Environmentalist Insurance Policies by Paul Driessen

Environmentalist insurance policies

Intellectual ammo for holiday party responses to claims that you need meteorite insurance

Paul Driessen

Many liberals went into denial, outrage and riot mode after November 8. Now they’re having meltdown over President-Elect Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees with climate and environmental responsibilities:

Former Texas Governor Rick Perry at Energy, Oklahoma AG Scott Pruitt for EPA, Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions for Attorney General, ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson at State, Montana Congressman Ryan Zinke at Interior. As Department of Agriculture secretary and multiple assistant, deputy assistant and other senior level positions are filled, the meltdown will likely raise sea levels by several feet.

It’s even worse than “white supremacists” and “Russian hackers” rigging and stealing the election. Having these people at the helm will be an “existential threat to the planet,” say meltdowners.

A typical over-the-top reaction came from an aptly named spokesperson for radical pressure groups and five-alarm climate scientists that feed at the trough of taxpayer and tax-exempt foundation funding “This is the wealthiest, most corporate, most climate-denying cabinet in history,” snorted Kiernan Suckling, director of the anti-development Center for Biological Diversity.

After eight years of anti-fossil-fuel, anti-growth, anti-job, anti-blue-collar policies – and the Left’s fervent wish for eight more years under Hillary Clinton – any Trumpian shift is bound to look that way to them.

So we’re likely to get a bellyful of bombast from like-minded (or ill-informed) office and neighborhood partygoers, especially if they’re too much imbued with holiday spirits. At the risk of offending those who do not share an NRA perspective on gun control (stance, grip, sight alignment, trigger control), here’s a little intellectual ammunition that conservatives may find helpful during those “spirited” discussions.

The United States needs to reduce taxes and regulations that have hobbled energy development and job creation – threatening to put federal bureaucrats firmly in control of our states, communities, livelihoods and living standards. However, as I noted recently, these essential, long overdue changes will come with no reduction in air, water or overall environmental quality standards that ensure our health and welfare. They will address rogue agency actions that actually impair our living standards, health and wellbeing.

Indeed, nearly all these autocratic government actions are based on some variation of the infamous “precautionary principle.” This infinitely malleable pseudo-guideline says chemicals and other technologies should be restricted or banned if there is any possibility (or accusation by radical activists) that they could be harmful, even if no cause-effect link can be proven.

Even worse, the bogus principle looks only at often-inflated risks from using chemicals, energy systems or other technologies that activists or regulators dislike – never at the risks of not using them; never at risks that could be reduced or eliminated by using them. Sustainability “guidelines” are very similar.

Just as perversely, if the Powers that Wannabe like a technology, they ignore or actively suppress any harmful impacts. For instance, since wind turbines can supposedly replace fossil fuels, they ignore bird and bat deaths, human health damage from infrasound, and the fact that essential metals are mined and processed under horrendous conditions by men, women and children in African and Asian countries.

Those environmental, health, human rights, and child labor violations are far away (literally not in their backyards), and thus can be conveniently ignored.

So can the poverty, disease, malnutrition and early death perpetrated and perpetuated by extremist groups that campaign tirelessly to shut down industries in developed nation communities – and prevent the poorest nations on Earth from gaining access to modern technologies that improve and save lives.

Eco-extremists claim they can save lives by preventing higher temperatures, rising seas, and more storms, droughts and crop failures due to “dangerous manmade climate change” decades from now. So they block fossil fuel power plants that provide reliable, affordable energy for modern homes, hospitals, schools and factories that improve health and living standards – and end up killing millions right now, year after year.

Climate change has been real throughout history. Sometimes beneficial (moderately warm, with ample rainfall), sometimes destructive (decades-long droughts or cold spells, glacial epochs with mile-thick ice sheets crushing entire continents), it is driven by solar, cosmic ray, oceanic and other powerful natural forces that humans cannot control. Carbon dioxide may play a role, but only a minor one, and rising atmospheric CO2 levels make crops, grasslands and forests grow faster and better.

The “unprecedented” manmade climate cataclysms that Al Gore and Barack Obama promised are not happening. For example, we were supposed to get more frequent, powerful and destructive storms; instead, a record 11 years have passed without one category 3-5 hurricane making landfall in the USA. 

To attack fracking and natural gas use, bureaucrats claim methane is 86 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas – but won’t admit that it is 1/235th as prevalent in Earth’s atmosphere (0.00017%), and at least 1/600,000th as prevalent as water vapor (1-4%), the most important GHG.

Their “social cost of carbon” schemes assign ever-higher monetary impacts to every climate and weather problem they can possibly attribute to using carbon-based fuels – but totally ignore the enormous and undeniable benefits of utilizing oil, natural gas and coal that still provide 82% of US and global energy.

They’re convinced their anti-energy diktats will “save the planet,” by shutting down US power plants and factories, despite vastly greater emissions from China, India and a hundred other nations that are rapidly expanding their fossil fuel use, to lift billions more people out of abject poverty, disease and malnutrition.

The same anti-technology activists and bureaucrats also detest biotechnology and genetically modified crops that require less water and can battle insect predators with a tiny fraction of the insecticides required for conventional grains and vegetables. They equally despise another GM marvel, Golden Rice, which prevents Vitamin A Deficiency that blinds and kills hundreds of thousands of children every year.

Instead of applauding the reduced blindness, malnutrition, starvation and death these crops can bring, precautionary and sustainability extremists obsess about imaginary risks of eating them, allowing more millions to die unnecessarily, year after year. It’s not their kids, after all. Why should they be concerned?

The same callous, phony ethics prevail on the disease front. Eco-activists support bed nets – but not insecticide spraying to kill malaria-carrying mosquitoes, and certainly not DDT, the most powerful, longest-lasting mosquito repellant ever invented. Sprayed once every six months on the walls of mud or cinderblock houses, DDT keeps 80% of mosquitoes from entering, irritates those that do come in, so they don’t bite, and kills any that land. 

But radical ideologues focus on trivial, irrelevant side effects that “some researchers say could be linked” to DDT use – and let 600,000 parents and children die excruciating deaths every year from malaria.

Every one of these anti-technology, “precautionary” attitudes is the environmentalist equivalent of protecting American kids from powerful chemicals, fatigue, nausea, hair loss, and increased risk of illness and infection – by banning chemotherapy drugs, and just letting the little cancer patients die.

They are the equivalent of requiring you to carry a $10,000-a-year insurance policy that covers you only if you are killed by a meteorite – or by a raptor or tyrannosaur. At least meteorite risks are real, if extremely remote.

Raptors and T rexes exist only in our imaginations, special effects computers and movie theaters – much like the manmade climate chaos and other precautionary extremism that come from computer models and PR hype, and drive too many of our policies, laws and regulations.

Have fun at your holiday parties. This season promises to be even more animated than most.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org), and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death and other books on the environment.

A Response to an "Obligated to Give Back" Commenter

Back in my post of 28 March 2009, I wrote about how hard my daughter Katie had worked as a biotechnology major in the Honors Program at Rochester Institute of Technology. Today I received a comment which I posted. If I only did that, few will see my response, so I am going to give it here. The comment was this:

Obviously Katie has done alright by herself...but what has she done for those less fortunate.
Does she tutor, mentor act as a big sister?
As a father you measure your daughter by what she has accomplished...why not add a little of "what she has given back."
Quite possible, she has learned with "me" behavior from her objectivist father.

If you ask these questions from the viewpoint that Katie or I or anyone is obliged to do things for the "less fortunate" then I completely deny your premise. Katie might not do so as completely, but she fully understands that her success has been the result of some very dedicated work on her part. Nobody gave her the knowledge she has acquired. She made a huge effort, which she might have chosen not to make, just as most people do choose not to make it.

However, Katie happens to like helping other people. She has tutored, been a notetaker for classes, collected money and gave time to a number of charities, and she worked very hard as President of the Habitat Club at RIT to build homes for people. I certainly have no problem with this as long as Katie has chosen to do these things because she enjoys doing them, rather than because she feels obliged or forced to do them while feeling little but pain. No one is obliged to feel pain for the sake of others, though they may choose to take it on for a friend or someone of great value to them.

It is a sad mistake that many people believe that the choice one faces in life is either one of only I matter or one of I am but dirt and only others matter. Only the person who knows he is very worthy of life is able to respect and care for others. We cannot help but assess others from the viewpoint of our own introspection. We are only really familiar with our own mind. If your mind is not respected and valued enough by you, you will not be able to perceive anything in others which is worthy of respect and to be valued. I believe that, like me, Katie really is able to see value in others because she sees value in herself.

You and many others make the false assumption that Objectivists cannot care much about others. This is not true about me and it was not true about Ayn Rand. She was personally a very charitable woman. I know the roommate of a man, to whom she was not related, whose B.S. degree in engineering she paid for just because he otherwise was not going to be able to go to college and she wanted him to. She was in many other ways a very caring and generous person, unlike such pretenders as Obama, Biden, and Gore who claim that their lives are dedicated to the good of others. These pretenders instead simply use force to make others give to the less fortunate through governments as the enforcer and conduit. These governments, in turn, provide the Obamas, Bidens, and Gores with power, the lust for which existed among the worst men long before money was invented.

Let me point out one more thing about Katie. Katie is extremely dedicated to doing medical research. She is at this time particularly interested in the study of immunology. She finds the field fascinating and she is looking forward to solving some very real problems so that many will live healthier and richer lives. The altruist who has not done alright by himself and chooses to tackle less arduous studies and to work at a minimally demanding job, is probably going to be objectively of less value to other human beings than Katie is likely to be. If you care so much about others, then you should have no objection to Katie's becoming a great medical researcher, even if she were never to give to charities or to never "give back" in any other way.

There is a terrible sense of the thug in this demand that others serve him or that others should be bowed down before an obligation to serve others. We should resist this by all means at our disposal. There is nothing wrong with exercising the choice to perform an act of charity for someone you care about or even for those who have met misfortune through no or little fault of their own, provided it is your free choice. But, do not attempt to force me to give up my values and adopt your values. Do not attempt to force me to live my life in accordance with your values. I am proud to manage my own life in accordance with the values I choose.

What we are obligated to give back to others is agreement to the principle that our relationships are voluntary and none of us, not even a majority, are to initiate the use of force to make others do our will. I am not to force you to live for me and you are not to force me to live for you. This principle then allows us a wide range of mutually beneficial interactions and trades of values, while yet respecting each other's life and the values we have each chosen as goals in our living.

A Hardworking Student, my Katie

My youngest daughter, Katie Anderson, coasted along in the public schools of Montgomery County, Maryland doing well in her studies when she had a good teacher and doing substantially worse when she had a bad teacher. When she was in about the 8th grade, she decided to become a more serious-minded student. In the 9th grade she took some Honors courses, including a newly offered Honors physics course. She continued taking honors and AP courses until she graduated from high school. Her school barely recognized her existence, however. When she graduated, she had taken 7 AP exams and had all 4's and 5's in the tests. She entered the Honors Program at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in biotechnology, classified as a sophomore due to her credits from her AP course work. She was awarded a RIT Presidential Scholarship and the Nancy and Bruce B. Bates Nathaniel Rochester Society Science Scholarship.

At RIT she worked extremely hard. In her 2nd year, she began the first of a series of research projects with professors in the biotechnology sciences. She has taken very large numbers of credits each quarter, until this year when she cut back to more normal course loads. She will graduate with many, many extra credits. Katie has worked as a teaching assistant for several courses and worked as a note-taker for RIT's Access Services and Academic Accommodations. She also serves as the secretary of the Honors Council.

She also organized a women's Lacrosse league at RIT as co-founder, which she has continued to run as president into her 4th year. She also became active in the Habitat Club at RIT and played a major role in organizing its events in her 3rd year. Now, in her fourth year, she is the President of the Habitat Club. RIT has a Sustainability Program which involves a number of the engineering departments. Early this year, the president of RIT asked Katie to come and see him and they talked about ways in which new sustainable building methods could be easily implemented in the homes that the Habitat Club was involved in building. Katie is very enthusiastic about this program and is working with the engineering departments to transfer ideas into future Habitat building projects.

Early this academic year, she was told she had won the Brody Scholarship and Award, which was offered for the first time ever to one Junior and one Senior. Then Katie was chosen for the Outstanding Scholar Award. Anna and I are driving up to RIT on 1 April to attend her reception, award ceremony, and a dinner for this award. More recently, she won the Baldwin Award, which is accompanied by a $3,000 payment upon graduation. The award ceremony for that is on 15 April, so Anna and I will be going back up to RIT for that ceremony. As of this time, Kathryn Anna Anderson has a 4.00 GPA! What an amazing young lady.

Katie will graduate with a combined B.S. degree in two majors: biotechnology and biomedical sciences and with a minor in psychology. She plans to do medical research for one year and then go on to graduate school to earn a Ph.D. She intends to pursue a research career in immunology.