea.)

Getting Richer, Faster

Bjorn Lomborg worries that we're worrying too much:

Since time immemorial, people have worried about the earth’s future. We once believed that the sky would fall. More recently we worried that the planet might freeze, and then that technology would grind to a halt because of a computer bug that was supposed to be unleashed at the turn of the millennium.

Those fears melted away, but today the world has many real, pressing problems.

One problem that's not real or pressing is deforestation, because it's been solved by the Free Market. Or will be. Or could be, in theory.

[D]eforestation is a diminishing problem. The solution wasn’t found in condemnation from the West of developing country practices, or in protests by well-meaning environmentalists, but in economic growth. Developed countries generally increase their forested areas, because they can afford to do so. Developing countries can’t. To encourage less deforestation – and more reforestation – the best thing we can do is help undeveloped nations get richer, faster.

After reading this, I was placed in three vats of cold water to extinguish my wrath. The first vat burst its staves and its hoop. The next boiled with bubbles as big as fists. In the third vat, the water grew hot enough that some might endure it and others might not.

Honestly, I hardly know where to start. Lomborg ignores the fact that undeveloped nations often get “rich” (or failing that, pay a bit of the interest on their debts) by mowing down their forests. While it’s possible that these countries will reforest as they become wealthier, it’s not a foregone conclusion by any means. And even if they do, what they'll end up with is likely to be a far cry – both in terms of acreage and biodiversity – from what they had. To Lomborg, though, "forested areas" are as interchangeable as hotels in Monopoly.

As usual, he accompanies this sort of lunatic assertion with arguments that almost sound reasonable. Why are we so worried about pesticide pollution, he wonders, when “fumes from cooking indoors with firewood and dung will kill more than 1.5 million people this year”?

It’d arguably be possible to address both problems at once, given the relationship between global agribusiness and third-world poverty. But Lomborg refuses to make these connections; what tends to matter to him are the dangerous “choices” made by victims. If we can prevent these backwards people from asphyxiating themselves, they may actually live long enough to be sickened by pesticide run-off. You can't deny that this would be progress!

He applies the same logic to climate change. We shouldn’t waste money on climate research, he says, let alone on reducing emissions; a better use of that money would be to “discourage people from living in foolhardy locations.”

I’m not sure any other kind of location can be said to exist on a planet that calls Lomborg “the 14th most influential academic in the world.”

(Photo: Clearcut forest, Sumatra. Taken by Jens Wieting.)

A Lesser Place

Nolan Finley explains that truth, by definition, is flattering to Americans:

The former vice president and recent Nobel Peace Prize winner declared with great disdain at the international climate change talks in Bali that the United States bears the blame and shame for stalling the crusade against greenhouse gases....

But Gore is now bigger than America. He belongs to the world. As such, he's fluent in the international language that translates every wrong into an indictment of Americans.

They talk of our drinking, but never our thirst!

In 2006, U.S. greenhouse gas emissions fell by 1.5 percent. If Gore were honest, Finley says, he'd trumpet this datum as evidence that we can decrease emissions 15 percent over the next ten years, while continuing to grow at our accustomed rate.

He won't, though, because "that would rub hard against Gore's agenda of forcing America to accept a lesser place on the planet."

Finley is writing from Detroit, a hotbed of innovation whose best and brightest would never dream of ceding American supremacy to foreign pretenders. All the same, he's overlooking a couple of points:

"Favorable weather patterns, where both heating and cooling degree-days were lower in 2006 than 2005, and higher energy prices, were the primary causes of lower total energy consumption," the DoE said.

Supposedly, one of the problems with Algore's Global Warming Theory® is that one hundred years of data are not enough to demonstrate warming. And yet, one year of below-average CO2 emissions somehow constitutes a trend:

If last year's reduction proves to be a trend, the United States will trim its greenhouse gas emissions 15 percent during the next decade, without damaging economic growth.

I found ten dollars on the sidewalk today. If this proves to be a trend, I'll have made ten thousand dollars in roughly 27 years. (I'll be able to quit my job at the jute mill! No more shiftin', piecin', spinnin' warp, weft and twine to feed and clothe my bairnie offa ten and nine!)

What'll happen if we accept the Gore Doctrine, instead of counting on this "trend" to continue? Plainly put, the sky will fall:

That will trigger the greatest transfer of wealth in modern history, as American jobs rush to places with the least regulatory burdens, and more Americans join the ranks of the world's poor.

In other words, cutting emissions will lead to an unprecedented new era of offshoring. Pretty sobering!

In a column he wrote earlier this week, Finley blames and shames Michigan's unemployed for being ignorant and lazy:

Create an appetite for the jobs, and maybe job seekers will get off their backsides and get themselves some skills.

Something must change. Because nothing says stupid louder than a state that watches its nation-leading unemployment rate go up while good jobs sit vacant.

None of those "good jobs," it seems, are in the renewable energy or environmental service sector. Which makes Finley's parting sneer at Gore seem a little...frivolous:

A generation from now, Americans may well look back at Al Gore as the Benedict Arnold of his age, someone so determined to save the earth he was willing to ruin his country.

(Illustration by Warren Rockwell, 1911. Via Filboid Studge.)

A Theory in Crisis

Jerry Taylor of the Cato Institute is trying to frighten the public by passing off the opinions of a small group of politically connected zealots as the consensus view of all economists:

Jerry Taylor, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute said "scientists are in no position to intelligently guide public policy on climate change." Scientists can lay out scenarios, but it is up to economists to weigh the costs and benefits and many of them say the costs of cutting emissions are higher than the benefits, he said.

In effect, these extremists have created a new Inquisition; any economist who dares to question the official dogma on the cost and appropriate methods of addressing climate change is promptly labeled a heretic (i.e., a "socialist"), and cast into the outer darkness. The message is clear: conform to the reigning economic ideology, or suffer the personal and financial consequences.

Thanks to the wide dissemination of this carefully constructed Consensus Myth, many Americans now confuse fashionable opinion with scientific fact, and accordingly accept the far-fetched claim that climate change mitigation efforts will somehow "destroy civilization."

This is no accident, I assure you. The goal of these economic alarmists - many of whom have the full attention of our most powerful politicians and business leaders, thanks to their fellow membership in the Global Elite - is to advance their longstanding "one-world" agenda of crippling representative government, eroding national sovereignty, and undermining democracy by demanding our submission to the "superior morality" of the market.

Since healthy debate over the "wisdom" of market forces, or the damaging effects of externalities and opportunity costs, could interfere with these plans, it must be discouraged at all costs. Thus, apostles like Taylor are careful to portray economics as a monolithic discipline within which there's no meaningful dissent, and about whose accuracy there can be no reasonable doubt. They simply can't afford to let the public know that theirs is a theory in crisis.

This is why it's so vitally important that we continue to demand debate and teach the controversy.

(Illustration from Puck, 56:1436, 1904.)

Sacred Texts and Abstract Principles

As we all know, belief in global warming constitutes a religion. And while religion may be fine and dandy for 35-year-old virgins, Southern trailer trash, and softheaded old biddies, sensible people like John Kay of the Financial Times prefer to take their marching orders from the Invisible Hand.

Some climate zealots have argued that we have a responsibility to our descendents to address global warming. Kay concedes that it's pretty to think so, but points out that it may not be practical:

The problem of weighting the present and the future equally is that there is a lot of future. The number of future generations is potentially so large that small but permanent benefit to them would justify great sacrifice now. If we were to use this criterion to appraise all long-term investment, the volume of such investment would impoverish the current population.

This is no laughing matter. Let's suppose that your upfront cost of ensuring a "small but permanent benefit" for posterity is one dollar per year. Now, let's assume that the future comprises 500,000 years. That's half a million clams you owe the ingrates who'll someday picnic on your grave, payable this instant.

I'm guessing that if you had that kind of cash lying around, you'd be reading the Financial Times instead of this cold, lonely little vanity blog.

And let's not forget that we don't know what kind of people our descendents will be. They may be protectionists, or neo-Muggletonians, or cannibals, or God only knows what. Why should we pay through the nose in order to subsidize lifestyle choices of which we might not approve? Why should we supply lifeboats to people who may've grown gills, for that matter, or food to people who may've learned to eat tin cans like cartoon goats? Where's the ROI, exactly?

The way some people talk about it, it almost sounds like a gift, for which we'd get nothing in return.

This is the sort of outlandish decision people inevitably make when they "seek to extend our natural, but not unlimited, capacity for solidarity with others by calling on sacred texts and abstract principles."

History illustrates the harm done when the fundamentalism of faith or abstract reasoning overtakes pragmatism as political principle.

What might history eventually "illustrate" about our staunch pragmatism? As our President wisely said, "We don't know. We'll all be dead." The only thing we do know is this: To the extent that we've entrusted our fate to "economic and political marketplaces," we'll be able to enter Heaven or Hell with an equally clear conscience.

UPDATE: Smokewriting goes further and fares better.

(Illustration: “Thoughts of Capitalism by a Missourian in the Depression Thirties" by James Penney, c. 1935.)

Ambition, Aspiration and Power

Jonathan Adler ladles a generous helping of grease onto those exceptionally squeaky wheels Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, whose new book strikes him as richly suggestive in its depiction of environmentalists as hectoring anhedonic grinches, and eminently reasonable in its embrace of "an explicitly pro-growth agenda."

First and foremost, Adler agrees with Nordhaus and Shellenberger that environmentalists must stop, already, with the "finger-wagging rhetoric." 'Cause as everyone knows, moral appeals for self-denial and personal responsibility are politically appropriate only when one is agitating against premarital sex or socialized medicine.

Another part of the problem is that too many environmentalists perceive "the environment" as a sort of substrate for human existence, like the Free Market, instead of as an optional lifestyle accessory:

The environment, Messrs. Nordhaus and Shellenberger say, is a "post-material" need that people demand only after their material needs are met.

Personally, I can't think of a much more material need than clean air and water, but that's probably just a symptom of my inability to move beyond "a politics of limits."

To make normal, productive human activity the enemy of nature, as environmentalists implicitly do, is to adopt policies that "constrain human ambition, aspiration and power...."

God forbid anyone - or anything - should do that. As President Bush so often says, "if it feels good, do it!"

Nordhaus and Shellenberger do have one fault in Adler's eyes, and that's their antiquated belief in the plausibility of government solutions:

[I]t is hard to see why their centralized subsidy plan would produce commercially profitable -- that is, "pro-growth" -- technologies better than the multiple efforts of private investors. In short: Why would an "Apollo" plan succeed where the Synthetic Fuels Corp. failed?

That teensy little quibble aside, he feels they've got a pretty firm grasp of the problem: doomsaying environmentalists and their philosophically untenable belief in constraining human ambition. Nordhaus and Shellenberger may not be quite ready to sit at the adult table, but when they are, it seems safe to say that no one will welcome them more heartily than Jonathan Adler.

(Illustration: "Monstrous Craws, at a New Coalition Feast" by James Gillray, 1787.)

The Battle Over What To Think

Though I'm as besotted with dialectics as the next lefty extremist, I can't quite approve of Andrew Revkin's attempt to achieve a synthesis of denialist disinformation and peer-reviewed science:

For many years, the battle over what to think and do about human-caused climate change and fossil fuels has been waged mostly as a yelling match between the political and environmental left and the right.

The left says global warming is a real-time crisis....The right says global warming is somewhere between a hoax and a minor irritant....

The thing is, if someone is yelling that global warming is a "hoax," that person is yelling nonsense. And anyone who hopes to give an accurate account of the debate is obliged to say as much.

Revkin can't bother himself with these minor details, though. He's too excited by the thought that reasonable people are beginning to "urge a move to the pragmatic center on climate and energy," as reasonable people must.

Who are these paradigm-shattering pioneers? Well, there's Newt Gingrich, who was "one of the most polarizing forces in politics a decade ago," according to Revkin (how times have changed!). He's now calling for "curbing carbon dioxide emissions (affordably)."

Who gets to decide what is and isn't affordable? Revkin doesn't say, but I'm guessing the honor'll go to a member in good standing of the pragmatic center.

Next, we have Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, whose self-congratulatory approach to torching strawmen is guaranteed by Nordhaus and Shellenberger to light our path towards a better future.

Last and least, there's Bjorn Lomborg, whose appalling new book I've dealt with here and here. Revkin, who's less compromised by partisanship than yours truly, effectively praises it with faint damnation:

In his short new book, “Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming,” Mr. Lomborg...tries to puncture more of what he says are environmental myths, like the imminent demise of polar bears. (Most bear biologists have never said the species is doomed but do see populations shrinking significantly in a melting Arctic.)

Ah, but are these "bear biologists" pragmatic centrists? To the extent that their views are not in harmony with those of Mr. Lomborg, one suspects that they are not, and pities them.

For those who came in late, here's a quick recap: The "pragmatic center" on climate change is inhabited by Newt Gingrich, Nordhaus and Shellenberger, and Bjorn fucking Lomborg. Or to put it another way, two pathologically dishonest free-market fundamentalists, and a couple of preening bourgeois polemicists who espouse "an ambitious new [!!!] philosophy that isn't afraid to put people ahead of nature and to dream big about creating economic growth."

This, you'll agree, is a group of thinkers who could solve all our problems, had we but world enough and time. My only complaint is that Gregg Easterbrook didn't make the grade.

UPDATE: David Roberts notes that Revkin's gone this route before.

Locked Into Concrete

Randal O'Toole moistens a finger, thrusts it into the prevailing political breeze, and concludes that the time is right for yet another attack on the theory and practice of planning:

After 30 years of looking at government plans -- forest plans, park plans, transportation plans, city plans, state plans, all kinds of plans -- I've realized all government planning is bad.

If you're thinking back to your last interstate drive, or subway ride, or trip to a national park, and worrying that O'Toole is painting with a rather broad brush, think again. Indeed, if there's one thing in the world this genial man dislikes, it's oversimplification:

Cities, forests and so on are just too complicated to plan, so [planners] oversimplify, and since they don't pay the costs of their mistakes, they don't have an incentive to try to get it right.

One might just as easily say that cities are too complicated not to plan. But for now, we'll take O'Toole's argument at face value (except for the part about there being no incentive for good urban planning, which is utterly demented horseshit).

How do we solve the problems caused by our all-too-human lack of omniscience? Why, nothing could be easier!

I'm arguing that we need to stop planning. We need to repeal planning laws. Congress and the states should stop passing new planning laws.

That may seem impetuous to some readers, and agonizingly stupid to others. But consider this chilling fact: planning will never lead to an ideal outcome for every single resident of a city:

[C]ities are really, really complicated organisms. They consist of hundreds of thousands or millions of people. Each of those people has different tastes, different travel needs, different housing needs and desires. It's impossible -- literally impossible -- to plan to the level of detail to make sure that everybody achieves what they need and want.

Well, yes. But that's not what planning is intended to do. And you'd have to be pretty fucking silly to imagine that any system could ensure "that everybody achieves what they need and want." You might as well argue that medicine is a failed project because it can't fulfill the public's demand for eternal life.

The fact that "most Americans prefer to live in a house with a yard" is interesting in psychological terms. But it doesn't have much to do with what's possible in the real world. Land and water are limited resources, last time I checked, and they're vulnerable to human activities. When you refuse to acknowledge those facts, as cornucopian goofballs like O'Toole have an unhappy tendency to do, you forfeit your right to accuse anyone else of oversimplification. And when you do acknowledge them, as sane people must, planning begins to seem like something of an...obligation.

O'Toole also argues that government planning is driven (unlike the planning of multinational corporations, I presume) by financial and political interests:

When government writes a plan, that plan gets locked into concrete because immediately special-interest groups consisting of people and businesses that benefit from that plan form to make sure that the plan never changes. So it becomes extraordinarily difficult to change the plan no matter how mistaken and costly it turns out to be.

And that, boys and girls, is how our nation came to be saddled with the vast terra mortua of Central Park, and why the Grand Canyon remains tragically undammed to this day.

That settles it, I guess. We can't plan our communities, the pretty conceits of Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa or Christopher Wren or Baron Haussmann or Daniel Burnham or the Shakers notwithstanding. And we can't change how and where we want to live, which is as eternal as our love of Beauty and Truth. You can't fight human nature, although it's human nature to try.

The interesting thing is, every argument O'Toole makes against planning could just as easily be made against political involvement per se, which is probably not an accident. What he's actually attacking - much like an assassin who pretends to be a bodyguard - is personal responsibility and personal freedom. Instead of engaging ourselves, for better or worse, with real-world issues like carrying capacity and resource depletion, we're commanded to turn our troubles over to a higher authority, and let hierophants like O'Toole interpret the resulting signs and wonders. Good citizenship is simply a matter of going along with whatever O'Toole and his ilk claim is "good for business"; follow this splendid principle, and you're guaranteed a moral victory no matter what sort of misery you bring upon yourself and others.

This astonishingly weird and infantile approach to our collective Short Life of Trouble isn't liberating, except to those of us for whom infantilization is liberation. Even if planning were just as bad as O'Toole says, it'd still be morally preferable to free-market fundamentalism, if only to the extent that it prevents us from blaming our problems on "market forces."

(Illustration by Jules Guerin, from The Plan of Chicago by Daniel Burnham and Edward H. Bennett, 1909.)

A Delicate Matter

Longtime readers know how enthused I am about Greenland's bid to become the Tahiti of the Arctic. It's not just the idea of being served mango and breadfruit by zaftik Norse beauties wearing coconut-shell brassieres that appeals to me (though you can be sure that in that regard, I'm as human as the next gink). It's also my conscience, which cries to me in the wee small hours that the Greenlanders have suffered enough. Why should they be blasted by subzero winds, or menaced by sleet, or annoyed by walruses simply because they have the misfortune to be situated in the realms of the Boreal Pole?

The New York Times seems to agree with me, to some extent. A new article by Sarah Lyall explains that Greenland is movin' up, yo, and no hataz need apply:

Kenneth Hoeg, the region’s chief agriculture adviser, says he does not see why southern Greenland cannot eventually be full of vegetable farms and viable forests....

“The limiting factor for human survival here is temperature, and there’s a lot of benefits with a warmer climate,” Mr. Hoeg said. “We are on the frontier of agriculture, and even a few degrees can make a difference.”

After bringing Greenland's history to radiant life by describing Erik the Red as "pugilistic," Lyall explains that yes, a few degrees really can make a difference:

Climate is a delicate matter in a place like this. A degree more of warmth here, an inch less of rain there; these can have serious repercussions for a farmer eking out a living raising sheep on the harsh terrain.

Can you believe it? It's a real-life science-fiction world where shifts in climate actually have agricultural repercussions. Makes you glad to live in America, where rain invariably follows the plow (unless we sin against the Holy Spirit, as Atlanta did when it proclaimed itself "the city too busy to hate").

Lyall does note that

Greenland’s great ice sheet, a vast white landscape of 0.695 million square miles covering 80 percent of the island’s land mass, is melting rapidly, alarmingly, with repercussions not only for the traditional way of life on an island of 56,000 people, but also for the rest of the world. The more the ice melts, the higher sea levels will eventually rise.

In Greenland's semi-inhabited south, however, "the changes are more subtle and carry more promise."

More promise, that is, than extinctions, hunger, and worldwide flooding.

More Green Areas

The brand of objectivity that equates microeconomics with Deus sive Natura usually requires reporters to be politely optimistic about the effects of climate change on Greenland's agricultural sector.

A new article in the Christian Science Monitor takes a somewhat more nuanced view of the matter. First, though, it offers up the standard palaver from one of Greenland's civic boosters:

"Spring is coming many weeks earlier now, and the last five winters have been very short and rainy," says Tommy Maro, mayor of Qaqortaq, the region's principal town. "It will be exciting to see how the land will change in the next 20 years. Maybe we will have more sheep farmers, more green areas, more things we can grow."

Mr. Maro apparently believes that the nation that dies with the most sheep farmers wins.

The CSM points out that things aren't quite that simple. What will allegedly benefit Greenland's farmers is already ruining its hunters:

[E]ven in northern Greenland, the sea hasn't frozen solidly for nearly a decade, effectively isolating thousands of Greenlanders for half the year and wiping out the livelihoods of hundreds more subsistence hunters who pursued seals and polar bears on the ice.

I find this candor refreshing. Most of the articles I've read on Greenland's looming Gilded Age don't have much to say about the loss of livelihood in the north.

As an aside, it's interesting how easily journalists can switch from sentimentality about traditional ways of life to mawkishness about Progress. In the US, for instance, the mythology surrounding truck drivers is pretty much inviolable, despite the fact that cross-country trucking is an eminently stupid and inefficient way of transporting goods. Environmentalists, by contrast, supposedly want to drag us back to the bad old days of cave-dwelling, root-gnawing, and surgical tools made of chipped flint.

It's almost as though there's some hidden criterion journalists can use to distinguish noble workers who are fighting for their traditional way of life from Luddites who'd rather bless the darkness than light a candle.

The article goes on to point out that warming a cold climate could lead to other outcomes than warmer, milder weather, and in doing so, hints at the shocking truth that warm climates are not automatically "better," locally or globally, than cold ones:

[N]obody knows for sure the long-term effects of Greenland's warming climate. Scientists expect that warmer sea temperatures will drive shrimp farther north, where they are less accessible, but they may be replaced by other species. Melting glacial ice may prove good for the country's expanding hydroelectric industry, but thinning sea ice is already claiming lives of people who rely on it for transportation.

Even in the south, the weather is proving a mixed bag. On the Qassiarsuk town landing stand a number of refrigerator-sized plastic-wrapped parcels – hay shipped in for local farmers' sheep. "In the beginning of the summer we had very dry weather, and the grass did not grow," explains Kiista Isaksen, mayor of the municipality of Narsaq, of which Qassiarsuk is a part. "Now it's raining too much."

The only correction I'd make here is that nobody knows the short-term effects of Greenland's warming climate, either.

But whatever they are, I'm sure its citizens will "adapt"...just like the citizens of Mashkan-shapir did.

(Photo at top by Poagao.)