Go read this first.
http://redneckperil.blogspot.com/2007/03/cui-bono.html
Kenny Said: At any rate, the serious point underlying my silliness here is that rich Westerners who are out to save the environment have a nasty habit of grossly underestimating the degree to which their environmentalism is a luxury of the wealthy. They have a nasty habit of underestimating the very real human cost that comes from environmentalism-motivated restrictions on freedom and capitalism, the two great engines of the prosperity of the Anglosphere in general and America in particular – which prosperity is, ironically, the precondition for all the spare time that Western environmentalists have on their hands in which to promote environmentalism.
Kenny Said: There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the foolish intellectual habits that are manipulated by the global warming propagandists, have a far more deadly potential than does global warming.
Kenny Said: We don’t have a nice long list of actual deaths and human misery directly attributable to global worming.
My first response to this is, ummm, yes we do. The severity of hurricane Katrina has been attributed to global warming.
My second response to this, is that pollution and environmental damage is not a rich westerners cause. I will cite two examples. I am sure you are aware of these examples. This is from our beloved Kazakhstan. The first is not a result of fossil fuels, but of the worst kind of environmental ignorance. I am sure you will use this as an example of how governments are bad, and I will agree. I will use this as an example of how not protecting the environment severely damages people – and poor people at that.
The Aral sea is a true environmental disaster. No it was not caused by global warming, It was caused by diverting water from the rivers that feed it in order to grow cotten in areas that should not grow cotten. There is a dead zone left after the Aral sea evaporated. It is not merely a lake that dried up, it is a land that cannot be used because of the pollutants that have precipitated out on the dry land that is left. Pesticide, herbicides, and many other toxic chemicals have left kids that lived around there with significantly higher rates of rare liver cancers. This doesn't even come close to describing the absolute devastation in that area.
The Caspian sea is one of the most polluted bodies of water in the world. For more information see here: http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/caspenv.html (I am sure you will discount this because it is a government site though) The pollution is a direct result of the industry and oil extraction that is centered there.
Kenny Said: In defense of this position they trot out the argument that our dependence on foreign oil causes petrodollars to flow to various nasty people like the oily (in multiple senses) Saudis or murderous loonies like Chavez, and argue that we need to make the price of oil fall.
Kenny Said: At which point I observe that this is a first-rate reason to open up the continental shelves and Anwar to oil production...and do you know, it’s just astonishing to see how instantaneously my conversational compatriots cease to be concerned with the security risk posed by American dependence on foreign oil production.
This is an intellectually dishonest argument and you know it. In fact, most global warming proponents are very clear and very consistent as to their attitudes towards oil. I would like to see the price of oil and gas driven up so high that it forces people to stop driving cars and forces people to use public transportation more. There are many reasons to stop using oil. It is not intellectually dishonest to through as many of those arguments out to try and convince people to reduce using oil, and find alternative energy.
Only secondarily would I even mention that oil funds terrorist countries. First and foremost, oil is bad for the environment. The pollution attributed to oil including the destruction caused by extracting it, the extremely toxic waste created in refining it, the toxic byproducts of burning it. Huston Texas is one of the most polluted cities in the country – due to oil refining. Oh, wait, oil is good isn’t it?
Kenny Said: Something tells me most global warming fanatics would, even in the face of the it’s-okay-because-there-are-other-good-reasons defense…
Hmmm, Given that there are so many issues surrounding global warming. The more important issue is protecting the environment. Without clean air, without clean water, humans die. Global warming is one a smaller issue surrounding protecting the environment. Most people I talk to about global warming agree that the bigger protecting the environment is what drives them to push for using less oil, using less electricity, and reducing pollution and increasing alternative energy.
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I don't think you caught my point about the terrorism thing. Let me try again.
If you drive up the price of oil, this helps make Americans behave the way environmentalists want them to. But the higher the price of oil, the more billions flow into the pockets of the Islamofascists. On the other hand, the more the price of oil falls, the harder it is for thugs like the Iranians and the Wahabbites and Hugo Chavez to spread their death and destruction; but the less likely Americans are to start carpooling.
Would you rather make American soccer moms stop buying Suburbans, or would you rather reduce the power of the Iranians and Saudis to foment terrorism and death and chaos and religious oppression?
I know, I know, you want both. In an ideal world we'd get both. But the question here is priorities. You can't make the price of oil go both up and down simultaneously. When it comes to the price of oil and the decision on how much domestic drilling to allow, either you advance the causes both of terrorism and of environmentalism by restricting drilling and pushing gasoline prices up, or else you harm the causes both of terrorism and environmentalism by allowing drilling pushing gasoline prices down. I think terrorism is a vastly greater priority than is environmentalism and so I would without hesitation choose the latter. If you would choose the former, then it is very hard to see how this choice can help but mean that environmentalism is more important to you than is terrorism.
However, I do want to apologize for something. I was getting two different conversations confused. Right in the middle of my thinking out loud about global warming, somebody fired at me yet again the argument that if we would just stop using so much gasoline, the terrorists wouldn't have so much money. But I don't, looking back, think that that person was you; so I directed that particular response at the wrong person, which must have made you wonder why in the world I was dragging Anwar into the discussion. I do sincerly apologize.
[chuckling] "The severity of hurricane Katrina has been attributed to global warming." Well, yes, I realize that. And the interception and forestallment of a terrorist plot against the Library Tower in L.A. "has been attributed" to our use of waterboarding; but I think you discount that attribution as politically motivated and invalid. The fact that young black men in America are incarcerated at wildly higher rates than are young white men "has been attributed" to racism in our legal system; but then it also "has been attributed" to the hypothesis that young black men go to prison at higher rates because young black men commit crimes at higher rates.
My whole point is that the global warming debate is not carried on like a scientific debate; it is waged like a political campaign. Of course people who are desperate to convince everybody else that global warming is the next Armageddon, "attributed" the suffering from Katrina to global warming, right alongside the Democrats who were attributing the same suffering to Dubya / white racism, even as Republicans attributed the very same suffering to Governor Blanco / the black Democrat political machine that has run New Orleans for the last few decades with apparently disastrous results for the black residents of the city. Seizing upon disasters and claiming that they prove that other people should adopt one's own political agendas and that one's political enemies are taking us all to hell in a handbasket, is what politicians do. And the global warming debate is politics, not science.
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