Keith Lockitch — VOICES for REASON

The Objectivist Academic Center (OAC) is currently accepting applications for its Fall 2011 incoming class. Designed to provide expert guidance in the study of Ayn Rand’s philosophy, this program is for those who are serious about advocating pro-reason, pro-individual rights, pro-capitalism views in the intellectual arena.

Aimed at young and ambitious students with the energy and drive to make a difference in the world, the OAC program begins with a one-year course focusing on philosophical understanding and communication skills. Students who complete the one-year course are eligible to apply to an Advanced Education Program. There is no charge for the Core Course or for the Advanced Education Program.

The application deadline for Fall admission is July 29, 2011.

On Earth Day I think it is a good time to mention a new article of mine—“Energy Privation: The Environmentalist Campaign Against Energy.” The article is my contribution to the new collection of essays called Why Businessmen Need Philosophy.

So why should businessmen care about Earth Day and the “green energy” movement? The answer is self-defense—intellectual self-defense against those who attack their activities and want to see businesses shackled with government controls and regulations. And one of the major threats that businessmen need to defend themselves against is the environmentalist movement.

Environmentalists claim that we need to change the way we use energy, and they make it seem as though they have a clear and practical plan for accomplishing this change. But what I argue in the article is that, in fact, environmentalist energy policy amounts to an all-out campaign against energy as such. It is “not a crusade to replace carbon-based fuels with something else, but a crusade to methodically eliminate any practical means of producing energy on an industrial scale.”

I discuss my view in more detail in the live Q&A session that took place this morning, which you can watch here, and in the article. See also these recent posts on VFR.

Following the Climategate scandal, I commented that on the climate issue “there has been a consistent pattern of exaggeration and deception, of context-dropping claims, and of distortion of the facts and the scientific process”—and that this has been driven by “a widespread commitment to environmentalist ideology.”

Well since Climategate, there have been so many other scientific scandals that have emerged it’s hard to keep up with them all. As the Wall Street Journal put it:

It has been a bad—make that dreadful—few weeks for what used to be called the “settled science” of global warming, and especially for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that is supposed to be its gold standard.

First it turns out that the Himalayan glaciers are not going to melt anytime soon, notwithstanding dire U.N. predictions. Next came news that an IPCC claim that global warming could destroy 40% of the Amazon was based on a report by an environmental pressure group. Other IPCC sources of scholarly note have included a mountaineering magazine and a student paper.

Here’s a round-up of the growing list of scientific distortions from the Orange County Register’s Mark Landsbaum.  So much for “The debate is over.”

Photo credit: flickr/azrainman

Last week I spoke at the 13th annual Energy & Environment Conference and Expo in Phoenix. This is one the largest events in the U.S. devoted to energy and environmental issues, with over 650 speakers and more than 2300 attendees.

Marketing slogan: “650 speakers tackle solutions for USA’s energy independence and reducing carbon emissions.” Well, make that 649, because the gist of my presentation was to argue against the “solutions” that every other speaker had to offer.

As I told the audience attending my panel session, I was there to make the case for not doing anything about climate change—or, more specifically, for not imposing a massive regime of government controls, regulations, or market interventions aimed at restricting greenhouse gases in the name of allegedly fighting climate change.

Mine was definitely the most controversial talk on my panel session. I was even attacked as a “denier” by one of my co-panelists, the executive director of the American Solar Energy Society. But there were a number of people in the audience who came up afterwards to thank me for presenting a contrarian view that they felt was badly needed at this conference.

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In my last post, I commented on how government central planning, being subject to shifting political agendas, makes long-range economic decision-making impossible. It’s worth looking at other examples of the chaos and market distortions that government intervention causes.

Consider the government’s support for alternative fuel vehicles, which—like the solar power plants in the Mojave desert—is driven purely by green ideology. It currently doesn’t make any technological or economic sense to try to replace the petroleum-powered internal combustion engine with currently existing alternative fuel technologies. (Just as it currently doesn’t make any sense to try to replace fossil-fueled or nuclear-powered electricity with solar or wind.) Nevertheless, the government is determined to do so.

In 2003, the Bush administration launched a 1.5 billion dollar initiative to subsidize the development of hydrogen cars—cars that use hydrogen instead of gasoline as their source of energy, producing water as their only emission.

Now, there are all kinds of reasons why hydrogen cars would never make it today on a free market. Critics cite legitimate safety concerns, the high cost of hydrogen fuel cell technologies, and the need for a huge, nationwide build-out of hydrogen refueling stations. Read the rest of this entry »

In October, I posted on the opposition by environmentalists to solar energy projects in California’s Mojave Desert. I mentioned that California Senator Dianne Feinstein was planning to bolster that opposition with legislation.

Well, just before Christmas the New York Times reported that Feinstein introduced a bill “to protect a million acres of the Mojave Desert in California by scuttling some 13 big solar plants and wind farms planned for the region.”

What I found most striking in the article was this (emphasis added):

But before the bill to create two new Mojave national monuments has even had its first hearing, the California Democrat has largely achieved her aim. Regardless of the legislation’s fate, her opposition means that few if any power plants are likely to be built in the monument area, a complication in California’s effort to achieve its aggressive goals for renewable energy.

Developers of the projects have already postponed several proposals or abandoned them entirely. The California agency charged with planning a renewable energy transmission grid has rerouted proposed power lines to avoid the monument.

“The very existence of the monument proposal has certainly chilled development within its boundaries,” said Karen Douglas, chairwoman of the California Energy Commission.

So even if the bill fails in Congress, the environmentalist anti-development agenda wins.

The irony is that these scuttled energy projects are creatures of green government intervention in the first place. Read the rest of this entry »

Thankfully, no binding agreement was reached on the global economic suicide pact that delegates were trying to craft at the climate conference in Copenhagen. Despite President Obama’s personal intervention—which apparently does not have magical agreement-forging powers (who knew?)—all that emerged from the meeting was a toothless “accord” and an agreement to keep talking.

But even though the provisions of the accord are legally non-binding, they do represent small steps toward actual commitments. The accord includes pledges to “enhance our long-term cooperative action to combat climate change,” to “hold the increase in global temperature below 2 degrees Celsius,” to “cooperate to achieve the peaking of global and national emissions as soon as possible,” and to provide undeveloped countries with “adequate funding” to adapt to climate change.

This last item was a major theme of the conference. The fact that poor countries are much more vulnerable to severe climate events than industrialized nations is widely recognized, and it is used to argue that developed nations have a duty to dole out massive amounts of foreign aid to help undeveloped countries adapt.

What’s not widely acknowledged is the fact that preindustrial countries have always been vulnerable to drought and hurricanes and heat waves and so on—and they always will be so long as they remain preindustrial. What keeps them at risk is not the possibility of large-scale changes to the climate, but their poverty and lack of technology. Their climate vulnerability is primarily a result of their lack of industrialization and political freedom.  Read the rest of this entry »

The Climategate documents—the hundreds of emails and other data hacked from the Climatic Research Unit of England’s East Anglia University—have exposed serious breaches of scientific integrity. They contain evidence of collusion among a small but highly influential group of climate researchers to suppress and even delete key data, to manipulate the scientific peer-review process, to exclude the work of dissenting scientists, and allegedly to evade Freedom of Information requests by destroying requested materials.

Climate alarmists have responded by trying desperately to make the issue go away. They argue that the bad behavior of a few individuals doesn’t invalidate the entire edifice of global warming science. Surely, they ask, you’re not suggesting that the whole theory is just one big massive fraud, are you?

Some are even trying to ridicule the legitimate concerns the documents raise by invoking the specter of some sort of nefarious global conspiracy. At a recent hearing on Capitol Hill, Rep. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) sarcastically put the question to a number of testifying scientists:

“I just wanted to ask you if you’re part of that massive international conspiracy,” he said to the witnesses, adding with a note of sarcasm, “Are either one of you members of the Trilateral Commission, SPECTRE or KAOS? I just need an answer.”

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Darwin’s masterpiece The Origin of Species was published 150 years ago today, and the truths Darwin discovered are now the cornerstones of modern biology.

Nevertheless, creationists are still trying to dodge the facts and distort Darwin’s science and legacy. The latest scheme is a creationist edition of Origin with an introduction that attacks Darwin personally and rehashes scientifically illiterate claims against evolution. The edition has been published by creationist Ray Comfort, a colleague of child-TV-star-cum-evangelical-fanatic Kirk Cameron, in order to hand out free copies to students on college campuses.

Check out this four-part exchange between Comfort and scientist Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education. (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.) It is revealing, I think, of the hostility and utter ignorance of Darwin’s enemies, as well as the futility—Scott’s valiant efforts notwithstanding—of trying to engage in reasoned debate with people who are essentially anti-reason.

In his autobiography, Darwin said: “I have almost always been treated honestly by my reviewers, passing over those without scientific knowledge as not worthy of notice.” While this is too broad a dismissal of all nonscientist commentators, it certainly applies to those who willingly and militantly embrace scientific ignorance in the name of faith.

One argument sometimes heard in favor of green energy is that sources such as wind and solar are “free, forever.”  Al Gore, in particular, has said repeatedly that to end our “overdependence on outdated, heavily polluting carbon-based technologies . . . we need sources that are free forever, like the sun, wind and earth.” (See also here, here and here.)

On a superficial glance, this might seem to have a certain ring of plausibility. To use the energy in oil, coal and natural gas takes a lot of work and resources: the fuels have to be discovered, extracted, transported, processed, refined, and distributed—all at great effort and expense.

By contrast, sunlight and wind are flows of energy that already occur all by themselves in nature. Sunshine is, literally, a stream of electromagnetic energy flowing onto the earth. Similarly with wind, which consists of air particles that carry kinetic energy by the very fact of their being in motion. We can feel the effects of such energy without effort, just by sitting in the sun and enjoying the breeze.

But if you give this even a tiny amount of additional thought, you should quickly realize that the “free forever” argument is just plain silly.

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