An Inconvenient Falsehood
The Law of Unintended Consequences reserves a special degree of scorn for the stupid and well-meaning. It seems that too often, the two go hand in hand, as if those who wear their altruism on their sleeve, feel no complementary need to arm it with knowledge. How often is this not the failure of the political left? To mean well absolves the activist from the responsibility of understanding the consequences of his good intentions.
An illustration of this phenomenon resulted from my March 29 post (Our New Icon, the Hermit Kingdom). The piece was linked to the blog of an avowed leftist, who paraded it and others, as exhibits against the “deniers”. I inferred in the post, that the greatest price to be paid for the folly of standing in the dark for an hour, was the lost opportunity value of all that would not occur. To this, a particularly air-headed example of what populates the environmental cult, replied derisively that nothing happens on Saturday night, anyway, except theatres and bars. To this person all the world’s progress through research and scientific endeavour, comes to a halt, along with her brain, on bar night.
This is entirely representative of the sort of mental vacuum that gets caught in the global warming doomsday net – people whose group hugging is a response to fear and the continuing ululation about the harm to our children, and is accompanied by insufficient knowledge to correctly spell environmentalism.
Even now, the Law of Unintended Consequences is rushing in to fill the intellectual void created by pressure from the cult. I began to read warnings several years ago, of potential consequences of pursuing the bio-fuel alternative. They warned that it was not energy efficient and thereby solved nothing, and that it would drive up the prices of food. Furthermore, it was being pursued for purely political purposes; as a sop to the bleatings of the Kyoto crowd, and as a sop to farmers who needed the new market and higher prices.
The Unintended Consequences of this “show” solution are now impacting billions of poor people throughout the world, in skyrocketing grain prices. This is only the beginning. BC and Quebec have recently established a toe in the door of carbon tax lunacy, citing good intentions for raising the price of fuels. If the near 100% increase in the demand-driven price of fuels, in the past couple of years, has not accomplished the sort of energy restraint, carbon taxes claim to foster, who are these people trying to kid? The answer is obvious – the vacuous, earth-saving taxpayer who will willingly walk to the edge of the cliff.
The bio-fuel debacle is only the first warning that saving the earth is not a job for the intellectually uninvolved. We had best start discriminating between inconvenient truths and convenient falsehoods before we start amputating parts of a patient that is not ill.
April 10th, 2008 at 3:20 pm
Yes I can see it now.
Please give generously to the poor starving *fill in the blanks*. We have a moral obligation to help. After all it is the policies of the west that have caused this problem. Only another large wealth transfer from the rich to the poor will solve it.