Modifying Nature
Since the 1970′s its become ever more popular to condemn humans for disturbing nature. it started with the belief that resources were being rapidly depleted and future generations couldn’t have near the standard of living we were enjoying. On top of that lie, the doomsayers told us the amount of industrial pollution our affluent society was generating was making the water undrinkable and the air unbreathable. Now when the industries have taken the tocsins out of the effluent pipes we’re told the elixir of plant life, CO2, is poisoning the air’s ability to radiate solar heat from the earth and ‘well-done’ is in all our futures. And just to be sure nothing is missed, animal rights say the squirrles, bears, and bugs need protection from mankind’s carbon footprint.
It is said the root of the problem is our disrespectful treatment of nature, our willful determination to continually modify the world we were born into. that we must learn to live with nature, not modify it at every chance we have.
I need to elaborate on the idea that all of us live by modifying molecules, some on the the microscopic and others on the macrosopic.
Green activists
The Editor
The environmental movement calls for us to reduce the amount of energy that we use. We’re told our use of energy is both harmful to the earth and causes an unsustainable drain on finite
resources.
We are presented with two apocalyptic views of the future – a world ravaged by pollution with vast uninhabitable areas, no longer able to support the people living on it or a world totally depleted of resources with hoards of starving people eking out a miserable existence. Neither picture is pretty.
The climate activist crowd claim as fact, that CO2, the product of combustion in most of our energy use, is warming the earth. The resulting warming is causing climate havoc. Temperature increase will cause all ice to melt and the ensuing floods will inundate all the coastal cities. Changing air currents will cause deserts to grow and increased rainfall will generate massive flooding. And tropical storm, massively strengthened by the global warming effect, will make life impossible for millions of people.
If that scary scenario leaves you unaffected, there is a second catastrophic event rapidly approaching in your future. Oil is disappearing at an alarming rate. Our consumption of fuel for our wasteful lifestyle is shortsighted and our children and our worldly neighbors are going to suffer as there will be nothing left for them in the future.
No rational person could object to changing the way we do thing if they believe either of the above ideas to be true, but what if they are not true? What if we are being asked to give up a wealthy lifestyle for no good reason? What if the global warming and the finite resource activist crowd are both wrong?
Is Ice melting causes oceans to rise? From the 10,000 year record of ocean levels rise, the mean was 4 feet per century. Ocean rise is now 1 foot per century and dropping. Support is growing for the belief that ice melt is due to the ending of last ice age.
The global warming movement claim that increased levels of CO2 cause global temperature to rise but researchers have shown there is a very poor correlation between the two, and temperatures have historically risen some 800 years before CO2 increases, not the other way around. The activists also ignore the influence of water vapor and solar activity, both larger drivers of temperature than CO2 according to climate researchers.
The reason CO2 is vilified is that our use of hydrocarbon can be curtailed if proof is given that the earth is being harmed by that release of CO2. It then legitimizes far more government control of our lives, something all bureaucracies strive for.
The people conducting climate research are finally overcoming their reluctance to criticize the activists and some of the media outlets are reporting on the growing rejection of the global warming hyperbola. The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Post have long been critical of the global warming activism movement. Even the New York Times, noted for being pro environmentalism, ran a front page article critical of compact florescent bulbs recently.
April 2nd National Post ran a front page article reporting that US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, now questions how much global temperature change is due to man’s activity verses natural causes.
On the finite resource issue, we are living on a globe that’s 8000 miles thick and have poked a few holes in the surface. The late Julian Simon probably presented one of the strongest arguments countering the fear of running out of resources.
We need to spend more time and attention to the science rather than the activist’s propaganda, as some other news source are doing. Blindly implementing the scaremonger’s call to cut our energy use by more than 90% does no one any good. As was said at the recent Heartland Institute climate conference, “the uncertainty warrants more study, not draconian regulations”.
USS Objectivity I
Robert Tracinski, in TIA wrote about a statement made by Joseph Bottum in a National Review article praising William F. Buckley for throwing the Randians overboard some years ago. His triggering sentence, “The presumptuous assumption in this analogy is that the religious right is steaming along under its own power, and we Objectivists are trying to hitch our pathetic little dinghies to their ocean liner.”
It made me think of a response…………
To those with ears and an intact mind:
Your ship is sinking, rapidly. It has been leaking for many years and only the bailing and patching efforts of rational people, like my father, managed to keep it afloat. Some years ago he was thrown overboard. However he survived, and started building a new ship, a ship with a keel made of reason.
Our ship is held together by an idea, an idea finally strong enough to combat the rot that is causing your ship to sink. We tried to rebuild your ship many years ago but the captain had my father’s crew confined to the bilge and the engine room rather than accept the report we presented, that the ship’s main member, its keel, was made from mysticism and needs to be replaced. He set my father adrift with only his mind.
Your leaders chose to ignore the warning and ‘shoot the messenger’ rather than fix the problem.
Our ship is now ready and we welcome you aboard. There is only a stipulation. You must accept reality as absolute and admit that ‘something for nothing’ means ‘something stolen from the person who created it’.
If you reject this stipulation, feel free to go down with your ship. There is no one left manning your bailing can. And your captain has irrationally ordered the crew to flood the ship.
My father John, was convinced by Ayn Rand that society could be changed without the extreme of going on strike. She said “I’ll write a book as if you had gone on strike and let the ideas percolate through the world seeking out the receptive minds. We will be laying the necessary ground work for reclaiming a free society.”
We’ve named this ship in her honor, USS Objectivity I
If you’re still not sure of what is happening, read Atlas Shrugged.
Howard Galt
My response to the people who continue to believe that the way to cure the ills of our degenerating society is by going back to the religious era, long rejected by thinking people, many years ago. Your thought are welcome.
Cheers, Garret Seinen
On Ayn Rand, my view
I recently followed an emotional smear of Ayn Rand courtesy of a writer for the ‘Huffington Post’ and posted on ‘The New Clarion’ blog site. It came to me, I hold an opinion suitable for public dissemination and here is a brief bit that I may be elaborated on at a later date.
I see Ayn Rand as the best ‘tool’ I’ve ever come across for understanding the world around me. Her ideas cut through an unmeasurable amount of obfuscating fog. But I believe considering her to have been infallible, as some of her supporters do, often does more harm than good, both to her and but especially her philosophy, Objectivism. There are some positions she took, on homosexuality being one area, where I have seen reasonable dissenting viewpoints. Arguing to support her minor shortcomings detracts from her monumental accomplishments and feeds fuel to her critics.
As well, blind acceptance is utterly contrary to everything she stood for. She was the strongest advocate I know of for respecting personal, independent thinking, for each of us, as individuals.
She was not a god, rather she was a brilliant human being, showing the world man’s true potential. She opened a window into a rational world and built a new, super highway to knowledge. The depth of her perception and reasoning ability is even more evident now, today, given the global financial meltdown. Atlas Shrugged, now coming true before our eyes, was clearly foreseen by her more than seventy years ago.
Was she perfect, is an irrelevant question. Given the attitudes she fought to change and the state of the society during her lifetime, and, keeping in mind she didn’t have a fully developed Ayn Rand to show the way, who else has influenced more thinking on ‘personal worth’ than she has?
She taught me, we are all equal, that my mind is my best tool for survival and my efforts belongs to me. Should she be criticized and condemned for her ideas, as her critics do? She wrote a few books and said that a mind can not be forced. Her vast influence is due to the fact that millions of people, seeing the validity of her ideas and accepting those ideas for themselves, are showing a reluctant world that knowledge and happiness is accessible to all. The more strident being the only voices protecting a largely indifferent majority from a return to primitiveness and poverty.
She constructed a new lens into reality and offered us a view from the same place she stood, asking only that we acknowledge her authorship.
She relied on persuasion to sell her ideas, and insisted that each of us think for ourselves. I use her ideas of my own free will. She said judge and be prepared to be judged, without guilt and as an individual. Be proud of all that you do. One can not judge her for my actions nor me for hers – only I am responsible for me. She taught me that. I thank her.
Her critics? I wonder if it is not a bitterness that, despite knowing her or knowing of her work, they never have made it to that state of mind, to be able to clearly see their own personal individuality, considering themselves unique beings, autonomous entities in a world of other sovereign, unique individuals. They fail to see that morality begins within ourselves, not from an outside source. Shame, its their loss.
Where we went wrong
In Hernando de Soto’s book, ‘the Mystery of Capital’, he discusses the means America used to establish property rights in both the raw frontier and the California gold rush claims. He makes the case that individuals operating outside the legal system, his term, the extralegals, adopted rules of conduct and claim settlement measures that were acceptable to all the parties directly involved, completely outside of the formal government system. When the general rules of conduct had been in place for a number of years, the government eventually wrote up formal laws based on these already accepted rules.
That bring me to what I see as the problem of the day; how the rules are now made, and the government expecting the people to live up to, laws imposed from above rather than the tried and true method of he past, where the lawmakers simply formalized the widely-followed popularized common procedures. When formalizing a common procedure, the people affected are already following that method to settle their differences and the test cases, already ‘water under the bridge’, have rooted the nonsense from the accepted rules. The effectiveness of this means to ‘test’ the viability of rules before the full force of the law begins sending offenders to jail is lost on the social engineering method in common use today
Whether we are talking about Ottawa or Washington, the body of members sitting in the various legislative are, in fact, far removed from where the action will be taking place. The rejection of many of the laws now being enacted is evident by the ever increasing amount of policing our society requires. That, of course being due to the regulations not reflecting what the people see as being in their own best interest.
Largely, the system we have today misplaces the cart and the horse. As Uncle Ab said, government of the people, by the people….one has to consider the broad moral principles that are the universals, the rules all us will gladly follow as they are the fundamental agreements necessary for the formation of a peaceful, prosperous society. Beyond that, the general rules the peaceful people find acceptable in a country should be the base of the laws of a country. The legislation should flow as a clear interpretation of natural and accepted action by the people, not from the lawmakers as rules designed to modify the actions of the people.
This is how I interpret the statement, accountable to the people, where the governing body’s only purpose is the formalization of the commonly accepted practices of a free and peaceful people, taking as its mandate the principle that the efforts of the citizens are honored, that each person is individually both responsible for, and the beneficiary of, the actions they undertake.