Environmentalism, Liberty, and the Socialist Agenda
By freemarketstudies
It is no doubt honorable for man to take care of his surroundings and eliminate waste where he can. What is dishonorable is when those pretended “enlightened ones” use this worthy cause to further their hidden agenda.
There are certain types of people in the world who feel that they have the superiority to decide what is best for other people. In this assumed superiority they feel it is their right to control others and to deprive them of their free agency. These central planners are drawn by the lures of power – the ultimate power being able to decide the fate of the “lessor ones”. These people are Socialists. W. Cleon Skousen, in his book The Naked Communist, describes this personality as “the criminal mind”. The criminal mind has no conscience nor morals. It is evil and has no hesitation in lying to achieve its objectives. It is fundamentally anti-human.
There are three important parts in this article that reveal the hidden motivations present in the current environmentalist movement. The conclusion is that this agenda – if not stopped – will enlarge socialism (under the guise of “environmentalism”) which can only result in the further loss of individual liberty.
Part One:
The following excerpt is from a 2001 interview Dr. George Reisman, economics professor at Pepperdine University:
AEN: On environmentalism, you seem to go way beyond your teacher.
REISMAN: Mises has some relevant discussions. For example, he speaks about monopoly pricing of very scarce resources acting as a means of conservation. But mostly, this political ideology we call environmentalism began in the mid-1960s. I remember that I was in San Francisco in 1967, reading a column by Eric Severeid. He predicted that environmentalism would be a leading political movement in the next decade. I recall thinking: that’s preposterous. It seemed so ridiculous, I couldn’t understand how anyone could take it seriously.
The whole movement seemed to grow out of Lady Bird Johnson’s objections to billboards on interstate highways. It began as a kind of silly political program to get rid of junkyards because they were unsightly. I recall that Al Capp had a solution to the problem of junkyards. He wanted Andy Warhol to put his signature on them and call them works of art. That was about the level of answer the whole thing deserved.
AEN: But in time, the movement would grow.
REISMAN: It is so large that it is impossible to get away from. A student told me that as a child he was exposed to all sorts of cartoons featuring children who fight dirty capitalists who own sludge factories. These kids are being indoctrinated, not only by cartoons but in school and in the culture at large.
What’s at issue here is a philosophical problem. The movement is fundamentally antihuman. That is what motivates it. This is a more widely occurring phenomenon than you might suppose. We know of serial killers, but every once in a while similar mentalities gain political power, as happened with the communists and the Nazis. There is a lot of hatred and hostility in many people that is just looking for something to attach itself to.
AEN: An attack on human life by another means.
REISMAN: That is essentially what environmentalism amounts to. It is the political movement where the destructive impulse has parked itself today. First you have the hatred, then you have a cultural vehicle, such as a totalitarian political movement or an insane religion, that allows and encourages the hatred to be expressed.
Intellectually, environmentalism is nothing more than the death rattle of socialism and should be much easier to overcome. Socialists used to masquerade as defenders of science and reason, and now they are openly anti-science and technology, as we see with environmentalism.
AEN: Also, they don’t promise to better our lot.
REISMAN: It’s true that the communists always claimed that if they had control, they would improve the material lot of mankind. The environmentalists don’t offer that; quite the opposite, they say that mankind is too well off. They claim they want collectivist control in order to avoid what they claim will be immense catastrophe.
But their idea of success is thwarting human success. In their view, the environment is only destroyed by human beings. The caribou eat the vegetation, and that’s okay. The wolves kill the caribou, and that’s okay. Microbes are killing them both, and that’s okay. The only thing that’s not okay is if human beings attempt to do anything. Only then does the environment need protection, in their view. We can conclude from this that it is only human beings they are really after.
AEN: What about the economic arguments?
REISMAN: We can distinguish between two types of natural resources: what nature provides and the fraction of what nature provides that man has become able to make useable and accessible. The whole physical world and universe consists of nothing but natural resources— matter, in all of its elemental forms, and energy, in all of its forms—provided by nature. The useable, accessible fraction of those resources can be progressively enlarged.
Menger speaks to this issue. He shows that we must create the goods character of any resource. If we do not, it is not a good and has no value. The more knowledge and physical power we exercise over nature, the larger becomes the supply of useable, accessible natural resources.
Our use of nature’s resources—of the chemical elements and energy provided by nature—does not reduce their overall physical quantity. It merely improves their relationship to our well-being. It thereby improves the external material conditions of our lives, which means: it improves our environment.
Despite all the propaganda, the market has led to vast improvements in such things as air quality. The fact that I’m sitting in an air-conditioned room in August in Alabama and not sweating is quite a testimonial to the improvement in air quality. So is central heating in winter time, and modern ventilation systems in kitchens and bathrooms. So is the automobile, which has eliminated the stench of horse manure and horse urine in the streets. So is the iron and steel industry, which made possible the low-cost pipe that enabled the streets to stop serving as sewers.
AEN: What other problems are they responsible for?
REISMAN: The waste involved in the forcible imposition of environmental regulations is incalculable.
Part Two:
Here is a post by Dr. Gary North:
It’s Not Just That Global Warming Is Fake. What Matters Is Why This Fakery Is Being Promoted.
Gary North
July 3, 2009
Global warming is based 100% on junk science. The most vocal promoters are not interested in the details of physical science. They are interested in two things: political control over the general public and the establishment of international socialism.
Junk Science vs. Real Science
For a detailed, footnoted, 12-page article, written by three scientists, two with Ph.D’s from CalTech, click here.
This paper was sent to tens of thousands of natural scientists in the United States.
Over 31,000 scientists have put their reputations on the line and signed a politically incorrect petition opposing the 1997 Kyoto agreement or protocol. Here is a photocopy of a signed petition.
Here is a letter from a former president of the National Academy of Sciences. He asks recipients of the petition to sign it.
Back in the 1970′s, the bugaboo was the coming ice age, as this Time Magazine article promoted. Not to be outdone, Newsweek got on board. The article warned: “Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects.” Want more examples? Click here.
It, too, was based on junk science. It, too, had the same solution: government control over the economy. The goal never changes: government management over the economy. The justification has changed. If the voters won’t accept control over their lives on the basis of one brand of junk science, maybe they will accept another. As they used to say in the Nixon Administration: “Let’s run this up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes.”
Socialism’s Last Stand
The global warming movement is not about global warming. It is about the creation of an international political control arrangement by which bureaucrats who favor socialism can gain control over the international economy.
This strategy was stated boldly by economist Robert Heilbroner in 1990. Heilbroner, the multi-millionaire socialist and author of the best-selling history of economic thought, The Worldly Philosophers, wrote the manifesto for these bureaucrats. He did this in an article, “Reflections: After Communism,” published by The New Yorker (Sept. 10, 1990).
In this article, he made an astounding admission. He said that Ludwig von Mises had been right in 1920 in his article, “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth.” Mises argued that without private ownership, central planners could not know what any resource is worth to consumers. With no capital market, the planners would be flying blind.
Heilbroner said that for 70 years, academic economists had either ignored this article or dismissed it without answering it. Then Heilbroner wrote these words: “Mises was right.”
Heilbroner was one of these people. There is no reference to Mises in The Worldly Philosophers.
This admission was the preliminary section of Heilbroner’s manifesto. He was cutting off all hope by socialists that there is a theoretically plausible response to Mises. The free market economy will always outproduce a socialist economy. Get used to it, he said.
Then, in the second section, he called on his socialist peers to get behind the ecology movement. Here, he said, is the best political means for promoting central planning, despite its inefficiency. In the name of ecology, he said, socialists can get a hearing from politicians and voters.
The article is not online. An abstract is. Here is the concluding thought of the abstract.
The direction in which things are headed is some version of capitalism, whatever its title. In Eastern Europe, the new system is referred to as Not Socialism. Socialism may not continue as an important force now that Communism is finished. But another way of looking at socialism is as the society that must emerge if humanity is to cope with the ecological burden that economic growth is placing on the environment. From this perspective, the long vista after Communism leads through capitalism into a still unexplored world that roust [must?] be safely attained and settled before it can be named.Heilbroner did not care that a worldwide government-run economic planning system would not be called called socialism. He just wanted to see the system set up.
Heilbroner’s peers got the message. That was what Kyoto was all about.
Conclusion
If you like poverty, inefficiency, and bureaucratic controls over the economy, and therefore control over your choices, the “climate change” movement is ideal.
If you want to subsidize China and India, neither of which will enforce the rules laid down by unelected international bureaucrats, this movement is for you.
If you want to pay more for less energy, there is no better way than to pass the cap and tax bill which the House has passed. It will be sent to the U.S. Senate next week.
The rest of us should oppose it.
I hereby authorize anyone to reprint this article or post it on any website, just so long as the text is not changed.© 2005-2009 GaryNorth.Com, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction without permission prohibited.
Part Three:
Now we come to see the “criminal mind” unmasked through this bombshell story:
ClimateGate – Climate center’s server hacked revealing documents and emails
November 20, 7:27 AM
Climate Change Examiner – Tony Hake
Britain’s Climate Research Unit, University of East Anglia, suffered a data breach in recent days when a hacker apparently broke into their system and made away with thousands of emails and documents. The stolen data was then posted to a Russian server and has quickly made the rounds among climate skeptics. The documents within the archive, if proven to be authentic, would at best be embarrassing for many prominent climate researchers and at worst, damning.
Story recap & latest news: ClimateGate emails provide unwanted scrutiny of climate scientists
The electronic break in itself has been verified by the director of the research unit, Professor Phil Jones. He told Britain’s Investigate magazine’s TGIF Edition “It was a hacker. We were aware of this about three or four days ago that someone had hacked into our system and taken and copied loads of data files and emails.”
The file that has been making the rounds was initially brought to light by the website The Air Vent. The 61mb file contains thousands of documents and emails. As the archive was just discovered within the last 24 hours, its authenticity has not been determined and as such readers should cast a skeptical eye on the contents. It should also be noted that it appears the emails were illegally obtained by whoever originally posted them.
At least one person that was included in some of the correspondence, Steve McIntyre of the website Climate Audit, verified the authenticity of at least some of the messages. McIntyre said, “Every email that I’ve examined so far looks genuine. There are a few emails of mine that are 100% genuine. It is really quite breathtaking.”
The contents of the archive contain documents and email correspondence from a veritable who’s who in climate science. Among those included in the emails are Phil Jones, Keith Briffa, his assistant, Michael Mann of the University of Virginia, Malcolm Hughes at the University of Arizona, Kevin Trenberth at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies and others.
The emails contain an array of discussions including what appear to be concerted efforts to withhold data. Just as troubling is conversations that allude to potentially manipulating climate data to “hide the decline” of temperatures seen in the last decade.
Some of the excerpts of emails within the archives (edited for brevity, emphasis added):
From Michael E. Mann (witholding of information / data):
“Dear Phil and Gabi,
I’ve attached a cleaned-up and commented version of the matlab code that I wrote for doing the Mann and Jones (2003) composites. I did this knowing that Phil and I are likely to have to respond to more crap criticisms from the idiots in the near future, so best to clean up the code and provide to some of my close colleagues in case they want to test it, etc. Please feel free to use this code for your own internal purposes, but don’t pass it along where it may get into the hands of the wrong people.”
From Nick McKay (modifying data):
“The Korttajarvi record was oriented in the reconstruction in the way that McIntyre said. I took a look at the original reference – the temperature proxy we looked at is x-ray density, which the author interprets to be inversely related to temperature. We had higher values as warmer in the reconstruction, so it looks to me like we got it wrong, unless we decided to reinterpret the record which I don’t remember. Darrell, does this sound right to you?”
From Tom Wigley (acknowleding the urban effect):
“We probably need to say more about this. Land warming since 1980 has been twice the ocean warming — and skeptics might claim that this proves that urban warming is real and important.”
From Phil Jones (modification of data to hide unwanted results):
“I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”
From Kevin Trenberth (failure of computer models):
“The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.”
From Michael Mann (truth doesn’t matter):
“Perhaps we’ll do a simple update to the Yamal post, e.g. linking Keith/s new page–Gavin t? As to the issues of robustness, particularly w.r.t. inclusion of the Yamal series, we actually emphasized that (including the Osborn and Briffa ’06 sensitivity test) in our original post! As we all know, this isn’t about truth at all, its about plausibly deniable accusations.”
From Phil Jones (witholding of data):
“The skeptics seem to be building up a head of steam here! … The IPCC comes in for a lot of stick. Leave it to you to delete as appropriate! Cheers Phil
PS I’m getting hassled by a couple of people to release the CRU station temperature data. Don’t any of you three tell anybody that the UK has a Freedom of Information Act !”
From Michael E. Mann (using a website to control the message, hide dissent):
“Anyway, I wanted you guys to know that you’re free to use RC [RealClimate.org - A supposed neutral climate change website] Rein any way you think would be helpful. Gavin and I are going to be careful about what comments we screen through, and we’ll be very careful to answer any questions that come up to any extent we can. On the other hand, you might want to visit the thread and post replies yourself. We can hold comments up in the queue and contact you about whether or not you think they should be screened through or not, and if so, any comments you’d like us to include.”
From Phil Jones (witholding of data):
“If FOIA does ever get used by anyone, there is also IPR to consider as well. Data is covered by all the agreements we sign with people, so I will be hiding behind them.”
If the emails and documents are a forgery, it would be an extremely large one that would likely have taken months to setup. No doubt much more will be coming out about these emails and their possible authenticity. Stay tuned to the Climate Change Examiner for updates as more information becomes available.
Update, 10:30am – Since the original publication of this article, the story is gaining steam and now the BBC is reporting on it. They report that a spokesman for the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), “We are aware that information from a server used for research information in one area of the university has been made available on public websites.”
Analysis of the emails and documents in the archives continues. We must stress that the authenticity has not been proven however there have been no denials of such by the climate center. Some of the more recent revelations include:
From Phil Jones (destroying of emails / evidence):
“Mike, Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis. Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address. We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.”
From Tom Wigley (data modification):
“Phil, Here are some speculations on correcting SSTs to partly explain the 1940s warming blip. If you look at the attached plot you will see that the land also shows the 1940s blip (as I’m sure you know). So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say, 0.15 degC, then this would be significant for the global mean — but we’d still have to explain the land blip. I’ve chosen 0.15 here deliberately. This still leaves an ocean blip, and i think one needs to have some form of ocean blip to explain the land blip (via either some common forcing, or ocean forcing land, or vice versa, or all of these). When you look at other blips, the land blips are 1.5 to 2 times (roughly) the ocean blips — higher sensitivity plus thermal inertia effects. My 0.15 adjustment leaves things consistent with this, so you can see where I am coming from. Removing ENSO does not affect this. It would be good to remove at least part of the 1940s blip, but we are still left with “why the blip”. Let me go further. If you look at NH vs SH and the aerosol effect (qualitatively or with MAGICC) then with a reduced ocean blip we get continuous warming in the SH, and a cooling in the NH — just as one would expect with mainly NH aerosols. The other interesting thing is (as Foukal et al. note — from MAGICC) that the 1910-40 warming cannot be solar. The Sun can get at most 10% of this with Wang et al solar, less with Foukal solar. So this may well be NADW, as Sarah and I noted in 1987 (and also Schlesinger later). A reduced SST blip in the 1940s makes the 1910-40 warming larger than the SH (which it currently is not) — but not really enough. So … why was the SH so cold around 1910? Another SST problem? (SH/NH data also attached.) This stuff is in a report I am writing for EPRI, so I’d appreciate any comments you (and Ben) might have. Tom.”
From Thomas R Karl (witholding data) :
“We should be able to conduct our scientific research without constant fear of an “audit” by Steven McIntyre; without having to weigh every word we write in every email we send to our scientific colleagues. In my opinion, Steven McIntyre is the self-appointed Joe McCarthy of climate science. I am unwilling to submit to this McCarthy-style investigation of my scientific research. As you know, I have refused to send McIntyre the “derived” model data he requests, since all of the primary model data necessary to replicate our results are freely available to him. I will continue to refuse such data requests in the future. Nor will I provide McIntyre with computer programs, email correspondence, etc. I feel very strongly about these issues. We should not be coerced by the scientific equivalent of a playground bully. I will be consulting LLNL’s Legal Affairs Office in order to determine how the DOE and LLNL should respond to any FOI requests that we receive from McIntyre.”
From Tom Wigley (ousting of a skeptic from a professional organization):
“Proving bad behavior here is very difficult. If you think that Saiers is in the greenhouse skeptics camp, then, if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official AGU channels to get him ousted.”
From Phil Jones (forging of dates):
“Gene/Caspar, Good to see these two out. Wahl/Ammann doesn’t appear to be in CC’s online first, but comes up if you search. You likely know that McIntyre will check this one to make sure it hasn’t changed since the IPCC close-off date July 2006! Hard copies of the WG1 report from CUP have arrived here today. Ammann/Wahl – try and change the Received date! Don’t give those skeptics something to amuse themselves with.”
From a document titled “jones-foiathoughts.doc” (witholding of data):
“Options appear to be:
1. Send them the data
2. Send them a subset removing station data from some of the countries who made us pay in the normals papers of Hulme et al. (1990s) and also any number that David can remember. This should also omit some other countries like (Australia, NZ, Canada, Antarctica). Also could extract some of the sources that Anders added in (31-38 source codes in J&M 2003). Also should remove many of the early stations that we coded up in the 1980s.
3. Send them the raw data as is, by reconstructing it from GHCN. How could this be done? Replace all stations where the WMO ID agrees with what is in GHCN. This would be the raw data, but it would annoy them.”
From Mick Kelly (modifying data to hide cooling):
“Yeah, it wasn’t so much 1998 and all that that I was concerned about, used to dealing with that, but the possibility that we might be going through a longer – 10 year – period of relatively stable temperatures beyond what you might expect from La Nina etc. Speculation, but if I see this as a possibility then others might also. Anyway, I’ll maybe cut the last few points off the filtered curve before I give the talk again as that’s trending down as a result of the end effects and the recent cold-ish years.”
Update, 3:45pm MDT: In regards to the authenticity, not one report disputing the veracity of the emails has come out. Many sources have talked to some of the email authors and they have not disputed the messages.
It would appear at this point that there is little doubt that the emails are authentic. If they were not, the principle players would certainly have said so by now.
