Pages Menu
TwitterRssFacebook
Categories Menu

Posted by on Jan 25, 2013 | 22 comments

Why I’m so down on the Green movement

This is a follow-up to my post about left-wing unreason. I was particularly struck by a comment about whether I was going to be down on chaps on the right who like incandescent light bulbs and SUVs, who were the big exemplars of consumption.  That struck me as just so typical.  This guy really thinks that cutting consumption is only something that affects his imaginary right wing redneck with the giant SUV powered by incandescent light bulb.

I at first thought that I was going to make this an in depth post, but various reasons have gotten in the way of that, so I will simplify.  I have met numerous people complaining about “consumption”.  They have invariably been upper middle class (or upper class) members of the first world who enjoy standards of living that would make the maddest roman emperor envious.

Meanwhile two billion people live in abject poverty.  There is one, and only one solution to poverty and the Green movement is determined to block it.  By preventing the building of hydroelectric dams and power stations, by stopping GM food aid and otherwise preventing industrialization  it contributes massively to human misery.  This weighs far more with me than some creationist bigmouth whining in the US.  I really am an internatonalist on these points.

  • Reginald Selkirk

    This guy really thinks that cutting consumption is only something that
    affects his imaginary right wing redneck with the giant SUV powered by
    incandescent light bulb.

    Translation: “I’m going to make up some BS, pretend this guy said it, and attack that rather than what he actually wrote.” Have fun with your strawman.

    • ThePrussian

      Well, reviewing your comments, and the context in which they occurred, makes that pretty obvious. On the other hand, I am sure dismissing this as “a strawman” makes you feel better.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100001520476469 Alex Norman

    I’ll comment on here purely due to space & number of comments, but I do feel that the two sides are not comparable. Is there anti-science on the left? Yes. I would prefer the environment to be untainted, but quite a bit of that is that a tainted environment has far reaching ramifications. I find the anti-GMO postions abhorrent, and I fully agree with you on Fission. While I would prefer solar, hydroelectric, and wind (they are safer, no matter how safe Fission becomes), I will accept Fission with proper safety measures in place. I do actually have issues with Lomborg (for example, he originally was anti-anthropogenic global warming, though he did admit that we have some effect later, and that changing of his mind does show that he’s willing to listen), but I understand where he’s coming from and while I think he’s wrong, he is trying to have an important conversation. All of that being said, the right is much, much, much worse.

    • ThePrussian

      Could I ask for a source for that claim about Lomborg being originally anti-APGW? I hear it around a fair bit, but I haven’t seen any decent source for it. In “The Skeptical Environmentalist” he affirms his views on’t, and also in “Cool It”. Wikipedia refers it to one Norweigan newspaper article which, predictably, isn’t online.

      It’s just that I have seen so much misinformation flung about on the guy, I like to check the sources myself.

      • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100001520476469 Alex Norman

        I had seen a translation of the newspaper at one point. I’d be hard pressed to find it again.

        • ThePrussian

          Rats; if you come across it again, I’d love to read it.

          • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100001520476469 Alex Norman

            In any event, I can’t say with much certainty that it was actually the newspaper. It claimed to be, but at the time I hadn’t seen to much slander of Lomborg.

          • ThePrussian
          • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100001520476469 Alex Norman

            I saw that, which is why I’m slightly more skeptical now.

          • ThePrussian

            Yeah, that was what got me to take another look at a lot of things. I didn’t know much about Lomborg, but I saw that, and thought “Well, this seems like a pretty serious and conclusive attack on the man”, and then I looked it up and found that every one of the statements were piffle.

            That’s when I started reading this stuff for myself and trying to get a grip on’t for myself.

  • peter

    To me there is no doubt that the current level of consumption and waste production is simply unsustainable in the long run. Especially when extrapolated to increased consumption of a likely 10 billion world population in the not so far future.

    Re hydro dams: dams take away land, and quite large amounts. Land that often if not arable is forested, acts as wildlife habitat and habitat for humans – see the Three Gorges Dam – has a role in carbon cycles etc. Dams are land-grabs, and taking the biology that is native out, destroys it for quite a long time. Dams are not just water storage, they even can change the micro-climate – not necessarily to the better.

    Re GM – so far the biggest benefactors seems to be the GM companies. I have nothing against GM foods, but the policies of preventing GM foods from being stored as seeds by the farmer for successive crops, the need to every year buy new seeds, the almost monopoly that seed companies have achieved, the replacement of often hardier native crops by more attention and capital input needing “high end crops” do not bode well for a diversified plant crop production.

    It reminds me of the “Green Revolution” that was in full swing when I studied agrology in the mid seventies. Some successes in some countries, but failure in others.
    Remember the drilling of wells in the Sahel, the subsequent increase in livestock and the catastrophe when the wells ran dry?

    At present aquifers are drilled and pumped, leading to an increase in crop production, an increase in population and the predictable depletion and following catastrophe and collapse. Just one example that new found resources will be followed by an increase in their exploitation, followed by an increase in population and the foreseeable crash of that population.

    We as humans follow blindly this biological cycling, should we not be smarter and somehow manage our resources for the long run? The present system of production an resource extraction really looks stupid and unsustainable.

  • http://www.www.skepticink.com/tippling/ Jonathan MS Pearce

    I think there is potentially a false dichotomy here. It isn’t, or shouldn’t be, an either or, but a both and. I am an environmentalist who is dead against abject poverty. I would like to tackle both.

    In my opinion, there is only one problem – population. It needs to stabilise at minimum cost.

    that, to me, is THE ONLY major problem from which most others emanate.

    • ThePrussian

      Well, I agree with you; I do think that large-scale industrialisation is not compatible with a clean and healthy environment, it’s impossible without it. You only really have the option to care about the environment when you reach a certain level of income.

      That’s why the blocking of development by the Greens is a double evil.

      • http://www.www.skepticink.com/tippling/ Jonathan MS Pearce

        I find this interesting and annoying. I think it fits with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs – of course, personal survival will always be ahead of group survival etc.

        However, and as callous as this sounds, is it not better to ensure the healthy long-term survival of a sustainable number of the planet – including other species (v. important point) – or is it better to achieve the bare minimal survival of a maximal number of people with a lower quality of life?

        I see this as a more accurate dichotomy. If having the most people survive as possible no matter what the consequences, we might as well become Catholic!

        Hence, the Optimum Population Trust, now known as Population Matters:

        http://www.populationmatters.org/

        • http://www.www.skepticink.com/tippling/ Jonathan MS Pearce

          Also, reducing waste . increasing efficiency in manufacturing (less consumption) does not entail not feeding the poor around the world. Again, i think these are two separate entities. It also depends how green the politics you are talking about goes.

          There is an argument to say intermediate sized, localized, community focused projects / economies are the way to go for poverty-stricken areas.

          Of course, the problem is that these areas are poor because they generally lack the natural resources (not entirely) to get them out of the whole.

          There are soo many problem to deal with in the world, that simple either / ors are dangerous. You’ve got to remember, when we lose those virgin rainforests, they are gone forever. And (perpetual) growth will ensure, pretty much, that that will happen. I had a mate that lived in Gabon City. He said that the growth of that city has lead to every living animal in a 25 mile radius from the city being eaten. He said you could go to the forest and no hear a single non-insect animal. These anecdotes exist the world over. What do we do about it? Animals take millennia, no millions of years to evolve, and we are snuffing them out at the highest rate known. Look what’s happened in the forests of Madagascar since the governmental collapse. It has been raped. You don’t get these things back.

          I am due to do a post on the fact that we (the developped world – me totally included) are becoming such a cyber-connected world and community that we have lost a sense of geographical community, and lost a sense of impact on the world. Environmental activism, I suggets, is dying. There will be no one leaving their houses soon. i know this, because I have become like this as have all the children I teach and so many of my friends and colleagues. We sit online all day. Our friends are there. We don’t meet our neighbours (was it 42% don’t know their neighbours, from the other day?), we don’t go to the high street. This is not a complaint per se – this is how life is changing., But what are the ramifications?

          I see us giving less of a shit about the world since we will not connect with it – we will not know it.

          Just a thought.

  • http://www.facebook.com/brian.curtis.3994 Brian Curtis

    “There is one, and only one solution to poverty”
    Pretty sure skeptics don’t tend to say that.

    • ThePrussian

      Er… in the way that we don’t say “there is one, and only one explanation for the origin of species”, or “there is one, and only one, second law of thermodynamics”.

      Is there any society, anywhere at any time that has managed to raise itself up from poverty without embracing industrialization and capitalism?

      • http://www.facebook.com/brian.curtis.3994 Brian Curtis

        Yes, all of them from the pre-industrial ages, including some impressively long-lived Egyptian and Chinese dynasties. Capitalism neither a science nor a law of nature. It’s an (optional) economic system.

        • ThePrussian

          Have you by any chance any knowledge of what life was like under those circumstances?

          I said “up from poverty”. This is the important part of that sentence. And, no, not just for tiny fraction up on top.

  • S.S.

    The green movement is going towards the same road as feminism. Towards extremization and overblowing issues and proposing unpractical, naive solutions.

  • DavidGaliel

    Objecting to one stereotype while promoting another is not skepticism, it is lazy, ideologically-driven thinking. As awareness of humans’ effect on the planet mainstreams, so does both the diversity of opinion and the moderating voice of scientific-evidence-based approaches to problem-solving. Even former extremists moderate over time – if their commitment to the truth outweighs their commitment to their ideology. See Mark Lynas’ widely-discussed mea culpa & plea for rationality to the Oxford Farming Conference just a few weeks ago: http://www.marklynas.org/2013/01/lecture-to-oxford-farming-conference-3-january-2013/ Unfortunately, complexity and diversity of opinion don’t fit into narrow ideological caricatures and don’t lend themselves to righteous polemics, which may not serve your purposes here on this blog.

    • ThePrussian

      Well, you’d be the expert on lazy thinking.