Hot Time in Cancun

The Climate Conference has taken it's carbon emitting show on the road again, this time to Cancun. After several long, lazy days frolicking in the sun, you would think it might occur to them that a big, hot ball in the sky plays some role in warming trends on Planet Earth. However, you would be wrong:

The Cancun deal commits all countries to keeping temperature rise below 2C (3.6F) by reducing emissions. Rich countries have agreed to consider an extension of the Kyoto Protocol while poor countries will sign up to emission cuts for the first time. There are also a series of key decisions on setting up a green fund to help poor countries cope with climate change and halting deforestation.

"Reducing emissions." That's climate-speak for "reducing economic activity," which is in turn a policy wonks way of saying "reducing human attempts to survive and prosper."

These Climate worshippers are nothing more than Luddites with expense accounts.

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All efforts to better ourselves and our society are dependent on human effort, ingenuity, inspiration, and innovation in harnessing energy and channeling it into productive ends. Lower emissions and you lower not only the existing status quo, but any potential for betterment. In despising technological progress, Luddites are really despising the human agency which drives that progress. And so too, the Climate worshippers: in the name of lowering emissions, they are really expressing their distaste for normal human beings pursuing normal human ends.

This becomes most apparent when you consider their rationale for what they want. Assume that all they claim about man-made global warming is true, and their argument amounts to this: man's economic activity is warming the planet; if we persist the planet will one day catastrophically over heat. Therefore we must reduce man's economic activity. In the same way, you could argue that we must reduce the amount of food we grow, because growing food reduces the available land and if we persist in growing food, one day there will be a catastrophic lack of land in the world.

Well, no.  Human beings need food and we cannot reduce the amount of food we grow.  This is simply a matter of survival and non-negotiable.  Instead, what we can do is to innovate new ways of growing food so as to reduce the amount of land needed, which is precisely what we have done these last 100 years. Corn yields per acre, for instance, have more than quintupled since 1930.

Food production is one kind of economic activity, but all economic activity amounts to the same thing. Economic activity is man's attempt to survive, grow and prosper. Stopping, or even slowing down such activities, is just not an option. If these activities are catastrophically warming the planet, then there is only one route to go: technological innovation that utilizes our global climate in less intrusive ways.

And it is not being some pie-in-the-sky optimist to assume that such innovations will be developed. All of economics is premised on the insight that market activity is at bottom the efficient allocation of scarce resources. If what the Global Warmists say is true, then climate is just another scarce resource. There is no reason to believe that markets - aka free people doing the things that free people can do to better themselves and their communities - cannot manage the climate impacts of its activities, just as well as it manages competing claims to energy, precious metals, dry goods, labor, capital, etc., and etc.

That is, assuming you care about human beings. If you don't, then like the Climate worshippers and the Luddites before them, you see nothing good about human beings doing anything human being-like, and you will joyfully opt for the most harmful option available: reduce energy use and stop people from doing what they are doing.

The resultant increase in death, disease, sickness and hunger for millions? Hah! Let them eat cake!

And the fact that the Climate worshippers will accrue great power in the process, along with the private jets, limousines, and publicly funded parties conferences in places like Kyoto, Copenhagen, and Cancun, is merely an unintended consequence of it all.