I disagree with some of their particulars but this is the right direction.
OpinionJournal - Leisure & Arts
OpinionJournal - Leisure & Arts
Let it be said that Messrs. Nordhaus and Shellenberger are anything but nature-scoffing know-nothings. They have worked for environmental organizations for years. Thus there is a certain poignancy to their view that "doomsday discourse" has made the green movement just another liberal interest group. They want environmentalism to have a broader appeal--enough to address major ecological concerns, including global warming. But no one, they contend, is going to demand draconian emission limits--the kind that would actually slow the warming trend--if they bring down the standard of living and interrupt the progress of the economy.
A progressive approach, the authors say, would acknowledge that economic growth and prosperity do not, in themselves, pose an environmental threat. To the contrary, they inspire ecological concern; the environment, Messrs. Nordhaus and Shellenberger say, is a "post-material" need that people demand only after their material needs are met. To make normal, productive human activity the enemy of nature, as environmentalists implicitly do, is to adopt policies that "constrain human ambition, aspiration and power" instead of finding ways to "unleash and direct them."
Messrs. Nordhaus and Shellenberger want "an explicitly pro-growth agenda," on the theory that investment, innovation and imagination may ultimately do more to improve the environment than punitive regulation and finger-wagging rhetoric. To stabilize atmospheric carbon levels will take more--much more--than regulation; it will require "unleashing human power, creating a new economy."
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Again yes, and what is astounding about this point is the obviousness of it. This is like saying, "the sky is blue, up and down are in opposite directions." But it is so obvious that rich westerners cannot see what is before their eyes. Have these silly "Greenies" never traveled? Have they ever been to the "Third World"? What is as obvious as the nose on your face is that America and Western Europe are clean, clean, clean. They are the most unpolluted places on the face of the earth, in large measure because they are rich. Rich people in the western world take baths or showers everyday, wash their clothes, and also have neat, clean, unpolluted environments. It is poor and undeveloped places that are filthy and polluted. Just go to India, the outbacks of China (as opposed to the few really rich cities that are show cases) the Philippines, many places in the Arab world, almost all of Africa, and a good part of South America, and they are POLLUTED. But ohhhhhhh, what comes in for the death blows by the environmentalists? Development! What is so obvious that these people cannot see it, because their entire ideology begins with self hatred, and hating ones own civilization (I think it actually begins with learning and believing that hating ones parents and rebelling against all they gave you, is somehow the foundation of all that is "with it")they cannot see that it is development and the acquisition of wealth that fosters a concern for how nice and clean your world is. Sorry, but the romanticised outback peasant in the filthy third world, has no time or money for such luxuries as cleanliness of any kind, nor can they afford it. You have to be rich to also be clean. A point too obvious to be noticed by the very rich environmentalists.
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