SOCIETAL ISSUES
PROTECTION OF THE ENVIRONMENT
[I]ncreased wealth, population, and technological innovation don’t degrade and destroy the environment. Rather, such developments preserve and enrich the environment.
BAILEY, RONALD, Earth Day Then and Now, Reason, May 2000
Cleaner air is a direct consequence of better technologies and the enormous and sustained investments that only a rich nation could have sunk into developing, installing, and operating these technologies.
BAILEY, RONALD, Earth Day Then and Now, Reason, May 2000, quoting Department of Interior analyst
Two centuries after Malthus, it is now clear that the exponential growth of knowledge, not population, is the real key to understanding the future of humanity and the earth.
BAILEY, RONALD, Earth Day Then and Now, Reason, May 2000
Man, like every other organism, can only live by the transformation of his environment for his own use. He must transform his environment from a condition where it is less to a condition where it is more subservient to his needs.
BELLOC, HILAIRE, The Servile State, Section One, Definitions
While the communists argued that we must all sacrifice some freedom in pursuit of "equality," the "warmists," as Mr. [Vaclav] Klaus calls them, want us to sacrifice liberty -- especially economic liberty -- to prevent a change in climate. In both cases, in Mr. Klaus's view, the costs of achieving the goal, and the impossibility of truly doing so, argue strongly against paying a price of freedom.
CARNEY, BRIAN M., The Contrarian of Prague
Cost-benefit analysis and the precautionary principle ‘are two different methodologies, two different approaches, two different ways of thinking,’ [Vaclav Kaus] says. The less desirable precautionary principle ‘as used by Al Gore and all his fellow travelers’ says that ‘if you are afraid that there are risks to something, you may prohibit everything.’ [Vaclav Klaus] continues: ‘This is for me absolutely unacceptable to think about.’
CARNEY, BRIAN M., The Contrarian of Prague
[I]f everybody “owns” African elephants, then nobody really does and nobody has a special incentive to protect them. Grant ownership of the elephants to a tribe and they will protect them as fiercely as a farmer protects his hogs or chickens.
FUMENTO, MICHAEL, Good News, Bad News, Reason, June 2000
[T]he ultimate resource is not minerals or food or water but the human mind and its ability to learn, adapt, and innovate.
FUMENTO, MICHAEL, Good News, Bad News, Reason, June 2000, quoting Julian Simon
Without private property rights there could be no meaningful conservation...animal species that are not privately owned are the ones at risk of extinction. Without private property no one has an incentive to conserve.
LEE, DWIGHT R., Conservation and Speculation, Ideas on Liberty, August 1999, Vol. 49, No. 8, published by The Foundation for Economic Education
We're told cars are wasteful. Wasteful of what? Oil did a lot of good sitting in the ground for millions of years. We're told cars should be replaced with mass transportation. But it's hard to reach the drive through window at McDonald's from a speeding train. And we're told cars cause pollution. A hundred years ago city streets were ankle deep in horse excrement. What kind of pollution do you want? Would you rather die of cancer at eighty or typhoid fever at nine?
“There was threat of development,” he said. (That is, people making livings, building homes, staking out a future for themselves and their children - as a good environmentalist one shudders at the thought.)
O’ROURKE, P.J., Parliament of Whores
Mass movements need what Eric Hoffer - in his book The True Believer, about the kind of creepy misfits who join mass movements - called a unifying agent. “Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying agents,” said Hoffer. “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.”...The environmental movement has found its enemy in the form of that ubiquitous evil - big business.
O’ROURKE, P.J., Parliament of Whores
[I]t’s rarely an identifiable person (and, of course, never you or me) who pollutes. It’s a vague, sinister, faceless thing called industry.
O’ROURKE, P.J., Parliament of Whores
Sprawl makes it possible for an awful lot of people to have a nice yard, to live on a street without much through traffic, and to be near the supermarket. That’s no mean accomplishment. Such efficiencies, moreover, are not the result of a master plan but the cumulative effect of the decisions of individual home buyers looking for lower land prices and of businesses following their customers beyond what used to be the edge of town.
PEYSER, TOM, Not-So-Grand Plan, Reason, June 2000
Sprawl, properly understood, should teach a lesson about the way that the unsupervised actions of individuals can spontaneously give rise to structures serving their needs...unsurprisingly, those who hanker after the job of engineer judge the results to fall woefully short of the ideal they have condoled for themselves.
PEYSER, TOM, Not-So-Grand Plan, Reason, June 2000
There are no such things as limits to growth, because there are no limits on the human capacity for intelligence, imagination and wonder.
REAGAN, RONALD, Address to the University of South Carolina, September 20, 1983
The threat posed by humans to the natural environment is nothing compared to the threat to humans posed by global environmental policy.
Green-minded activists failed to move the broader public not because they were wrong about the problems, but because the solutions they offered were unappealing to most people...They rejected technology, business, and prosperity...No wonder the movement got so little traction. Asking people in the world’s wealthiest, most advanced societies to turn their backs on the very forces that drove such abundance is naive at best.
STEFFEN, ALEX NIOLAI, The Next Green Revolution, Wired, May 2006
Entrepreneurial zeal and market forces, guided by sustainable policies, can propel the world into a bright green future.
STEFFEN, ALEX NIOLAI, The Next Green Revolution, Wired, May 2006
Earth throughout history has been a very bad environment for all but a tiny fraction of species. Without a single person or power plant, Earth's ecosystem has managed to extinguish almost every species that it has ever produced. Whatever balance exists is a constantly shifting, dynamic thing. Change is the rule. And some of these changes produce fatal environments for some species and happy environments for others. From the perspective of nature, states of the ecosystem are neither better nor worse than others; they are merely different.
WILKINSON, WILL, Environmentalism for Humans, Liberzine.com, March 3, 2001