Outras Leituras

The threat to capitalism from the worldwide green movement is formidable, and Lal’s chapter “The Greens and Global Disorder” is the best short analysis of it I have read. He exposes the misanthropy underlying green philosophy. I have yet to meet a classical liberal who does not appreciate a healthy and diverse environment. However, the questions are: What can we preserve, and how can we preserve it without inflicting greater harm on ourselves? The green movement grows by preying on people’s natural fears of ecological catastrophe. Greens object to life-saving chemicals such as DDT, low-emission nuclear energy, genetically modified crops that save millions from malnutrition and starvation, harvesting of renewable resources, wind farms, geoengineering, and innumerable other initiatives worldwide that threaten their idyllic and static view of the world. They seek to employ the precautionary principle to veto any enterprise that bureaucratic scientists do not declare to be environmentally risk free. Civilization cannot exist in such a regime. The great green trump, of course, is climate change. The facts that the climate changes without human causation, that its fluctuations over long periods are well known, that the human contribution to climate change is speculative, that there are enormous costs in trying to stop climate change, that there are actual gains from climate change, that adaptation to climate change is feasible, and that there are technological and market-based alternatives to the Kyoto scheme do not deter green fundamentalists.