Environment

… is Enemy Action

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Another drilling rig has exploded in the Gulf and just days after the House (maybe) overturned the drilling moratorium.

Hmmmm,

We went 31 years without a major oil spill in the Gulf prior to Deepwater Horizon. Now we have a second explosion so soon. Meanwhile, some Greenpeace “direct action” types are attacking an oil rig off Greenland.

Hmmmm,

There’s no evidence of any human agency in either explosion. Still, when you look at the utter frothing hysteria directed against drilling and the oil industry in general, it’s pretty easy to imagine a group deciding that a little violence now will save a lot of lives later. After all, don’t environmental activists always tell us that they’re fighting for the survival of the entire earth and humanity itself? With such high stakes, it would be easy for someone to talk themselves into a “you’ve got to break a few eggs to make an omelet” rationalization.

Certainly, if the situation was reversed, the left would have no trouble using the same level of proof as evidence of nefarious plots by the right wing. After all, they think the right engineered a war that killed hundreds of thousands just to make a few bucks. Blaming the right for something like blowing up an oil rig would be chump change compared to that.

At present, the FBI considers ecoterrorists the most active domestic terrorist groups. It wouldn’t be much of a step from burning down buildings to blowing up oil rigs. With the resources and training that Greenpeace and other environmental groups have demonstrated they possess, they certainly have the physical ability to carry out such an attack.

Hmmmm,

We will have to wait and see I suppose. Even if sabotage was the cause it might be hard to prove with all the evidence thousands of meters below the sea. Still, you know the old axiom: Once is a fluke, twice is coincidence, three times…

[Update (2010-9-3 7:58am): From reading the comments, I think this post came out sounding more serious than I intended. I intended a more of a tongue-in-cheek tone to serve as a reminder of how easy it would be to see human agency in such events especially given the hysterical levels of leftwing rhetoric against the oil companies. We could eventually see the environmentalist version of the Weathermen if the hysteria continues.]

Save the Frogs! Burn Coal!

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OMG! All the little froggies are dying world wide! It’s all caused by evil, greedy humans destroying habitat, the ozone layer and causing climate change! Oh, wait, they’re dying because of fungus plague spread by migrating waterfowl? Never mind, stop shooting the 3rd world charcoal makers. Turns out they’re not to blame…this time… we’ll get them on something else next month.

Still we need to do something for the little froggies! After all, how do we know that some obscure amphibian species in an isolated valley somewhere isn’t the linchpin species for the entire planetary ecosystem? Frankly, the biosphere is so incredibly fragile that it’s amazing it’s survived 3.5 billion years at all. Obviously, we need to completely reengineer the planetary economy based on the pronouncements of the heartthrob of the poli-sci department or everything, everywhere will die!

Hmmm, what kind of environmental conditions do amphibians like? Oh, yeah, they like it warmer and wetter. How could we make things warmer and wetter everywhere? Wait, don’t most of the absolutely-proven-without-a-doubt-just-because-climatologists-are-so-confident-they-don’t-actually-have-to-test-computer-models-against-real-world-observations computer models predict that increasing CO2 concentrations will lead to significantly warmer and wetter conditions virtually everywhere?

That’s it! To save the froggies all we have to do is increase our CO2 output. With hard work and massive government regulation and subsidies we could turn the whole planet into a froggy-friendly swamp within a few decades.

Write your elected representative and demand we spend hundreds of billions every year burning every carbon containing compound on the planet. If you don’t, it means you’re an ignorant racist who hates absolutely every living thing everywhere!

Not Good

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This report suggests that so many skimmer vessels are being deployed to fight the BP oil spill that there are not enough in reserve to meet the required contingency levels for any future oil spills–and, hence, that the Obama administration may able to legally justify its desired drilling moratorium.

Are the skimmer deployment levels really that high? I’ve seen other reports asserting that there are large numbers of skimmers sitting around doing nothing because of bureaucratic confusion and waffling. I wonder if—anywhere in the country, in any government or private organization—there is a list of all skimming vessels and their current status.

Regardless of the truth about the severity of the skimming-vessel shortage, you can bet that the Obama administration and the “progressives” will use this as ammunition to shut down offshore oil drilling, as part of their generalized hostility toward all practical energy sources and their desire to punish the American people for what they see as our excessive prosperity and energy use.

Mini-Book Review — Ridley — The Rational Optimist

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Ridley, Matt, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, Harper Collins, New York, 2010. 438 pp.

Matt Ridley is a well-known British science writer who, in recent years, has specialized in writing books for the general public on new research in biology … evolutionary biology, genomics, plus a biography of Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA.

For well over a decade I’ve enjoyed his books and been very impressed with the quality of his writing, so “on spec” I put a library hold on Ridley’s latest without paying much attention to what it was about. That decision turned out to be a wonderful piece of serendipity. I’ve been reading about European “trading republics” (ancient and modern) for a few years, and trying to assemble an amateur theory about how economic dynamism and technological innovation follow, or are reinforced by, republican values. Whether Athens, Rome, Venice, Genoa, Antwerp, Amsterdam, London, Liverpool, Glasgow, Boston, or New York and Montreal, trade under republican regimes creates massive relative wealth and huge leaps in human knowledge and standards of living.

Now Matt Ridley looks at the innate human capacity for “exchange” … and how that unique capacity affected the course of prehistory, the introduction of agriculture and “civilization,” and more latterly, the shape of the industrial revolution and the modern world. Underlying the politics of republicanism, and individual freedom, we can see the human appetite for exchange creates persistent economic advantage. Trade flows from comparative advantage, in the words of David Ricardo, and comparative advantage relentlessly rewards more specialized use of the natural environment … from the labor of humans carrying sea shells inland for trade 80,000 years ago, to the labor of domesticated horse and sheep and dogs largely for human benefit, to the use of vast quantities of ancient vegetable matter (in the form of petrochemicals), to extend the efforts of humans out of all proportion. Our species is most prosperous when most specialized, when most dependent on the differentiated talents of thousands of others. We now can live lives like the Sun King, without a retinue of thousands.

In this book I have tried to build on both Adam Smith and Charles Darwin: to interpret human society as the product of a long history of what the philosopher Dan Dennett calls ‘bubble-up’ evolution through natural selection among cultural rather than genetic variations, and as an emergent order generated by an invisible hand of individual transactions, not the product of a top-down determinism. I have tried to show that, just as sex made biological evolution cumulative, so exchange made cultural evolution cumulative and intelligence collective, and that there is therefore an inexorable tide in the affairs of men and women discernible beneath the chaos of their actions. A flood tide, not an ebb tide. p. 350

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