This rustle in the grass is not real (Leon Louw) South Africa

This rustle in the grass is not real

By Leon Louw Executive Director The Free Market Foundation of South Africa January 24, 2017 The intellectual debate against radical environmentalism was lost by "the other side" long ago, during the 1960s. But the wider public emotional, vested interest and political debate was won and continues to be won by "them".

Sky-is-falling alarmism has been around forever, in an eternal battle between realism and alarmism. This seems to be an innate hard-wired aspect of most animals and even plants, not just humans what I call the "rustle in the grass hypothesis" essentially that you can be wrong about a deadly snake hiding in the grass only once, and passionate play-fighting prepares you for the real thing.

There are, of course, genuine problems, as my friend, Malcolm Russel keeps reminding me. The problem is that all the fake crying "Wolf!" diverts attention from real challenges.

Alarmism manifests itself constantly on all sides it's not binary; there are many sides.

I often chuckle about how much of it there is amongst putatively rational persons who support economic freedom and business sense. One of its commonest guises is the Linus Blanket conspiracy theories. I blush when I recall how I fell for them during my 20s.

Early versions of environmental and other catastrophism appear in all historical and hysterical records, starting with the prediction of the end of freedom (ama-gi) in the earliest cuneiform tablets when King Uri Kagena introduced tax. At that time the prophesies of doom turned out to be accurate the ancient city state of Lagash was never heard of again.

The current tidal wave of environmental catastrophism started with Rachel Carson's falsified book "Silent Spring" -- an absurd attack on DDT (DDT was supposedly making egg shells thin and fragile leading to a decline in bird populations). The resultant prohibition of DDT caused millions of malaria deaths, especially in Africa.

It had multiple related disastrous impacts, which continue to this day.

The next giant pseudo-science catastrophism victory was Paul Ehrlich's book "Population Bomb". It, like Malthusian twaddle, and contemporary “inequality" twaddle, impersonated serious scholarship. If you’re not familiar with Ehrlich's hysteria then check it out. He predicted mass starvation in the First World, and the demise of entire countries due to “over-population”. All by the 1980s! Now many countries have an obesity problem.

And so we see modern versions of ancient catastrophism have progressed through various iterations and incarnations.

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The problem with the current optimism amongst climate realists (aka “denialists”) to the effect that Big Brother AGW is receding, is that the juggernaut not only survived every setback, but resurrected itself, dusted itself off, and acquired more terrifying dimensions. It progressed – should we say regressed – from minor localised concerns through “ozone depletion” to global catastrophe. Past predictions of environmental catastrophe tended to be geographically confined, such as countless iterations of biblical-type floods. But now we have a monster of an entirely different kind, one that will gobble the world. Al Gore gets away with saying we have to save the earth. Where on earth does he think it’s going? It’ll proceed along its merry path regardless of climate change, anthropogenic or otherwise.

Economist Rob Jeffrey calls the current phenomenon the gigantic, burgeoning and truly global climate change industry -- the biggest and most destructive Ponzi scheme in history. The power, ubiquity, skulduggery and wealth of the self-serving vested interests involved is entirely unprecedented.

I fear that people in the rational economically liberal bracket of society believe that rational argument wins the day. The eternal battle between reason, logic, science and facts on one hand, and emotion, instinct, megalomania and vested interests on the other, never ends. Neither side is ever victorious. It is an eternal tug-o-war where the mid-point nudges slightly in one direction or the other, but always returns towards the centre.

I often ponder whether liberty is a net winner or loser. It seems that in the great scheme of things, during the course of ancient and modern history, the balance has been slowly, but surely moving in the favour of rational good sense. Something seems always to avert the worst, and the right things get things back on track in most places at most times for most people.

The two forces to which we humans owe most, it seems, are science; and economics and its associated jurisprudence (as opposed to law and legislation).

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