Another "Answer": Global Warming

As I occasionally do, I took the time today to answer another "Facebook Question". This time, the question is about Anthropogenic Global Warming, asking:

Do you believe that human-caused global warming is real and a serious long-term threat?

My short answer was "maybe". But as one is supposed to do in these situations, I did take the time to elaborate my position, and since I already did the work, I figure I might as well put it right here as well.

So here it is:

There are multiple issues here that everyone seems to take for granted as all one single, unified question. To say "human-caused global warming is real" is one question, but then to say that it is a "serious long-term threat" is another question which requires better definitions.

So I feel compelled to break it down a little bit:

• Is global warming real? I think it's clear that it is.
• Do people contribute to it? Again - I think it's clear that we must contribute in some way. We are part of the ecology of the planet after all.
• Are human actions the primary driver of GW? Ah... Well, that's much less clear, isn't it? CO2 only makes up a very small fraction of overall greenhouse gases and human beings, with all our cars and power plants, still contribute only a minuscule amount of overall CO2 emissions.
• Is global warming a serious threat? To whom? Certainly not the Earth itself, which has been much much warmer over its 4 Billion year history. To people? Not necessarily... Consider that we are talking about 1-2 degrees C over the course of 100 years based on current models which also require assumptions about rather significant positive feedback loops in order to be accurate to begin with. The evidence for these feedback loops is a lot less clear than it is often portrayed... and estimates of warming without the worst-case assumptions about feedback loops suggests only a fraction of 1 degree Celsius increase in temperature over a Century - which is far less severe than the worst case scenarios. In fact, in either case, over the time frame we're talking about, the effects of global climate change are so slow and small that they are not actually perceivable by direct observation... Which, by the way, makes comments like "its been blazing hot" utterly useless and not at all representative of evidence for global warming.

So now we really have to stop and start thinking a bit more... What aspects of warming are "a threat" to people?

Certainly if we're talking about the whole world turning into the Saharan Desert, that seems like it would qualify as a legitimate "threat", right? But that's not at all what anyone's actually talking about - and the historical record shows that in previous periods of significantly warmer global climate, such as the Medieval Warm Period, resulted in an impressive growth of plant & animal life as well as provided opportunities for human beings in previously inhospitable environments to grow more and wider varieties of crops - and for longer amounts of each year - than in colder times.

That sounds like a good thing to me.

But let's assume for the sake of argument that Global Warming is a serious long-term threat. Let's take all of the most extreme positions we can. Let's say that in 100 years, global mean temperatures will be 2 degrees (C) higher than they are right now. Let's say that causes significant melting of polar ice-caps and higher sea levels and everything else that would be worst-case scenario.

Ok.

How do we solve the problem?

This is where the assumptions of most people arguing these issues really go off the deep-end, as far as I'm concerned. To jump from "global warming is a serious threat", to; "we need to spend trillions of dollars on international programs and control the activities of billions of people around the world to combat this problem" requires dozens of, honestly, really tremendously bad assumptions.

For instance, to get there you'd have to assume that:

1. We know enough about climate to know how to control it. (We don't)
2. We CAN reverse the effects of positive feedback loops by inhibiting CO2 emissions. (Not likely)
3. The best way to reduce CO2 emissions and fight climate change is through government force. (When has that ever proven to be a really viable means of accomplishing any goal effectively or efficiently?)
4. The benefits of such policies outweigh their considerable costs. (Virtually impossible)

The big assumptions that I am frequently shocked that anyone takes even remotely seriously is the idea that a handful of politicians has enough knowledge between them about the huge variety of issues they'd need to understand to make even remotely effective decisions in this arena that they can accurately predict and plan out people's lives 100 years into the future.

Likewise, the idea that taking trillions of dollars worth of potential capital out of the global economy and blowing it on a single (or even a dozen or so) top-down anti-climate change goal makes the even more ridiculous assumption that human beings benefit more from the destruction of wealth than from the creation of it. That's just crazy-talk.

If you really want to save people from even the worst effects of climate change, the best thing to do that I can think of is to encourage global production & innovation on scales never-before-seen in human history.

Don't worry, even in the post apocalyptic world of
global climate change, you'll still get a great pair of Jeans!

And hot chicks... Don't forget about the hot chicks.

Freedom and sound economics can (and very much will if we let it) turn people loose to innovate and engineer new solutions to problems like energy efficiency, air conditioning, biotechnology & food production, and all of the other issues that any potential global warming might effect. The way to help the poorest people in the world is by producing enough wealth that natural disasters have limited effects.

Consider the effects of earthquakes in places like Haiti vs. Los Angeles. Ask yourself why the Hatian people were so screwed over by something that happens fairly frequently in other parts of the world with little of the same consequences. The answer is because of wealth - not the concentration of money, mind you all - but the differences in real productive output of different types of economies. Personally... I think we need to focus way more on bringing people up to our standard of living - and that definitely means finding ways to make energy much more widely and cheaply available to everyone around the world - rather than focusing on capping growth and stalling advancement.

Politically directed solutions are - in my opinion - the worst way to deal with the negative or harmful effects of natural global phenomenon like climate change... So ultimately, even if it was true that it is human-caused and a serious threat, that doesn't instantly give rise to the conclusion that we should advocate the kinds of policies of people like Al Gore.

And that I think is the more salient issue at stake.

Peter Schiff on Krugman

Good lord, Paul Krugman is a moron... Here Peter Schiff explains to Paul Krugman, that in fact... No... We can't print money indefinitely or buy our own bonds.  It's flat out impossible how ridiculously bad an economist Krugman is.

Deliberately Misplacing Blame

Let’s play a game. I have a not-so-famous quotation to share with you, then you guess who said it…

“We might have done nothing. That would have been utter ruin. Instead we met the situation with proposals to private business and to Congress of the most gigantic program of economic defense and counterattack ever evolved in the history of the Republic.”

I’ll give you a hint; it was spoken by a sitting US president. Not quite enough? How about multiple-choice… Was the speaker;

• A. Current president, Barack Obama
• B. Overseer of the 1st round, $700 Billion bailout, George W. Bush
• C. New Deal designer, Franklin Delano Roosevelt
• D. "Hands-off", Free-market supporter Herbert Hoover

Ponder that for a minute or two, and we’ll come back to the answer later on…

Geesh! Free-market, laissez-faire, Capitalism sure has been taking a beating in the press lately. The official story seems to be that everyone knows the financial crisis represents a failure of the capitalist system, and now only a “gigantic program of economic defense” will save us.

I suppose that would make plenty of sense, if only the niggling little details we’re being told day-in and day-out were actually true…

It’s rather amazing the lengths to which many of the people chronicling the economic crisis are willing to stretch reality in order to ascribe blame to those they wish to be responsible, all-the-while ignoring those who actually were. One depressingly common tactic, seemingly en vogue at the moment, is to falsely claim that a person held certain beliefs in order to denigrate the person by association. Examples abound, but the case du jour is Thom Hartmann’s traducement of laissez-faire’s “intellectual roots” in the Huffington Post:

"The intellectual forefathers and mothers of the insane conservative economic policies that have brought us to where we are include Ludwig Von Mises, Friedrich Von Hayeck [sic], Milton Friedman, Alan Greenspan, Tom Freidman [sic], Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, and Ayn Rand."

Hartmann will likely get away with this slap-dash conflation of (misspelled) names, simply because the people he impugns are mostly dead and relatively unknown to the average reader. Hartmann isn’t alone either; it seems almost daily we read another set of distortions, myths & outright lies trotted out by similarly minded writers.

The reality, quite unfortunately for Mr. Hartmann and friends, is that his claim is built on a wobbly foundation of misinformation. Why?

Well for starters because Mises, Hayek, Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand have not a whit to do with Robert Rubin, Tom Friedman, or Larry Summers and next to nothing to do with Alan Greenspan.

Without delving too heavily into the differences between the Austrian (Mises, Hayek, Rand) and the Chicago (Friedman) schools of economics, these names can at least be mentioned together as prominnt supporters of economic liberty… But to even mention them in conjunction with the other four names is simply bizarre!

Of course, without attaching the former set to the latter, Hartmann’s attempt at besmirching the free-market fails spectacularly, as London School economists Rubin and Summers, journalist Tom Friedman and ex-Federal Reserve Chairman Greenspan aren’t free-marketers at all, yet were the only ones who were in anyway responsible for policy decisions over the last 30 years.

Mises and Hayek in particular, Friedman to a large degree, and Ayn Rand (with characteristically vitriolic passion) opposed the Federal Reserve and central banking system on which the US economy is now based. They also all opposed subsidies, tariffs, protectionist legislation, and would have been positively mortified by the bailouts. Each advocated strong penalties and policing against fraud (in fact, all four argued that the only legitimate purpose of government was defense against the initiation of force –protection of natural rights, including life, liberty & property). So yes, it’s no secret they advocated a laissez-faire system, but to suggest that laissez-faire has anything at all to do with the economic policies of the last 30 years – or the past 100 – is asinine.

So exactly how Thom Hartmann and the dozens of others currently attempting a posthumous defamation of the supporters of economic liberty manage to view them as proponents of the corporatist status quo is simply mind-boggling.


Another attempt at deriving guilt-by-association involves pointing to Alan Greenspan as a “disciple” of Ayn Rand and concluding that therefore her free-market ideology drove all of his decisions as Federal Reserve Chairman… Ergo, Ayn Rand’s Objectivism is responsible for the financial meltdown! Right?

Well… No. Aside from the fact that that’s a breathtakingly far-reaching proposition to begin with, it’s also pretty idiotic if you take into account the second half of the story...

Greenspan, you see, was a close friend of Ayn Rand – until he did the very thing she most despised. That is to say, until he became a central economic planner… Something antithetical to the very core of Rand’s views on economics. When Greenspan had become an agent of government intervention into the economy, Rand initially thought he would be her "man in Washington", but over time it certainly became apparent to her and her intellectual heirs that whatever influence Rand had on Greenspan as a younger man, he rejected her views on economics over 40 years ago.

Fallacy after fallacy and ignorance upon ignorance seems to pervade the chattering classes at the moment. Few of them seem even to manage to check Wikipedia… the laziest form of research. Perhaps they’re busy?

The truly astounding part is that people like Hartmann and the scores of others currently trying so desperately to blame the “free-market” for this crisis talk out of both sides of their mouths. They know we don’t have a free market! How could they not, when they’re also trying to blame Summers, Rubin and especially Greenspan – the very planners of the current economy!?

Central economic planning and laissez-faire Capitalism are completely incompatible concepts... By definition!

 Part of the problem, I think, lies in people’s one-sided misunderstanding of the nature of free-markets and wrongly assuming that it is the equivalent to corporatism (what some in the media unfortunately like to call “crony capitalism”), where government colludes with businesses and provides special benefits, tax provisions, and looks the other way on accounting fraud and other crimes. From there, the further assumption is that people like Milton Friedman were just shilling for large corporations, idolizing businessmen and glorifying “greed”, and thus would have approved of the bailouts and special handouts for the fat-cat bankers. But corporatism is no more free-market oriented than communism is – and all four of the supposed villains knew it!

While I suppose I can understand the confusion to an extent, this misunderstanding has resulted in the common narrative being so wildly inaccurate it’s getting hard to stomach.

Sadly, it’s all indicative of a bigger problem. The narrative itself is being shaped before our very eyes. Over time, it will come to be generally accepted as historical “fact”. Our children will learn the stories of the financial collapse of 2008, and everything they will be told about its causes, the philosophical roots, the main players, it’s prolonging, and even the reasons for the next 20 years of (inevitable) inflation will be lies. The fact that it was the Austrians – the heirs of Mises & Hayek – like Peter Schiff who publicly predicted the collapse (and were ridiculed for it) will largely get swept under the rug. That is, unless those of us who are actually interested in truth and liberty stand up right now and come together to defend it.

Oh, and the answer was D – President Herbert Hoover, during his acceptance speech for the Republican Party nomination in 1932.

So how could the man who created “the most gigantic program of economic defense and counterattack ever evolved in the history of the Republic” during the first few years of the Great Depression also have been a hands-off laissez-faire advocate?

Easy. He wasn’t.