There’s interesting news on the global warming front in today’s Financial Times:
Everyone knows trees are “A Good Thing”. They take in the carbon dioxide that threatens our planet with global warming and turn it into fresh, clean oxygen for us all to breathe.
Continuing the discussion of energy usage from yesterday, check out this review in the New York Sun of Children of the Sun (W.W. Norton), by Alfred Crosby, emeritus professor of history, geography, and American studies at the University of Texas.
Jeffrey Tucker at the Ludwig Von Mises Institute:
You might say that water needs to be conserved. Yes, and so does every other scarce good. The peaceful way to do this is through the price system. But because municipal water systems have created artificial shortages, other means become necessary. One regulation piles on top of another, and the next thing you know, you have shower commissars telling you what you can or cannot do in the most private spaces.
Arnold Kling at the excellent EconLog says that “the government should empty its strategic petroleum reserve and buy energy futures contracts instead. At some point, the futures market has to be taken seriously.”
Check out this review of James Howard Kunstler’s new book, The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century (Atlantic), which describes it as a “litany around the increasingly fashionable panic over oil depletion.” This paucity of oil will in large part contribute to a future in which “the best-case scenario is a mass die-off followed by a forced move back to the land, complete with associated feudal relations. As the title implies, this is to be an ongoing state rather than a crisis to be overcome – a sentiment that the US critic Susan Sontag described as ‘apocalypse from now on’.”
There are two good articles out there in today’s press about socialist thinking, which alas is all too prevalant, especially in issues concerning the environment.
The first is a tribute to Arthur Seldon in the Daily Telegraph. Some of Seldon’s friends and family are gathering in a London synagogue today to remember one of the founders of the Institute of Economic Affairs.
Today, Orthodox Christians all over the world are celebrating Epiphany, one of the great feast days of the Eastern Church.
Epiphany is, for the Orthodox, the manifestation of the Lord’s divinity and the mystery of the Trinity, the inauguration of the sacrament of baptism, and the beginning of the preaching of the Kingdom of Heaven. For the Orthodox, Epiphany is also a profoundly ecological moment. Churches hold Blessing of the Waters services which commemorate Christ’s baptism in the Jordan River, an event that transformed not just earthly Creation, but the entire cosmos.
Topping today’s Science/Nature section at BBC News, “Population size ‘green priority’”, by Richard Black. The article focuses on the thoughts of Professor Chris Rapley, Director of the British Antarctic Survey, who contends that the “current global population of six billion is unsustainably high.” This is to say nothing of the growth rate and future generations.
