ENVIRONMENTALISM OR THE END OF MAN

SUMMARY A free market, economic system is far more environmentally friendly than any statist system, including the welfare state, socialism (whether democratic or centrally planned), or fascism. The world might be different had government never intervened to protect the environment but rather left all matters to property owners to sort out. Environmentalism and the government interference do not resolve environmental problems. On the contrary, environmentalism, especially through the notion of global warming, real or imagined, is an excuse for collectivist control of the economic system. And if we are to allow the really green members of the environmentalism movement to govern our every day lives with their apocalyptic sermons, we will soon assist at our very own extinction. 1. INTRODUCTION A free market, political, economic system is far more environmentally friendly than any statist system, including the welfare state, socialism (whether democratic or centrally planned), or fascism. The world might be different had government never intervened to protect the environment but rather left all matters to property owners to sort out. This fact needs to be recalled when we consider such current problems as those involving what is commonly referred to as the environment. What might have prevented some of the lamentable pollution that we now experience? No, not all of it was preventable. Some environmental problems are inherent in the ecology of the globe - for example, the Los Angeles basin had been subject to atmosphere inversions throughout the past which left it filled with what we now call smog but was the combination of haze, dust, smoke from wild fires, and so forth. Other so-called environmental problems, such as wildlife extinction, also occurred not through human agency but because of natural events. Only when human agency is involved - so that we can consider the different choices people could have made - can we entertain the possibility of having done things better. Indeed, a point rarely noted these days, the very idea of critically assessing past policies and conduct involves the assumption that human beings can make basic choices and they might have made ones different from those they did actually make. In this paper I bring forth arguments stressing the fact that environmentalism and the government interference do not resolve environmental problems. On the contrary, environmentalism, especially through the notion of global warming, real or imagined, is an excuse for collectivist control of the economic system. And if we are to allow the really green members of the environmentalism movement to govern our every day lives with their apocalyptic sermons, we will soon assist at our very own extinction. 1

2. THE STATE INTERVENED AND IT ALL WENT DOWNHILL FROM THERE When Jayant Bhandari, a Canadian-established businessman, went to pay a visit to one of the three public sector electricity-generation plant in New Delhi, one of their top officers told him this: I dump the ash (the residue from burning coal) in the river, I do not pay the railways for delivery of the coal, I do not pay the coal company, and I will keep running it this way. The pollution related departments of the government had a lot of teeth to stop such polluting electricity plants. But then imagine, how could one arm of the government stop the other arm? Instead of closing these plants down they agreed on sanitizing statistics to fool everyone - and this was so oft repeated that they started to believe in it themselves. How could this cover up be done so easily I dont know as one of these power plants is right opposite the South East Asian Regional Office of the World Health Organization, the other two not too far away. They spew black soot and cover WHOs building. A commonly favored argument towards state intervention in the economy and thus in the environmental issues is the fact that thanks to its influence many good things were developed. Such good things are the Internet, which rose out of the governments ARPANET system, the revolution in flight which came about not only because of the work of private geniuses but also because a bunch of bureaucrats at NASA pushed it, and because those bureaucrats were lucky to have had as their boss since 1992 an engineer named Daniel Goldin. If the truth be said, the ARPANET system did give rise to the Internet but, as many historians argue, that was of minimal significance. The initial ARPANET was clumsy and only after a demand for the service developed did it become efficient and useful. Kelly was right - as was, also, former U.S. Vice President Al Gore - that the initial ideas that produced the Internet had come from efforts by the Department of Defense to enhance the defense of the country. However, these ideas could have developed independently and once they became divorced from state matters become far more productive than beforehand. The story is the same all the way across, including the flight industry where government airports have been the source of much consternation both for environmentalists and for those with different visions as to how that industry might and should have developed. The bottom line, though, is this: Governments use force to accomplish their goals. Force, unless used in defense - as the military is supposed to use it - wreaks havoc in its path, even where the ostensible results seem to be grand. When law and public policy favor the system of eminent domain and the use of publicly owned lands and waters for whatever happens to be in democratic demand, the result is akin to a zero sum game: the favored policy or law wins and the disfavored one loses. Whereas in the free market there are many demands that get satisfied to a greater or lesser extent. My main point, then, is plain: had there been a consistent and firmly implemented system of private property rights, there would not have been massive environmental mismanagement. But it is better late than never. 3. THE KYOTO PROTOCOL: WHEN STATES CAME TOGETHER AND MESSED UP BIG TIME 2

According to the international environmentalist movement, such complex problems as environmental problems can only be solved at international level. Thus the Kyoto Protocol, an international statist intervention offspring. Working out the rights and the wrongs of the international effort to reduce global warming is far trickier than you may imagine. Its been portrayed as a battle between good and evil, good guys and bad guys, but in truth there are no good guys The environmentalists whose views tend to dominate the media tell us that all the countries attending the climate change negotiations in Kyoto have honorable intentions except one: Australia On the other hand, the government and the energy industry tell us that the cost to Australians in lost incomes and jobs not to mention exorbitant petrol prices from the uniform gas reduction targets that could be imposed on us are horrible (Ross Gittins, Sydney Morning Herald, 3 December, 1997). United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Control (IPCC) sponsored the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol by the most industrialized nations around the world, with estimated costs of legally binding compliance estimated at over $150 billion per year. The chief promotional artifact in the proceedings, the "hockey stick" historical temperature chart of IPCC Third Scientific Assessment Chapter Lead Author Michael Mann, is shown to be based on a computer program that produces hockey sticks from over 99 percent of ten thousand samples of random noise fed to it. Stephen McIntyre, retired Canadian minerals consultant, demonstrates numerous other defects and distortions in both the data and statistical methodology, ultimately the subject of a front-page article in the Wall Street Journal of February 14 and a follow-up editorial on February 18. Any government investigation? Despite the fact that the US government funded eleven out of the twelve "Funded Proposals" cited in Dr. Manns curriculum vitae, it neither conducts audits of the results reported nor requires that information be made available to others for conducting audits at their own expense and initiative. But the Kyoto Protocol remains in force and legally binding. Government and science have found each other, and the spawn of this marriage look set to destroy global wealth on a scale that will render the greatest of historys wars trivial by comparison. The ultimate outrage of all this is that the people who are subjected to the ravages of the wrong-headed policies promoted by these self-seekers are taxed to pay for the production of this junk science to begin with. Actually, as described in the Wall Street Journal editorial of February 18, two climatologists, Willie Soon and Sallie L. Baliunas, had the temerity to advance criticism of Manns article in 2003. The tsunami of protest from the academy against this suggestion that man may not be warming up his planet after all would have made Trofim Lysenko, the Soviet Unions quack official geneticist of the 1930s, proud. 4. ENVIRONMENTALISM IS NOXIOUS While it is not necessary to question the good intentions and sincerity of the overwhelming majority of the members of the environmental or ecology movement, it is vital that the public realize that in this seemingly lofty and noble movement itself can be found more than a little evidence of the most profound toxicity.

Consider, for example, the following quotation from David M. Graber, a research biologist with the National Park Service, in his prominently featured Los Angeles Times book review of Bill McKibben's The End of Nature: "This [man's "remaking the earth by degrees"] makes what is happening no less tragic for those of us who value wildness for its own sake, not for what value it confers upon mankind. I, for one, cannot wish upon either my children or the rest of Earth's biota a tame planet, be it monstrous or however unlikely benign. McKibben is a biocentrist, and so am I. We are not interested in the utility of a particular species or free-flowing river, or ecosystem, to mankind. They have intrinsic value, more value to me than another human body, or a billion of them. "Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, are not as important as a wild and healthy planet. I know social scientists who remind me that people are part of nature, but it isn't true. Somewhere along the line- at about a billion years ago, maybe half that - we quit the contract and became a cancer. We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth. "It is cosmically unlikely that the developed world will choose to end its orgy of fossil-energy consumption, and the Third World its suicidal consumption of landscape. Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along." While Mr. Graber openly wishes for the death of a billion people, Mr. McKibben, the author he reviewed, quotes with approval John Muir's benediction to alligators, describing it as a "good epigram" for his own, "humble approach": "'Honorable representatives of the great saurians of older creation, may you long enjoy your lilies and rushes, and be blessed now and then with a mouthful of terror-stricken man by way of a dainty!'" Such statements represent pure, unadulterated poison. They express ideas and wishes which, if acted upon, would mean terror and death for enormous numbers of human beings. These statements, and others like them, are made by prominent members of the environmental movement. The significance of such statements cannot be diminished by ascribing them only to a small fringe of the environmental movement. Indeed, even if such views were indicative of the thinking of only 5 or 10 percent of the members of the environmental movement - the "deep ecology," Earth First! Wing - they would represent toxicity in the environmental movement as a whole not at the level of parts per billion or even parts per million, but at the level of parts per hundred, which, of course, is an enormously higher level of toxicity than is deemed to constitute a danger to human life in virtually every other case in which deadly poison is present. The idea of nature's intrinsic value inexorably implies a desire to destroy man and his works because it implies a perception of man as the systematic destroyer of the good, and thus as the systematic doer of evil. Just as man perceives coyotes, wolves, and rattlesnakes as evil because they regularly destroy the cattle and sheep he values as sources of food and clothing, so on the premise of nature's intrinsic value, the environmentalists view man as evil, because, in the pursuit of his wellbeing, man systematically destroys the wildlife, jungles, and rock formations that the environmentalists hold to be intrinsically valuable. Indeed, from the perspective of such alleged intrinsic values of nature, the degree of man's alleged destructiveness and evil is directly in proportion to his loyalty to his essential nature. Man is the rational being. It is his application of his reason in the form of science, technology, and an industrial civilization that enables him to act on nature on the enormous scale on which he now does. Thus, it is his possession and use of reason - manifested in his technology and industry - for which he is hated. 4

In other words, the doctrine of intrinsic value is nothing but a doctrine of the negation of human values. It is pure nihilism. It should be realized that it is logically implicit in what has just been said that to establish a public office such as that recently proposed in California, of "environmental advocate," would be tantamount to establishing an office of Negator of Human Valuation. The work of such an office would be to stop man from achieving his values for no other reason than that he was man and wanted to achieve them. Of course, the environmental movement is not pure poison. Very few people would listen to it if it were. As I have said, it is poisonous only at the level of several parts per ten. Mixed in with the poison and overlaying it as a kind of sugar coating is the advocacy of many measures which have the avowed purpose of promoting human life and well-being, and among these, some that, considered in isolation, might actually achieve that purpose. The problem is that the mixture is poisonous. And thus, when one swallows environmentalism, one inescapably swallows poison. Given the underlying nihilism of the movement, it is certainly not possible to accept at face value any of the claims it makes of seeking to improve human life and well-being, especially when following its recommendations would impose on people great deprivation or cost. Indeed, nothing could be more absurd or dangerous than to take advice on how to improve one's life and well-being from those who wish one dead and whose satisfaction comes from human terror, which, of course, as I have shown, is precisely what is wished in the environmental movement - openly and on principle. This conclusion, it must be stressed, applies irrespective of the scientific or academic credentials of an individual. If an alleged scientific expert believes in the intrinsic value of nature, then to seek his advice is equivalent to seeking the advice of a medical doctor who was on the side of the germs rather than of the patient, if such a thing can be imagined. Obviously, Congressional committees taking testimony from alleged expert witnesses on the subject of proposed environmental legislation need to be aware of this fact and never to forget it. Not surprisingly, in virtually every case, the claims made by the environmentalists have turned out to be false or simply absurd. Consider, for example, the recent case of Alar, a chemical spray used for many years on apples in order to preserve their color and freshness. Here, it turned out that even if the environmentalists' claims had actually been true, and the use of Alar would result in 4.2 deaths per million over a seventy-year lifetime, all that would have been signified was that eating apples sprayed with Alar would then have been less dangerous than driving to the supermarket to buy the apples! And now, in yet another overthrow of the environmentalists' claims, a noted climatologist, Prof. Robert Pease, has shown that it is impossible for chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) to destroy large quantities of ozone in the stratosphere because relatively few of them are even capable of reaching the stratosphere in the first place. He also shows that the celebrated ozone "hole" over Antarctica every fall is a phenomenon of nature, in existence since long before CFCs were invented, and results largely from the fact that during the long Antarctic night ultraviolet sunlight is not present to create fresh ozone. The words of Paul Ehrlich and his incredible claims in connection with the "greenhouse effect" should be recalled. In the first wave of ecological hysteria, this "scientist" declared: "At the moment we cannot predict what the overall climatic results will be of our using the atmosphere as a garbage dump. We do know that very small changes in either direction in the average temperature of the Earth could be very serious. With a few degrees of cooling, a new ice age might be upon us, with rapid and drastic effects on the agricultural productivity of the temperate regions. With a few degrees 5

of heating, the polar ice caps would melt, perhaps raising ocean levels 250 feet. Gondola to the Empire State Building, anyone?" The 250-foot rise in the sea level projected by Ehrlich as the result of global warming has been scaled back somewhat. According to McKibben, the "worst case scenario" is now supposed to be eleven feet, by the year 2100, with something less than seven feet considered more likely. According to a United Nations panel of alleged scientists, it is supposed to be 25.6 inches. (Even this still more limited projected rise did not stop the UN panel from calling for an immediate 60 percent reduction in carbon-dioxide emissions to try to prevent it.) Perhaps of even greater significance is the continuous and profound distrust of science and technology that the environmental movement displays. The one thing, the environmental movement holds, that science and technology can do so well that we are entitled to have unlimited confidence in them is forecast the weather - for the next one hundred years! It is, after all, supposedly on the basis of a weather forecast that we are being asked to abandon the Industrial Revolution, or, as it is euphemistically put, "to radically and profoundly change the way in which we live" - to our enormous material detriment. The meaning of this insanity is that industrial civilization is to be abandoned because this is what must be done to avoid bad weather. All right, very bad weather. There is actually a remarkable new principle implied here, concerning how man can cope with his environment. Instead of our taking action upon nature, as we have always believed we must do, we shall henceforth control the forces of nature more to our advantage by means of our inaction. Indeed, if we do not act, no significant threatening forces of nature will arise! The threatening forces of nature are not the product of nature, but of us! Thus speaks the environmental movement. The reason that one after another of the environmentalists' claims turn out to be proven wrong is that they are made without any regard for truth in the first place. In making their claims, the environmentalists reach for whatever is at hand that will serve to frighten people, make them lose confidence in science and technology, and, ultimately, lead them to deliver themselves up to the environmentalists' tender mercies. Such claims have nothing to do either with actual experimentation or with the concept of causality. Direct evidence of the willful dishonesty of the environmental movement comes from one of its leading representatives, Stephen Schneider, who is well-known for his predictions of global catastrophe. In the October 1989 issue of Discover magazine, he is quoted (with approval) as follows: ". . . To do this, we need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public's imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have. This 'double ethical bind' we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest." 5. CLIMATE CHANGE: SHATTERING THE MYTH Climates change and have been changing for as long as the earth has existed. Changes affect air temperature, rainfall, sail moisture and sea levels. Sea levels around the world have risen between 10 and 25 cm over the past 100 years. Average temperatures of the past few years have been the warmest since 1860. Night temperatures have also tended to increase more than daytime temperatures. 6

Scientists suggested in 1996 that between 1990 and 2100 average temperatures will rise 2C, average sea levels will rise about 50 cm and there will be more extremely hot days and fewer cold ones. The world's climate is in constant flux: on time-scales from days to millennia, global and regional temperature, wind and rainfall patterns are changing. Over periods of decades and centuries, the most significant factor affecting climate appears to be changes in the output of the sun. Man's emissions of 'greenhouse gases' (GHGs) also play a role in altering climate. However, estimates suggest that only 30 to 40 per cent of the warming seen over the past century was caused by GHGs. Measuring climate change: how accurate is the scientific data about climate change? There are no agreed ways to measure climate change. Measurements have only been made for a few decades. Scientific knowledge remains incomplete. Although there are measured changes in climates, there is some conflicting evidence about the accuracy of this evidence. Given the uncertainty about climate change, the precautionary principle implies that we should improve our understanding of the world's climate and do what we can to ensure that we are able to adapt most effectively. This means collecting better data, encouraging scientists to develop and test competing theories about the causes and consequences of climate change, freeing up the world's markets, and eliminating subsidies. We should not wait until we know everything before we take preventive measures.

6. RECYCLING DOES NOT PAY! What's wrong with recycling? The answer is simple; it doesn't pay. And since it doesn't pay it is an inefficient use of the time, money, and scarce resources. That's right, as Mises would have argued: let prices be your guide. Prices are essential to evaluate actions ex post. If the accounting of a near past event reveals a financial loss, the activity was a waste of both the entrepreneur's and society's scarce resources. The same applies to recycling. What is the true cost of all factors involved in the recycling activity? I haven't a clue. Though using Misesian logic I know that the costs of recycling exceed the benefits. This is the simple result of the observation that recycling doesn't return a financial profit. Since there is no market for recyclable materials, at least no market sufficient to at least return my investment in soap and water, not to mention time and labor, I conclude that there is no pressing need for recycling. If landfills were truly in short supply then the cost of dumping waste would quickly rise. I would then see the financial benefit to reducing my waste volume, and since the recycling bin does not count toward waste volume, the more in the recycling bin, the less in the increasingly expensive garbage cans. Prices drive entrepreneurial calculations and, hence, human action. Recycling is no different. Come on now, there can't be any benefit to even the neoclassical society if you actually have to pay someone to remove recyclables. That recycling doesn't pay signifies that resources devoted to recycling activities would be better utilized in other modes of production. Instead of wasting resources on recycling, it would be 7

more prudent to invest that money so that new recipes could be created to better conserve scarce materials in the production process. Human action guides resources toward the activities that meet the most pressing needs. This movement of resources means that those activities that don't meet pressing needs are relatively expensive. Why? Those activities have to bid for factors of production along with the profitable activities- activities that are meeting the most pressing needs. The profitable activities will drive the cost of those scarce factors upward leading to financial ruin for those activities that don't satisfy the most pressing needs. Forced recycling is such a failed activity. The only caveat to this train of thought is what Rothbard wrote about when he discussed psychic profit: the perceived benefit one gets from performing an action, even if that action leads to an economic loss. Who reaps the real psychic reward from recycling? The statist do-gooder and the obsessed conservationist. Since recycling is now a statist goal, the do-gooders and greens force the cost of recycling on the unsuspecting masses by selling recycling as a pseudo-spiritual activity. In addition to these beneficiaries, there are those who have not considered the full costs of recycling, but their psychic benefit is more ephemeral than real. The other winners are the companies that do the collecting and process the materials, an industry that is sustained by mandates at the local level. If recycling at a financial loss leads you to greater psychic profit, then recycle, recycle, recycle. Let your personal preferences guide your actions, but don't force your preference schedule on others who have a different preference rank for their own actions. And, do not delude yourself into thinking that you are economizing anything; you are simply increasing your psychic profit at the expense of a more rational investment. But, hey, your actions are your business; just don't force your preferences to be my business.
7.

THE OBVIOUS SOLUTION TO ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS: PRIVATIZE, PRIVATIZE, PRIVATIZE!

Consider the proposal that current champions of free-market environmentalism often make, a proposal that defenders of the politicization of environmental problems oppose almost automatically. This proposal boils down to the very general principle, namely, that it is better all around for land and other property to be owned privately than publicly. Common or public ownership results, in other words, in what has been dubbed the tragedy of the commons. This occurs when everyone in a given society is convinced that some realm belongs to us all, so that we all are entitled to make use of it to our hearts' content. This leads to depletion of resources. The remedy champions of politicized environmentalism offer, namely, that the government ration our use of public or common resources, will not work. Environmentalists may gain temporary advantages from governments, but soon other interests take over. Imagine how it might have been had the free-market idea been made part of basic law: all land would be owned by individuals and any use made of the land would require the agreement of the owners. This would have made it nearly impossible to implement massive technological projects such as building railways, highways, airports, sports and recreational arenas unless complete consent had been given by the owners over whose property these projects would have had to be constructed. 8

The Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution suggests this approach, stating that only for public use may private property be taken. Public policies must protect individual rights. So, very little of what there is to be owned can belong to the public. The rest must remain at the disposal of private owners. Such a general approach to ownership of land, for example, would not have made possible the implementation of massive projects in the name of the public and thus would have diversified resource use throughout the country. The building of railways, highways and many other pseudo-public projects would not have occurred with the aggressiveness they actually occurred in this country's history. It is the contention of those who champion a free society that implementing the principles of the right to private property on the broadest possible scope would have worked out for better as far as our environmental woes are concerned. Nevertheless, it is better late than never! Thus the best approach to environmental issues is to privatize - that is how responsible environmental management is encouraged (though never guaranteed, as it certainly isn't when government takes on the task). Societies where the principle of freedom of association is upheld and where private property makes it possible for one to enjoy a significant measure of sovereignty, are certainly better ones than those growing in levels of involuntary servitude, even to the highest or noblest goals one can imagine, including environmental rectitude. This is true, beyond any reasonable doubt. Yet, sadly, most propose political solutions to problems they see with the environment and support state regimentation as the default solution to whatever problem they perceive.

CITED WORKS Tibor Machan: Environmentalism without Government, posted on Monday, June 20, 2005. George Reisman: The Toxicity of Environmentalism, posted on Monday, October 03, 2005 on www.mises.org. Jayant Bhandari: The Polluting State, posted on Wednesday, July 20, 2005. N. Joseph Potts: The Climate Debate: When Science Serves the State, posted on Wednesday, March 02, 2005, on www.mises.org. Jim Fedako: Recycling: What a Waste!, posted on Thursday, September 22, 2005, on www.mises.org. Ike C. Sugg and Urs P. Kreuter: Elephants and Ivory: Lessons from the Trade Ban, posted on 01 November 1994, on www.mises.org.