It's a cost, not a benefit

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One little point that all too few seem to appreciate. In Gordon Brown's speech on how we're going to make ourselves poorer reduce carbon emissions he let drop this little comment :

There would be "hard choices and tough decisions" but he said a new low carbon economy could bring thousands of jobs.

That's how we know that it's going to make us poorer of course. Now it still might be a wise idea, might not be as well, but my point is rather that everyone seems to insist that "creating jobs" via such schemes is a good idea. It isn't. It is most certainly not a benefit of such schemes, it is a cost. 

For of course if all those busy little workers were not installing tofu machines to light the yurt growing communes, they'd be off doing something else, curing AIDS, planting turnips or hanging politicians, all things which would arguably increase human happiness more. We are therefore poorer by those things which they will not be doing.

This is a blog post, so I'm not going to try and work out whether what they're going to do in their new green jobs increases human happiness more or less than the alternatives they would do without the government intervention: I just want to insist that we should regard this creation of jobs as something to put on the costs side of our analysis, not the benefits.

A lot of hot air

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On the train this weekend, I was sitting accross the aisle from a lady reading George Monbiot's new book.

Every few minutes, she put the book down and loudly pontificated on global warming. We should all stop flying, of course, and carbon emissions should be set at a world level (!) with everyone given the same individual ration (never mind the economics or enforceability of that one...).

I was sorely tempted to point out the error of her ways, when her husband stepped in and did the job for me. Eager to get on with reading his own book, he said: "You know darling, there would be a lot less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere if people would just shut up!"

Quite.

Dog Whistling Environmentalism

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Delegates to the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) agreed to attempt to move the public onto a setting of Defcon–1 through the use of vague, but threatening language, in a thinly veiled push to change global human behaviour for the worse. Prior to the next round of negotiations on the UN climate convention and Kyoto Protocol in Bali on 3rd December they announced that climate change, “may bring abrupt and irreversible impacts.” (My emphasis added). They failed however to balance the argument by stating the obvious that it, “may not bring abrupt and irreversible impacts.” (Again my emphasis added).

The IPCC has concluded that climate change is “unequivocal”, and that we are almost 90% more than likely to be the main cause through our emissions of greenhouse gases. And now that they have a Nobel Prize (N.B. not in Science, but for Peace) everything they say is the gospel truth. This is nothing more than another step along the climate scaremongering ladder, and we can only hope that they become more shrill as a majority of the populace and the politicians grows to ignore them. They are simply trying to impose a socialized model of politics upon us through the use of data that suits their arguments. Science of this kind needs to be depoliticized, and the language associated with it (including those who question climate change) needs to be tempered.

The climate is evolving, but we have to realise that we are as hardy a species as the others of this planet and we can adapt, even more so if we are free to. Just as those insects that the Sami people haven't seen previously, (though no doubt there are probably records of them under their feet), adapt, so can we. We are fast becoming a world constrained by the shackling of ourselves with the green politics of environmentalism. The rejection of technology and the welcome of wasteful spending is irrational on our parts and we need to come to our senses.