If you really care about global warming, there are a whole bunch of things you probably think you shouldn’t be doing that you should, and vice versa. The environmental religion of the modern age, in which an angry Gaia will punish us for our sinful ways, but we can redeem ourselves by sacrifice and self-denial, has spawned a mythology of classical proportions. The problem is that many of those myths, spouted as accepted wisdom by an uncritical media and special-interest activists, appear to be just plain wrong.

Wired magazine goes to the actual science — remember science? — and makes some proposals for those who really care about climate change, and think not only that reducing carbon emissions will actually help, but delude themselves that it is possible to reduce them enough to make even a little dent in anticipated warming.

Here is its list, each of which is explored further in a separate article:

• Live in Cities: Urban Living Is Kinder to the Planet Than the Suburban Lifestyle
• A/C Is OK: Air-Conditioning Actually Emits Less C02 Than Heating
• Organics Are Not the Answer: Surprise! Conventional Agriculture Can Be Easier on the Planet
• Farm the Forests: Old-Growth Forests Can Actually Contribute to Global Warming
• China Is the Solution: The People’s Republic Leads the Way in Alternative-Energy Hardware
• Accept Genetic Engineering: Superefficient Frankencrops Could Put a Real Dent in Greenhouse Gas Emissions
• Carbon Trading Doesn’t Work: Carbon Credits Were a Great Idea, But the Benefits Are Illusory
• Embrace Nuclear Power: Face It. Nukes Are the Most Climate-Friendly Industrial-Scale Form of Energy
• Used Cars — Not Hybrids: Don’t Buy That New Prius! Test-Drive a Used Car Instead
• Prepare for the Worst: Climate Change Is Inevitable. Get Used to It

It doesn’t say all of these are good ideas, of course. There are excellent reasons to slash-and-burn overgrown, bug-infested jungles, to plant more productive crops, sure. But there are also plenty excellent reasons not to cut down old-growth forests. However, if your policy goal is to reduce carbon emissions, which seems to be the sole fetish of environmentalists and policy makers, then all of these points, including razing the rainforests, are valid.

Meanwhile, the US Congress is about to debate a cap-and-trade scheme that will vastly expand government powers and revenue, cost consumers trillions in bureaucratic red tape, tax and lost economic growth, and achieve very little indeed. In welcoming an open floor debate on these mushy measures, the Wall Street Journal writes:

The vehicle is a bill that principal sponsors Joe Lieberman and John Warner are calling “landmark legislation.” They’re too modest. Warner-Lieberman would impose the most extensive government reorganization of the American economy since the 1930s.

Ouch. Nothing like a fat bureaucracy to infringe on the liberty and prosperity of the people. Nothing like a first-country moral crusade to give developing-country leaders ideas to foist upon their long-suffering people. Nothing like an overbearing state to hold down the development of the poor.

As if $130 oil isn’t reason enough to consider more fuel-efficient cars, reduce energy usage in industry and invest in alternative energy sources.

While we wait for this legislative disaster, however, would the disciples of St Al please report to the consistory, so they can get cracking on Wired’s measures?

(Hat tip: Climate Skeptic.)

I’ll admit, I’m one of those people who are thrilled to see the back of Eliot Spitzer, New York’s law unto himself. I’m just disappointed that his fall was prompted by a petty sex scandal.

Spitzer made a career out of screwing people he shouldn’t have screwed. But since he went around destroying the careers of high-profile people, often with no basis in fact, and with little more moral justification than the puerile principle that every Goliath must be wrong and every David right, I really would have preferred him being taken down by one of his victims, such as Hank Greenberg or Dick Grasso. I wish the victims of Spitzer the judge, Spitzer the jury and Spitzer the executioner, had been able to defend themselves against their inquisitor.

Problem is, he didn’t often bring those victims before a court, where his self-aggrandizing crusades might have faced rational, independent scrutiny. He preferred extortion and public humiliation as his weapons of choice. He preferred to denounce the heretics from his bully pulpit, and club them with the extraordinary legal powers he wielded.

Take Dick Grasso, for example, who got publicly humiliated with disclosures and insinuations that were none of Spitzer’s business. By all accounts, Grasso did a great job keeping the New York Stock Exchange competitive against both upstart competition and foreign stock exchanges. The NYSE’s board thought fit to pay him handsomely for those services. Yet for some reason, Spitzer thought he had a right to second-guess the NYSE’s own shareholders. He thought he had the moral justification to publicly challenge Grasso over his remuneration, using absurd arguments about the stock exchange’s culpability for the behaviour of listed companies, or worse, that the performance of a stock exchange should be judged on whether share prices rise or fall. If that’s what Spitzer really wanted, he should have nationalised stock markets and got it over with, rather than singling out apparently innocent executives to strong-arm.

Speaking of innocent, the case of Maurice “Hank” Greenberg is even more blatant. Spitzer forced this long-serving head of an insurance company into a hasty resignation not by charging him in court, but by calling his actions illegal on television and threatening the company that employed him with indictment. If Greenberg had indeed broken the law, Spitzer’s duty was to charge and convict him in an independent court. It would have behooved him to do so without creating a media circus around it. But though he had been entrusted with the power to prosecute, Spitzer declined, preferring public insinuation as his billy-club. Last time I checked, falsely accusing someone of a crime on television constitutes defamation, not justice. As for the threat of indicting Greenberg’s employer, AIG, we know what such action can do to a company: Arthur Andersen was indicted, but was exonerated on appeal. By then, however, there was no company left to save. Justice delayed is justice denied, in such a case: indictment can be a death sentence for a company. It is an extraordinarily powerful, extraordinarily blunt instrument. Use it judiciously, or not at all. Spitzer abused it to ruin the careers of people he had no intention of giving their day in court. If he wasn’t entirely false, but had made good on that threat, he would have robbed shareholders, destroyed jobs, reduced competition and punished policy-holders, just to feed his monumental ego and burnish his political stature as a supposed corruption buster. In his crusade against what he saw as corporate corruption, Spitzer came to epitomise the corruption of state power.

If he wants to screw around and hurt his family, that’s between him and his family. It’s reprehensible, but a man’s private moral failings are his own business. Granted, he was breaking New York law, and no person given a position of public trust should get away with doing so. Granted also that he exposed an office of public trust to the risk of blackmail and extortion, which is a grave offence. But still, it is an unsatisfying end to his career. He should have crashed and burned in one of the dogfights he picked with innocent high-fliers. That would have been justice served.

Follow the logic here:

The government will table draft legislation intended to regulate the private health sector, including private hospitals, within two months, Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang said on Wednesday.

“It is clear that we cannot sustain unregulated private health care service delivery in this country and at the same time regulate the medical schemes industry,” she told the National Assembly.

“We must therefore regulate the providers and the industry as a whole.”

Of course, once the industry as a whole is regulated, they’ll find that they cannot regulate the health industry and sustain unregulated medical supplies, cleaning services, labour, construction, equipment manufacturing or import… in fact, they cannot sustain unregulated anything.

All aboard? Next stop, central planning. Funeral services will be held in the dining car once a day and twice on Sundays.

Trust a government bureaucracy like NASA to make rocket scientists look like idiots:

The link goes to this history page, where the alternative text for the main image is: “Sputnik: Fortieth Anniversary”.

Now those of you who studied advanced applied mathematics may already suspect that something is wrong here. Indeed, a little bit of calculation makes it clear that in fact, it is Sputnik’s 50th anniversary today. Here’s the proof. Close your eyes if you’re scared of complicated maths: Δt = t₂ — t₁. Since t₁ = 1957 and t₂ = 2007, it follows that Δt = 50. QED. No wonder NASA’s super-expensive tax-funded space ships keep breaking.

Never mind the Soviets. Google is watching.

I’d say in the nick of time, but I’m neither sure if “nick” is a measure of time, nor if using it could land me in it. The nick, I mean. Having a pint may have presented a similar problem, but it is now officially legal. Yup, instead of just sneering at the yobs, they were going to ban it, the Eurocrats were.

This column was first published in Maverick, 9 August 2007. If you live in South Africa, and like great photography and copy marred only by my own, do subscribe.

We think we’re so smart. We think the problems we face are unique and modern and unprecedented. We think things are different now. They aren’t. When the invisible hand is bound, the dead hand rules.

Who wouldn’t kill for a name like Isambard Kingdom Brunel? It has the grandeur of his life about it. He was driven by an iron will and untiring work ethic. Even his failures – such as propelling trains by a sort of very long pea shooter with a vacuum pump at the end – were stupendous feats of grand engineering.

He died in 1859, aged only 53, yet his life story reads like the parallel lives of two men – one a railway engineer of renown, and another a famous ship builder. Throughout his life, while working on some of the most complex and grand projects of the golden age of engineering, he fought tirelessly against his commercial rivals. Yet he reserved his strongest animosity not for his competitors, but for the government.

Read the rest of this entry »

Pity the farmer in a bureaucratic state who spends his every waking hour stepping in steaming piles of regulation and law. Joel Salatin is just such a man. He writes:

Everything I want to do is illegal. As if a highly bureaucratic regulatory system was not already in place, 9/11 fueled renewed acceleration to eliminate freedom from the countryside. Every time a letter arrives in the mail from a federal or state agriculture department my heart jumps like I just got sent to the principal’s office.

And it doesn’t stop with agriculture bureaucrats. It includes all sorts of government agencies, from zoning, to taxing, to food inspectors. These agencies are the ultimate extension of a disconnected, Greco-Roman, Western, egocentric, compartmentalized, reductionist, fragmented, linear thought process.

I should note that I disagree with four out of every five words on the web site that hosts this piece. In fact, the only words I won’t quibble with are “are” and “and”.

The site, mindfully.org, is a eco-leftists fever swamp, though it seems to have been abandoned now. It defends, for example, a precautionary principle that logically precludes its own application. It also notes with glee that Bjørn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, was found guilty of “scientific dishonesty” by the Orwellian-sounding “Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty”. It fails to note that a superior authority cleared Lømborg, directing a scathing rebuke at the Committee about the lack of evidence it presented, its failure to even refer to Lømborg’s own text to establish the facts in the case, its use solely of published criticisms by others of Lømborg’s work, and its use of “condescending and emotional” language. It fails to note other studies which similarly found that the criticism of Lømborg was largely unsubstantiated and constituted an abuse of authority on the part of the Danish commission. A review in the Journal of Information Ethics found: “The inevitable overall impression of the debate is, not that Lomborg has deliberately been twisting arguments, but many of his opponents have. This is somewhat more than embarrassing.”¹ This indicates a deliberate bias on the part of mindfully.org. Some of the other material on the site borders on tinfoil-hat paranoia, and might present a problem for the authors if the men in white coats were to come across it.

With that disclaimer, do read the farmer’s lament. It offers a disturbing insight into what happens — even to citizens like Salatin who in principle fully agree — when governments use law and regulation to enforce on a powerless population its own politically-correct notions about food, health and living.

1. For more details, see A Critical Consideration… by Arthur Rörsch (inexplicably in Microsoft Word format) and When Scientists Politicize Science by Roger A. Pielke Jr. (in PDF). [↩]

In the wake of communications minister Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri’s diktat that a single national mobile broadcasting network would be created in South Africa, based on the DVB-H standard, news from Europe appears to support her:

The European Commission Wednesday urged national governments and industry to take up DVB-H as the single standard for mobile television in the 27-nation bloc.

While Wednesday’s call isn’t a legal mandate to solely use DVB-H to broadcast TV over a wireless handheld device, the commission said it may in 2008 propose binding rules requiring the exclusive use of DVB-H in the European Union.

Amazingly, it goes on to claim:

The Brussels-based executive and regulatory branch of the E.U. “is not choosing a winner” but is simply giving “the market the clear signal that it should move voluntarily, but quickly, to a single standard.”

The DVB-H standard is based on Nokia Corp. (NOK) technology for mobile TV, which the commission said is the strongest standard for mobile TV.

Needless to say, the industry opposes such intervention. It believes the Eurocrats are disingenuous when they say the move will be “voluntary” and they’re not “choosing a winner”. Granted, there are drawbacks to the market fragmentation caused by competing standards, and competition is not guaranteed to pick the superior solution in the end. But there is no reason to believe that central planning is any better at choosing the right winner. Worse, eliminating competition can actually harm consumers because neither quality nor price will come under pressure. Why would anyone have a motive to improve DVB-H now that it’s been chosen as de jure winner? In agreeing that people can’t be trusted to make their own economic decisions, I guess Poison Ivy will feel vindicated by the mandarins of Europe.