Oliver Hartwich has a point in claiming that media sensationalizes and exaggerates threats, about the part governments play in “fixing” the problem and concerning the tendency for big business to use these crises as an opportunity to seek assistance from our "eager to please big business” governments. Other vested interests no doubt also clamour for favour from governments in response to these crises.

But that is as far as it goes. Hartwich fails to disguise his neo-liberals sympathies.

The first clue to his pro free market agenda was his lumping together of a whole lot of localized threats, (BCE, SARS), various known health issues, (asbestos, passive smoking) and that non-event, the Millennium Bug, with really major crises, AIDS (which would have been an even worse had it not been tackled in most parts of the world)and the civilization-threatening environmental crises (climate change and peak oil). As almost an after thought he adds “limits to growth” which is not a crisis at all but a bit of self-evident logic given that the planet is a finite thing.

Incidentally (clue number two) The Limits to Growth was the book that resulted from a project commissioned by the Club of Rome to examine the long-term causes and consequences of growth in the world’s population and material economy. Under every realistic scenario the authors found that the planet’s physical resources in the form of depletable natural resources and the finite capacity of the earth to absorb emissions from industry and agriculture would force an end to physical growth sometime in the twenty-first century. Nothing alarmist about this conclusion is there? Hartwich brushes the logic aside as if the very idea of a limit to growth was evidence of deranged thinking.

It seems to me that the hallmark of traditional free marketeers or neo-liberals is their trivialization of the effects of “growth at all costs capitalism” on the finite resources of the planet.

The final clue to Oliver Hartwich’s right wing credentials is that he is a fellow of that ultra-right wing think tank, the Centre for Independent Studies.

That is merely argument by slogans and labels.

The great attraction of Malthusian theory is its seemingly invincible logic: you can’t have infinite growth on a finite base. Sounds plausible, but as soon as the reasoning is examined, it crumbles.

100,000 years ago, were there enough caves to house a population of six billion? No. Did it matter? No.

150 years ago, was there enough whale-oil to light and power our modern cities? No. Did it matter? No.

Why not? Because people figured out new ways to satisfy their wants and needs using different stuff. Did they need a big centralized government Department of Important Fretting to figure it out for them? No. They used supply and demand, profit and loss.

Was there a problem of “inter-generational equity”? No. By your logic, if future generations live better than us, as is likely, inter-generational equity requires that we use more resources today so as to be even with them.

It is simply wrong to assume that natural resources and human behaviour are in their nature fixed and limited.

What is supposed to be the problem? We’re all going to die from an impending ecological catastrophe?

Even if you accept that logic, fuel energy now powers the farm equipment, the factories and vehicles to provide food, clothing, shelter, transport, communication, medical care and entertainment for hundreds of millions of people who would otherwise die. What are we supposed to do? Cause hundreds of millions of people to die now because you’re worried that they might – but might not - die in the future?

From your post, you would think that central planning by government socialist bureaucracies has a wonderful track record of success, and human freedom is some kind of wacky, dangerous, untried hypothesis.

Even if you assume that there is a massive problem, what reason is there to think that governments are going to be in any better position to solve it?

This is just more of a belief that government has superior knowledge, capacity and goodness that is not reality-based, a superstitious worship of governmental omnipotence that doesn’t exist.

What makes you think these problems are best solved in general, in the abstract, by arbitrary decree, by people who pay no cost if they get it wrong? What evidence is there that they won’t be better solved in particular, specific circumstances by interested parties?

Besides which, carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. The world is not about to face a tipping point at which we all boil to extinction. We are not facing an ecological catastrophe.

Every one of the predictions of Malthus, and the neo-Malthusians such as Ehrlichman (“the USA is going to starve to death by the 1970s”), have been disproved both in theory and practice. People pretending to have privileged knowledge of a coming ecological collapse are pious frauds. Their computer models can’t even predict today, let alone the future.

What I think is interesting about the neo-Malthusians is that they keep on being disproved over and over and over and over and over and over again, and they just keep on popping up with the same unchanged theories and rationales.

What we are witnessing with the environmental movement and global warming is a modern-day epidemic of religious hysteria. It has all the same elements as the old-fashioned kind.

There’s the unfalsifiable belief (either hot or cold weather, flood or drought, are taken as proof). There’s the belief that man’s sin is at the root of the problem. There’s the need for repentance, and abstinence from pleasure. There’s belief in a future paradise (the stasis of ‘sustainability’). There’s high priests (government scientists) reading mysterious signs (computer models) inscrutable to the common herd. There’s the reverencing of a corporation (government) as being morally superior and omnipotent, and charged with showing man the path to salvation.

And now, to cap it all off, we have carbon taxes – the selling of indulgences

For anyone else unaware of the baggage between myself and dio: I never made any equation "free trade = capitalism". Dio persists in claiming I did, whether as provocation or plain tenacious error.

Now dio, I have no problem with ignoring that bugbear anyway. But maybe we can get somewhere if you give us your take on the derivatives bubble? Any insights?

I have much the same understanding as yourself about the "carbon" rubbish, especially its obvious economic intentions. However, on "indulgences" to date, I also identify the derivatives trade. I think you'll find it is a critical factor behind this systemic implosion.

Diocletian,
There is no doubt that capitalism has brought with it benefits to much of humanity and that it has out-performed the Soviet style command economies that are now all but extinct. But in its present form, and perhaps in any form it, has reached its use by date as it a) doesn’t take account of externalities (which the emissions trading schemes are meant to address in a limited regard), b) has become increasingly reliant on the exploitation of material resources and sinks provided by the planets natural systems – and this in spite of improving technologies) and c) feeds on perpetual economic and, in the English speaking economies, population growth.

I said in my previous post the planet is a finite thing. That’s a fact NOT a belief. So with both exponential per capita economic growth encouraged by capitalist systems (and also, but less successfully by command systems) and exponential population growth, an affliction of poor, uneducated society and a goal of some religions and governments, the limits of the planet to provide for humanity as we now know it will be reached at some point. When and what form the limits will take and how society will adjust can be argued. It is impossible to predict with certainty the future of highly complex ecologic and economic systems.

Diocletian, I don’t, as you suggest, believe for one moment that government has superior knowledge, capacity etc. I am as anti the type of governments we have as you appear to be. They do not work for the common good at all but for themselves and, it must be said big business (as can be clearly seen by their latest offerings on the ETS where they tax some and hand most of it right back to our biggest polluters – a windfall for them). They promise the voters but deliver for big business.

Lastly, if the conservationist values are labeled religious (an oxymoron as they are based on facts and logic) then what is the term that should be used to describe the blind faith free marketeers have in their system?

To explain my take on the derivatives bubble I need first to explain the Austrian school theory of the business cycle which causes it.

Increasing the money supply over and above what is held in specie is inflationary. So credit expansion is inflationary. But inflating the money supply doesn’t just cause rising prices, it causes financial crises, for the following reasons.

The easiest way to think about it is, say a bank has 100 ounces of gold in their vault. They lend out in paper money substitutes - banknotes – 150 ounces of gold worth of loans. The bank profits on the extra 50 ounces worth of paper money. If there is a run on the bank, 50 percent of the depositors lose out.

In an unhampered market, there are two major restrainers. The first one is that it’s against the law – fraud – to lend out the extra 50 without disclosing that it’s not backed by gold. Secondly, even if the bank does it, honestly or fraudulently, they are liable in loss and bankruptcy. The market select out banks that do it.

But the market is not unhampered. Government is subject to no such negative feedback loop. Government encourages such fractional reserve fraud by legalizing it, and by backing the banks who are doing it. The banks are happy to profit on the extra non-existent money, and governments take a big cut. Together they milk Joe Public.

Creating new money has the same effect as counterfeit. Even though the Fed’s new money is legal, and counterfeiting is not, *economically* the effect is exactly the same. Those who get the new money first have an advantage over everyone else. They can buy stuff at the old price, and with their new dollars are able to bid up prices.

Those who are last to get the new dollars are paying the new higher prices before they get the new dollars. So inflating the money supply is a transfer of wealth from everyone who uses money to those who can get the new dollars. Joe Public gets milked a second time