By Alan Caruba
I confess
I have always been wary of intellectuals. They love arcane theories that often
have little to do with real life and this is particularly true of
eco-intellectuals who have embraced a panoply of lies and claims about the
“environment”, “fossil fuels”, “sustainability”, and other notions that permit
them to bloviate without once addressing reality.
This has
been a week of eco-propaganda on a global scale. On Sunday there were “Climate
Marches.” On Tuesday there will be a UN “Climate Summit”, and there will likely be an avalanche of
nonsense in the media intended to make us believe we have control, influence,
or impact on the climate when it is obvious to the rest of us that we—the human
race—have none.
In
the past nearly two decades we have all been experiencing not a warning, but a
cooling of planet Earth. It has nothing to do with us and
everything to do with the Sun that has been in a low cycle of radiation—less heat!
A friend
alerted me to an article in the August 22nd edition of the New Republic, a famously liberal
magazine. “Global Warming Is Just One of Many Environmental Threats That Demand Our Attention” is the title of Amartya Sen’s article. He is a Nobel laureate in
economics, a winner of the National Humanities Medal, an author, and teaches at
Harvard University.
There were
two immediate red flags that caught my attention. First was that he is an
economist and the second was that he was writing about “global warming” as of
it was happening.
In early
September I had written about another economist who had an opinion published in
The Wall Street Journal. It was
ludicrous in terms of his complete lack of even the most basic science he was
either addressing or ignoring as he too warned of horrid environmental portents
to come. Economists should stick to
economics.
If you
suffer from insomnia or have a fondness for reading sentences filled with words
rarely used in common communication, you will find that Sen’s article will
either put you to sleep or, more likely, give you a migraine headache. The
article is an insufferable platform for him to demonstrate his Nobel certified
intellectual brilliance, while possessing very little understanding of science
or what we ordinary people call common sense.
“Our
global environment has many problems. If the high volume of carbon emission is
one, the low level of intellectual engagement with some of the major
environmental challenges is surely another.” That’s how Sen began his article
and, in the very first sentence, he reveals his ignorance by referring to
“carbon emissions” instead of “carbon dioxide” (CO2) emissions.
The latter
is a so-called “greenhouse” gas that the Greens keep telling us is trapping
huge amounts of heat in the Earth’s atmosphere that will surely kill us all.
CO2 is about 0.04% of the entire atmosphere, the least of the gases of which it
is composed. It doesn’t trap heat, but it does provide the “food” that all
vegetation requires to grow. We carbon-based humans exhale CO2 after we breathe
in oxygen. It is part of the natural
cycle of life between animals and the vegetation that releases oxygen; a
perfect balance of nature.
Suffice to
say that Sen’s very lengthy article is typical of the eco-intellectual disdain
for virtually any form of energy to serve humanity except for the two least
reliable, wind and solar energy. There’s a reason why mankind turned to coal,
oil and natural gas. It was vastly abundant and released large amounts of
energy for transportation and other benefits that include the production of
electricity.
There was
a time not that long ago when people used whale oil to light their homes. And
wood was used to heat them. Walt Whitman, a famed poet who lived in Lincoln’s
time, never turned on an electrical switch in his life. It didn’t exist 150
years ago. There were no autos, no telephones, et cetera. If you define a
generation as 25 years, that’s only six generations ago. And Sen wants us to
abandon “fossil fuels” because he fears “the dangers of global pollution from
fossil fuels…”
He’s no
fan of nuclear power either. (I guess we should all go back to whale oil, only
we won’t because we love the whales.) “There are at least five different kinds
of externalities that add significantly to the social costs of nuclear power”
writes Sen, but who else refers to “externalities” of nuclear power? Okay, why
not just say there have been two bad accidents, Chernobyl and Fukushima, and
leave it at that. That still leaves a lot of safely performing nuclear plants
here and worldwide.
We do not
live in a world without risk or trade-offs. For lack of enough pipelines, a lot
of oil is being transported by rail and there have been accidents. Around the
world there are coal mining accidents. Even solar farms literally sizzle birds
to death that fly over them and wind turbines chop them into little pieces.
Mother
Nature does not care what happens to us when she conjures up a volcanic
eruption, a flood, a wildfire, a hurricane or blizzard.
Humans
have learned to either flee these things or wait them out in the safety of
their homes. That’s what modern life is all about and it is a hundred times
better than in the past when people were lucky to live to the age of sixty.
Many died much younger from plagues of disease and we are watching that occur
with Ebola in Africa. Even simple injuries caused death a scant time ago.
“There are
empirical gaps in our knowledge as well as analytical difficulties in dealing
with the evaluation of uncertainty.” Huh? What? This is intellectual
gobbledygook, a substitute for saying that much of the time we don’t know what
the future holds.
What we do
know is that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old and that we humans have
developed what we call civilization over the past 5,000 years, a blink of time
in eternity.
We should know by now to accept the Earth, the Sun and the galaxy
in which we live for what it is and stop bothering to embrace idiotic notions
that we have any control or that we are causing so much “pollution” the Earth
cannot exist much longer.
You know
what we do with the mess of stuff we produce and throw away? We burn it or we
bury it. We even recycle some of it.
This keeps archeologists busy as they
examine the garbage our not-too-distant ancestors left behind in their caves.
Thankfully, none of them were economists.
© Alan
Caruba, 2014
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