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COMMENTARY
November 14, 2007
Kyoto'd repeatedly
I do not think market forces are good, or bad, but rather that they are part of nature. I take a similar view of the wind: it is there. It makes more sense to set your sails with the wind than against it. But this is less a moral issue than a question of basic intelligence, and if the solo sailor wants to tack around the world in the face of all known trade winds, let him try.It only becomes a moral issue when we are not dealing with a solo sailor, but with a mad captain taking the rest of us on the slowest possible boat to China, with the best possible chance of drowning. It is in such circumstances that the refusal to sail with the wind becomes a valid topic for public debate. My opposition to “Kyoto” (not the city, which is still beautiful in parts, but the environmental protocol of 1997 carrying forward the crazed environmental principles by which we were Rio'd in 1992, and will be Bali'd next month) is thus a moral objection. Our political masters persist in advancing schemes of international economic regulation that, apart from their intrinsic cost, confuse the issue of punishing polluters. Oil at 100 dollars a barrel is an environmental solution. It is not the best possible environmental solution to the general planetary exhalation of carbon, but it moves in the right approximate direction. The more oil costs, the greater the inspiration to technological improvement. There are, however, two grand misfortunes that are also advanced by dearer oil. One is that cheaper technologies are not necessarily cleaner. For the first time in a generation, Europe is now importing North American coal. There are better scrubbers on the smokestacks, today, but still, just think of it. There are also better scrubbers on oil refineries, and both emission and fuel-efficiency standards for oil have been considerably improved. We get coal now, chiefly because the environmentalists successfully fought off nuclear and other more benign technologies (e.g. urban trash incineration). Darn them: darn them to heck. The other is that countries becoming richer by dearer oil are in very few cases our allies. Essentially unearned oil wealth is now powering the rebuilding of Russia's armed forces, for a renewed threat to the security of Western Europe. It is in the hands of Saudi and other Arabian sponsors of international Islamism and terrorism. It is assisting Iran in its bid for regional hegemony, while making possible phenomena such as Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. It helps push countries from Nigeria to Indonesia down similar paths to perdition. And even within Canada, the sight of gleaming oil profits in Alberta is turning that province politically towards the kind of tax-and-spend quasi-socialism that has been the ruin of other once industrious polities. Which is why, I think, libertarians who argue that “the market will take care of it” are too clever by half. Yes, free trade and nearly unregulated domestic capitalism have proved good news, economically, and not bad news, morally, in countries that were short of natural resources. For the people in such countries had to earn their wealth, by developing skills and mastering the etiquette of trade. Whereas, the kind of wealth that comes without effort is among the most morally corrupting forces known to man. When the oil runs out -- either from physical exhaustion, or because it has been supplanted by superior technology -- the countries that built their economies around it will be utterly ruined. This is a point that can be grasped without the use of statistics. It does not follow, however, that “market forces” must be systematically resisted in such countries, or anywhere, to achieve a moral end. Behind the “Kyoto process” and all the variants now being tried against the (imaginary) threat of global warming, is the assumption that some international regulatory regime can guide us to a less carbon-choking future. But whatever the mechanism, it will produce the perverse results we are already witnessing, in which the most environmentally-advanced countries collect taxes and carbon credits to be dumped into the least environmentally-advanced countries, where the money is squandered. This is what all regulatory regimes end up doing: punishing virtue, and rewarding vice. “Global warming” is a crock (according not only to me), but pollution is a real, material, demonstrable evil, and not abstract. It is also a vast grey area, for there is no form of biological life, including the postmodern human, that does not produce waste products. This does not, however, prevent us from seeing the obvious: that the planet is being poisoned, on an unprecedented scale, by the kind of crude and irresponsible industrialization that is encouraged by authoritarian, centralized regimes. (Mainland China comes to mind.) Virtue is its own reward, various sages have assured us. What we need, now as always, is to discover more effective measures for punishing vice. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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