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Originally Posted by Letum
I have heard this a lot, but I'm not sure who stands to make a lot of money.
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People who depend on government grants. Nobody is going to give a research grant to a scientist who says everything is fine, nothing new or troubling here. Nobody is going to start the International Satus Quo Agency, either.
Like it or not, even state budgets are a form of market. Aramike is correct. Where the demand has been satisfied, people seek to create new demand, and the government is a bountiful cornucopia of supply. It is populated primarily by arrogant idiots who have a credit card in someone else's name with no spending limit. Is it any wonder why private interests of all kinds, even scientists, take advantage of it so regularly?
The media also profits from this, and all kinds of other doomsday scenarios. They want to get advertisers, which means broadcasting things people will watch. Nobody is going to watch a report on how everything is fine. It's nice, but it isn't news. Journalists also have a bad habit of believing scientists without checking up on them. That's no fault of their own. Most of them wouldn't be willing or able to understand and interpret experimental data properly, anyway. That's why they are jounalism majors and not climatology majors, if they majored in anything at all.
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If I wanted to make serious money I would perpetuate a myth about how
consuming vast amount of resources helps everyone and the world in the
hope that overall consumption would go up as a result. On the face of it, the creating a global warming myth would seem to do the reverse. Am I missing
something?
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Yes. Creating a myth that consuming vast amounts of resources would do anything won't fly in the free market. It would be impossible to convince me that I should buy even a single plank of rainforest lumber from you, or anyone, let alone vast amounts of it. The reason is because I value my money more than your lumber, and with good reason. I don't need lumber, and most arboreal rainforest growth makes for terrible lumber, anyway.
But a government might buy it, just like the Brazillian government did for a time. The premise of the legislation was to aid poor farmers and simultaneously get something productive out of their cultivation of the rainforest. Naturally, this only led to a destructive increase in cultivation, because an artificial supply was introduced, increasing demand. After the Brazillian government ended up with umpteen-million tons of worthless lumber(that nobody wanted), they repealed the legislation, and ended up with a vastly increased number of even poorer farmers (rainforest soil is very poor, so the agricultural products it produces tend to be substandard, and no one wants to buy them) who then resorted to the slash and burn methods they used earlier.
Or we could look at the U.S. aluminum industry, which does great business because it convinced Congress that aluminum was a vital defense need. Congress heavily subsidized it, and now we have relatively affordable aluminum cans for soda, because all that aluminum production had to be used somewhere. Of course, if the state hadn't gotten involved, no one would buy an aluminum can full of soda because it would cost like $3.00. And then all the precious resources wouldn't have been wasted, because nobody would be extracting them.
Even better, we had an entire generation of armored fighting vehicles that suffered from severe(and lethal) spalling problems because of an attempt to use aluminum armor.
On the other hand, when the free market consumes resources, it does productive things with them. It has to, or the pertinent industry is out-competed and ceases to function. Private industry is solely responsible for the modern computer, which saves untold amounts of paper annually, and uses only a small amount of power. It also created cellular telephone networks, which save vast amounts of copper and rubber. It created the agricultural revolution, and gave us efficient, clean means of generating power, like nuclear energy. And when that wasn't efficient enough, it made it even more efficient.
And it also generates wealth. The wealthiest nations in the world (in terms of GDP per capita and PPP per capita) that don't have vast amounts of oil are all ranked high on the economic freedom index. Wealth begets better education and lower birth rates, which means fewer resources consumed.
If you want to look at what the state-sponsored green revolution has given us, go right ahead. We have ethanol fuels, which are a tremendous waste of land and energy. We have wind power, which is probably the most inefficient means of generating power known to modern society besides biofuel. We have hybrid cars, which just plain suck, and the evidence is in the fact that more people prefer to buy small, cheap, gas-powered conventional vehicles. We have organic food(again), which takes vast amounts of land and feeds fewer people. And we have untold billions wasted on other things that have yet to bear fruit.
Even worse, private industry is responding to this imaginary demand for green products and trying to take advantage of it, resulting in more expensive products(that use more resources, human and natural), which means fewer products sold, which means less money, which means lower wages, less demand for labor, and everyone having a lower standard of living.
Poor countries and people can't afford to care about the environment, and they don't.
Do I even need to name examples? The Green revolution is fine as long as it comes when the market says it should, which is when prices for materials get higher on their own. Until then, there is no point in it. It is just inefficient.
Global Warming, specifically is one of the greatest frauds ever peddled to a mass consciousness. Perhaps the globe is warming, but that is more due to natural changes we cannot stop than due to human activity. Even more naive and vain is the belief that we can somehow change it. This planet spent the vast majority of its' history being warmer than it is now, and some time being much colder. We are not going to change that, no matter what we do. We just have to adapt, and if there is one thing the free market does well, and the state does very, very, poorly, it is adapt.