Back to the Caves

A good friend of this blog sends a link to The New Yorker (and yes, the page has a cartoon in it). David Owen makes one of the more intelligent and compelling cases that energy consumption is required to advance human comfort and prosperity. Owen flatly states that "the world’s principal source of man-made greenhouse gases has always been prosperity."

The recession makes that relationship easy to see: shuttered factories don’t spew carbon dioxide; the unemployed drive fewer miles and turn down their furnaces, air-conditioners, and swimming-pool heaters; struggling corporations and families cut back on air travel; even affluent people buy less throwaway junk.

Where Owen diverges from your average right wing, DAWG-denyin', knuckle-draggin' whacko is that he thinks it is great. He only worries that efforts to revitalize the world economy might succeed -- and concomitantly raise carbon footprints.

The environmental benefits of economic decline, though real, are fragile, because they are vulnerable to intervention by governments, which, understandably, want to put people back to work and get them buying non-necessities again—through programs intended to revive ordinary consumer spending (which has a big carbon footprint), and through public-investment projects to build new roads and airports (ditto). Our best intentions regarding conservation and carbon reduction inevitably run up against the realities of foreclosure and bankruptcy and unemployment. How do we persuade people to drive less—an environmental necessity—while also encouraging them to revive our staggering economy by buying new cars?

Those bastards!

My e-mailer suggests (so pointedly I wish had share permission) that these people have no plans to join us in the caves when we are driven back. They'll spin off a check for carbon offsets before they climb aboard he Gulfstream. But I do appreciate Owen's honesty.

Deleterious Anthropogenic Warming of the Globe Posted by John Kranz at March 26, 2009 12:38 PM