As green as you can afford to be

Walter Russell Mead on environmentalism as a luxury good:
An age of energy shortages and high prices translates into an age of radical food and economic insecurity for billions of people.  Those billions of hungry, frightened, angry people won’t fold their hands and meditate on the ineffable wonders of Gaia and her mystic web of life as they pass peacefully away.  Nor will they vote George Monbiot and Bill McKibben into power.  They will butcher every panda in the zoo before they see their children starve, they will torch every forest on earth before they freeze to death, and the cheaper and the meaner their lives are, the less energy or thought they will spare to the perishing world around them. 
But, thanks to shale and other unconventional energy sources, that isn’t where we are headed.  We are heading into a world in which energy is abundant and horizons are open even as humanity’s grasp of science and technology grows more secure.  A world where more and more basic human needs are met is a world that has time to think about other goals and the money to spend on them.
And, as he points out, greens should be glad Gaia in her ineffable wisdom put the oil share here instead of in, say, Nigeria or North Korea.

H/t Ace.

9 comments:

MikeD said...

Oil shale?!?!?! Why not just RAPE the land, why don't you? Next you'll say you're in favor of FRACKING!!! I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT IT MEANS, BUT I HATE IT!!!
/wierdenvironut

Grim said...

It is good news, but I would still like to see movement on nuclear power.

bthun said...

What Grim said...

Now to tidy up the work bench, grab W.B. and go vote in the primary for some capitalists pigs.

Texan99 said...

There's interesting news out this week about a Panasonic breakthrough in artificial photosynthesis. It has the advantage of being able to use focused or high-intensity light that a natural plant cannot. Light energy plus CO2 plus H2O = some kind of higher-energy C-H-O compound, a/k/a food, a/k/a fossil fuels, with an oxygen by-product.

I expect to hear soon that energy from such a source is still evil, because too much oxygen will act as a greenhouse gas and has therefore been classified as a toxin. Actually, of course, oxygen is about as toxic a substance as we know of, but environmentalists seem unaware of it. Actually, I should say ignorantly politicized environmentalists seem unaware of it, as I consider myself a rabid environmentalist.

Nicholas Darkwater said...

"Should"

And then there's " ... humanity's grasp of science and technology grows more secure." I see precious little evidence of that.

E Hines said...

...too much oxygen will act as a greenhouse gas....

It's not so much that, as it is hard on new-born babies' eyes: too much oxygen can lead to blindness. It's why doctors are between a rock and a hard place when they're trying to save a prematurely born baby that needs long-term breathing assistance.

So--with O2 as such an awful byproduct of this new technology, proponents actually are guilty of infanticide.

We must ban all technology. For the children.

Eric Hines

E Hines said...

there's " ... humanity's grasp of science and technology grows more secure."

Actually, this gets stronger almost daily, at today's pace. What I see little evidence of is humanity's moral understanding of what technology enables.

Eric Hines

Texan99 said...

And what are all those antioxidants for if not to protect us from the pernicious influence of photosynthesis?

MikeD said...

One of the reasons I love paleontologists is that they are VERY hard to sell on the AGW nonsense. Because they KNOW what the climate was like before humans. They KNOW extinctions are not uncommon in history. They don't buy the nonsense that humans are the most destructive force in nature.

I read an essay from one (and I wish I could find it) which scoffed at the extinction hysteria of the 70's. He pointed out that the single biggest die off in all of Earth's history was at the hands of... chlorophyll. The introduction of the toxic, corrosive oxygen killed more lifeforms than anything else in the planet's history.