Eating meat can be good

This is a little late, but what the hell. George Monbiot recently told the Guardian that he was entirely wrong when he called veganism "the only ethical response". Worth reading.

In the Guardian in 2002 I discussed the sharp rise in the number of the world's livestock, and the connection between their consumption of grain and human malnutrition. After reviewing the figures, I concluded that veganism "is the only ethical response to what is arguably the world's most urgent social justice issue". I still believe that the diversion of ever wider tracts of arable land from feeding people to feeding livestock is iniquitous and grotesque. So does the book I'm about to discuss. I no longer believe that the only ethical response is to stop eating meat.

Who's a skeptic?

Guardian: Bjørn Lomborg: $100bn a year needed to fight climate change

The world's most high-profile climate change sceptic is to declare that global warming is "undoubtedly one of the chief concerns facing the world today" and "a challenge humanity must confront", in an apparent U-turn that will give a huge boost to the embattled environmental lobby.

Bjørn Lomborg, the self-styled "sceptical environmentalist" once compared to Adolf Hitler by the UN's climate chief, is famous for attacking climate scientists, campaigners, the media and others for exaggerating the rate of global warming and its effects on humans, and the costly waste of policies to stop the problem.

But in a new book to be published next month, Lomborg will call for tens of billions of dollars a year to be invested in tackling climate change. "Investing $100bn annually would mean that we could essentially resolve the climate change problem by the end of this century," the book concludes.

Examining eight methods to reduce or stop global warming, Lomborg and his fellow economists recommend pouring money into researching and developing clean energy sources such as wind, wave, solar and nuclear power, and more work on climate engineering ideas such as "cloud whitening" to reflect the sun's heat back into the outer atmosphere.

Apparently Lomborg has joined a fairly exclusive club. Mainly that of people with famous books that no-one seems to have actually read.

The only way anyone can say Lomborg has "changed his mind" about global warming is if they've never read his book in the first place. Contrary to what is usually reported, The Skeptical Environmentalist does not deny either global warming in general or anthropogenic global warming. In the Skeptical Environmentalist, Lomborg argued that while global warming is a very real problem, we need to be careful about what measures we take to fight it, as some of the policies being advocated to reduce CO2 emissions would end up costing us much more than unchecked global warming.

Of course, saying that we need to apply rational cost-benefit analysis to global warming was treated as heresy. The head of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, infamously compared Lomborg's views to Hitler's. He said, and I am not making this up:

What is the difference between Lomborg’s view of humanity and Hitler’s? You cannot treat people like cattle. You must respect the diversity of cultures on earth. Lomborg thinks of people like numbers. He thinks it would be cheaper just to evacuate people from the Maldives, rather than trying to prevent world sea levels from rising so that island groups like the Maldives or Tuvalu just disappear into the sea. But where’s the respect for people in that? People have a right to live and die in the place where their forefathers have lived and died. If you were to accept Lomborg’s way of thinking, then maybe what Hitler did was the right thing.

That's right, folks. Cost-benefit analysis is genocide.

As Lomborg himself says in the Guardian article:

Lomborg denies he has performed a volte face, pointing out that even in his first book he accepted the existence of man-made global warming. "The point I've always been making is it's not the end of the world," he told the Guardian. "That's why we should be measuring up to what everybody else says, which is we should be spending our money well."

The problem is that no-one has read the point he was making. The entire "environmentalist" movement had a knee-jerk reaction to Lomborg's book; all they saw was someone voicing the wrong opinion.

The level of journalism displayed by the Grauniad is just appalling. In the header, they refer to Lomborg as "the world's most high-profile climate change sceptic". He isn't a climate change skeptic at all, unless now "climate change skeptic" means anyone who doesn't agree with Al Gore.

I'm now going to do something that, apparently, the Guardian is incapable of: actually quote from Bjørn Lomborg's book, The Skeptical Environmentalist. Amazing, I know, but that's the kind of blog I run.

Summing up

Global warming has become the great environmental worry of our day. There is no doubt that mankind has influenced and is still increasing atmospheric concentrations of CO2 and that this will influence temperature.

There's your climate change denial. What kind of idiots do they hire to write their articles?

The Environment: Nuclear power!

Last week, the Finnish government greenlit the construction of two new nuclear power plants. I consider this a signal victory for environmentalism and security.

First of all, this transforms the balance of payments of the Finnish electricity grid, so to speak. At the moment, Finland is more dependent on imported electricity than any other European country. Some of it comes from Scandinavia, but the majority of the electricity we import comes from Russia. That isn't a nice situation to be in for purposes of security policy. The new nuclear plants will end Finland's energy dependence on Russia.

Secondly, and much more importantly, they will finally allow Finland to stop using fossil fuels for electricity generation, thus making the most important contribution to diminishing global warming that we can. As I explained earlier, power generation is the biggest single source of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.

Predictably, the Finnish "environmental" movement is up in arms over this. The Green party, which is currently in government as part of a coalition, has protested strongly, but like they always do, has done nothing but protest. I thought I should address this, as opposing nuclear power is, to me, the most illogical and senseless part of the "environmental" movement.

Basically there are two kinds of renewable energy, "old renewables" (mainly hydroelectric power) and "new renewables" (solar, wind, tidal and geothermal energy, to name a few). Of these, we're utilizing hydroelectric power pretty much to its maximum extent. The ecological effects of dams are so profound that it's hard to see any developed countries building any more of them. As for the new renewables, at the moment, they're a pipe dream. They're the energy generation means of the future, sure, but that future is a long time and a gigantic investment in R&D and plant away. To stick with our example, Finland, at the moment none of the new renewables are cost-effective. All Finnish wind power generation runs at a net loss and must be heavily subsidized by the government.

To convert current electricity production from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources is, if not completely impossible, far too expensive to contemplate. In the alternative, our energy policy options are either continuing to burn fossil fuels or replacing them with nuclear power. With a (slowly) growing population and a growing economy, we can't very well reduce electricity consumption by the kind of amounts it would take to get rid of Finland's electricity deficit and stop using fossil fuels.

The safety hazards of nuclear power plants in normal operation are grossly exaggerated, but the problem of nuclear waste is real. Interestingly, the problem could be very much reduced if we used nuclear fuel more efficiently, but that's a topic for another time. However, nuclear waste is a much smaller problem than global warming. Anti-nuclear campaigners make much of the horror of leaving nuclear waste to future generations. What about leaving them a world that's at about the same temperature as this one? Surely the consequences of runaway global warming are infinitely worse than those of a very minute amount of nuclear waste?

It's this failure to prioritize that I find most galling about the current "environmental" movement, by which I mean Greenpeace and their ilk. The inordinate attention they pay to the problem of nuclear waste nicely obscures the greater problem: how will we generate electricity without using fossil fuels? I stress, again, that renewable energy sources like solar power are simply not practicable yet.

The only current alternative to building nuclear power is continuing to use fossil fuels. Not only does burning fossil fuels for electricity generation make the largest single human contribution to the greenhouse effect, but in normal, day-to-day operation, coal plants kill people. They produce air pollution that shortens the expected lifespan of everyone living around them.

So the question is, really: do we want to stick with a form of power generation that not only kills people through air pollution but also makes a huge contribution to global warming, or build nuclear power? By taking the latter route, Finland will be able to entirely stop burning fossil fuels for electricity generation. That is a huge step toward doing our part to mitigate the effects of global warming. And it's only possible with nuclear power.

At the same time, it must be done despite the active campaigning of Greenpeace and the Finnish green movement. In my opinion, their opposition to nuclear power is nothing more than a cheap popularity stunt to capitalize on technophobia and old Cold War-era fears of nuclear annihilation, which have nothing whatsoever to do with nuclear power. It's an excellent example of how the Green movement is no longer an environmental movement, because in this case, they are allocating considerable funds and energies toward fighting against the only form of power generation that does not contribute to global warming.

In short, while preaching the dangers of global warming, the Green movement opposes the phasing out of fossil fuels as quickly as possible. How is that environmentalism?

The Environment: Introduction

I made a post on my Finnish-language blog about how I thought Earth Hour was rubbish. Not because I don't believe in global warming or I don't believe we shouldn't be doing something about it, but because I firmly believe that trying to get people to switch their lights off is a horribly inefficient, even counterproductive way to mitigate global climate change.

So far, expressing that opinion has cost me one friend. Several other people have disagreed with me in less drastic ways, and I want to explore this issue further.

Around the same time, my good friend Aaro wrote in his blog about how overpopulation threatens the Earth: if we don't change our lifestyles, he says, our children will be "really screwed" by 2050 when the world's population may approach 11 billion. I also think he's being very silly, but we're still friends (I think!). Of course, just saying he's being silly isn't very constructive criticism.

These are by no means the only debates I find myself in on the topic of the environment. After all, these are complex issues we're talking about here. I and my co-bloggers want to properly address them, so we're starting a series of posts titled The Environment. We hope to cover several broad topics, including:

The limits to growth
Probably not the book, but the topic in general. What are the limits to the growth of the human population? Is overpopulation a real threat to the ecology of the planet and our welfare in it? Are we running out of resources?

Climate change
I think I can speak for all of us when I say that we agree that global warming is happening, and it is strongly affected by human greenhouse gas emissions. We want to look at this topic in some detail. How much greenhouse gas are we emitting? What human activities are contributing the most toward climate change? We may even take a brief foray into alternate history.

The forgotten environmental issues
It feels to me like most people today equate environmental issues with climate change. During the course of this series of posts, I also want to pay attention to some of the "forgotten" environmental issues. Even though global warming is very real, it doesn't mean that we can afford to ignore other pressing issues like overfishing and air pollution.

What can we do?
Interspersed with all this is the most interesting question: what are we going to do about all this? The ambitious goal of this series is to try to figure out what kind of environmental policies we should be advocating in our communities. Should we all become vegetarians? Should we participate in Earth Hour? How should we generate electricity?

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So, to sum up, this is the first post in a series under the label "The Environment". Over the coming months, several of us will be posting about a range of environmental topics. Our goal is to eventually create a series of summaries on the topics I've listed above. At first, the posts may be somewhat random, because we will do this using hypertext. Some of our first topics will be an overview of CO2 emissions, a look back at the Montréal Protocol that banned CFCs, and some hard limits on human population growth. We'll be working from the bottom up to put together a comprehensive look at the large issues. The first summaries will follow, um, later.

So stay tuned!

An organic snippet

BBC: Organic 'has no health benefits'

Organic food is no healthier than ordinary food, a large independent review has concluded.

There is little difference in nutritional value and no evidence of any extra health benefits from eating organic produce, UK researchers found.

Brief book review: Cormac McCarthy's The Road

Last weekend, I took it upon myself to read Cormac McCarthy's The Road, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Having read it, I can't understand what all the fuss is about. Also, it was apparently an influence on Fallout 3, and that influence is responsible for all the stupidity I complained about in my game review.

Basically, the Road is a rip-off of JG Ballard's early sci-fi novels, most notably Drought. The novel is startlingly similar to Ballard's stuff, but with the imporant difference that it's stylistically decisively inferior. McCarthy writes a very simple, down-to-earth style, which he occasionally interrupts with ridiculous flights of purple prose. The impression is occasionally very jarring. Overall, the writing and plot is captivating enough that it keeps you reading, but the purple prose is sometimes so awful it reminds me of Andy Remic. Seriously.

I didn't think the book really had any theme or message. Of course, I could be wrong. From the Wikipedia article:

British environmental campaigner George Monbiot was so impressed by The Road that he declared McCarthy to be one of the "50 people who could save the planet" in an article published in January 2008. Monbiot wrote, "It could be the most important environmental book ever. It is a thought experiment that imagines a world without a biosphere, and shows that everything we value depends on the ecosystem."

Oh, for crying out loud. You needed a novel to tell you that we would find it hard to live without any plants or animals at all? That, though, really is the sum total of the environmental message of the Road.

On a Fallout note, this is apparently the reason there isn't any vegetation in the Capital Wasteland in Fallout 3. Having read the book, I now understand that the makers of Fallout 3 were trying real hard to give the game a "Road" vibe. I wish they hadn't, frankly.

To rant for a moment, I feel like these days, entertainment and art only comes in one of two varieties. Either it has no theme at all, no message, nothing to say about anything, or it has a single message that it bludgeons you senseless with.

The Road is firmly in the first camp. I didn't think it had any meaningful theme. Overall, it's captivating enough to make you read it through, but it's short enough that that isn't any challenge. It's a forgettable, mediocre novel. I can't for the life of me understand why it won awards.

Verdict: don't bother. Read J.G. Ballard's Drought or Drowned World instead.

An optimum population

BBC: Attenborough warns on population

The broadcaster Sir David Attenborough has become a patron of a group seeking to cut the growth in human population.

On joining the Optimum Population Trust, Sir David said growth in human numbers was "frightening".

Sir David has been increasingly vocal about the need to reduce the number of people on Earth to protect wildlife.

And so David Attenborough joins the most frightening lunatic fringe of the environmental movement: the "population control" nutcases.

There's another article on the BBC website, titled "Population: The elephant in the room", in which the writer makes the case for population control:

It's no far fetched possibility. Increasingly, environmental scientists insist we have overshot the Earth's carrying capacity.

I believe they are right; the proof is everywhere. Our inability to live as we do, at our current numbers, without causing pervasive environmental degradation is the very definition of carrying capacity overshoot.

This is pure garbage, and it's sinister garbage at that.

I should write on this at greater length, but I can't be bothered to right now. Suffice to say that despite the catchy name of the looney bin Attenborough has joined, there is no such thing as an optimum human population. Any balance struck between "people" and "wildlife" is an arbitrary, political one. There is no optimum. Demands for population control can't, logically, be demands for optimums or deep ecology-like "species equality", they're always arbitrary.

Basically, therefore, population control entails restricting the right of people to have children in the name of a political goal. Here's a fun quote from the other article I mentioned:

Some activists insist acting to influence population growth infringes on human rights; they maintain that it is best to leave the problem alone.

Let's dispense with this confused notion right now.

Yes, there have been past abuses in the name of "population control".

There have been abuses of health care and education too, but the idea of reacting by abandoning any of these causes is absurd.

Yes, because using government power to stop people from reproducing is exactly like health care and education.

Any talk of population control is, by definition, talk about human rights, in this case restricting them. This is one of the issues in which human rights and environmentalism clash dramatically.

In deep ecology, for instance, the priorities are clear:

The flourishing of human life and cultures is compatible with a substantial decrease of the human population. The flourishing of nonhuman life requires such a decrease.

Here "flourishing" is an arbitrary term, but the message is clear. Nonhuman life must be allowed to "flourish", therefore human life must be reduced.

Deep ecology claims to advocate "equal rights" for all living things. That's a funny definition of equal rights when one form of life must be systematically displaced in favor of others.

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I personally maintain that deep ecology and all other movements are misanthropic, inhuman and against all concepts of human rights as we hold them. They appeal to some innate cruelty in people that makes them seek solutions in hecatombs, not in policy. It's no coincidence that the Jokela school shooter in Finland was a student of Pentti Linkola, a deep ecologist: he was a misanthope, and so was Linkola. Under Linkola's philosophy, the Jokela school shooting was a good thing as people died.

Population itself does not correlate with ecological damage. It's what the population does that causes damage. The article I quoted mentions, among other things, desertification in Africa as a result of overpopulation. Now this is just stupid. Desertification in Africa is caused by deforestation, largely a result of slash-and-burn farming but overall of using trees for firewood.

If your solution to this problem is "less people", then those fewer people will keep practising slash-and-burn agriculture and cutting down trees for firewood, and the problem will continue. On the other hand, a smarter way to fix the problem would be introducing modern agriculture and nuclear power. Then the trees don't need to be cut down any more.

Of course, this would mean advocating technology. As a rule, modern-day environmentalists prefer ludditism and hecatombs to technology. I believe most "deep ecologists" get such a kick out of being extreme and advocating insane solutions that they'd be deeply unwilling to make a sensible environmental case for, say, solving the desertification problem in Africa. Instead, they prefer the kind of sweeping proclamations like "we must reduce population" that have no basis in reality and can't be translated into policy. In my opinion, that isn't environmentalism.

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No call for reducing the human population is anything but misanthropy, very much by definition. The whole idea is founded on the mistaken belief that the world is approaching or even, to some lunatics, exceeding, its carrying capacity. It's doing no such thing. This planet could easily house billions more humans.

We're extremely unlikely to ever even approach the limits of our carrying capacity. If there's one thing we've seen, it's that once societies reach a certain level of sophistication population growth simply ends. None of the developed nations of the world are growing at very high rates.

If you really want to stop population growth, start working toward bringing the Third World up to our level of affluence. That will effectively reduce human population growth across the planet to marginal levels.

Then again, that would mean advocating technology. And for the environmentalist movement, technology is evil. So I guess not.

Environmental philosophy, part I: a guide

As I'm thoroughly sick of the topic of immigration and refugees, and the zombie infestation that comes with discussing them, it's time to move this blog onto its next theme. I thought I'd jot down some thoughts on environmentalism and environmental philosophy, to address a few things I have on my mind about them.

No sooner had I decided to get to writing my first post on the topic, than Something Awful posted the Guide to Environmentalism. So maybe we'll just start with that.

Some reading for the weekend

Reuters: Alp-sized peaks found entombed in Antarctic ice

H. P. Lovecraft: At the Mountains of Madness

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The Wall Street Journal: The War on Drugs Is a Failure

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Also, the latest in global warming alarmism, from the New Scientist:

How to survive the coming century

How unbiased is it? The author is called Gaia.

(I'm kidding, but they are being a bit extreme)

For instance:

"All of the world's major deserts are predicted to expand, with the Sahara reaching right into central Europe.

Glacial retreat will dry Europe's rivers from the Danube to the Rhine, with similar effects in mountainous regions including the Peruvian Andes, and the Himalayan and Karakoram ranges, which as result will no longer supply water to Afghanistan, Pakistan, China, Bhutan, India and Vietnam."

Is it just me, or does it seem like the author is saying Europe's river water comes from glaciers? The one link the article had anywhere near that was to an article that said no such thing. There seems to be some consensus that rainfall in Europe will decrease by as much as 20% in the worst case scenario, but that's nowhere near enough to "dry Europe's rivers". As with so many other impacts of climate change, the effect will be to increase rainfall in the winter and decrease it in the summer.

The idea that the Himalayas will "no longer supply water" is ludicrous. Maybe someone should explain to the author what a drainage basin is and where river water comes from. Yes, a significant portion of river water in summer comes from glaciers, and apparently in a worst-case scenario the Ganges may become a seasonal river, flowing only in the summer, but rivers will not vanish because of glacier retreat. They'll only vanish if rainfall stops completely.

After scaring you with overblown images of desertification, the author gets to the real point:

"In order to survive, humans may need to do something radical: rethink our society not along geopolitical lines but in terms of resource distribution."

"If we use land, energy, food and water efficiently, our population has a chance of surviving - provided we have the time and willingness to adapt."

And the article goes on and on about what kind of a global planned economy we need to set up to "survive the coming century":

"We need to look at the world afresh and see it in terms of where the resources are, and then plan the population, food and energy production around that."

I have to write some more on environmentalist alarmism in the future, but the biggest reason articles like this make me highly sceptical is the effortless way in which the writers go from looking at the science of global warming to positing global fascism to deal with it. From the author's own website:

"The most obvious logical solution is to move the people where the resources are, and I explore this idea in a recent article. There are other options. How about enforced sterilization of people that have produced one child - this would immediately shrink the population?"

Um, because human population may decrease in the future, we should decrease it ourselves by force? Why not just advocate shooting people? One of the comments to the post hits right to the heart of this kind of thinking:

"Hi agree with limiting population growth - people should have to apply to have children, instead of it being everyones god given right. The world is being filled up with the ill-conceived offspring of degenerates and criminals, from families too large to already look after themselves."

Maybe a little extreme, but then again, James Lovelock, creator of the Gaia theory, basically agrees with him: 'humans will survive and be "culled and, I hope, refined."' Also, how does Ms. Vince imagine we would go about "moving people to where the resources are"? By force? What other way is there?

I'm not a global warming skeptic, and I'm not arguing global warming isn't happening. I'm arguing that I'm frightened by the possibilities of what might happen if global warming gets worse; I'm also frightened by the idea of the kind of people who write these articles getting to impose their ideas on the world.

The idea of "planning the world" in the way the article describes would require a total abandonment of many of our basic human rights and of representative government. Environmentalists try to justify this by saying it is necessary to the survival of our species. Somehow, eco-fascism doesn't seem like too extreme a word to describe these people.

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Finally, some old school Internet humor: Niilo Paasivirta