There's a certain amount of chortling today as the latest UN climate boondoggle opens in Montreal. Not only is Canada the poster child for empty gestures - talking emissions reductions while hugely increasing them - its government has fallen amid corruption scandals, and will most probably be replaced by one much less likely to champion empty climate gestures.

In the UK Tony Blair has been mooting ideas for a more rational approach to emissions, trying to edge popular thinking more toward the sensible goal of producing sufficient energy to power the nation robustly using non-carbon technologies - meaning nuclear energy of course.

The chief impediment to rational thinking about emissions is that authoritarian nations, and authoritarian thinkers within even the least authoritarian nations such as the US, are stuck on stupid, unable to break the bad habit of responding to threats by hunkering down. Authoritarian people are trained to the whip and habitually cringe. They get nervous and fearful when things become too cheerful or easy since this is usually followed by the crack of the authoritarian whip. In a perverse fashion they have come to love the whip and will wield it themselves against others.

This Beeb article has several gems that demonstrate the problem.

Thousands of participants in Montreal are pondering how to meet the targets in the Kyoto treaty, and what measures should follow when it expires in 2012.

The host nation wants to find a formula to include dissenting countries and developing states not covered by Kyoto.

The US insists it is serious on climate change, but is still resisting targets. . .

Steve Sawyer of Greenpeace told the BBC it is pointless to attempt to re-engage the Bush administration on meaningful worldwide action on global warming.

"The one thing... we cannot afford is to allow this US administration to hold the rest of the world hostage while they go on about voluntary this and voluntary that," he said.

Resisting targets? Isn't it more a matter of patiently explaining to authoritarians that the appearance of virtue is inadequate, that this isn't a situation that can be helped by making pious claims? Canada, like many other nations, and Greenpeas, like most pseudo-environmental orgs, fail to grapple with reality, they merely want to look good so that the whip doesn't come down. But this isn't a problem that can be helped by cringing. You won't get a pass from mother nature because you are pious. She doesn't give a fig whether you are bad or good. Cringing in apologetic obsequiousness is just an uncomfortable posture and not an admirable way to meet your maker.

The crass cringing noted above isn't the only sort. The Environment Correspondent for the BBC News website, Richard Black, who has written some thoughtful articles in recent weeks, discusses a more sophisticated cringe.

For the last two years, Mr Starkey has been working on DTQs - Domestic Tradable Quotas - at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research.

He has been honing the concept which writer David Fleming invented nine years ago and pinning down details of how a scheme could work in the UK. . .

Domestic Tradable Quotas are in effect personal allowances to pollute. . .

Pollution has become a commodity with a price determined by the market, which will ensure that emissions are cut in as cost-effective a manner as possible.

DTQs would simply extend this concept to the public.

"To make the substantial cuts in emissions we are going to have to make, there are only two ways to do it - taxation or rationing," David Fleming told me.

Well, no David. In fact, neither taxation nor rationing would help even a little bit. The emissions reduction would be miniscule compared to those needed to have an effect on climate, assuming that we have even a tiny grasp of climate dynamics and that this isn't all just a false alarm. And it doesn't matter at all what a tiny European nation in decline does since the vast majority of present and future humans live elsewhere and have very different ways of living. They don't carry plastic credit chits and are exceedingly unlikely to carry a DTQ chit either. This idea is just the old cringe reflex, duck and cover, stop enjoying yourself and making so much noise or the authorities will clamp down hard!

The change needed isn't to limit emissions production in trivial ways now any more than it was when the streets of major cities were awash in horse dung. Horse diapers or asshole bungs weren't sensible solutions though they were proposed by the same sorts of unimaginative cringers who now propose emissions targets. Taxing teamsters to reduce their driving around town wasn't a sensible solution either since the town would grind to a halt without them. The solution was better transportation systems powered by fossil fuels. The internal combustion engine saved cities from drowning in horse effluvia.

There's a pattern here, one that is worth grasping since it seems invariant. The solution to current problems is never cringing, never sticking your head in the sand or hiding under the bed, it is making a flamboyant and creative change that greatly alters current behavior, usually by adopting superior technologies. The fact that those technologies have their own future limits that we will eventually face isn't a defect, a reason to decline them, it is breathing space, a reprieve that allows time to develop ever better methods. Nothing is sustainable, it's an idiotic concept for cringers afraid to live and woefully unobservant of reality. Nothing lasts. The world is robust and resilient, but not sustainable, not static.

We don't yet know what that reprieve, that provisional and pragmatic solution, will be. It might involve some combination of nuclear technologies and electricity, we don't know. We have a laundry list of candidates, none of which are clearly the answer, but we aren't good judges of such things. They laughed at the horseless carriage too. What is clear is just that - we are poor judges and so the very last thing we want is political interference. This isn't a political issue. The UN meeting in Montreal is the very worst thing we can do, or would be if there was any realistic expectation that anything would come of it. And DTQs are merely cringer's prayer beads to finger when we get nervous and fearful, something to do instead of doing something useful, a way to calm our fears while waiting for the axe to fall.

Update:

BaySense points to this TAP article by Shellenberger and Nordhaus, the Death of Environmentalism twins, which makes a related point.

...the stalemate over addressing global warming highlights the failure of neither Blair nor Bush but rather of environmentalism and the politics of limits. Global warming did not have to be, a priori, an “environmental” issue. It was made so by environmentalists who understood global warming originally not so much as an impending global crisis that needed to be addressed by any means necessary but rather as a powerful new argument for restricting activities (e.g., driving cars and burning fossil fuels) that they already wanted to restrict. As such, the solutions to global warming were, from the very start, conceived of as limitations and restrictions -- the approach that lies at the heart of the Kyoto Protocol and virtually every other effort to address global warming.

S&N, as usual, have half an insight. They are right that approaching climate change as an opportunity to ratchet up the cringing so deeply desired by pseudo-environmentalists was a blunder. But they are wrong that the alternative is to understand climate change as an impending global crisis.

Cringing is dumb but so is the crisis mentality. Cringing and whinging, fearful of the future and unable to face it squarely, are the twin neuroses of the failed quasi-leftist pseudo-environmental movement.

A far better alternative is to react to change with pleasure. Yes there are threats. Yes there is danger. There always has been and there always will be both threats and danger. The mature response is to accept that this is so, always has been and always will be so, and get on with developing useful policies, techniques and behaviors that deal with the current issues whatever they may be.

It is well to remember that there are real environmentalists who calmly do what requires doing without the hysterical and ineffective posturing of the posers. One of my hopes for the net is that the efforts of these real people will be better communicated so that the majority of people can come to understand that the noisy activist/advocate/politican types are merely opportunists exploiting the real and sensible concerns of those who look ahead, rather than a useful force for dealing with those concerns.

We clearly see the problems of the politicization of science even if we still have lack of clarity about who is zooming whom. The politicization of environmentalism is as bad. It leads to bad policies and mistaken responses while preventing the social mind from gaining a useful understanding of the issues.

Update:

Andart has some related thoughts.

The moral ought to be that if we dislike what the climate is doing - for whatever reason - and think we can affect it - through whatever means - then we should consider controlling it. Most climate discussions focus on reducing economy and the effects of civilization rather than fixing the climate per se. That is why it took so long for ideas of carbon sequestration to be accepted and why organisations seem more interested in debating how to stop climate change while agreeing that it is unlikely to succeed than the more practical matter of adapting to it - it is the aims that are important, not the result.

My emphasis. The argument is about who gets to use the climate change club to oppress society, not how to deal with climate change.

There is a strong stream of antimodernist ideas from Rosseau and onward linked to environmentalism that make proponents more interested in being anticapitalist, anticar, antiindustry rather than being primarily for a nice climate (however defined - I want Scandinavia to have a climate and ecology like the bronze age heat maximum myself).

In the long run we better control the eigenvalues of the critical points of the climate dynamical system. That is both the practical and moral thing to do.

While nailing the defects of the environmentalist mindset another issue creeps in: if we can and do control climate, who decides which climate period will be chosen for the target? And related questions arise given the delay time between action and response. I suspect there would still be a battle for the control stick, conflicting actions by dissidents that screw up the plan, and plain old mind changes over time so that climate would still be changing constantly.

Update:

This interiew of Robert Fogel that focused on his recent book The Escape From Hunger and Premature Death: 1700 to 2100 is relevant.

Nick Schulz: The first chapter of the book is called, "The Persistence of Misery In Europe and America Before 1900". What was so miserable about life before the 20th century?

Robert Fogel: Well first of all it was short. The life expectancy, if I can go back to 1700, was only about 35 years at birth. In 1900, 200 years later, it had increased by about 12 years -- it was in the neighborhood of 47 in Western European countries. And, today it's 77 or 78, so in a century we added 30 years to life expectancy, maybe a little bit more.

Nick Schulz: That's obviously unprecedented for life expectancy to increase by such a large amount in one century. What were the primary drivers of that?

Robert Fogel: Public health reform, cleaning up of the water supply, cleaning up of the milk supply. But if you said what was the single most important factor, it's technological change.

Let me give you one small example. We complain a lot about air pollution today, but there were 200,000 horses in New York City, at the beginning of the 20th century defecating everywhere. And when you walked around in New York City, you were breathing pulverized horse manure -- a much worse pollutant, than the exhausts of automobiles. Indeed in the United States, the automobile was considered the solution to the horse problem because pulverized horse manure carried a lot of deadly pathogens.

So technological change made it possible to greatly increase the food supply and permit levels of nutrition that were not previously attainable. Secondly, it made it possible to have a safe water supply. We needed a more modern technology to be able to carry away waste water and provide safe water, both through filtering and chlorination. And, still another area was the development of vaccines, which made it possible to inoculate the very young against diseases. And with better nutrition, you greatly increase the physiology of human beings.

Update:

Pipe Dreams

The environmentalists who want to bring an end to the age of fossil fuels should spend a lot more time promoting the idea of a broad research effort to develop cleaner technologies. Their fight against fossil fuels is doomed because as soon as prices rise high enough the majority of the public will swing around toward supporting more pipelines and drilling. Fossil fuels use will not get regulated out of existence. Only lower prices for other energy sources will bring an end to fossil fuels use.