Ideological Formations

John J. Miller visits Luray Caverns with his family, and finds that its bizarre formations remind him of FREEDOM.

I haven't visited enough caves to say how this one compares to others, but it did make this top-ten list and I recommend it highly. It's also a private business that sells tickets and souvenirs, not a public park that consumes taxpayer dollars. Luray Caverns may not be a model for balancing tourism and conservation at every natural wonder in the country, but it's probably a better one than most people realize. Americans can perform a lot of wonders on their own.

His enthusiasm is understandable. I mean, they actually play Luray's stalactites with mallets! That's a wonderful example of the creative solutions you get when you unleash the power of the Free Market.

I'm assuming Miller has never been to Carlsbad Caverns, where they also sell tickets and souvenirs (just like most other national parks). As for consuming taxpayer dollars, that's a complex subject...but for whatever it's worth, a recent study claims that while Carlsbad Caverns has an annual budget of about $6 million, "the total impact of the park is almost 1,000 jobs and $17 million in income in the county."

That doesn't sound like such a bad deal to me, even if the caverns do lack spectral mood lighting, pipe organs, and an animatronic figure of Ronald Reagan welcoming visitors to the snack bar.

One can only hope that despite Miller's excruciating political correctness, his family managed to enjoy the cave for its own sake. My parents had their faults, God knows, but at least they didn't reduce the scenic wonders we visited to economic case studies.

The Final Frontier

Andrew Rice reports that Saudi Arabia is buying up African croplands. Amazingly, the headline asks whether there is "such a thing as agro-imperialism."

It's a strange question, given that most of the classic narratives of imperialism revolve around agriculture (e.g., tea, opium, rubber, bananas, palm oil). You wouldn't think it'd be necessary to invent a new, fashionably hyphenated name for the economic imperative that gave us the term "banana republic"...unless the goal is simply to treat established facts as controversial theories, so that business as usual can proceed while we quibble over terminology.

Maybe the confusion stems from the fact that in today's fully enlightened world, growing your country's food on a poorer country's land creates jobs and opportunities. This is a far cry from the imperialism of the bad old days, which was explicitly undertaken in the name of Radical Evil and had no use for humanitarian platitudes. In the 1800s, plantation owners paid their laborers starvation wages as an expression of racialist contempt. Nowadays, they do it out of love.

Or failing that, necessity.

A variety of factors — some transitory, like the spike in food prices, and others intractable, like global population growth and water scarcity — have created a market for farmland, as rich but resource-deprived nations in the Middle East, Asia and elsewhere seek to outsource their food production to places where fields are cheap and abundant. Because much of the world’s arable land is already in use — almost 90 percent, according to one estimate, if you take out forests and fragile ecosystems — the search has led to the countries least touched by development, in Africa.

I'm not sure how you distinguish "fragile ecosystems" from the other kind. Maybe they don't withstand conversion to industrial monoculture? Or maybe the distinction has less to do with biology than with the power and visibility of a given ecosystem's human defenders. By that measure, California's remaining wetlands are probably a lot more "fragile" than most of Africa.

Either way, Ethiopia is one of the countries that may or may not be falling prey to agro-imperialism.

“We are associated with hunger, although we have enormous investment opportunities,” explained Abi Woldemeskel, director general of the Ethiopian Investment Agency.

As you can see, Abu Woldemeskel has a firm grasp of history. And that goes double for Robert Zeigler of the International Rice Research Institute:

“The idea that one country would go to another country,” says Robert Zeigler, “and lease some land, and expect that the rice produced there would be made available to them if there’s a food crisis in that host country, is ludicrous.”

I'll say. I can't come up with a single example of a country that exported food crops while its people died of starvation, and I've been trying for several seconds. The scenario is even more ludicrous given that we're talking about Saudi Arabia, which has very little clout in international affairs and tends to buckle under the mildest criticism.

But if you want a really clear-eyed view of history, you must consult Susan Payne of Emergent Asset Management.

“Africa is the final frontier,” Payne told me after the conference. “It’s the one continent that remains relatively unexploited.”

Roll over King Leopold, and tell Cecil Rhodes the news! Perhaps it's time for a new Berlin Conference.

Joking aside, there's an awful lot of money at stake here, so it's just as well that global warming turned out to be a hoax.

Clarifying Priorities

During the months when my mother was dying of a brain tumor, and unable to speak or think coherently, I found myself somewhat distracted. In addition to the emotional issues, there were serious legal and financial and logistical problems to sort out. It was all very...engrossing, I guess you'd say, and I didn't have much attention left over for current events. If a fleet of swastika-covered UFOs had streamed forth from New Swabia to form a one-world government with the Greys and the Bilderbergers, I'm not sure I would've noticed.

Many of the decisions I made turned out to be good...or at least, not as bad as they could've been. But a lot of that was sheer dumb luck. God knows I wasn't thinking ahead, or following any kind of plan; I simply lashed out at immediate problems as they popped up, and put everything else on the back burner, for better or worse.

I wouldn't wish that mindset on anyone else, which is one of the many reasons I'm unlikely to be hired by the Wall Street Journal. A recent editorial gloats over evidence that public concern about global warming has declined, as economic traumas like losing a job or home, or declaring bankruptcy due to medical bills, make more pressing demands on their attention.

Tough economic times have a way of clarifying political priorities and forcing people to distinguish among needs, wishes —- and fantasies....Electorates all over the world are starting to question the climate-change received wisdom.

The WSJ supports this rather ghoulish argument with a survey by Australia's Lowy Institute, which "showed climate-change had fallen to the seventh 'most important' foreign-policy goal for the public."

The Australian public, that is. And while it did rank 7th as a foreign-policy goal, it still rated as "the 4th most critical threat facing Australia." (I believe this is known as "cherrypicking.") Also, the fact that economic issues are foremost on people's minds doesn't mean they're all free-market fanatics; for all I know, some of them may be strongly in favor of sending oil industry CEOs, glibertarian investment bankers, and WSJ editorialists to the guillotine, on the assumption that it'd solve many of our problems at one blow.

All things considered, invoking one disastrous side effect of anti-regulatory, cornucopian dogma as an argument against addressing another is kind of problematic. What's even more problematic, though, is the notion that tough economic times "clarify" our priorities, and cause us to make wiser or better decisions for ourselves and for society.

One of the things we're supposed to do, as proudly self-interested individuals whose private vice leads to public virtue, is eliminate the social safety net and replace it with uncoerced charity. Putting aside the fact that this is nightmarishly illogical, what happens to charitable giving in the times when it's needed most?

As Helmut at Phronesisaical notes, it declines as our priorities are clarified by our imminent ruin. In 2008, charitable contributions fell by two percent in current dollars, which is the largest decrease in four or five decades. The situation is actually far worse when you look at specific types of charity: for instance, donations to the human services sector comprised only nine percent of total giving, but "declined an estimated 12.7 percent in current dollars." And this happened in a year when "54 percent of human services charities saw an increase in need for their services."

The Giving Institute, which compiled these figures, makes the essential point:

Charities in this subsector are among the first to report increasing needs for their services and slower growth in contributions when the national economy slows its rate of growth.

Given that little detail, and these ones, it begins to look as though you can't necessarily rely on individuals to make socially beneficial decisions during tough economic times. That seems like a pretty good argument for strengthening the social safety net, and a pretty good argument against letting public opinion drive climate policy.

But of course, that's not how we roll.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein is joining 6 other Senators to demand that Speaker Nancy Pelosi approve a commission to recommend cuts to Medicare and Social Security - or else they'll refuse to vote to increase the US government's debt ceiling....

Cutting Medicare and Social Security benefits would be a truly insane, reckless, and radical act. At a time when the US economy is entering a period of long-term high unemployment, the very last thing you want to be doing is further undermining the ability of Americans, particularly the aged, to make ends meet.

Cuts in Social Security and Medicare will not only ripple through the economy in the form of reduced spending, they'll also ripple through younger generations, who will fill the gap lost by the cutting of government benefits with money out of their own pockets to help their elderly relatives make ends meet and get the treatment they need.

At which point, their priorities will be so wonderfully clear that they may ignore the climate altogether, and we can declare that Doomsday has been canceled due to lack of interest.

The At-Risk Population

Yet another cartoon lightbulb has appeared over Bjorn Lomborg's head:

Limiting carbon emissions won't do much to stop disease in Zambia.

See, 'cause malaria is killing people now, whereas climate change may kill or otherwise inconvenience them at some point in the future. Let this be a lesson to all those warmists who insist that we must stop trying to prevent malaria!

Lomborg's not a denialist, so he naturally acknowledges that warming is expected to increase the prevalence of malaria:

Most estimates suggest that global warming will put 3% more of the Earth's population at risk of catching malaria by 2100. If we invest in the most efficient, global carbon cuts — designed to keep temperature rises under two degrees Celsius — we would spend a massive $40 trillion a year by 2100. In the best case scenario, we would reduce the at-risk population by only 3%.

The at-risk population for malaria, that is. Which is a comparatively minor issue, as AGW-related catastrophes go, given that we currently have far more reliable remedies for malaria than for sustained regional drought and famine, or the loss of a keystone species.

Regardless, Lomborg contrasts the eleventy-gazillion dollars it'll cost to reduce emissions with the relatively modest cost of investing in mosquito netting, and comes to the daring conclusion that mosquito netting is cheaper. Which is pretty fucking stupid, since controlling malaria is not the sole aim - nor even a major aim - of reducing emissions.

The sleight of hand on malaria obscures Lomborg's far more bizarre claim that "if we invest in the most efficient, global carbon cuts...we would spend a massive $40 trillion a year by 2100." Climate forecasting, as everyone knows, is dangerously unreliable. But there's apparently no problem with making an economic forecast in which ninety years of investment in efficiency (which presumably includes alternative energy and cleantech) result in steadily climbing costs, and deliver no meaningful benefit beyond maintaining the malaria caseload at its current level.

That, believe it or not, is the sunny outlook that's supposed to serve as an antidote to Algore's hollow-eyed thanatophilia.

Like all of Lomborg's best theories, this one is endorsed by the Copenhagen Consensus Center, which is kind of like saying that L. Ron Hubbard's views are endorsed by the Church of Scientology.

[S]pending $3 billion annually on mosquito nets, environmentally safe indoor DDT sprays, and subsidies for effective new combination therapies could halve the number of those infected with malaria within one decade. For the money it takes to save one life with carbon cuts, smarter policies could save 78,000 lives.

Again, Lomborg's treating malaria prevention as the goal of carbon cuts, which makes this calculation misleading at best. It's also interesting that a decade of investment in new pesticides and therapies will bring good results and a prompt ROI, while nine decades of investment in energy efficiency will bankrupt the entire planet and bring our deaths halfway to meet us.

In the real world, there are lots of benefits to improving efficiency and cutting emissions. Which is why I think Lomborg would be much better off attacking the Near-Earth Object Program and related alarmist busywork. The world spends huge sums of money to identify asteroids that may never come nearer than a million miles to the earth, and to develop equally expensive deflection strategies that -- let's face it -- probably wouldn't work if they ever became necessary. Shouldn't we be using these resources to eradicate one of the world's most devastating diseases, instead of fussing over some fanciful Doomsday scenario that we couldn't prevent even if it actually were a serious threat?

Alternatively, I suppose we could cut our military budget by one percent, and use the extra six billion dollars per year to address both problems, along with a few others.

It's even possible that a similar approach would allow us to reduce emissions and fight malaria at the very same time. But for some reason, fearless, irreverent, paradigm-shattering heretics like Lomborg never seem to argue along these lines; it's almost as though they understand that they'd vanish overnight from the American media's Rolodexes. As Cocteau said, one must always know how far to go too far.

Pleasant Landscapes

Alan Oxley has been hearing a lot about "ethical" business decisions lately, and he's skeptical. The paradox here -- the aporia, if you will -- is that "denying opportunities for growth is clearly unethical."

Palm oil plantations are a good case in point. "Environmentalists" keep saying they're "bad," because they lead to "deforestation" and the "destruction" of "habitat." But consider this:

[Palm oil] is a basic food product for the poor in the developing world.

Here, then, are two competing visions of the future: in one, the Virtuous Poor are burdened with acres of redundant forest comprising rocks and dirt and poisonous snakes. In the other, they're blessed with as much palm oil as they can drink. From a humanitarian standpoint, the choice is clear.

Besides, it's not transnational agribusiness that's bulldozing forests in the developing world; it's poor people who need food and firewood.

Researchers at the Food and Agricultural Organization report regularly that deforestation in developing countries is result of the search for firewood and land to house and feed people.

And besides that, Europe and North America had similar economic incentives for hacking down their own forests -- in addition to the Third World's -- and everything turned out just ducky, as demonstrated by the fact that you're probably reading these words in a reasonably modern house filled with electronic gadgetry.

This was how Europe and North America developed, and it is how the Third World is growing too. The Malaysian government promoted palm oil, making it the world's largest producer for several years as a deliberate and successful strategy to provide prosperity and economic security to previously landless workers.

The Malaysian government's seal of approval should be enough for anyone; after all, Malaysia has been reaping the benefits of palm-oil production ever since this sturdy West African plant was first turned into a cash crop by foreign entrepreneurs under British colonial rule.

Still, a few Negative Nellies persist in wringing their hands over the "loss" of "biodiversity." These people don't seem to realize that this battle is already over, and we won:

Five years ago the U.N. concluded that the biodiversity target of preserving 10% of the world's forests had been reached. There is more forest preserved in the developing world now than in Europe.

That being the case, how can anyone seriously object to additional deforestation? There's only one possible explanation:

This is now merely a campaign to satisfy a Western urge to see pleasant landscapes.

If you thought that colonialism had something to do with exploiting Third World resources and labor while patting oneself on the back for "civilizing" the natives, think again: the real colonialists are those Western snobs whose languid aestheticism is interfering with the world-healing operations of Cargill.

Like Martin Durkin's bolshevist fury at the bourgeois cult of global warming, and Brenden O'Neill's radical critique of eco-imperialism, Oxley's article showcases the growing usefulness of left-wing clichés to corporatist shills. Soon enough, I'm sure, we'll see child labor on cocoa plantations justified with quotes from Frantz Fanon, and Tom DeLay characterizing opposition to Saipan sweatshops as a new and worse form of Orientalism.

It may be that Oxley's happy talk about food and prosperity and biodiversity doesn't impress you much. If so, forget about it, and focus on the bottom line:

Shareholders ultimately rate companies by the business they do, not the causes they support.

A sobering message indeed. We're very fortunate that in this case, a profitable business opportunity also happens to be the salvation of the poor and a boon to the environment. Because if it weren't, we couldn't necessarily trust CEOs and shareholders to listen to humanitarian and environmental arguments against cashing in.

Human Needs

If there's one thing our troubled nation needs more than ever, it's a newspaper editorialist who's willing to take a principled stand for human needs.

And I'm not talking about clean air and water, or food, or education, or affordable healthcare, or the right to marry the person you love. I'm talking about real human needs, like building parking lots, sneering at science, conflating vulgar-libertarian claptrap with the Word of God, elevating willfully ignorant contempt for nature to a moral imperative, and turning environmental management decisions over to the extraction industries.

The first thing you need to understand is that things you've never heard of don't matter.

Ever hear of the Yellowstone sand verbena? Probably not, since the only place this plant is currently known to grow in North America is a beach in the Wyoming national park bearing that name.

Know how you can tell valuable things from worthless things? Valuable things become more valuable as they become more scarce.

Consider this: If Yellowstone sand verbena were of any use to anybody, people would be growing it on purpose and selling it. Since they're not, it's pretty clear that it does not meet human needs, and probably never will. (Unless it turns out to cure some disease or something, but what are the odds of that?)

And no, the desire to look at Yellowstone sand verbana doesn't count as a human need. On the contrary, it's an affectation. And not the good kind, like smoking a cigar while wearing a bowtie.

How about the meltwater lednian stonefly that is only found in Glacier National Park in Montana? That one will be gone by 2030, thanks to global warming — assuming global warming is a reality, as claimed by some scientists. Or, it may be frozen by the new little ice age predicted by other scientists.

If these educated fools had the sense to cast aside their astrolabes and alembics, and consider the world in the hard astringent light of Oeconomics, they'd know that both of these outcomes are a) impossible (or at least unlikely); and b) inconsequential.

People are fretting over bugs and weeds that can only be found in Montana's national parks. The conclusion is inescapable:

[S]uch policies will “essentially sequester large swaths of private property from all use for years.”

Which would be bad enough. But the more serious problem is that they are guided by "a fundamentally unbalanced view of the proper relationship between man and nature." These policies emanate from some topsy-turvy dreamworld in which human avarice is constrained by intangibles like humility, and science, and law, and...and a sense of personal responsibility, instead of being allowed to trample everything in its path.

And for what? Here's a perfect example of how we're coddling these dime-a-dozen parasites, instead of forcing 'em to shift for themselves as God intended.

Last summer, Bureau of Land Management officials lifted environmental restrictions designed to protect one variety of sage grouse — aka “prairie chickens” — from seeing or hearing oil or natural gas wells. But, as The Examiner then predicted, environmentalists have since sued, seeking federal court orders directing reclassification of other prairie chicken varieties as endangered species.

"Sage grouse," indeed. This reminds me of the ginned-up controversy surrounding the "marbled murrelet," which despite its five-dollar name is basically nothing more than a common seagull.

Besides, if I have to hear a garbage truck every week at 6 AM, why the hell shouldn't a chicken have to hear the occasional oil well? If they don't like it, let them roost behind the moon, as the old song says.

Though these objections to conservation are unanswerable, they may seem somewhat abstract to people who are busy working, and shopping, and watching TV, and disrupting town-hall healthcare meetings in order to protect Granny and Grampy from liberal-fascist Selektion.

How will protecting useless, redundant species ruin your life, you ask? Get a load of this:

Environmental law that puts more emphasis on forever preserving the current condition of nature also shortchanges America’s ability to provide housing for a growing population. As Hewitt explains, “The proposed Clean Water Restoration Act would vastly expand federal control with private property and greatly complicate and increase the cost of bringing new homes to the market.”

Since housing is a key engine of employment and economic growth, hobbling this essential industry doesn’t just deny people shelter, it also prevents the creation of millions of needed new jobs.

It's infuriating, isn't it? The nation could be in the midst of a well-nigh unstoppable housing boom at this very moment, if it weren't for the sage grouse's interference with oil and gas leasing, and the little-known weeds and bugs that are cluttering up Montana's national parks.

These are just some of the reasons America needs a new national discussion of which is more important, the needs of the sage grouse or those of the people with whom such creatures share the natural world.

Sounds reasonable to me. Strictly in the interests of balance, and fairness, and equity, and impartiality, and stuff like that, I say the decision should be made by people who stand to benefit financially from throwing ESA protections out the window.

Because the plain fact is, we've been ruled by the sage grouse for far too long. It's time we cast its hateful yoke from our shoulders, and started the great work of catering to human needs. As Frederick Douglass said, in a remarkably similar situation, "There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven who does not know that slavery is wrong for him."

(Photo by Jeff Brouws.)

Useless Jobs

I have to confess that until today, I didn't really grasp the breadth and depth of the abyss that Obama has opened at our feet.

Of course I understood, in my fuzzyheaded, genial way, that he was shepherding us into a new Gulag. And I had no reason to doubt the experts who claim that spending isn't actually stimulus and jobs aren't actually work.

But it's only after reading a new column by Ben Shapiro -- who looks as though he's about 12, but would be wise beyond his years even if he were as old as Steve Simels -- that I've come to realize how desperate things have gotten:

The public relations backbone of this bill -- government spending on our nations crumbling infrastructure -- is misguided. While the countrys infrastructure may need revamping, this sort of spending will not stimulate the economy. It will not create the kind of jobs Americans need.

The thing is, see, these jobs do nothing more than build infrastructure, while paying wages that can be exchanged for good and services. Real jobs are entirely different:

The goal of a thriving economy isnt full employment -- its raising the standard of living. Employment rate means nothing if the jobs it measures do not create wealth for the economy.

You're not getting this, are you? Let's see if we can dumb it down a little:

Heres the magic of private sector jobs. Imagine Bill owns a fruit stand. He sells his fruit for $2 per pound. Herman sees that Bill is doing well, and decides to open a fruit stand of his own. He figures he can undercut Bill and live on less of a profit margin, so he sells his fruit at $1 per pound. Pretty soon, Herman runs Bill out of business. Its tough for Bill. But meanwhile, customers are spending $1 less for their fruit than they were. Theyre spending that extra money at Bobs clothing store, keeping Bob employed -- and Bob can now hire Bill.

This is simple, rational, and just, precisely as God intended it to be. By contrast, here's what happens when the government "hires" people to "build" "necessary" "infrastructure," as Stalin did when he squandered the lives of thousands of laborers to complete the Belomorkanal:

Imagine Cool Hand Luke works for the government as a menial laborer. He builds roads in New York. People dont choose to pay Cool Hand Luke -- the government forces them to pay his salary. Now, certain people in New York may benefit from the new road. But they would rather have spent their cash on a new car, or a new computer, or a new business. And the people who live in California, who are also paying Cool Hand Luke, get nothing for their money. Their quality of life is not improved one iota.

To be fair, it's not obvious that New Yorkers would rather pay for cars than roads, or that Californians don't benefit from well maintained roads when they visit New York for business or pleasure, or when their friends and family and business associates travel on them in relative safety. Nor is it obvious that no one in California ever benefits from the spending decisions of Cool Hand Luke, Cotton-Eyed Joe, 'Flicted Arm Pete, Whistling Rufus, Poke Salad Annie, and the rest of the "menials" who get paid to loiter beside the Empire State's highways.

But apart from these minor details, Shapiro's anecdote gets at the throbbing black heart of the problem, and makes us realize how much better things would be if we sold the roads in New York to the government of Saudi Arabia, which could hire Bill and Bob as independent contractors once Bob's clothing store is driven out of business by Walmart, whose low prices are subsidized with their tax dollars.

And besides, the best and the brightest Americans don't even want government jobs:

[O]ur politicians think they can appease us by offering us useless jobs. They think investment bankers will be happy to staff the bureaucracy at the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Think for a moment of the sheer wastefulness of forcing our unemployed investment bankers to tend to the squalid affairs of these drunken aboriginal ingrates, instead of letting them blaze new trails in the science of mortgage securitization. And then thank your lucky stars that unlike Barack Hussein Obama, you understand the difference between having a job, and having a life:

Obama might prevent rising unemployment. After all, so did President Jimmy Carter. But hell do so at the cost of private sector employment. Americans will pay the price in standard of living -- but at least they can say they have a job, no matter how useless.

It's even more chilling when you realize that some of them may actually delude themselves into thinking that it beats the alternative.

Meanwhile, those of you who are looking for the kind of work that actually advances civilization may want to get in on the ground floor of PJTV.

(Photo: Prisoner labor at construction of Belomorkanal, 1932.)

Our Best and Brightest

Fort Detrick can't seem to keep track of its pathogens:

It's the only place in the American military complex equipped to handle the worst of the worst diseases -- those that have no cure and are transmissible by air. Which makes it extremely unnerving, that the place had to suspend biodefense research on Friday, "after discovering apparent problems with the system of accounting for high-risk microbes and biomaterials...."

The concern this time is that the lab may not be accurately tracking the use and storage of all of its biological organisms in an internal government database -- leaving the door open to misplacement, mishandling, or worse.

The federal government has delegated food-safety responsibilities to states that can't afford them:

The U.S. government has increasingly relied on food-safety inspections performed by states, where budgets for inspections in many cases have remained stagnant and where overburdened officials are trained less than their federal counterparts and perform skimpier reviews

There's a shortage of water in the desert:

The Central Valley has been hit harder than most parts of California, in part because housing was so overbuilt there. But the valley faces a problem that much of the rest of the state doesn't: Its economy is heavily tied to the farming industry, which in turn is dependent on water imported from the mountains of Northern California.

Who or what is to blame? The Endangered Species Act, naturally:

Republican George Radanovich of Mariposa, who introduced a bill to this effect last week, called the Endangered Species Act a "horrendous" law and said that pumping restrictions to protect Delta smelt and other species at the expense of farmers amounts to "economic eco-terrorism."

The NOAA is punishing a marine biologist for advocating conservation:

Professor Rick Steiner, a noted marine scientist and environmentalist with the University of Alaska Marine Advisory Program, incurred the wrath of NOAA officials by protesting a pro-industry slant in Sea Grant programs to promote oil drilling in Alaska’s Bristol Bay.

And the Pentagon has come up with a fraudulent mitigation banking scheme:

The Pentagon has been funding Texas A&M University to pay landowners near a Texas military post to protect endangered bird species on their land under a secretive program designed to free the military to conduct training activities that would damage the birds' habitats inside the post's boundaries....

Meanwhile, the Canadian government is funding an asbestos lobbying group:

[T]he new federal budget continues to provide funding for the Chrysotile Institute, which promotes the use of asbestos throughout the world.

"When Canadians find out we're actually doing this, they can't believe it," said Bradley, who has written Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff urging the party to support an end to the funding.

All of which is pretty depressing. But take heart, for the economy, at least, is in good hands:

Mr. Geithner, who will announce the broad outlines of the plan on Tuesday morning, successfully fought against more severe limits on executive pay for companies receiving government aid.

Clearly, prosperity is right around the corner.

Detroit's Welfare

The Times-Herald of Port Huron, MI is worried about the environment:

President Barack Obama carries the hopes of many Americans -- many who rightly believe his administration has a responsibility to reduce air pollution and set a national course toward a healthier environment.

There should be no dispute about the importance of that goal.

Having ruled out any possibility of disputing this, we can all agree that as important as a healthier environment may be, it's not nearly as important as kowtowing to the dead-enders who control what's left of our auto industry:

Obama's decision opens the way for the Golden State to set its own standards -- and at least 14 other states that adopted California's. Despite the euphoria many environmentalists might feel, the prospect is another challenge to the nation's embattled auto industry.

"Embattled" is one way of putting it. "Shortsighted," "arrogant," "corrupt," and "stupid" are other words that spring to mind. Particularly given what comes next:

Stronger emissions and fuel-efficiency standards...cannot come at the risk of the nation's weakened auto industry.

For now, new federal regulations must be considered in accordance with Detroit's welfare.

So there's no disputing the importance of cleaner air, but Detroit gets the final say on when and if we can have it. Seems to me I've been hearing that refrain for several decades now. Perhaps its basic assumptions are as flawed as the business model that led to the recent "need" for a massive bailout (or "Detroit's welfare," if you prefer).

That bailout, by the way, is not a reward for mismanagement, by any means. Nor does it amount to throwing money down a well. In fact, it's a cruel, cruel burden that Detroit bears only with the greatest difficulty:

Chrysler LLC and General Motors are fighting for their lives. The automakers are struggling to meet a number of stringent restructuring demands in accordance with the billion [???] dollars in emergency loans the Bush administration approved in December.

In other words, the "hardship" of restructuring gives the auto industry the moral authority to veto clean-air regulations in 15 or more states.

Once you've accepted this, you can pat yourself on the back for your patriotism and your understanding of the Free Market.

Blessed Benefits

A 1944 pamphlet on propaganda, published by the US Armed Forces Institute, makes a couple of important points:

[I]f propaganda is not in harmony with the individual and his desire, it is likely to be met with cynical skepticism....

In addition...a man's own knowledge and information may cause him to hold to an opinion no matter how heavy the barrage of propaganda attempting to force him to change it.

Movement conservatism has, I submit, sidled away from these bracing truths in recent years, and this has led to a certain...tone-deafness in regard to life as she is lived in the cesspool of iniquity we call America.

As plenty of other bloggers have noted, the Right's current attempt to demonize contraception is roughly on a par with its horrific intervention in the case of Terri Schiavo (a subject on which I had my rather melancholy say here). Which is to say that it's going to cost them more than they'll gain.

If you, as a politician, measure the success of such tactics by the amount of chatter they generate on cable news, it's easy to miss the more crucial point that in the real world, real people are seeing you and yours -- once again -- as a pack of opportunistic busybodies and hypocrites whose commitment to "liberty" is belied by your unseemly appetite for panty-sniffing, your peacock strutting and screeching outside hospices and clinics, and your tireless freelance meddling.

Granted, Americans are seldom happier than when they're fretting over and resenting other people's enjoyment of sex. And yes, very few conservative politicians have gone broke denouncing things of which they're secret devotees; if a conservative politician speaks out against masturbation, you can be pretty confident that his house has a room devoted to it, the contents of which cost more than every healthcare facility in Haiti, and rival an oil refinery in their complexity and danger.

But sneering at contraception -- and, by extension, at the cost of bearing and raising children -- doesn't really come across as a moral stance to most people, I don't think. It's more akin to sneering at people for working at a car wash, or cooking their own food, or not having a chauffeur, or being a woman. There are plenty of stupid stances on which people will give you the benefit of the doubt, or even agree with you: people may be quite willing to believe that climate change is a socialist plot, or that Europe is three years away from sharia. These are subjects about which many Americans know little or nothing, so it's easy and fun to have strong, self-flattering opinions about them.

But when you get into areas where Americans have plenty of their own "knowledge and information," the congressional and media loudmouths who seemed Jeffersonian in regard to foreign affairs begin to look more like a cage full of monkeys who are baring their nasty little teeth and hurling clumps of dung at you.

And that's before you consider the specific economic stresses we're under, thanks to years of the glibertarian economics they championed. I know people who actually want kids, but are holding off because of the economy. I'd assume that there are lots of people like that, in houses great and small across this land, and that they deeply resent the implication that sex is strictly for people who can afford a child. Especially if they understand that our tax dollars pay for contraception for members of Congress, and for their healthcare, and their childcare, and the line of designer fucking machines they've installed in their fur-lined dungeons.

But here's how James Pethokoukis of US News and World Report views the matter:

This is wrong on so many levels, one of which is looking at children born to the "wrong people" as economic burdens rather gifts, the music makers, the dreamers of dreams. She sees them as a cost instead of blessed benefits. Wow.

Wow, indeed. So much for family planning, and the personal responsibility it entails. If it feels good, do it...and the Lord will provide! You can tell the butcher, the baker and the candlestick-maker that your baby is not a cost but a benefit, and instruct them to forward their bills to The Man Upstairs. And don't worry about what grinding poverty and stress do to your child's physical development or sense of self; as soon as your Blessed Benefit is old enough to understand Atlas Shrugged, he or she will forgive you everything.

There's a more basic fact to consider here, and it has something to do with the mixture of mawkish sentimentality and cold brutality that Pethokoukis has picked up from his political overlords: A lot of people really don't like Republicans, at this point, and many of them will approve of Obama's presidency to the precise extent that he grinds people like John Boehner into the dirt. When you're in this position, attacking programs that are infinitely more popular than you are is probably not a good idea.

So why do they do it? Amanda thinks it's sour grapes. I think it has more to do with a schoolyard conception of sex that most conservatives seem never to have outgrown: it's a snake pit of cooties and faggotry and excretory functions -- simultaneously nauseating and good for a laugh -- which makes it, above all, an excellent stick with which to beat other people over the head. My guess is that given the chance to make fun of Nancy Pelosi for talking about contraception, sober political calculation went out the window: they simply assumed that forming a ring around Pelosi and chanting "Nancy likes condoms!" in singsong would make her a laughingstock, and earn the respect -- or at least the fear -- of the other children.

(Photo from How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis, 1890.)

Entirely Manageable

Today I will abandon, for a time, the tone of calm objectivity that has previously characterized my labors in the blogosphere, and indulge myself in mere opinion: Bjorn Lomberg is a flaming asshole, and deserves a swift kick in the slats.

Consider his latest column, in which he proposes to help that genial hayseed Obama understand politics:

He will be swamped with suggestions as to what to do first -- perhaps none more impassioned than those who advocate dealing with man-made climate change. He will be told that it is the biggest threat facing humanity and that its solution is the mission of our generation.

What Obama needs to realize is that all of this is lies. And here's why:

The United Nations science consensus expects temperature increases of 3 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century, leading to (for example) sea-level increases of between one-half and two feet. Yet such a rise is entirely manageable and not dissimilar to the sea-level rise of about one foot we dealt with over the past 150 years.

Three points come to mind. First, a higher sea level is one of the problems that a 3-degree temperature increase would cause. There are others. This is also true of a 7-degree increase, obviously.

Second, the IPCC expects increases of 3 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit, but says that an increase of 11.5 degrees Fahrenheit is possible.

Third, it's true that a two-foot rise in sea level is "not dissimilar" to a rise of one foot, inasmuch as water is water and feet are feet. But it is dissimilar when you think about the actual amount of water involved (hint: it's roughly twice as much), and its effects.

This is a knotty point, so let's try a thought experiment. Bjorn Lomborg is up to his neck in a tank of reeking, frothy elephant piss. The last two buckets I poured into the tank raised the level by about a foot. That being the case, Science tells us that the four buckets I'm about to add are likely to raise it by about two feet.

The question is, will this rise be as "manageable" for Our Hero as the previous one? More important, can we rely on speculation and hearsay for an answer, or must we insist on having clear scientific evidence, in the form of Lomborg's sodden corpse?

For an economist, and a man who constantly sees fit to slap the wrists of climate scientists, Lomborg is amazingly casual about numbers. Elsewhere, he calls 0.3 degrees Fahrenheit "almost immeasurable." That's not the attitude I'd look for in a CFO or a scientist, personally.

Lomborg goes on to assert cheerfully that a hotter world means a reduction in cold-related deaths, even though he knows as well as anyone else that I've already addressed this argument here.

The rest of the article comprises the usual arguments against cutting CO2 emissions, in favor of reducing poverty, malnutrition, disease, and so forth. As always, the possible results of climate change never seem to complicate Lomborg's humanitarian schemes: neither drought nor flood nor the loss of ecosystem services will stay him from his appointed rounds. And to the extent that his point is valid, it's still not a valid argument against cutting emissions. Sensible people should support mitigation and adaptation, just as the experts have been saying for years.

Lomborg's unique brand of economic logic can best be appreciated by considering his views on investing in solar panels:

Investing in existing inefficient technology (like current-day solar panels) costs a lot for little benefit. Germany, the leading consumer of solar panels, will end up spending $156 billion by 2035, yet only delay global warming by one hour by the end of the century.

If Mr. Obama invested instead in low-carbon research and development, the dollars would go far (researchers are relatively cheap), and the result -- maybe by 2040 -- will be better solar panels that are cheaper than fossil fuels.

Putting aside the fact that there are other benefits to solar power than climate mitigation -- and that these benefits include reducing malnutrition, poverty, disease, and economic hardship in the very countries over which Lomborg routinely weeps -- he's assuming that Germany will invest until 2035 in current-day solar panels, and that investing in low-carbon technology will bring about improved solar panels by 2040. The argument seems incoherent. If we're going to assume that Germany will spend the (comparatively small) sum of $156 billion over the next 27 years, and that solar panels can improve in efficiency over that time, why would we assume that Germany's panels will remain at 2008 efficiency levels for the duration?

Weirder still, Lomborg wants Obama to "invest in creating new technologies, rather than simply subsidizing existing ones." And yet he uses solar panels as an example of inefficient "existing technologies"...the very same solar panels that he says could be cheaper than fossil fuels by 2040, if only we have the wisdom to invest in "new technologies."

Anyway, you'll be happy to know that bold ideas like this "could realistically and cost-effectively fix global warming in the medium term" (thereby condemning 1.8 million souls to an icy death per annum, according to one of Lomborg's favorite statistics).

In other news, the Maldives intends to use tourist money to buy a new homeland. Opportunity never stops knocking!

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, 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 decades 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.)