If you know me you know of my damnable addiction to demonstrable fact as opposed to consensus opinion, mystical revelation, emotion, or necessarily oversimplified computer model. So you'll not be surprised that I find the shrill cries of doom from the environmentalist movement distasteful at best and life-threatening at their worst, that is once they start enrolling the government as the muscle enforcing their maniacal hatred of man. So I was interested to see, a unique perspective on the analysis of energy and the environment, an article by Dr. Keith Lockitch called Climate Vulnerability and the Indispensible Value of Capitalism, announced yesterday on the blog Voices for Reason.
He addresses the ideas from an interesting angle, rather than wade into the muck about the science of climate change he focuses on what other factors make us susceptible to harm by storms or other climate disasters, in his words:
Climate alarmists are trying to make people hysterical over the possibility of large-scale changes to the earth’s climate, which they claim will be a “planetary emergency.” But they ignore the fact that our susceptibility to climate-related threats depends on a lot more than what’s happening in the atmosphere. In particular, it depends on our political and economic conditions.
He shows that policies which stifle innovation and protect wilderness, for wilderness sake, make us ill equipped to prevent or react to storms, fires and other disasters. He also presents historical examples where industrialized countries fared much better in similar weather related disasters to countries that were pre-industrial or weighed down with statist controls.
I recommend reading it because it strikes a blow against the assumption that the solution to bad weather is outlaw industrial society and return to a "simpler" time.