Category Archives: Economics

The Problem With Environmentalists

They have succumbed to fear-mongering and a psychological urge to "return to Eden"

The disagreement I have with environmentalists is, I think, on two levels.

The first level is the propagandistic level, the relentless, baseless fearmongering. For example the General Secretary of the UN, António Guterres, proclaiming last month that the “era of global boiling has arrived”.

That attempt to create a panic “meme”, spread throughout the world by a sickeningly compliant media, is, on the face of it, beyond ridiculous. What will they say next year, or next decade? Maybe this: “Earth has now reached the aggregate phase of plasma”.

How does the spreading of these kinds of memes tally with the most frequently repeated commandment in the Bible, namely “do not be afraid”?

The other level also has deeply religious connotations. On the deepest level, environmentalists appeal to the “urge to go back to Eden”. Psychologically speaking the “unwillingness to grow up”. That appears a bit harsh as a statement. However, state education and media pronouncements are designed to see in “Big Brother” or rather “Big Daddy”, the state and the corporations it is living in symbiotic relationship with, as the only saviour. No other God allowed, and no individual thinking and research either.

Succumbing to this trend is an expression of the fear of responsibility, responsibility which was given to us by God before the Fall, to “fill the earth and govern it” (Gen 1:28, other translations say: “subdue it”, or, as the Amplified Bible writes: “subjugate it [putting it under your power]”). Governing entails responsibility. To whom? Ultimately to God.

Environmentalists however don’t tend to think that way. Or if they do, they like to appeal to the government (i.e. Caesar) to sort out what they consider to be a problem. Instead of doing it themselves. They pass on the responsibility to the government. Thereby rendering to Caesar what in truth is God’s. Empowering Caesar in a way contrary to what Jesus commanded.

In Genesis 2:15, it says (again in the Amplified Bible): “So the Lord God took the man [He had made] and settled him in the Garden of Eden to cultivate and keep it.” Note that “cultivate” precedes “keep”. That means, again, taming nature and making it amenable for human use.

In other words: We are not to “retreat” to Eden (impossible anyway according to Genesis 3:24). Attempts to do so will cause no end of troubles. That’s not “fearmongering”, that’s a statement aligned with the commandment to “fear God” (e.g. 1 Peter 2:17). We were not even meant to remain in Eden before the Fall (at least, not exclusively), but to venture out into the world and govern and cultivate it. For what purpose? To be, as the image of God, the cultivators of nature – under God’s guidance and commandments – and stewards of the resulting Kingdom of God.

In other words, instead of retreating to Eden, which is conceptually at the heart of environmentalism, we are to progress towards the Kingdom of God. One of the central commandments of God which enables us to do exactly that is of course “thou shalt not steal”. This is a commandment we are progressively, institutionally breaking on a massive scale: The progressive abrogation of private property through taxes (way beyond the tithe), regulation and inflation.

Private property rights is the main instrument with which humans can exert their stewardship under God. The manifold stealing of theses rights is what lies at the heart of our environmental problems. But it is this root, this economic, institutional and not least spiritual root, that the institutions committing the infringements are loath to address, because they profit from continuing with their infringements. Most environmentalists appear to be totally oblivious of this root problem. Or, if they are aware of it, they are silent about it for reasons that may sometimes even be nefarious.

It is interesting to note that it is often the biologists who want to do the retreating and the economists who want to do the progressing. This was exemplified by the bet that the economist Julian Simons arranged with the enviromento-alarmist biologist Paul Ehrlich in 1980. Here’s an article about it. To quote from it:

To make his case, Simon published an article in Social Science Quarterly that taunted Paul Ehrlich, the main proponent of imminent doom, into taking a bet on their respective views. If population growth was outpacing the finite quantity of resources, the prices of key resources should (theoretically) be rising. If prices increased, then Ehrlich would be vindicated. If not, Simon would be. Ehrlich chose five resource prices and bet on their trends over a decade. Simon won the debate, as all five commodities (copper, chromium, nickel, tin and tungsten) declined in the wager period of 1980 to 1990. 

(Ehrlich then offered a counter-bet which Simon rejected, for good reasons. Read about it in the above linked article.)

I think this disagreement between a biologist and an economist is almost archetypal. I think so because biologists argue from the point of view of nature, and economists from the point of view of humans.

Economists also are trained to think in terms of cost-benefit analyses, which may entail more than just monetary costs and benefits. Which is why the world should listen more to Bjorn Lomborg, a statistician who has emerged from the environmentalist movement saying that, while he believes human made climate change is happening, it is “not the end of the world“. He even explains how a rising temperature will actually save lives and that there are much more pressing problems we could and should solve and which we could do with much less effort and thus save – human – lives.

It’s no wonder most people are not aware of positions like Lomborg’s. They have been essentially frozen out of the debate. Which is one of the reasons I became instantly suspicious when I saw how the media handled the Covid pandemic and started pushing for “solutions” which served a nefarious agenda, while obviously ignoring a proper cost-benefit analysis of the promoted measures.

I had seen it all before, in relative “slow motion”, during the preceding decades of climate debate and policies. I continue to see it now.

Creation Stewardship

From the book “The Mission of God” (2016 [2014]) by Joseph Boot, p.249-251:

Much is said today about nature or land and ‘environmentalism,’ and Christians (usually the younger evangelicals), often with good intentions, can get caught up in the ‘save the planet’ rhetoric and agenda.

[. . .]

A truly biblical picture of creation stewardship does not elevate nature to the status of God as the source and wellspring of life, nor does it give nature or land priority over man, but rather tells us that the land suffers because of man; and because God governs all things by his personal agency, the created order responds to our moral conduct.

[. . .]

But because most people today (even Christians) think in impersonal terms about the creation and the land and view ecological processes in purely naturalistic terms, they do not think about man’s sin in relationship to the fruitfulness of farming, husbandry, forest health and animal populations.

[. . .]

Biblical creation care however, means obedience to God’s law as it concerns God, man and the land. This means that the environmentalists of today, who claim to love Mother Nature and therefore want to sav the planet whilst worshiping idols, advocating the killing of the unborn to reduce carbon footprints, pursue the theft and re-distribution of land and resources, seek a radical equalization of all things, viewing the wealthy, the church, the family and Christian marriage as the primary obstacle to planetary salvation, are in fact destroying the environment; the land, cursed on their account, will vomit them out. IF we are concerned with responsible care for creation and want to see human flourishing in the land and blessing on our agriculture, cattle, wilderness and animal kingdoms, we must obey God’s law. If we are parched in these areas, we need look no further than our sins. Obedience is green! Thus the Puritan mind actually takes the totality of the law seriously in these matters rather than arbitrarily picking bits from the Torah or prophets that might fit with a given ideology, then setting the rest aside as hopelessly outdated and inconvenient.

My own thoughts on this: I have long considered our fundamentally flawed and fraudulent monetary system to be the main if not root cause for many of society’s ills, including environmental degradation. In the latter case, another ungodly cause can be identified: The denial by the courts of property rights, which happened in the course of the 19th century. To accelerate industrialisation, people were denied the possibility to sue companies polluting their land. When this eventually lead to such great environmental degradation that it could no longer be ignored, the property rights were not re-instated, as they should have. Instead, governments declared that they would henceforth be the protectors of the environment. As if. Only when we do the biblical thing, which is to re-instate property rights and thereby fully re-instate individuals and their families as the true stewards of creation, responsible and answerable to God, will we receive a truly sustainable improvement of the state of nature.

By the way, the author, Joseph Boot, is affiliated with the Ezra Institute.

The human cost of Net Zero

The war on fossil fuels is far more dangerous than climate change.

Article by Ralph Schoellhammer.

Excerpts:

The truth is that our societies are still massively dependent on fossil fuels. For all the talk of the advances made in renewable energy, the proportion of our electricity production reliant on fossil fuels has barely changed over the past 40 years. In that time, only nuclear power has declined as a source of electricity.

None of this is to say that an energy transition is impossible. A target of Net Zero by 2050 could well be met. But the rapid abandonment of fossil fuels that this demands would inflict misery and hardship on billions of people.

[. . .]

Canadian political scientist Vaclav Smil lists cement, steel, plastics and ammonia as the four ingredients that make the modern world possible. For example, modern healthcare systems need enormous amounts of plastic (for everything from flexible tubes to sterile packing), making it yet another crucial ingredient in the wellbeing of humanity. And without steel and cement, nothing could be built – no roads, no houses, no harbours, no airports. Plastics, steel and cement also require fossil fuels for their production.

[. . .]

Industrialisation transforms societies. The industrialisation of agriculture, for example, enables higher outputs with less labour, freeing humans for other endeavours. In the US, the labour needed to produce a kilogram of grain fell by 98 per cent between 1800 and 2020. The share of the population working in agriculture fell by a similar margin during that period. Not every country will have to follow this development path exactly – coal, for example, could be replaced by gas and nuclear. But what is certain is that no country will be able to industrialise and develop without fossil fuels.

[. . .]

The talk of leaving fossil fuels behind is not based in reality. It’s fuelled instead by a mixture of apocalypticism, hypocrisy and sheer wishful thinking. In the future, perhaps we will be able to power hospitals using kinetic energy. But right now, the costs of abandoning fossil fuels will likely do far more harm than climate change itself.

The WHO Is a Real and Present Danger

And: Why did so many German doctors join the Nazi Party early?

Article by Justin Hart.

Here’s the first paragraph:

Our governments intend to transfer decisions over our health, families, and societal freedoms to the Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO), whenever he or she declares it necessary. The success of this transfer of power depends on public ignorance of its implications, and of the nature of the WHO itself and its recent pandemic policy reversals. When the public understands, then its leaders are more likely to act in their interests rather than against them.

Here’s the final paragraph:

The only real question is whether, and how, this society-wrecking pandemic train can be stopped. The public health professions want careers and salaries, and will not intervene. They have proven that in previous manifestations of fascism. The public must educate themselves, and then refuse to comply. We can just hope some of our supposed leaders will step forward to help them.

The above link leads to this study:

Why did so many German doctors join the Nazi Party early?

Meanwhile, someone’s wearing a duncecap for a mitre:

Welby’s dream of insult-free universities amounts to an unwitting attack on free speech, truth and reason. A university should never be punished for allowing free and open debate. And it should never seek to shut down the questioning of any ideology – not least trans ideology, which is based on denying biological reality. People must be allowed to tell the truth, no matter how offensive or insulting some might find it. And students should be continually exposed to difficult ideas.

The Religion of Statism

From the book: 'The Mission of Gd', by Joseph Boot

From chapter 4 of Boot’s book:

“The Puritan missiologist, however, is neither a retreatist pacifist nor a neo-Marxist, but believes in the necessity of civil government, qualified by the biblical conviction that the state only has abiding legitimacy where it surrenders to its limited God-ordained role as minister (diaconate) of justice in terms of God’s authority (Rom. 13:4)

[. . .]

“As soon as the state steps outside this sphere it plays God and offers every form of counterfeiting of the Word of God. [. . .] Such a state will be judged by God and once a state commands what God forbids, if Christ is truly Lord, then the Christian has to religious duty to resist. [Emphasis in the original.]

[. . .]

By moving outside its God-ordained sphere, the state thus progressively destroys localism and with it, liberty, as it asserts a messianic (saving) role for itself in the centralized politics of power that exists to serve itself. This is done by attaching to itself the prerogatives of God. It is fascinating to observe in this regard that the theological categories of God’s word are inescapable to all people, and if denied to God are typically transferred to the individual (anarchism) or the state (totalitarianism). When examined through theological lenses, statism involves a pretending to deity by offering everything from usurped sovereignty and law (in terms of human autonomy and positivistic law-making), to providence (cradle-to-grave security through state welfarism), predestination (by social science and planning), incarnation (by the implementing of man’s ‘word’ and idea), atonement (via political reparations, payments, and the politics of guilt), salvation (through a growing world order) and judgement (by threatened environmental and social catastrophe for disobedience) and thus a counterfeit kingdom – the dream of Babel.

The Perfect Dictatorship

According to Aldous Huxley

“The perfect dictatorship would have the appearance of a democracy, but would basically be a prison without walls in which the prisoners would not even dream of escaping. It would essentially be a system of slavery where, through consumption and entertainment, the slaves would love their servitudes.”

Found here.

And here‘s a fitting quote from George Orwell’s “1984”.

The Mythology of Spaceship Earth

Article by Gary North, written in 1969, the year of the first landing on the moon.

The full article is here.

Excerpts:

The gap between moral wisdom and scientific knowledge has been a problem since the scientific rev­olution of the sixteenth century. Immanuel Kant, writing in the late 1700’s, struggled mightily with this very question: How can man bridge the intellectual chasm between scientific knowledge (the realm of law and necessity) and moral knowledge (the realm of freedom and choice) without sacri­ficing the integrity of one or the other? Hegel, Marx, and the mod­ern moral philosophers have all lived in the shadow of this dilem­ma, and the crisis of modern cul­ture reflects man’s failure to re­solve it. The responses to this dilemma, as a rule, take one or the other of two forms, symbolized by Arthur Koestler as the Com­missar on the one hand, and the Yogi on the other.

The Commissar is enraptured with science and technology; he is confident that scientific planning in proper hands can so alter man’s environment as to bring about a new earth and a new mankind. The Yogi takes the opposite tack of disengagement from “the world,” laying stress on each man cultivating his own garden. Find inner peace, he urges, and the ex­ternal world will take care of it­self. His assumption is that sci­ence and technology are neutral, that developing from their inner imperatives they will eventually find their own benevolent level.

[. . .]

Mr. Wicker, unfortunately, made a great leap of faith when he be­gan to compare our heavenly achievement with our supposed capabilities for solving more earthly tasks. He was not alone in this leap. Editorial after edi­torial echoed it, and I single him out only because he is widely read and generally regarded as one of the superior liberal pundits. He makes the leap seem so plausible: “So the conclusion that enlight­ened men might draw is that if the same concentration of effort and control could be applied to some useful earthly project, a similar success might be ob­tained.” He recommends a vast program of publicly-owned hous­ing construction, say, some 26 million new units by 1980.

Flora Lewis’ column was far more optimistic; her horizons for mankind’s planning capabilities are apparently much wider. “If the moon can be grasped, why not the end of hunger, of greed, of warfare, of cruelty?” She admits that there are problems: “They seem provocatively within our new capacities and yet maddeningly distant. We are told it is only lack of will that frustrates these achievements, too.” Nature is boundless, apparently; only our “lack of will” prevents us from unlocking the secrets of paradise and ending the human condition as we know it. This is the mes­sianism of technological planning. It is basic to the thinking of a large segment of our intellectuals, and the success of the Apollo flights has brought it out into the open.

Mr. Wicker wisely set for our government a limited goal. Miss Lewis does not necessarily limit the task to government planning alone, but it is obvious that she is basing her hopes on a technological feat that was essentially a statist project. At this point, several questions should be raised. First, should the state have used some $25 billions of coerced taxes in order to send two men to the moon’s surface? Would men act­ing in a voluntary fashion have expended such a sum in this gen­eration? In short, was it worth the forfeiting of $25 billions worth of alternative uses for the money? Second, given Mr. Wick­er’s plans, could we not ask the same question? Is the construction of public housing, and the use of scarce resources involved in such construction, on a priority scale that high in the minds of the American public? Would a non­inflationary tax cut not be pref­erable?3 It is typical of socialistic thinkers to point to emergency spending (e.g., a war) or some statist rocket program and rec­ommend a transfer of funds from one branch of the state’s planning bureaucracy to another. I have never heard them recommend a reduction of spending by the state. Spending precedents set in war time, like “temporary” taxes, seem to become permanent. Finally, in Miss Lewis’ example, is the mere application of the techniques of applied science sufficient to end warfare and cruelty? Or could it be, as the Apostle James put it, that our wars come from the hearts of men? Conversion, in and of itself, may not redeem tech­nology, but can Miss Lewis be so certain that technology can redeem mankind?

[. . .]

A LEAP OF FAITH

Therefore, to take a leap of faith from some particular in­stance of a “successful” govern­ment project—success defined as the operationally satisfactory com­pletion of a certain unquestioned goal—to the realm of economic planning involves a faith far greater than anything imagined by the medieval scholastics. Yet Dr. Irving Bengelsdorf, a staff writer with the Los Angeles Times, thinks that “there may be hope” along this line of thinking, in spite of the difficulties inherent in any computerized quantification of qualitative personal prefer­ences. He states the problem well; he cannot show how his answer is linked operationally with the prob­lem he states:

In contrast to the novel and un­cluttered venture of getting to the moon, [an] uninhabited, non-social, non-political moon, the problems of society are exceedingly complex to solve because any solution demands that, people have to change their daily ways of life, their interactions with other people. This is difficult to do. For, from birth, people already come overlaid with traditional prejudices, encrusted with hoary cultures, and swaddled in ancient customs. And these are hard to change.

But, there may be hope. Both the Apollo 11 flight and the Manhattan Project of World War II show that once a clear goal has been set, a vast, complex project involving large num­bers of people with different training and skills working together can achieve a solution.

Between the first paragraph and the second lies a social revolution. Also present in the gap is the un­stated assumption that we can re­duce the complexities of society to “a clear goal,” which is pre­cisely the problem governments have not learned to solve. I am at a loss to see how a wartime bomb project or a trip to the moon in­dicate anything except the amaz­ing capacity for spending that gov­ernments possess.

SPACESHIP EARTH

Barbara Ward, one of the most respected Establishment thinkers in Britain, and former editor of The Economist, has taken Buck­minster Fuller’s spaceship analogy and has turned it into an effective neo-Fabian propaganda device: “The most rational way of con­sidering the whole race today is to see it as the ship’s crew of a single spaceship on which all of us, with a remarkable combination of security and vulnerability, are making our pilgrimage through infinity.” [. . .]

[. . .]

The problem with all of this “spaceship reasoning” is that it assumes as solved those funda­mental problems that need solving in order to make possible the spaceship analogy. The thing which strikes me as ironic is that the language of the spaceship involves a chain of command approach to the solution of human problems. Those humanitarian intellectuals who decry the petty military dicta­torships in underdeveloped nations want to impose a massive system of command over the whole earth. That is what the call to world gov­ernment implies. The spaceship analogy necessarily views society as a vast army. Yet for some reason, Hayek’s identical conclusion about the implications of socialist planning is invariably rejected as absurd. It is the mentality of the militarist. Miss Ward even is will­ing to admit that our experiences in wartime helped to create the foundation of modern economic policy:

Thus, not by theory or dogma but largely by war-induced experience, the Western market economies have come to accept the effectiveness and usefulness of a partnership between public and private activity. . . . but there is now no question of exclusive reliance on any one instrument or any one method. The pragmatic market economies have worked out their own evolving conceptions of public and private responsibility and the result is the dynamic but surprisingly stable mixed economy of the Western world.

THE CHAOS OF NONECONOMICS

I would have put it a different way. I would have pointed to the signs of our contemporary sys­tem’s increasing inefficiency, cor­ruption, and extralegal practices which we more usually associate with those warfare economies from which she says we borrowed our planning techniques. What we have created is non-economics, and Miss Ward proclaims the ben­efits of such a system:

But, on the whole, in economics the Western world can move from posi­tion to position with little sense of contradiction and incompatibility. We had no very fixed views before so we do not have to bother too much about what we believe now. It is a consider­able source of strength.

This, then, is “reason, spaceship style.” It is the triumph of intel­lectual chaos, and it is inevitably recreating the economy in its own image.

GROUNDING THE SHIP

Dr. William G. Pollard, a physi­cist who was a part of the Man­hattan Project, has written a little book which tries to undergird the spaceship analogy with a theolog­ical framework. His theology is radical, but he is honest in seeing the purpose of the Apollo flights as being ultimately religious. He thinks it marks the end of the era of science-worship. Diminishing marginal returns are about to set in:

Sending men to the moon and bringing them back in 1969 may prove to be from the perspective of the twentieth century the central symbol of the golden age of science in the twenty-first. Like the great pyramids of Egypt or the lofty cathedrals of medieval Europe, this feat will stand out as a peak expression of the spirit of the golden age; the maximum economic investment which a great civili­zation could make in a feat which served no useful purpose other than making manifest the lofty height to which the spirit of an age could rise. It will not be worth repeating except perhaps by Russia for the purpose of sharing in its glory. Thereafter, even more massive applications of science and technology to basic human needs will have become so urgently neces­sary that no further diversion of available talent and resources to manned space flights can be per­mitted.

We can hope that he is correct, but who knows for certain? The government was so successful, as it usually is, in achieving a feat “which served no useful purpose” other than its own glory, that we may have more of the same. But this much should be clear: the analogy of spaceship earth is more than an analogy; it is a call to religious commitment. The call is to faith in centralized planning.

At the beginning of this essay, I pointed to the dual theories of regeneration, symbolized by the Yogi and the Commissar. They feed on each other, take in each other’s intellectual washing, so to speak. If we are to confront the mythology of spaceship earth, it must be in terms of a rival moral philosophy, one which has social and economic implications, as well as technological implications. We must deny the validity of any vision of man as central planner, a little god who would arrange in an omniscient fashion the lives of all men in all the spheres of their existence, as if we were some per­manent military crew. We must acknowledge the validity of the late C. S. Lewis’ warning in The Abolition of Man that when we hear men speaking of “man’s tak­ing control of man,” we should understand that it implies certain men taking control of all the others.

When men seek to divinize the state, they succeed merely in cre­ating hell on earth. The Christian church fought this point out with the Roman Emperors, both pagan and Arian. The state may not claim to be God’s exclusive or even chief representative on earth.”’ The the­ology of spaceship earth would have us return to the religious political theory of the ancient world, all in the name of progres­sive technology and planning.

The astronauts are back on earth. We must seek to keep them here. It is time to ground our spaceship programs, both interplanetary and domestic. Let the captains go down with their ideological ship. There are better ways of allocating our scarce resources than in construct­ing spaceship earth.