Isn’t cleaner better II
Last time I looked at some of the problems with Bill O’Reilly’s fallback argument that fighting Global warming would at least make the world cleaner, and isn’t cleaning up the world a good thing? In addition to the problems that CO2 is not really a dirty pollutant that needs to be cleaned up, and all the ambiguities in the science concerning whether the earth has warmed, will it continue to warm, how much humans are affecting any warming, and whether there is anything we could realistically do about it, it is not at all clear whether global warming is even a bad thing.
For example, one of the bad effects cited by Al Gore is the number of people who will die as the result of increasing temperatures. But what Gore ignores is that far more people die each year as a result of cold, than heat. Thus, any warming of the earth should result in a net saving of life. In addition, most of the land mass of the earth is concentrated in the northern latitudes. This means that while warming might result in the loss of some costal lands due to increased sea levels, and some farm lands due to drought, we will gain far more land that is currently uninhabitable due to cold. Nor is this unprecedented in human history, for example, during the time of Rome, England was warm enough to be a producer of wine, while today it is too cold. So while some decry the coming of Global warming, it is just as likely, if not more so, that we should be celebrating the ending of Global cooling, assuming of course that it is really ending.
Still, there is even a more troubling problem with O’Reilly’s argument. His isn’t-cleaner-good argument ignores the costs other than his caveat of not destroying the economy. A common problem that affects a lot of arguments on all sides of many debates is Utopianism. Utopianism is presenting your side in a perfect world context of only positives while ignoring or downplaying the costs and downside. If this was a perfect world and there were no cost or downsides, then clearly cleaner would be better. Sadly such perfection is still a ways off, and here in the real world to make things cleaner, will not only have some benefits, it will also have costs and downsides. There are pros and cons to everything. So while, in a perfect world, cleaner is better, in this world it all depends on whether the benefits of being cleaner, outweigh the costs to be cleaner, and we could cause an awful lot of suffering, without destroying the economy.
When we look at the proposals made to fight Global warming, even the drastic proposals such as the Kyoto treaty, would have at best minimal effect on Global warming. Yet the cost would devastate our economy, and lower living standards worldwide. More minimal proposals such as increasing the CAFE Standards to force more fuel efficient cars would have almost no effect at all on Global warming, though it would reduce our dependence on foreign oil, at a cost of increased deaths and injury from car accidents, for more fuel efficient cars mean smaller and lighter cars, and smaller lighter cars are more dangerous cars. Yes in a perfect would, you could have smaller, lighter and safer cars, but again this is not a perfect world.
A clear example of the dangers of being “cleaner” is DDT. In the 1960s the big environmental scare was DDT and unfortunately the environmentalist got their way and DDT was banned. Like so many environmental claims, those that resulted in the ban on DDT, have also turned out to be false. DDT is safe, except of course to the insects it kills. But the costs of the ban are not speculation, and in fact were known before the ban and used as arguments against it. But the environmentalist ignored the costs, for them the danger was too great. As a result diseases like malaria, which in many areas had been wiped out, have since returned, and now kill between 1-2 million people a year. In the nearly 40 years since the ban that is over 40 million people who died as a result of environments scares, and this is for malaria alone. And yet even today despite the fact that millions have died and continue to die, many environmentalists are still more worried about theoretical risks lifting the ban on DDT might have, despite all the evidence against it, rather than the actual deaths the ban is currently causing.
The changes demanded by the global warming activists are far more sweeping and invasive than just a ban on a pesticide. The changes would devastate the world economy, entail a huge loss of freedom in order to enforce, remove any hope for those in poverty of ever getting out, throw many more into poverty, and lower standards of living worldwide. It should not be forgotten that one of the effects of a lower standard of living and increased poverty is not just increased suffering, but also more deaths.
So the real question is not isn’t cleaner better, but rather is how many people must looses their jobs, how many people must be thrown or locked into poverty, how many people must die, for how much cleanness and all to fix something that we may not have any control over, may not even be happening, and even if it is, it may not even be a bad thing? Environmentalist like Gore may have good intentions but that does not change the fact that people with good intentions can still do a lot of harm. Just ask the relatives of all those who have died from Malaria or West Nile virus.
