What’s the harm in acting anyway?

Saving energy or stopping pollution is a good thing. What’s the danger in acting now?

We can save energy and stop real pollution without setting up a whole financial bureaucratic system based on “thin air”. The wholly unnecessary trading system feeds the sharks of finance with more money and power. We waste blood, sweat and tears and encourage cheats. We reward fraud and foster corruption.

When we trade real things, people who cheat get caught easily. They can’t get away with it for long. But in the quasi world of meaningless permits-for-air, the only limit to cheating is “what they can get away with”.

For example: Carbon credits paid to China to build hydro dams end up helping bankers buy yachts, and feed the mafiosi in China. They evict homeowners, don’t pay them enough compensation, flood their valleys and commit these people to homelessness or more slavery to bankers through mortgages.

Sure, some useful outcomes might occur. But hoping we get lucky is not “planning”. It’s policy-by-accident. If solar energy, say, is a good idea all on its own, we don’t need to invent fake reasons to force people to use more of it.

We could for example tax fuel or gas and subsidize the less efficient energy sources to encourage the switch… oh, that’s right, we already do.

The real price is often invisible. It’s all the things we won’t do that we could have: $3.4 billion dollars spent on carbon sequestration is not just “money”, it’s 46 million people who didn’t get cured of blindness and another 100 million who won’t get clean water — some of whom will die from cholera or dysentery.

If we employ thousands of accountants, lawyers and auditors to monitor a scheme that’s pointless, it means all these honest hardworking people are wasting everyone’s time and resources. They could be finding a cure for cancer, or feeding kids in Haiti. They could be teaching children here to use logic and reason, and help stop the next generation from wasting billions on manufactured scares.

Taking action to save us from “climate change” will result in deaths among the poorest poor who depend on cheap energy.

How many people would you kill in order to save us from a theoretical “modeled” threat?

Page 15

TURN THE PAGES (Links in red will become active as pages are published). You are on the page in the Red Square.

This is page 15 of The Skeptics Handbook II. A 20 page PDF

Post script

I meant to put both entire Handbooks up as pages (and yes, you can see I got distracted!). This page further exposes the idea of the infamous (and bogus) precautionary principle, which got a brief mention in Skeptics Handbook I (point 4). It’s a critical point because it’s the invisible opportunity costs, like the Broken Window Fallacy, that many people never notice.

Henry Hazlitt’s “One Lesson”? It is this:

“The whole of economics can be reduced to a single lesson, and that lesson can be reduced to a single sentence. The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.”

“Economics is haunted by more fallacies than any other science known to man.”
— Henry Hazlitt in Economics in One Lesson

Tiny URL for this page: http://tiny.cc/kji4a