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Opening Arguments

Send back your handbasket

Looking for a good cause you can be enthusiastic about? Hop on board:

Environmentalists Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus famously proclaimed The Death of Environmentalism in 2004. Now they're back with an ambitious new collection of essays titled Love Your Monsters: Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene. Their goal is to dismantle the neo-Malthusian environmentalism of sacrifice and collapse and replace it with a new environmentalism that celebrates human creativity and technological abundance. Hooray!

In their introductory essay, Shellenberger and Nordhaus make the case that technological progress and economic growth is the road to salvation, not the highway to ruin. They acknowledge that global warming may bring worsening disasters and disruptions in rainfall, snowmelts, and agriculture. However, they add, there is little evidence it will end civilization. “Even the most catastrophic United Nations scenarios predict rising economic growth. While wealthy environmentalists claim to be especially worried about the impact of global warming on the poor, it is rapid, not retarded, development that is most likely to protect the poor against natural disasters and agricultural losses.” 

George Will has an interesting column on abundance and progressivism that relates:

In 2011, for the first time in 62 years, America was a net exporter of petroleum products. For the foreseeable future, a specter is haunting progressivism, the specter of abundance. Because progressivism exists to justify a few people bossing around most people, and because progressives believe that only government's energy should flow unimpeded, they crave energy scarcities as an excuse for rationing — by them — that produces ever-more-minute government supervision of Americans' behavior.

[. . .]

An all-purpose rationale for rationing in its many permutations has been the progressives' preferred apocalypse, the fear of climate change. But environmentalism as the thin end of an enormous wedge of regulation and redistribution is a spent force. How many Americans noticed that the latest United Nations climate change confabulation occurred in December in Durban, South Africa?

Comments

Tim Zank
Mon, 01/09/2012 - 10:50am

RUT-ROW!!

Better go start my Suburban and let it run all day to help fight the coming Ice Age!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16439807

Harl Delos
Mon, 01/09/2012 - 1:02pm

Swing: "Well Harl, the AAAS opinion doesn

Christopher Swing
Mon, 01/09/2012 - 1:42pm

Harl, you're making an appeal to authority logical fallacy with your AAAS reference, and your trying to use your exclusive definition of scientist. I'm sure the world will continue quite merrily on in spite of your proclamations and personal insults.

(Oh, hey, Leo, you want to try actually moderating out the personal attacks re: the rules you finally set? Don't be surprised if no one respects the rules you fail to enforce.)

Tim, you're just embarrassing yourself. But at least you're not in Fort Wayne, so we don't have to claim you.

Harl Delos
Mon, 01/09/2012 - 11:43pm

The fallacy is that the world's largest general scientific society doesn't know what science is?

The difference between the almost right word & the right word is really a large matter--it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.
- Mark Twain 10/15/1888

By the way, as long as you're lecturing me that I need to become illiterate, here is a page you need to study.

Christopher Swing
Tue, 01/10/2012 - 1:13pm

Harpin' on a typo, the last bastion of the defeated. Good job, Harl.

And an appeal to authority is still a logical fallacy, it doesn't matter how big the authority is.

Tim Zank
Tue, 01/10/2012 - 7:26pm

I am little surprised Harl called ya out on that, it's pretty much always been LittleJohn's job around here.

Harl Delos
Wed, 01/11/2012 - 2:16am

Tim, as you point out, I don't normally chide people for being illiterate. Mr Larsen's posts tend to be full of piddling little errors, but it's obvious that he's put a lot of research and thought into what he's saying. Even when he's wrong, he often convinces me to change my thinking on the subject. He's well worth reading.

Your posts tend to be "thinner" by comparison, Tim, but you seem to be sincere, and you have a sense of humor.

But in this case I was frustrated by a disingenious and mendacious troll, one who could teach Snowball of Animal Farm a few tricks.

For what it's worth, an appeal to authority is not a fallacy if the authority is, in fact, authoritative on the matter in question. As Packard used to advertise, "Ask the man who owns one." On quantum black holes, Stephen Hawking is an appropriate authority. On Fort Wayne real estate, you may be an appropriate authority. And the troll would be an authority on, uh, er, uh, does he actually DO anything?

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