Hopeful Environmentalism

Bjorne Lomborg, the co-founder of Greenpeace and ``skeptical environmentalist`` who came to believe that the doomsday predictions of the Greens were seriously off base, and who was reviled for it, is interviewed by Tech Central Station.

He points out that ignorance on the issue is growing, and scientists are the true GW skeptics:

This has actually led to one of the lead modellers in the UK to come out and say it's bizarre that before we had the debate between the climate change skeptics and the scientists, and that now we have the debate between the scientists, who are now becoming the skeptics, and those who are saying it's all going to end in chaos, when it is going to do nothing of the sort - and this is not what the UN panel is telling us.

He also observes that Climate Change isn`t necessarily a bad thing:

One of the top climate change economists has modelled - and several papers that came out a couple of weeks ago essentially point out - that climate change will probably mean fewer deaths, not more deaths. It is estimated that climate change by about 2050 will mean about 800,000 fewer deaths.

In a world of competing problems, GW is one of the more minor, and our huge expenditure of effort to ``solve`` this particular non-problem is detracting from our efforts to address real ones:

So if we stand back, as Al Gore asks us to do, and look at it from the coming generation's point of view, they are going to ask 'what were they thinking?' They tried to do a tiny little bit about climate change at a fairly high cost, but have done very little good, whereas there are many other problems that they could have tackled that would have left a much better world behind.

A nuclear war, for instance, would be far more devastating to the Earth`s people and the environment than a 1* rise in world temperatures in 100 years, yet the very people who are so gung-ho on Climate Change refuse to address the serious and real issue of weapons proliferation, terrorism, and Jihadist states-such as Iran. The hypocrisy is galling.

That`s because they believe that Western Civilization is the root of all evil, and they pine for a world free of the curse of industrialism. Of course, they would never willingly surrender their blackberries, their home computers, their playstation 3`s, their sports cars, their satellite dish, etc. They either do not understand or willfully ignore the fact that these are all products of a high-energy, high tech industrialism which must be surrendered to build this agrarian paradise they long for. Civilization developed for a reason; life in the neolithic was hardly entertaining. It`s cold in the winter, hot in the summer, you die by age 30, if you get sick you have nothing to comfort you, no medicines. Travel is a bitter, arduous task, but you have to do it if you want to eat. Agriculture is an even more arduous task without tractors, plows, and all the modern farm equipment. If our would-be Adams and Eves (or Adams and Steves in some cases) would bother to consider what it means to dismantle the industrial base which bestows our current easy life, perhaps they would reconsider?

Doubtful; they want this for the ignoranti, the poor and working class schlubs. They, of course, as the cream of the intellectual crop, would still have all of these nice things, and would be able to live a high-energy, technologically sophisticated lifestyle. The minions below them would have to labor to produce these things, but fair is fair and they are the apex of Darwinian Evolution, and so deserve it.

That`s why environmentalists and Al Gore feel free to fly about the world, or drive huge, gas-guzzling SUV`s to the rainforest; restrictions don`t apply to them because they are our betters.

Our betters would truly serve the interests of the common man, not serve their own particular visions and prejudices. Bjorne Lomborg understands that!