Congressional Democrats, exhausted by the health-care fight and nervous about the coming elections, have all but abandoned efforts to federalize the nation’s energy sector via cap-and-trade this year. To which the rest of America can thankfully exclaim – whew!
American families hurt by the recession would have seen their energy bills skyrocket as a result of cap-and-trade. Just look at the effects of such legislation in Britain: According to the U.K’s Taxpayer Alliance, British families are paying an average of $1,300 per year in extra taxes due to carbon-targeting regulations.
Environmentalists and their left-wing sympathizers are disappointed by this temporary setback, and little wonder – they have been astonishingly effective in lobbying for curtailments of liberty and economic opportunity (in the name of saving the planet, of course), and have been spoiled by their own past successes.
Defenders of free markets have pushed back largely on points; challenging the data, methods, and motives of the other side. This can be a successful mode of counter attack – the recent exposure of emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, which showed professional global-warming alarmists colluding to manipulate data, has proven a spectacular tactical success for opponents of left-wing environmentalism, and doubtless helped derail the cap-and-trade legislative train.
But these types of successes are all-too-often mere rearguard actions, amounting to a tit-for-tat struggle for public opinion. Too infrequently are the underlying philosophical and logical assumptions of modern environmentalism challenged.
For these premises exhibit inherent contradictions, the explication of which could profoundly undermine the environmental movement and amount to a strategic rather than a tactical victory for the forces of freedom and common sense.
For example, the base equation of modern environmentalism seems to be: Nature good – Man bad. By this logic, a tree is more beautiful than a skyscraper; a beaver dam a wonder of nature, a man-made dam an unsightly blight, etc.
This is a false and dangerous dichotomy: Man is not separate from nature, he is a part of it. He was forged in the same evolutionary furnace as all Earth’s creatures; he is a product of the same bio-chemical forces, subject to the same physical laws and limitations.
To accept the false premise of Man contra nature is to surrender reason and context – and thus to embark on political and economic folly. Take, for example, the environmentalists’ obsession with CO2.
This naturally occurring compound, an amalgam of carbon and oxygen, is both necessary to, and a byproduct of, biological processes such as respiration and photosynthesis. It is also a bi-product of man’s industrial activity, and it is in this guise that environmentalists classify CO2 as the engine of Earth’s destruction in the form of “global warming.”
Now, greenies will say that it is the amount of CO2 that man spews into the atmosphere that makes it dangerous. This is utter nonsense: Volcanoes have been pouring vast quantities of CO2 and other fluorocarbons into the atmosphere for billions of years. The Industrial Revolution, meanwhile, has resulted in significant atmospheric CO2 for less than a century.
And yet environmentalists would have us believe that the Earth cannot handle the recent, paltry carbon production of homo sapiens. Or that humanity, having adapted countless times as our planet warmed and cooled over the millennia, would somehow be unable to cope with a slightly warmer average temperature.
Madness, that way lies. The madness of wrecking our economy in pursuit of some fictitious, perfect global temperature.
The BP oil spill provides another illustrative case. Oil and natural gas regularly seep into the ocean in large quantities through natural fissures in the ocean floor. According to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, for example, “there is an oil spill everyday at Coal Oil Point (COP), the natural seeps off Santa Barbara, California, where 20-25 tons of oil have leaked from the seafloor each day for the last several hundred thousand years.”
Yet when BP or Exxon accidentally spill far, far less oil, it is treated by environmentalists as a catastrophe of Biblical proportions.
It isn’t any such thing, of course. Oil and water are both of the Earth, and the former is being folded into the latter’s bosom, as has been transpiring since time immemorial – clean up crews in the Gulf can’t even find the oil they were sent to clean up.
Man has striven to alter his surroundings to his advantage, just as every other species. The fact that man has been singularly successful in this endeavor does not make it any less natural, or necessary.
A skyscraper is every bit as beautiful as a tree – both are products of the same wondrous universe which we are blessed to be a part of – and help shape.
Matt Patterson is editor of Green Watch, a new publication of the Capital Research Center in Washington, D.C. Green Watch will debut next month. [email protected].
