Environmental Luddites

There is a predictable arc of environmental progress that should be evident to all who pay attention with an open mind.  Advances in Medicine, Sanitation, and Nutrition lead to burgeoning populations.  When those people are poor they do not care about the environment but care about their own survival needs.  As a result, people in developing countries tend to ignore the environment.  However, once they have attained a level of existence which obviates the need to worry quite so much about subsistence, they invariably begin to pay attention to the environment in which they and their children reside.  As the society becomes wealthier, there is more and more marginal income available to direct toward the repair and preservation of the environment.  This is the stage that the West has already reached and which the new Core states are approaching. 

The Climate Change alarmists not only appear to not understand this developmental progression but insist upon statist interventions that will not only halt the progression but will actually cause the environmental progress to regress while impoverishing millions, perhaps billions, in our deeply connected world.

Consider Cap and Trade, an enormous energy tax which will make everything from food to transportation more expensive for everyone while, at it proponent's most optimistic best case scenario, will mitigate the presumed AGW by ~0.5 degrees. 

Michael Anissimov, in an effort to address the misguided demands of the environmentalists, makes the argument:

Dismiss Gaianism

One of the many useful terms that George has popularized is "Gainism" -- "reverential desperatism and misanthropism that is now the all too familiar opium promoted by the deep ecologists." I love the environment, but I think that the insipid SWPL, New York Times-inspired environmentalism held so dear by the farmers market crowd is the wrong way to go about helping our planet.

The reason why is that individual conservation is ultimately a losing game and improving our industrial manufacturing, energy, and agricultural processes are the only ways to avoid spewing garbage all over our pristine verdant globe. The global population is doubling about every 40 years, and any conservation efforts undertaken by the First World (less than a third of humanity) are ultimately dwarfed by exponential population increase worldwide....

The way to be a good environmentalist is to talk about and invest in strategies that impact the environment less whatever people believe -- I'd rather have a planet of people who don't explicitly care about the environment but have little impact on it due to the structure of their society than people who profess care but still drive cars and take airplanes everywhere. For manufacturing, that means investing in molecular manufacturing, synthetic biology, renewable building materials, new materials in general, and other potential routes to cheap, low-waste manufacturing, not buying endless trendy electronic gadgets that deposit heavy metals into our landfills.

Our modern, technological civilization is like the shark in Annie Hall, it must keep moving or it will die. 

We cannot enact policies that will slow growth and development, watch our standard of living fall, and then assume that as we all return to a state of nature, all will be well.  we are in a race between a future of abundance brought about by technologies that are currently in their infancy and a dystopian future of scarcity and strife. (Read all of Michael's post; he touches upon some of the technologies that are already coming into view in nascent form, which will do more for the environment than any legislative achievement imaginable.)  The idea that we can return to a pristine, natural environment if only we all drive Priuses and eat Tofu is a Utopian fantasy.  There is no return to an Eden that never existed.  (Even if Eden once did exist, there is no such thing as a natural environment that doesn't include man's impact.  There hasn't been such an environment in a very long time.)  Radical environmentalism is yet another iteration of the age old human fantasy to return to a lost state of grace, of union, of merger with the primordial mother.  Such fantasies are derivatives of religious and spiritual experiences that tap into the deepest currents of our primary process, our primordial minds.  Sadly for the environmental absolutists, once born we all share the original sins of desire and life.  Sadly for us, those foolish and power mad purveyors of environmental absolutism now have control over much of our legislative machinery.  Cap-and-Trade, if passed through the Senate, will be an epic disaster, based on absolute good intentions. (We must Save the Planet! shrieks Paul Krugman.)  As with most young religions, human sacrifices will be necessary to slake their Deity's thirst.