Whaling was a brutal business and lying there on the surface of the ocean on a sun-filled morning in the 21st century it was scarcely believable that men could bring themselves to harpoon such creatures. Indeed, these southern right whales were precisely the species hunted by my great-great-grandfather and his mates. Unhappily, they were named right whales because they were the ”right” ones to catch, for they gave up enormous amounts of oil and baleen, they were relatively slow and they floated when dead. Brutal as the industry was, its products helped lubricate the industrial revolution, produced soap, paint and perfume and illuminated the world’s towns and cities, the flare from whale oil candles and street lights rolling back long centuries of night.
Tony Wright Betwixt sacred and propane (via indefensible)
We forget the extent to which some things which seem inacceptable today were really useful at some point. People today complain about how industrialization of the wetlands are putting New Orleans at risk “just for” more convenient shipping lanes. That may be true, but even though this industrialization may threaten New Orleans today (and I think that’s probably right), New Orleans probably wouldn’t exist today anymore if they hadn’t been built at the time.
An example a friend often refers to is smog in London. During the industrial revolution London was polluted to an extent that seems incomprehensible today, even compared to the world’s most polluted cities such as Mexico or even industrial cities in China. Smog from coal extraction was such a thick haze that some days you couldn’t see a few feet ahead of you. The smell was incredibly noxious. But — and this is the crucial point — smog was not defeated by environmental regulation, but by technological and economic progress. Coal was replaced by oil, which pollutes, but less, and less aggressively. Coal extracting and burning became more efficient, rejecting less pollution — not to save the spotted owl, but to increase ROI. And, in smart countries *cough*FRANCE*cough* oil was replaced by nuclear, which doesn’t pollute at all. And the next generation of nuclear power plants, unless environmental activists get their way, can actually use spent rods as fuel, settling one of the few big legitimate concerns with nuclear power.
Don’t get me wrong: I don’t reject environmental regulation wholesale, far from it. Negative externalities are a real thing, and we should have mechanisms in place to remedy them — preferably decentralized ones, but policy also has its place. Classic liberal law has all the tools in place to sanction pollution and environmental harm from negligence.
But this explains why, e.g., I am a Lomborgian on fighting climate change. A carbon tax might help (although it is maddeningly complex to implement in practice), but at the end of the day what will “save” us is new technology, and new technology that is economically viable: extended-range EVs; carbon-capturing GM trees; and so on and so forth. This is what we need to focus on.
(via indefensible)
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