Barrel Strength

Over-Proof Opinion, Smoothly Aged Insight

Barrel Strength - Over-Proof Opinion, Smoothly Aged Insight

Category Archives: Ecology

The March of Large Stupid Ideas

The coverage of Ontario’ s energy policy in the Post today by the incomparable Ross McKitrick leads me to reflect upon the invincibility of stupidity.

Essentially, the government of Ontario has pursued an energy policy predicated on reducing dependence on fossil fuels, substituting more expensive and unreliable wind power for coal and natural gas, and paying for the lot by raising prices. Who benefits? Small groups of investors in wind farms, close to the regime. Sound like Venezuela? Who loses? Everyone but the small groups of investors in wind farms. McKitrick predicts that Ontario could price itself out of significant manufacturing and processing jobs because of higher electricity prices.

Which leads me too stupidity. The premier of the province, Dalton McGuinty, is one of the most pedestrian dullards to have ever led a Canadian province. He became convinced of this Large Stupid Idea on the basis, one supposes, of the general Opinion climate created by environmental catastrophism ceaselessly propagated in the media. Desiring to Do Something in that earnest stupid way of his, he gutted normal regulatory oversight, common sense, and economic rationality in favour of doing something for future generations, such as loading them with debt and higher prices in the name of being environmentally friendly.

The Germans have an expression for it:

Gegen Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.

Against stupidity, the gods themselves struggle in vain.

It follows with ineluctable necessity that you cannot make people richer by raising their input costs for so basic a commodity as electrical energy. As McKitrick observes of the Ontario government’s response to his study:

This response is completely inadequate. Ontario, having already lost a quarter of a million manufacturing jobs in the past decade, is throwing away its longstanding competitive advantage in electricity prices for the sake of minuscule environmental benefits that could have been achieved in other ways at a fraction of the cost. Our information about the air pollution consequences of various energy strategies are not pulled out of thin air; we use the same data the government itself uses.

More to the point, the Minister’s (Bob Chiarelli)  response is disconnected from reality. Ontario has always used coal for at least some of its electricity. So do many Canadian provinces, most U.S. states, most of Europe, China and all the other jurisdictions our exporters compete against. Even Germany, which Ontario claims to be copying in its green energy strategy, opened two new coal-fired power plants last year, will open six more this year, and plans six more after that. Ontario is ready to price our manufacturing sector out of business based on an ideologically-driven energy strategy at odds with all our major trading partners.

The environmentalist fallacy of green energy and its policy consequences are catastrophic and they go on and on and on and on.

 

Jared Diamond and the collapse of the Greenland Norse

Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel‘s essential message is that there was nothing special about Europeans, their societies, or their culture that have led them to dominance of the world from the 17th century forward, which continues.  In all ways he has worked to explain why European and offshoot societies have had more goods, more freedom, and more power than other societies, not through any racial or cultural characteristics but purely through geographical, mechanical advantages.

I have seen him burst into tears on a PBS television special at the thought of racial or cultural differences between Africans and Europeans having any explanatory power whatever.

Diamond’s book is one that can be read for profit and pleasure without  being persuasive in the least. His anti-whitism is extreme but by no means untypical of self-hating academic circles.

His book Collapse explores several reasons why some societies have failed, including the Norse of Greenland, who died out, or emigrated out, during the Little Ice Age of 1300-1850.

This from the Wikipedia article on Diamond’s book Collapse:

Part Two describes past societies that have collapsed. Diamond uses a “framework” when considering the collapse of a society, consisting of five “sets of factors” that may affect what happens to a society: environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbors, loss of trading partners, and the society’s own responses to its environmental problems. The societies Diamond describes are:

  • The Greenland Norse (climate change, environmental damage, loss of trading partners, irrational reluctance to eat fish, hostile neighbors and most unwillingness to adapt in the face of social collapse.

As you might expect, actual studies of the Greenland Norse reveal a much different picture.

  •  they quickly gave up herding cattle for sheep and pigs.
  • they adapted quickly to a fish diet

On the other hand, they did not want to become Inuit or live the lives of Inuit. They abandoned the settlements in an orderly way, taking gold and silver with them. The young and strong got out, leaving the aged to stay behind, as was ever the case with emigration.

Although the descendants of the Vikings had adjusted to life in the north, there were limits to their assimilation. “They would have had to live more and more like the Inuit, distancing themselves from their cultural roots,” says Arneborg. “This growing contradiction between identity and reality was apparently what led to their decline.”

An Orderly Abandonment

In the final phase, it was young people of child-bearing age in particular who saw no future for themselves on the island. The excavators found hardly any skeletons of young women on a cemetery from the late period.

“The situation was presumably similar to the way it is today, when young Greeks and Spaniards are leaving their countries to seek greener pastures in areas that are more promising economically,” Lynnerup says. “It’s always the young and the strong who go, leaving the old behind.”

In addition, there was a rural exodus in their Scandinavian countries at the time, and the population in the more remote regions of Iceland, Norway and Denmark was thinning out. This, in turn, freed up farms and estates for returnees from Greenland.

However, the Greenlanders didn’t leave their houses in a precipitous fashion. Aside from a gold signet ring in the grave of a bishop, valuable items, such as silver and gold crucifixes, have not been discovered anywhere on the island. The archeologists interpret this as a sign that the departure from the colony proceeded in an orderly manner, and that the residents took any valuable objects along. “If they had died out as a result of diseases or natural disasters, we would certainly have found such precious items long ago,” says Lynnerup.

The Greenland Norse are like the English speakers of Quebec, who abandon old towns and farms where they have dwelt for a hundred and fifty years for more opportunity in other provinces. In one case the reason is the Little Ice Age. In the other it is official suppression of their language and of their economic opportunity. The energetic emigrate; they do not stick around in order to become a people living on what the emigrants consider to be too poor or too small a scale, or too isolated an existence.

Sometimes it is advantageous not to adapt.

 

 

 

The world has stopped getting warmer

Says the Met Office of the UK.

global temperature changes

Do I believe this? Do you mean: do you think the anthropogenic global warming thesis is proved or disproved by the earth getting warmer, or not? The answer must be “no”. The issue is the cause of global warming, or cooling. The earth will continue to heat up until it stops and gets colder. Perhaps it will plunge back into an ice age in two to five thousand years. This would be a continuation of a long period of glaciation and temporary inter-glacials, ever since Panama connected with South America a million years ago. We are in a temporary inter-glacial, which has mostly run its course.

And suppose man has heated the environment? So what? Does that mean we have prevented the next ice age? I doubt it, but I do not know, and neither does anyone else. Those who wish to put us into 19th century levels of prosperity by cutting electricity consumption,  on the basis of spurious, politicized  science, should face trials for crimes against humanity.

A hat tip to Glendronach for the Daily Mail article.