I have previously posted on global warming, at least back as far as 2007.
If you want to know the costs associated with the “Cap and Trade” system proposed by Kyoto, look at this report. If you can’t decipher the bureaucratic language, here is the conclusion. GDP and consumption impacts in the Full Auction case are substantially larger than those in the Phased Auction case. Relative to the reference case, discounted total GDP (in 2000 dollars) over the 2009-2030 time period in the Full Auction case is $462 billion (0.19 percent lower), while discounted real consumer spending is $483 billion (0.29 percent) lower. In 2030, projected real GDP in the Full Auction case is $94 billion (0.41 percent) lower than in the reference case, while aggregate consumption is $106 billion (0.69 percent) lower, almost twice the estimated consumption loss in the Phased Auction case. A reduction in GDP is called a recession.A reduction that is permanent is called a Depression.
It’s no wonder that nothing was done. First, the risks of serious harm are small. The small amount of warming suggested by more serious studies has nothing to do with the alarmist views.
Now, we have a new strategy. The alarmists are going to try to destroy the fossil fuel industry.
The fossil free movement has spread far and wide on American campuses. Fossil Free Stanford organized in fall 2012 after McKibben visited Palo Alto on his “Do the Math Tour.” Two of the founding members, Michael Penuelas and Yari Greaney, both from the class of 2015, proclaimed their commitment. Greaney held that “our tuition money…is going to support industries that are polluting our future.”
This is standard student radical rhetoric. What is new ?
The students waged a textbook campaign, assembling impressive numbers, soliciting key testimonials, maintaining a respectful tone towards authority while at the same time keeping up the pressure.
The question is really: to what end? The answer is, sadly, self-delusion. No one doubts that Stanford students are smart, but their intelligence is not much of a defense against irrational enthusiasms that can sweep through a community. What the divestment movement has sold to Stanford students is a bit of flummery. When Stanford announced on May 6 that it would divest “direct investments in coal mining companies,” President John Hennessy issued a statement that begins, “Stanford has a responsibility as a global citizen to promote sustainability for the planet…”
Got that? Stanford is no longer a university. It is a “global citizen.” And global citizens, of course, are charged with promoting “sustainability.”
Delusions of this magnitude seem to be getting more common. As at Dartmouth, for example.
The activists unveiled a Freedom Budget in February with over 70 specific actions they want the Dartmouth administration to take to address students’ concerns over diversity, perceived sexism and the campus climate for minorities and the LGBT community. Students entered President Phil Hanlon’s office Tuesday afternoon at 4 p.m. asking for a point-by-point response, following what they felt was a half-hearted statement about their budget from Dartmouth a day before finals on March 6.
What do they want ? Why not much, just turn Dartmouth into an insane asylum.
The Freedom Budget’s items include hiring more racial minorities as faculty, implementing more gender-neutral housing and bathroom options, banning the term “illegal immigrant,” evaluating the Greek system’s role in sexual assault, and harsher punishments for those who commit sexual violence.
Stanford assigned another Constitutional Law professor to teach the course that Derrick Bell was teaching. Why should this be ?
Stanford at that time had one of the leading scholars in constitutional law, Professor Gerald Gunther — and Derrick Bell was no Gerald Gunther. A hastily created program of study of constitutional law was then used to teach that subject to students who were not getting what they needed in Professor Bell’s course.
When this clever finessing of the problem came to light, the administration apologized — to Derrick Bell for the embarrassment this caused him.
They should have apologized to the law students for short-changing them with a professor who was not up to the job — and to those who donated money to the university to advance the cause of education, not to allow administrators to play racial quota politics on campus.
As a full professor at the Harvard law school, Derrick Bell was also surrounded by colleagues who were out of his league as academic scholars. What were his options at this point?
Here is one example of the result of affirmative action. What about global warming ?
The orthodoxy of the left is just as powerful. It recently claimed another scalp.
Dear Professor Henderson,
I have been put under such an enormous group pressure in recent days from all over the world that has become virtually unbearable to me. If this is going to continue I will be unable to conduct my normal work and will even start to worry about my health and safety. I see therefore no other way out therefore than resigning from GWPF. I had not expecting such an enormous world-wide pressure put at me from a community that I have been close to all my active life. Colleagues are withdrawing their support, other colleagues are withdrawing from joint authorship etc.
No mercy for those who say the earth revolves around the sun. Anyway, the alarmists have a big agenda.
This is not a single-issue movement. This is a space where environmental justice, climate justice, and economic justice have come into contact. We understand that we will not win the fight against the fossil fuel industry without confronting racism, classism, homophobia, and other systems of oppression in our movement spaces.
My colleagues and I at the National Association of Scholars have been pointing out for some time how fluidly the sustainability movement changes from clean energy advocacy to a hard left agenda on social issues. Official Stanford no doubt brushes aside these elaborations, thinking that it has discerned the core issue: dirty industries that pollute the water, blight the landscape, and foul the air. But the true core issue is the effort of a movement to foster in students a lifelong aversion to Western values.
How well it will succeed in that no one knows, but there is no comfort in the ease with which Bill McKibben in a little less than two years has conjured this movement into existence.
Personally, I see this as another example of how environmentalism has become a religion that tolerates heretics not at all. The similarity to the Puritans is striking, even to the region that has given rise to the leftist ideology.
Joseph Bottum, by contrast, examines post-Protestant secular religion with empathy, and contends that it gained force and staying power by recasting the old Mainline Protestantism in the form of catechistic worldly categories: anti-racism, anti-gender discrimination, anti-inequality, and so forth. What sustains the heirs of the now-defunct Protestant consensus, he concludes, is a sense of the sacred, but one that seeks the security of personal salvation through assuming the right stance on social and political issues.
Environmentalism is but one branch of leftism but is a particularly intrusive one.