Mike Kaulbars,

I hope you won’t mind me taking the liberty to write this rather long letter, but I have had some time to think after your comment on a previous post and your link.  You made an excellent argument against Mr Bellamy and your blog brought a few things to mind as I was reading.  Now, at this point I’d expect you may be thinking that I’m going to present some argument in an attempted ‘refutation’ of global warming.  But I am not and this is hardly an attack on yourself.  Just more an initiation of discussion.  In particular, I want to address something else that you have brought to my attention.  While I remain sceptical about global warming, I am not a scientist.  Any attempt by me to argue consistently or accurately for or against global warming will be half assed and end in disaster.  So, although I have expressed my opposition to global warming in the past, for the moment I have reverted to a fence sitter.  A sort of global warming Agnostic, if you will.  I will admit that your science is convincing and has knocked down many arguments I possessed against global warming but I am hardly here to discuss whether global warming exists.  Instead, my interest lies in the implementation of solutions and many of the supporters that I come across declaring their unwavering support for the theory of man-made global warming.

My concern is, not you as a individual, but the actions of many other fanatics donning the green hat, raising the anti-CO2 standard and marching on to evangelise in the streets, cafes, bookstores, universities, schools, in the newspapers and the on the TVs.  Make certain, I use the term “evangelise” specifically, because they are akin to the religious crazies on the street corner quoting Romans and accusing all passers by of being morally corrupt.  The moment you present the slightest doubt regarding the official line of their religiosity, you are shunned as a ’sinner’ and damned to hell.  Surely, you can understand the response you will receive from the likes me of and others who specifically make a point of questioning everything when there are others who behave in such a manner?

I can certainly understand and agree with the desire to find more efficient technologies for decreasing waste and pollution into our environment while conserving ecosystems so as to prevent those at the top of the food chain (us) of being placed in a precarious position.  While I oppose any attempt at using the institution of government to achieve these two worthy goals, I certainly agree with them.  They make sense.  I realise that it is quite unlikely that you share the same politics as myself.  In fact it is more likely that you will outright oppose me, but I ask you, consider for the moment that second category of global warming soldiers.  I have come to find that many of these Green evangelicals are hardly the environmentalists they claim to be.  They simply champion man-made global warming as the bane of their existence and so any means of ‘fixing’ the problem becomes acceptable, regardless of its ripple effect or morality.

Many of these people, and there seem to be many more irrational pro man-made global warming types than rational that I have met (though that’s maybe because I don’t associate with too many science graduates), appear to hate society and disdain their fellow human beings.  I have even had the displeasure to meet some who propose that we need to, “heavily reduce the population of the planet because we are too many.”  When I question this bizarre statement, it’s usually to be achieved through some form of mass murder, be it WWIII or a contagious virus.  There’s even a whole division of Anarchists who see man-made global warming as just one more justification of their anti-civilisation, back-to-nature bullshit (please forgive my vulgarity).  Others who I have discussed global warming with, often begin their conversation with, “If I was in charge…” and proceed to lay out a very well thought out system that increases the power of government tenfold while proposes a strict regimen of taxation, regulation and coercion — as if they were god — without any consideration for the harm they’d to do.  There are those, that continue to horrify me, arguing that the current recession is a good thing (as well as blaming it on the free market, but that’s an entirely other can of worms) on the basis that people will have less money to spend, and will so better the environment.  They somehow fail to comprehend that being kicked out of your home, having your business foreclose, losing your job, starving and even economic depression are very bad things and many people will suffer as a result.  The only reason I can imagine is that these people have money.  Further still, some radical evangelical global warming proponents to go so far as to propose the taxation of babies in Australia — though many public figures dismissed this as silly and rightly so.  These are the people I loathe.

Then there are the disturbing claims of increasing the power of government.  As a political activist to an environmental activist, I ask you for a moment to seriously give this a thought, even if you probably do not share my political outlook.   Through out human history government has been bad.  Look deeply into any issue, event or saga and you will come to realise that the problems were primarily caused by our friendly neighbourhood government.  Taxation, wars (be they the conventional kind involving a machine gun or the wars on drugs, prostitution, homelessness, terrorism, poverty and even the foreseeable war on global warming), genocides, redistribution of wealth and many more ills can all be linked back to government interventionism somewhere along the line.  In most of these situations, a government or someone close to a government, will alway benefit, for those key supporters of government and the politicians themselves are inherently parasitic and survive off the labour of others (subsidisation, taxation).  Even when government intervention is initiated with the best intentions, it will always breed more problems which need to be fixed by more interventionism. It is even probable that many of the problems associated with combating global change can be attributed to governments, but that is a very sensitive discussion for another time.

Often, the loudest call from many man-made global warming supporters is for government intervention, which as you would expect, startles me. If you will allow me the pleasure of using my own labels, their proposals can be considered Negative Solutions.  Lobbying governments to ‘do something’ entails a Negative Solution.  Greater regulation, control and taxation is an authoritarian approach taken by many man-made-global warming supporters, which has been another reason for my distrust.  I can’t really blame your average man-made global warming supporter for trying to seek a solution.  However, I believe it is the wrong solution.  Government, if made to see a problem, will immediately initiate solutions that involve the use of force through government intervention and such intervention only leads to the creation of further problems which require more intervention to solve. Talk about circular logic…

A clear alternative to these should be those solutions that don’t involve the coercive institution of the state and, I think, should have greater value placed upon them.  Positive Solutions, as I see it, are those that may involve grass roots organising to increase the number of trees in local areas, the creation of community gardens (which would decrease transportation, packaging, and costs associated with the farming process) or the development of newer, more efficient and ‘green’ technologies — basically anything that doesn’t involve government and is to all intents and purposes free market.

There is a fundamental difference between these two forms of solutions. Perhaps that is something to think about, particularly as associating yourself with the bureaucratic, rigid system that is government is never good politically or logistically and only serves to sacrifice morality for pragmatism and wastes resources trying to achieve Negative Solutions which could be better put into Positive Solutions.  Obviously, these are simplistic outlines, but maybe there is room for someone with more knowledge to expand on them.  They’re just an Anarchist perspective.

As I suspect you may be in favour of government intervention and you may very well be thinking that force is justified in this instance.  And although I suppose you may lack the same philosophical background as myself, this is the same argument many Socialists give in regards to wealth redistribution.  According to them, although theft is wrong, it is fine to use government to take money earned by one and give it to another that didn’t work for it.  Aggression can never be justified, as the act of aggression invalidates any justification as it is an act that is unjust and infringes upon individual autonomy.  In relation to global warming, although you may think government intervention is justified by the prospect of a serious catastrophe, entrusting our future to governments because, “individuals cannot handle it,” won’t do any good.  Government will make the situation worse and if you don’t believe me, I’d suggest read up on the Murray Darling river system and the problems government are having in ‘managing’ that issue.  If you want to agitate for change and an environmental consciousness, you need to do it without government.  Keep them out of it.

I greatly respect your militancy, which becomes apparent after just a few minutes reading your blog.  It’s hardly a bad thing, though it’s been given a bad rap.  It is something I admire in others and fail to emulate when confronted with staunch, yet remarkably naive statists in my own debates.  If you take anything from me, I hope it is that you consider how you wish to go about achieving your ends, who some of your supporters are, what else they are proposing and the implications of what whatever your proposed solution is.  Although, if you are correct and you are working to solve a global problem, you need to understand that the path you choose to take may have greater implications for the rest of us.  It is the same consideration any political activist must make.

On a final note, I’d suggest a rethink the overuse of the word “deniers.”  Yeah sure, it’s appropriate to use in certain debates and while I know you have your reasons for using it, it’s overkill.  It’s the same as if I used the words, “fascist,” and, “statist,” in every discussion — particularly in the sense that the term ‘denier’ does evoke connotations with ‘Holocaust Denier’ just as ‘fascist’ creates a jerk reaction which causes people to think, ‘Nazi.’  It can be a useful piece of rhetoric, but not so helpful in many situations.

Hopefully, through this you can make sense of my position in the whole, sticky debate.  I have an intense mistrust of fanatics and I hope I’ve presented an entirely different angle that provides some food for thought, in the very least.

Royce Christian