| Muck and Mystery Loitering With Intent |
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Groups of politicians and lawyers have recruited Inuit people as plaintiffs in a suit they'd like to lodge against the US for causing global warming. Many have pointed out the irony of the suit which cites the heartbreaking problems the Inuit now face:
Large sections of the [ACIA] report deal with problems faced by indigenous Arctic people, who tell of hunters falling through melting sea ice, declining reindeer herds and difficulty traveling in roadless regions with no snow for their snowmobiles and sleds.Snowmobiles? Hunting with guns? Indigenous? What is it that these people are claiming? It clearly is not that their traditional way of life is being altered since that has been going on for a long time and has been enthusiastically embraced. After all, they are happy to shoot off lawyers, politicians and activists as well as guns to make their lives easier and make money.
The Inuit live in houses not igloos. They build their houses on stilts because the heat would otherwise melt the permafrost and cause the house to sink into the resulting mud. They heat and illuminate their homes with gas and electricity not animal fats. They have power stations, hospitals, police, schools, fire departments, stores, and churches like others. They use snowmobiles and trucks on solid ice and motorboats on water. They dress themselves in modern fabrics not animal skins.
The Inuit do all the things that those they wish to sue do. What's their point? How is another society that does just as they do responsible when they are not? How is one nation that produces only one fifth of the exhaust blamed for the warming responsible when those responsible for the other four fifths are not? This is especially pertinent since the share produced by that one nation is falling while others rise.
Could it be otherwise? Could that one nation alter its behavior in some way and avert the problems the Inuit complain about? Well, no, nothing they can do will make any difference. If a miracle happened and that nation was blotted from the earth nothing would change. Eliminating their contribution to warming entirely, assuming that the theories are correct, wouldn't change anything. It would take over twice as much reduction just to stabilize things as they are now. What is their point?
Money honey. It's all about money. The lawyers and activists see a gold mine that they liken to the suits against tobacco companies. Those suits generated a few bucks for those who harmed themselves with tobacco and billions for the lawyers. It's extortion pure and simple, a symptom of governance failure and social dysfunction arguably far more damaging than climate change since it degrades the quality of life, wastes huge amounts of resources and so in a humorously circular way is a cause of climate change. Who will sue the lawyers?
This is what the environmental movement is doing instead of working to improve the environment. They use the environment as a wedge issue to make money but do nothing at all to improve the environment. Their battles are political not because any political group is any better than another on environmental issues, but because one helps them make money and the other wishes to stifle their hustle and focus on real change.
We need two things to improve the environment. One is to stifle these hustlers vigorously. They are parasites sucking the energy of society. But more importantly we need to evolve our techniques for living to be cheaper in every sense, to use less to do more. We will continue to evolve our techniques of course as we are doing now.
The most pressing need and the greatest opportunity for improvement is to help developing nations develop. Western nations developed first but in the history of the species this is just a brief time lag in development. The lead nations alternate over time, first one is more advanced then another, so that in the long run they all progress. China and India for example were in the lead for a long time but are now lagging. This will change again and is extremely important because there are many, many more people there than in western nations. They will need far more resources to achieve parity if they follow the same development path as the west.
Progress won't stop. China, India and the other populous regions of the world are not going to stay as they are. Nothing that the west can do will change this, convince them to remain impoverished and uneducated. They are "indigenous people" too and aspire to a better life just like the Inuits. They want snowmobiles, trucks, hospitals, schools, power stations and nice clothes too. Ok, not many want snowmobiles but they'd love a motor bike or a motor boat.
We won't be able to eliminate the parasites like those in the environmental movement. Every human society has had them and likely always will have them but we need to distinguish their predations from the real task of improved environmental management, and seek to limit the damage they do just as we seek to reduce burglary and other crimes against persons and societies. They are sociopaths, non-cooperators that prey on others rather than contributing to society, and it seems that our species finds a certain number of them to be acceptable and evolutionarily stable. If it wasn't so they would be extinct after all this time. Cooperators in the main stream defend themselves and punish the sociopaths when opportunity arises in a never ending, non-optimal but resilient system. All we can do is point and laugh at the cheats while continuing to work for progress.