It’s almost time for the 2008 Olympics, and the Chinese authorities are making sure their coming out party is as green as possible. And what does environmentalism entail? Draconian restrictions, of course. The Communist Party of China no doubt can relate to the greens’ penchant for fascist measures to save the rest of us from ourselves.

In a bid to pacify the environmental tyrants of the occident, the communist tyrants of the orient have instituted a ban on cars. Beijing residents will be limited to driving only every other day, with the aim of halving the usual 3.3 million cars on the road. Additional restrictions will shut down (and even move out of the city) many major factories.

BEIJING (Reuters) — Beijing will introduce “odd-even” traffic restrictions for two months from July 20 to help ease congestion and reduce pollution during the Olympics and Paralympics, officials said on Friday.

Authorities hope the regulations will take 45 percent of the city’s 3.29 million cars off the road and reduce emissions from vehicles by 63 percent, officials told a news conference.

[…] Those affected by the ban will be compensated by not having to pay road or vehicle taxes for three month, costing the city about 1.3 billion yuan ($189 million).

Violators would be punished “according to relevant national and local regulations” and lose the compensation.

Only 70 percent of government-owned cars will be included in the scheme.

And if you’re sufficiently poor to have an older, high-emissions car (of the kind Britain’s PM, Gordon Brown, unapologetically wants to use as an excuse to super-tax the working class), you don’t get to drive it at all.

Over at the Huffington Post, this measure is considered a mere band-aid. One dreads to think what a real cure would look like.

And while you park your car, and close your factories, and stop smoking, and renounce your right to protest or get drunk, here’s what you shall cheer, the “spiritual civilisation bureau” decrees: “Aoyun! Jia You! Zhongguo! Jia You!”

The offically-approved cheer, complete with “civilised” gestures, is being taugh through official media and school training programmes. Note the faceless face of “civilisation”. Reports the BBC: “Li Ning, president of the Beijing Etiquette Institute, told the Beijing News that the cheer was in line with general international principles for cheering, while at the same time possessing characteristics of Chinese culture.”

Good to know we have international principles for cheering. I’ll confess I’ve been very disturbed by the uncivilised cheering I’ve come across. Granted, this involved anti-social people who even had the temerity to wear individual faces in public. Shameful. Glad they’re cracking down on that sort of thing.

Just when you thought this couldn’t get any funnier, you discover that with beautiful irony, the cheer means, “Olympics! Add oil! China! Add oil!”

Not if you have the misfortune of being a Chinese citizen in Beijing, you don’t.

Our own politicians and 2010 World Cup organisers undoubtedly have luxury box seats at the Beijing Olympics, where they’ll be learning from the masters how to please the world’s eco-fascists.

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 just responded to a comment on my “10 reasons to reject global warming” post, and since I often get variations on these questions, I thought I’d turn that response, with minor edits and additions, into a separate post.

Here are the questions:

1) Would you risk the Earth for your carefree lifestyle?

2) I’m pretty sure you’ve seen heavily industrialized areas before (such as Beijing)…I promise you that that smog was not there before we humans got around to letting out excess carbon all the time. How do you propose cleaning up our mess? By sitting around watching TV all day? (Not that I’m saying that’s what you do, but you get my drift.)

Both questions involve fallacies of various kinds, so I’ll address them in some detail.

1) I’m not risking anything. Rejecting global warming orthodoxy — and a government-imposed “solution” to the “crisis” — doesn’t constitute a “carefree lifestyle”. It simply means a different view of the environment, and a different view on how to solve environmental problems. I don’t believe that the Earth is being risked. The Earth will be just fine. The environment has proven to be a pretty robust system, with a tendency to return to stable equilibrium, rather than a fragile system whose unstable equilibrium is easily disturbed for good. Besides which, there’s risk in anything, whether it’s planting a field of wheat, drilling a borehole shaft, building a house, taking a job, crossing the road. There’s also risk in not doing any of those things.

Surely one doesn’t go around asking people, “Would you risk your life to cross the road? Is it really worth your life to get to the other side?” Surely one doesn’t advocate laws that restrict road crossing only to people who can demonstrate that they have no alternative, have paid their road-crossing tax, have undertaken at their own cost a documented study of traffic conditions in the area so their road-crossing has the minimum possible impact, and undertake not to cross the road more than three times a day? (Insert gratuitous chicken joke here.)

2) Environmental pollution and global warming orthodoxy are not the same thing. Saying that carbon emissions cause smog is not the same as saying they cause global warming. Smog can be tolerated, dissipated, or minimised. Global warming, by contrast, is supposedly an irreversible catastrophe making life on Earth hard or impossible.

Not believing that global warming is a catastrophic crisis, or rejecting a government-imposed tax-and-regulate approach to it, does not mean one favours pollution, slash-and-burn agriculture, or not caring about the environment. There’s a difference between opposing modern environmentalism and opposing a healthy, sustainable environment or sensible nature conservation.

If I said the war on drugs isn’t working, would you ask me whether I favour mainlining kids on heroin? If I said I’m opposed to banning alcohol, would you ask me whether I want to die of cirrhosis of the liver and heart disease? Would you ask how I propose to deal with drunken bar fights and marital violence while alcohol remains legal? This question on pollution is just as absurd. The “drift” is irrelevant, and does not address any of the reasons why I claimed I don’t believe the orthodox dogma about global warming, its causes, and its solutions.

But let me address pollution, since it often comes up as a convenient way to change the subject from arguments about climate change. Pollution is something that people won’t tolerate when they can afford not to tolerate it. Look around the world: pollution is inversely correlated with prosperity. The richer people get, the less pollution they are willing to accept, and the more they care about the environment. They can’t get prosperous without some measure of pollution or environmental damage, but they also can’t get prosperous without giving some care to the sustainability of their economic growth. This is why the best way to ensure both health and prosperity, to ensure both economic growth and environmental sustainability, is to grant private property rights that ensure people will consider their land and environmental resources as assets to be wisely exploited for long-term gain.

London is a classic example. During the Industrial Revolution, Londeners bore the burden of air and water pollution, in return for remarkable economic development. Today, London’s air is cleaner than it has been at any time in the last four centuries, the streets are no longer covered in ankle-deep manure, starvation and plague are unheard of, and the average citizen lives three times as long and many times as well. Pollution was a temporary cost, which is not tolerated in a prosperous, successful society. In fact, the pollution peak came 120 years ago. It was since then, the most prosperous time of all, which saw the introduction of the fossil-fuel-burning motor vehicle, in which the majority of historic smog was eliminated.

Part of the reason is that our predominant fuels have contained progressively less carbon. We used to burn straw and wood. Then we burnt coal. Then oil. Then natural gas. Each contains less carbon than its predecessor, and there’s no reason to believe that this trend will stop.

It is also instructive to note that the most filthy industrial areas of all have been in regions where governments run industrial production on behalf of the people, instead of companies producing for private profit. Examples are common in former Soviet regions, for example — and indeed in China, to a considerable extent. Where there aren’t any property rights, or people are not free to wield power over their government or industrial organisations, that’s where things go badly wrong. That’s where people are unable to take care of their own wellbeing, and where people with no stake in society and the environment get to mismanage it however they please. To this day, the most serious environmental problems occur in regions where there aren’t any private property rights, and the tragedy of the commons is the rule. Think fishing, logging, hunting, for example.

So in short:

1) Irrelevant question, because both assumptions — that the Earth is at risk, or that the alternative to global warmism is a “carefree lifestyle” — are false.

2) I propose that people get rich enough to sit around watching TV all day. That way, they won’t tolerate pollution, will want a healthy environment, and can afford to invest in cleaner, more sustainable environmental resources.

Since I’m laid up in bed with a rather annoying flu that managed to switch off both body and mind, I figured I’d pass the time and break the silence with links to the half-dozen most popular posts on my blog, as per Google Analytics. They represent a gratifying mix of subjects, ranging from the environment to economic theory, from social networks to media freedom, from silly bureaucrats to great press photographs. In order of popularity:

1. 10 reasons to reject global warming — A summary of why I can’t accept the orthodox view that global warming is a crisis that requires large-scale government intervention. This item has not only been the most popular, despite being published only three weeks ago, but it recorded a surprisingly high average of 24 minutes spent on the page. It was a follow-up to a column published in Maverick magazine, entitled Global warming is a hoax. In some ways, the second attempt turned out to be the column I had actually set out to write.
2. Child labour: the baby dragon — This was a response to a question asked in the comments to an earlier post, which simply argued that import restrictions on Chinese goods, while protecting narrow interests, are not in the broad interests of South African consumers. “But what about child labour?” came the question. My response, namely that the description of such practices is an over-generalisation, that blanket condemnation is simplistic, and that either way, our objection can better be expressed in individual, targeted, specific boycotts rather than state-enforced punishment against an entire foreign country at the cost of local consumers, prompted a fair bit of outrage. As it would, when you see things only in black-and-white, and when every problem only has one, statist, solution.
3. This is a poke-free zone — Despite deriving some benefits from Facebook, the popular social network that attracted hundreds of thousands of South Africans in the space of just a few months, the signal-to-noise ratio had been declining, and I vowed to leave for good the day Microsoft got involved. It did. I left.
4. Info Scandal II — A cautionary tale about what happens when politicians and civil servants own media interests and try to buy out a major newspaper critical of the government. A follow-up post noted a significant difference, pointed out by Anton Harber, between the proposed buyout of Johnnic Communications (soon to be called Avusa) and the original Info Scandal of 1978.
5. The candyman can’t — Who needs to invent jokes when politically-correct bureaucrats will hand them to you on custom-printed signs?
6. The life and death of Kevin Carter — An old article about the late Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer stirred recollections of the years of South Africa’s transition to democracy. It occurred to me that many of my memories from that time aren’t memories at all. They’re Kevin Carter’s photographs.

Of these, my own favourite is the Kevin Carter piece. Like the item on William F. Deedes and the post on Isambard Kingdom Brunel (and the follow-up column it sparked), they reflect the pleasure I take in history and the great people that populate it.

This editorial makes a good point about the opposition of green groups to the climate agreement the White House favours, which prioritises economic development and quality of life standards, and insists on including China and India, two of the world’s four biggest CO₂ emitters, in any deal.

In a sense, [US president George W] Bush and [Australian prime minister John] Howard are calling the bluff of global warming alarmists by insisting that China and India be included in any emissions-reduction effort. They know the enviro-activists’ ultimate goal is not what the green lobby and complicit media have been selling to the public, but rather a crippling of thriving capitalist economies. Braying at a plan that insists on China’s and/or India’s participation exposes their real objective: punishing success.

China and India are by far the world’s worst large polluters, in terms of emissions as a function of economic output. This is the only sensible way to measure it, since it can be justified only in terms of economic benefit. No amount of pollution is a justifiable cost without a commensurate economic benefit. That makes it all the more reasonable for the US and Australia to insist that China and India contribute to any efforts to curb emissions.

Environmentalists accuse Bush and Howard of being disingenuous, and they have a point. The two know full well that global warming is hogwash, yet they support the greens’ measures for large-scale human interference with the fragile, ineffable mystery of life on earth.

But the real reason they’re wrong is far more serious. The leaders also understand that environmental activists are driven by an underlying anti-capitalist, anti-consumerist guilt complex. That their eco-demands will not so much clean up the environment as harm productive countries and curtail economic progress. But if that is true, why argue that green measures should be extended to China and India, two relatively poor countries that have yet to enjoy the full benefits of industrialisation and development? After all, prosperity is how countries earn quality of life, liberty and leisure. Prosperity produces the means to achieve a clean, healthy, enjoyable and productive environment. To solve the problems, including pollution, requires creating wealth, not destroying it.

It is true that successful countries shouldn’t be singled out for attempts to hobble their economies in the name of environmentalism. But Bush and Howard should be arguing against the misguided efforts by greens, not in favour of meting out eco-whippings equally. They should argue against hindering progress, instead of arguing in favour of hindering everyone equally.

Over at Politics.za, they note an interesting article in The Telegraph, which reports that Britain has been told by China that it would withdraw all support from Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe, save humanitarian aid. If true, this would be a dramatic shift in policy, and could precipitate the final collapse of the regime. Even if Mugabe has not lost his appetite for power.

The economy is already on its knees. With prices having been fixed by government dictat, the only supply of goods and services is on the black market. With wages having been fixed too, nobody can afford them.

It’d be nice to think that the South African government had the foresight to accept Zimbabwean economic refugees and grant them work permits on the basis that their labour and entrepreneurship will contribute to the South African economy. However, the protectionist impulse among the politicians, steeped as they are in socialism and unionism, is too strong. So a refugee crisis is what it’ll be.

On the other hand, the sooner Zimbabwe collapses altogether, the sooner Zimbabweans can get to work rebuilding a new post-Mugabe country. Let’s hope this happens without a war.

Used to be the CIA spied on the KGB, and vice versa. In the post Cold War world, the black and white hats appear to have been passed to Microsoft and Google.

It appears Microsoft Virtual Earth captured a picture of a super-secret stealth propeller design (see alongside — publish and be damned, I say) on an American Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine in the graving dock at the naval base at Bangor, Washington. A couple of months ago, Google Earth took a snap of what appeared to be China’s new nuclear submarine, so the Chinese won’t be feeling so stupid anymore.

Monster Maritime has more details, including a picture of how the Navy normally keep its secret prop under wraps. The comments section contains some more interesting places curious spies might want to check out.

Neil Blakey-Milner asked the following, in response to my previous post on fear of trade with China and protectionism. It’s a good question, worthy of a detailed response.

What should a country do about imports from countries that are known to be or highly suspected of using child labour or other forms of “slave” labour or other techniques that are banned by that country?

First, let’s stipulate that only a small fraction of the trade that ends up being restricted by tariffs or other forms of protectionism is, by this standard, objectionable, and that this fraction represents an extreme-case scenario. I’ll focus mostly on child labour in my response, but similar arguments go for other forms of labour policy on which prosperous nations frown.

Let me first try to be somewhat specific: Africa, not Asia, has the highest child labour force participation rate in the world. According to UNICEF, almost one in three African children work, while the corresponding figure for Asia is one in five. That Asian statistic is not much worse than that in Latin America or the Middle East. Why China should be singled out for censure is unclear to me.

Moreover, child labour below the age of 16 is illegal in China. The International Labour Organisation recommends a minimum working age of 15, and China has ratified the relevant convention. So the problem is not one of legal labour standards either.

Read the rest of this entry »

The fear of Chinese trade is really puzzling. It reminds me of the fear of all things Japanese in the 1980s. I suspect it’s a strong case of xenophobia, disguised by a weak understanding of basic economics.

Cherryflava makes a good point (albeit unwittingly) about China:

With everything from pyjamas to Barbie dolls suddenly subject to spontaneous combustion scares - it must be asked: “Why are local manufacturers not kicking the giant dragon in the head..and the nuts…while it’s down?”

Finally - a reason to charge more and sell locally made stuff.

Yes…. this t-shirt is made in Epping, costs R20 more and will not blow up and entire neighbourhood block when you combine it with domestic washing powder.

Personally, we’ve got a feeling that all this anti-China news flooding every paper, smacks of major conspiracy theory. But that being said - now is the time to promote that whole Proudly South African thing. Perceptions around cheap Chinese imports are being tested…GO.

The point to note is that any voluntary trade is based on the subjective perception of value of the traders. Both parties benefit from the trade, or they wouldn’t engage in it.

If our people buy cheap Chinese clothes, they will effectively be richer, retaining more income to spend on housing, education, investment or Gucci bags. If our industries buy cheap Chinese imports, this means their input costs are lower, and they can earn more job-creating profit, or out-compete others more aggressively. The local industries that cannot compete with Chinese imports should go out of business, or differentiate themselves, or find something they’re better at, because that way, the greatest number of South Africans benefit.

It has nothing to do with patriotism. Buying local isn’t better for the country, it is worse. It means we’re propping up unproductive industries. By artificially propping up unproductive jobs, we’re prolonging the pain of structural unemployment elsewhere in the economy. For each unproductive job lost, more than one productive job can be created.

Now if consumers make a judgement that says Chinese goods are not of sufficient quality and will no longer do, they will voluntarily choose alternatives. This decision means that China has lost the competitive advantage that implied trade with them is better for South Africa than local production.

Whether or not to buy Chinese should be a free, subjective value decision on the part of consumers. It should not depend on government programmes like tariffs and subsidies, on protectionist cartels like Proudly South African, or on xenophobic fears that believe trade is some sort of foreign ripoff or play for dominance.

Trade does benefit both parties, but only if the decision whether to engage in the trade or abstain from it is voluntary. Only if that decision is not based on coercion or false information. Those are known as extortion and fraud.

Seems a lot of people are curious about the tub the Chinese forgot to park in the garage. A commercial satellite snapped a pic of what appears to be China’s new nuclear ballistic missile submarine. The image ended up on Google Earth, so the spies didn’t have to work too hard.