• Tag Archives totalitarianism
  • The Totalitarianism of the Environmentalists

    The Totalitarianism of the Environmentalists


    Late last year, I gave a talk about human progress to an audience of college students in Ottawa, Canada. I went through the usual multitude of indicators – rising life expectancy, literacy, and per capita incomes; declining infant mortality, malnutrition, and cancer death rates – to show that the world was becoming a much better place for an ever-growing share of its population.

    It seemed to me that the audience was genuinely delighted to hear some good news for a change. I had won them over to the cause of rational optimism. And then someone in the audience asked about climate change and I blew it.

    While acknowledging that the available data suggests a “lukewarming” trend in global temperatures, I cautioned against excessive alarmism. Available resources, I said, should be spent on adaptation to climate change, not on preventing changes in global temperature – a task that I, along with many others, consider to be both ruinously expensive and, largely, futile.

    The audience was at first shocked – I reckon they considered me a rational and data-savvy academic up to that point – and then became angry and, during a breakout session, hostile. I even noticed one of the students scratching out five, the highest mark a speaker could get on an evaluation form, and replacing it with one. I suppose I should be glad he did not mark me down to zero.

    My Ottawa audience was in no way exceptional. Very often, when speaking to audiences in Europe and North America about the improving state of the world, people acknowledge the positive trends, but worry that, as Matt Ridley puts it, “this happy interlude [in human history will come] to a terrible end.”

    Of course, apocalyptic writings are as old as humanity itself. The Bible, for example, contains the story of the Great Flood, in which God “destroyed all living things which were on the face of the ground: both man and cattle, creeping thing and bird of the air.” The Akkadian poem of Gilgamesh similarly contains a myth of angry gods flooding the Earth, while an apocalyptic deluge plays a prominent part in the Hindu Dharmasastra.

    And then there is Al Gore. In his 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth, Gore warns that “if Greenland broke up and melted, or if half of Greenland and half of West Antarctica broke up and melted, this is what would happen to the sea level in Florida,” before an animation shows much of the state underwater. Gore also shows animations of San Francisco, Holland, Beijing, Shanghai, Calcutta, and Manhattan drowning. “But this is what would happen to Manhattan, they can measure this precisely,” Gore says as he shows much of the city underwater.

    Thinking Environmentalist Laws Through

    It is possible, I suppose, that our eschatological obsessions are innate. The latest research suggests that our species, Homo Sapiens Sapiens, is 300,000 years old. For most of our existence, life was, to quote Thomas Hobbes, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Our life expectancy was between 25 years and 30 years, and our incomes were stuck at a subsistence level for millennia. Conversely, our experience with relative abundance is, at most, two centuries old. That amounts to 0.07 percent of our time on Earth. Is there any wonder that we are prone to be pessimistic?

    That said, I wonder how many global warming enthusiasts have thought through the full implications of their (in my view overblown) fears of a looming apocalypse. If it is true that global warming threatens the very survival of life on Earth, then all other considerations must, by necessity, be secondary to preventing global warming from happening.

    That includes, first and foremost, the reproductive rights of women. Some global warming fearmongers have been good enough to acknowledge as much. Bill Nye, a progressive TV personality, wondered if we should “have policies that penalize people for having extra kids.”

    Then there is travel and nutrition. Is it really so difficult to imagine a future in which each of us is issued with a carbon credit at the start of each year, limiting what kind of food we eat (locally grown potatoes will be fine, but Alaskan salmon will be verboten) and how far we can travel (visiting our in-laws in Ohio once a year will be permitted, but not Paris)? In fact, it is almost impossible to imagine a single aspect of human existence that would be free from government interference – all in the name of saving the environment.

    These ideas might sound nutty, but they are slowly gaining ground. Just last week, a study came out estimating the environmental benefits of “having one fewer child (an average for developed countries of 58.6 tonnes CO2-equivalent (tCO2e) emission reductions per year), living car-free (2.4 tCO2e saved per year), avoiding air travel (1.6 tCO2e saved per roundtrip transatlantic flight), and eating a plant-based diet (0.8 tCO2e saved per year).”

    And then there is Travis N. Rieder, a research scholar at Johns Hopkins’ Berman Institute of Bioethics, who says that “maybe we should protect our kids by not having them.” He wants tax penalties to punish new parents in rich countries. The proposed tax penalty would become harsher with each additional child.

    And that brings me to my final point. Since the fall of communism, global warming has been, without question, the most potent weapon in the hands of those who wish to control the behavior of their fellow human beings. Lukewarmists like me do not caution against visions of an environmental apocalypse out of some perverse hatred of nature. On the contrary, concern for the environment is laudable and, I happen to believe, nearly universal. But environmentalism, like all –isms, can become totalitarian. It is for that reason that, when it comes to our environmental policies, we ought to tread very carefully.

    Reprinted from CapX.


    Marian L. Tupy

    Marian L. Tupy is the editor of HumanProgress.org and a senior policy analyst at the Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


  • Pokémon GO Is Not, in Fact, Totalitarian

    In a recent interview about his new film on Edward Snowden, director Oliver Stone warned about the potential for data-mining on the part of major companies to lead to “totalitarianism.” Partly speaking about the data collected by the popular app Pokémon GO, he said, “What’s happening is a new level of invasion… They’ve invested a huge amount of money in data mining – what you are buying, what you like, your behavior. It’s what some people call surveillance capitalism.”

    The implication here is nuanced, but important: while speaking about a movie which depicts a whistle-blower for unconstitutional government surveillance, Stone drew a parallel between “surveillance” by tech companies and the horrifying contents of Snowden’s leaked documents.

    This notion is mistaken and dangerous, but symptomatic of a much deeper disease in American thought: the false equivalence between power leveraged by “Big Government” and “Big Business.”

    This microcosm of conceptual chaos is what Ayn Rand called a “package-deal”: a fallacy in which one uses one word or phrase to group conceptually opposed or dissimilar things. Under the umbrella of “power,” for instance, our culture has paired both political and economic power – or, in other words, we consider as identical both massive economic influence and the government’s legal monopoly on the use of force.

    Mr. Stone and the Package Deal

    How does this apply to Mr. Stone’s words, then? In his case, he has grouped into package-deals the notions of “surveillance” and “totalitarianism,” a decision which obfuscates crucial distinctions. Google has economic power, gathered by the voluntary decision on the part of its customers to use its services. This was a deal made by mutual agreement in pursuit of mutual advantage – Google receives a certain set of profits from advertisements and the like, and I receive an effective search engine, an email service, and so on. That this deal is more complex than presented does nothing to soften this point: the long and detailed “terms of services” pages are crafted precisely for this reason.

    Because any powers of “surveillance” are mutually agreed to (even if, as a consumer, I am negligent in learning just what it is I have signed), Google and Nintendo could notin any meaningful way be “totalitarian.” This is not so for the government. Because the government holds a legal monopoly on the use of force (e.g., in its use of a police force, military, binding legal code, etc.), its covert surveillance is not enforced by mutual agreement but at the proverbial point of a gun. Whether it is done for the alleged “security” or “safety” of the nation is irrelevant – intentions do not make coercion less coercive.

    This danger is compounded by the fact that many of the activities unveiled by Snowden were unconstitutional – accordingly, the government was not only acting in a coercive manner, but in a way contrary to the design of its founders.

    Here’s the most egregious package-deal Stone presents: Britannica defines “totalitarianism” as a “form of government that theoretically permits no individual freedom and that seeks to subordinate all aspects of the individual’s life to the authority of the government.” In other words, there is no room for the mutual exchange and voluntary association allowed by capitalism – the state becomes all-consuming, with no room for the individual to “opt out” of the provided “services.”

    To define companies in such a way as to group them within this category of government coercion is to form a reckless package-deal. If one wishes for his data to be shielded from companies like Google, he can use another service. He can choose not to buy a cellphone. He can research whether there is a way to use these services while opting out of its more invasive features. Moreover, if he discovers this mid-use, he can stop using the service. He can decline his side of the agreement, leveraging his agency as a free individual. And Google won’t be using his information to detain him without rights, anyway.

    When a totalitarian state is formed or a free state like the United States acts in a totalitarian manner, citizens have no ability to exercise their rights against it. This is why Snowden would be immediately arrested upon his return to the United States. This is not so with Google. Perhaps Mr. Stone should watch his own movie.

    Source: Pokémon GO Is Not, in Fact, Totalitarian | Foundation for Economic Education