One
of the climate change protestors in London got arrested for vandalising a
government building, and had the following to say about it in her blog post (I
saw this because my wife is friends with her):
"It seems the
message of the urgency and importance of real cuts to greenhouse gas emissions
is not getting through in conventional ways, and hence the need for a bit of
drama. We’ve marched, we’ve petitioned, we’ve written to MPs, we’ve written to
ministers, we’ve met our MPs and lobbied, we’ve campaigned and voted in the
election, we’ve moved investments and supported businesses who are calling for
progress… we’ve used all our democratic powers, and yet still those who are
meant to represent us are doing the opposite of what we are calling for"
Every sinew
of this blogger's being seems wedded to the conclusion that these politicians
she is trying to galvanise are too supine to even
bother addressing her obviously correct analysis of the climate change
situation. Now I've no doubt that most of our politicians are hardly paragons of
mental excellence, but I wonder if it ever occurred to her that, in actual
fact, her questions may be wrong to begin with, so she is not likely to arrive
at the right answers, let alone convince politicians to act on her every wish.
Or to put it another way, she may not have realised yet that, in actual fact,
the reason politicians are so inactive is because there isn't that much they
can do.
You see, I'm
with the climate change activists on pressing forth the notion that more needs
to be done to help countries that have been negatively impacted by climate
change - of course that's a good and noble cause. But it's their auxiliary
narrative that I think sends them wayward - calling governments to be the ones
to instil these game-changing alterations to our economic behaviour - that's
where I think they are putting the cart of wrong
answers before the horse of right questions. The right questions they should be
asking, and seemingly are not, are:
a) What
realistically can politicians do to change an economy that they have almost
zero ability to manage or predict (apart from what they are already doing
through green taxes)?
b) Are the
people supposedly in crisis because of climate change actually in crisis, primarily,
for other more important reasons?
c) Are the
drastic measures the climate change alarmists are looking to enforce subjected
to a proper cost-benefit analysis?
Asking the
right questions to begin with gives me a gut feeling that the answers to the
questions are:
a) In all
likelihood not much more than they are already doing
b) Almost
certainly yes
c) Almost
certainly no
Here's what I think needs
to be realised in relation to the three answers. If you do a proper
cost-benefit analysis of the situation to begin with you can more easily see why
the answers are as they are. Just like nature’s physical laws, the natural flow
of the economy tends towards the path of least effort (as I explain here
in this blog), so although there are exceptional cases (cases already
penalised with State-enforced Pigouvian taxes) there are already huge
incentives in market transactions to be as parsimonious as possible with energy
and resources (as I explain here
in this blog).
That's the reason
governments cannot do very much more (stress 'very much more') to 'tackle'
climate change than they already doing. As the blog attached to the first
hyperlink explains, the entire nexus of the global economy is a physical system
which is all the time tending towards the principle of maximum efficiency, or
it would be without all the government interference retarding it. Businesses
are already looking for the most efficient means of supplying customers using
as little energy as possible, because in a highly competitive market it is in
their interest to do so to remain profitable.
The goal to reduce energy
output can, and has, come in various ways: replacement of human energy for
machines, replacement of metal-based technology for higher intensity resources
or carbon-cased materials, replacement of paper for digital devices, and so
forth – and these are improvements in production that naturally improve
business’s cost-effectiveness.
The transition from the paper revolution to the
digital one required lots of burning of fossil fuels, equivalent to energy
being driven into the system from outside, but all the time that external
energy is helping the global economy tend towards a path to least resistance
very similar to how thermodynamics operates in the natural world. As the old
saying goes, you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs - and the
eggs we've cracked since the Industrial Revolution, while not without some
externalities, have done more to improve global standards of living than
anything else in human history (more in depth analyses of which you'll find in
these blog posts here,
here,
here,
here,
and here).
On top of how vastly over-exaggerated the
government's ability to 'tackle' climate change is, now the other issue needs addressing
- the one where climate change alarmists peddle the narrative that the world's
poorest people are being drastically hurt by what a thriving global economy is
doing to our planet. As I said, where the world's poorest people are in any
kind of crisis by climate change, we should be pulling out all the stops to
help them.
However, the reality is deeper. The world's poorest people's
main plights of life are not caused by climate change, they are caused by an inability
to participate in a thriving global economy (for all sorts of complex reasons).
What you have to realise is that most of the things negatively affecting the
world's poorest people now - labour hardship, inadequate
access to clean drinking water, low life expectancy, children having to be sent
to work, subjugation of women, lack of literacy and numeracy, and conflict over
hard to acquire resources - were affecting the vast majority
of people before the progression-explosion that began about 200 hundred years
ago, and has exponentiated ever since. Before the Industrial Revolution they
were the natural state of most humans, and had been ever since the evolution of
homo sapiens - they are not for the most part plights that have suddenly been
caused by climate change.
In fact, if you take the overall picture into
consideration, those human plights only began to be eradicated precisely when
we started to break a few environmental eggs of industry to create the progression
explosion that has brought about the diminution of most of those plights for over
six eighths of the world's people.
There is still a long way to go, sure - but I hope
that will at least offer a slightly broader perspective that factors in the
benefits as well for a more balanced view, and gives some exhibition as to why
the picture is much bigger than it simply being the case that politicians can
'tackle' climate change with some grand-slam panacea.
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