What Is Senator Whitehouse Smoking?
The best part of my new IER post is the title, but the content isn’t bad either. An excerpt:
Internet enthusiasts are quite familiar with Godwin’s Law, which says that the longer an online argument continues, eventually someone will compare his opponent to Hitler. Well we have already had that for years in the debates over climate policy. Those favoring aggressive government intervention aren’t content to call coal, oil, and gas “dirty energy,” or to label carbon dioxide emissions “pollution”—even though trees breathe it and we exhale it. No, the alarmists go even further with their rhetorical smears, routinely calling their opponents “deniers,” making an obvious (and intended) comparison to the Holocaust.
In his recent piece, Senator Whitehouse has decided that the Nazis apparently aren’t bad enough, so he’s bringing in lung cancer.
Isn’t Whitehouse the same clown who had that embarrassing exchange with an economist from the Heritage Foundation a couple years ago about spending in Europe?
Yeah but Further gets money from the Koch Brothers, just like the other conservative witness – Furtchgott-Roth – at the hearing, so you cannot trust any of them. (Besides, they’re all economists.)
Arg..missed the spell check change…Salim Furth.
I don’t know, I mean clowns wear so much makeup I really had no idea who it was underneath.
Zack and Bob,
And he is not just seeking to gum up the wheels of debate, he wants to invoke the RICO act to persecute his adversaries. Yet, a free markets think tank is being gracious enough to give him the floor to advocate his policies.
http://www.aei.org/events/to-tax-or-not-to-tax-sen-sheldon-whitehouse-presents-his-american-opportunity-carbon-fee-act/
Next time a Progressive states that free market libertarians and conservatives are closed minded beyond rehabilitation who are responsible for all our intellectual gridlock point this out. I do hope Ben Zycher tears this clown a new one….
So I looked it up and Whitehouse is indeed the one I was thinking about. It’s actually kind of funny.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/350528/senator-whitehouses-mistaken-austerity-addition-salim-furth
How dare you criticize Senator Whitehouse, whoever the hell he is. What is the difference between you and Hitler?
Hitler wasn’t part of the secret Koch brothers conspiracy
“Carbon dioxide itself is an odorless gas that is quintessentially natural, the equivalent of oxygen for plant life. ” “to label carbon dioxide emissions “pollution”—even though trees breathe it and we exhale it. ”
Natural does not mean harmless. Heat is essential for life, but in the wrong place it is pollution. If a power station kills all the fish in a river by discharging hot water we wouldn’t say “well, it was just water so it can’t be pollution.” CO2 is toxic at a few % – well above any levels we are talking about here, but shows it is not harmless.
It seems a bit much to say such things in a piece that it criticising the tone and style of language used by the “opposition”.
The comparison to tobacco is about strategy. The accusation is that there was an attempt to spread doubt about global warming using tactics developed by tobacco industry.
Fortunately, the campaign has not been completely effective, hence China may meet peak emissions target 5 yrs earlier than planned. I have some more detailed points I may post later.
“If a power station kills all the fish in a river by discharging hot water we wouldn’t say “well, it was just water so it can’t be pollution.””
If the fish weren’t owned, then it wasn’t pollution.
But if a bird drops a fish in my watering hole, and that fish takes a dump in it, then that’s pollution.
“If the fish weren’t owned, then it wasn’t pollution.”
So if they were owned it is pollution – which is exactly my point.
The whole bit about trees breathing it is obfuscation. Have you no t heard of light pollution? Noise pollution? Thermal pollution? All these things are natural and necessary, yet are commonly referred to as pollution.
They are commonly referred to as pollution because “pollution” is a buzz word.
But simply calling it pollution doesn’t make it so.
People create dark rooms when light is pollution; create sound-proof rooms when noise is a pollution; and go inside when heat is pollution.
They are natural, but not always desirable, as you say, but different people desire different things. To one person something might be pollution, but to another it isn’t.
Understanding and respecting private property rights solves the problems that might result from this situation.
You have a right to do what you want with your own property, but you don’t have a right to prevent someone else from doing what they want with their property unless it violates your private property rights.
And if you don’t own something, you don’t get a say in how it’s used; There’s no such thing as public property.
We are talking about slightly different things. It is valid to argue that what some people call pollution is OK because of property rights. I may or may not agree, but it is valid argument.
Bob implied that labelling CO2 “pollution” was duplicitous. He is not disputing what pollution is – he is disputing that CO2 is in the category of “pollutant” as that is commonly understood.
He did not use arguments like yours – it is not pollution because of property rights. He argued it was not pollution because it occurs in nature and is required by plants.
You just made Bob facepalm. Heh.
Harold, since you think a man cooking fish is pollution, what isn’t pollution? Is pollution something only man can cause? Do volcanoes pollute? What about tsunamis? Do animals pollute?
Everything that lives changes the environment. What you want is for man to maintain that environment in some idealized state You are not against man made climate change you are counting on it.
Grane gets it.
The core of environmentalism and “pollution” is a denial of human values, period.
If humans change things, then there is some cosmic tragedy because of it.
Just to take it a step further and make the environmentalist agenda explicit, since humans cannot act without changing the environment and since mankind as a whole cannot exist without at least some individual men acting, the environmentalist agenda involves wiping mankind off the face of the earth.
So the environmentalist solution to the cosmic tragedy you mention is to eradicate the virus that has gripped the planet – Man.
The phrase “virus” is frequently used, approvingly, in environmentalist circles.
I also see the phrase “rape” (as in rape the planet), “destroy” (when describing productive activities that improve people’s quality of life).
That only applies if all change caused by man is classed as harmful, and if all harmful acts must be prevented. Most environmentalists do not advocate for this, so it is a straw man argument.
What does harmful mean? Do animals also cause harm?
What is harmful is open to question. I have not got all the answers. If something is not harmful it need not be prevented within the environmentalist agenda, and some harm is permissible within the ecological agenda.
Sure there are a few extreme environmentalists that say any change caused by man or technology is harmful. It is totally wrong to say that their view is the ecological agenda.
Use of weasel words like “harm” does not strengthen an argument.
In this case it IS the argument. You said any change was against environmental agenda. I said that is not true, only change that caused harm. However we define harm, that changes the environmental agenda from what you said to something different. Unless all change is defined as harm. I specified that only extreme environmentalists thought that.
Exactly how we define harm affects how different, but I was indicating a qualitative rather than quantitative difference, so I don’t need to go into what harm means in detail.
It is indeed interesting that a weasel word IS the argument. Speaks volumes for your position.
Clever rejoinder!
However, for completeness I will spell it out. I showed why the word as I used it was not actually a weasel word. Weasel words on Wikipedia is defined as “creating an impression that a specific and/or meaningful statement has been made, when only a vague or ambiguous claim has been communicated, enabling the specific meaning to be denied if the statement is challenged.”
Since my claim is not vague or ambiguous – it is not dependent on any particular definition of harm, only on the existence of harm, the word is not a weasel word.
Harold,
That’s quite funny. The word “harm” is fundamentally subjective and ambitious. What’s harm in one person’s eyes is not harm in another’s. Further, harm does not exist. It is a subjective assessment by an individual.
So harm can mean whatever you want it to mean. You can always come back and say “I didn’t mean harm in THAT sense.”
So, one has to reject the claim that harm is not a weasel word. It is indeed an excellent specimen of that species.
“You can always come back and say “I didn’t mean harm in THAT sense.””
You re wrong here – as long as you acknowledge that harm means something then my point stands. I could say harm means painting something blue – my point stands that all change is not harm. My argument is not subject to a specific meaning of the word “harm” that I can later back away from.
Actually it’s worse, as you put it, rather eloquently.
You could say just about anything is harm. You could say that my exhaling is harm. You could say my consumption of food is harm. You could say my occupying some land to sleep on is harm. Basically, anything goes.
It is this subjective and arbitrary “identification” of “harm” that makes it unfit to use as a basis to decide what an individual is or is not free to do. And the point is that environmentalists do consider themselves to be the last word on the question of “harm” done to the environment.
We could vote on it.
You couldn’t say that was subjective.
Bala, I think I see the problem here. You say
“It is this subjective and arbitrary “identification” of “harm” that makes it unfit to use as a basis to decide what an individual is or is not free to do.”
You may or may not be correct about this, but since I was not arguing what anybody is or is not free to do it is not relevant.
Please check back to my argument. I was refuting that the ecological agenda required removal of all humans. I was not agreeing or disagreeing in any way with the ecological agenda.
Harm could be a weasel word, it just is not in my argument.
To be a weasel word one normal definition of the word would make my argument invalid, and to rescue my argument I would then have to claim that “I didn’t mean it in that sense!” as you put it. See below for an example where the word “cook” is used in this way.
In my argument above you can define harm any way you want and the argument remains valid. My argument is NOT dependent on a specific definition of a word that I can later back away from.
I will let you define harm, and lets see if my argument stands. That does not work in the other example if we use the dictionary definition of cook.
Grane does not get it, because Grane fails to distinguish between cooking a fish and killing all the fish in a river or lake.
If you want to deny or re-define pollution for your own purposes that is fine for you. What is not fine is to criticise others for using the word in the usually accepted manner rather than your specific and unusual manner. It starts to look as though you are trying to push an agenda by any means rather than informing or furthering the discussion.
“What is not fine is to criticise others for using the word in the usually accepted manner rather than your specific and unusual manner.”
And here we’ve found the problem. The meaning behind the term pollution has no basis in reality apart from how we usually use the term. The concept of ‘pollution’ is not something found in nature somewhere.
The concepts of justice or beauty are not found in nature, but we still talk about them.
It is a bit like a gardener or farmer talking about weeds – a weed is a plant in the wrong place. There is no such thing in nature, but it is still commonly and productively used in gardening and farming.
We cannot say anything is pollution per-se. Mercury is an element – quintessentially natural – one of the 92 (or so) building blocks of everything. But discharged from your factory into a water supply it is pollution. If you deliberately add it to the water supply as an act of terrorism it may not be pollution.
There’s only two basic reasons why you would distinguish between cooking a fish and killing all the fish in a river or lake.
Those are:
1) You believe that fish have rights, or
2) You believe that fish are a public good to which all people, and people in the future, are entitled.
If #1, then you should argue for the specific religion that teaches this.
Or, if it’s not a religious position, then, to be consistent, you should be defending all species from each other, not having a fit only when humans threaten the existence of other animals.
If #2, since only individuals have rights, and since no one has a right to the labor of others, when someone transforms an object into something that’s useful to him, that object logically becomes his property.
So, until someone homesteads the fish, no one has a right to prevent someone else from doing something that results in the deaths of all the fish.
There are too many logical holes in homesteading for you to keep using it.
At some point, let’s go over those.
I’m under the impression that I’ve got all my bases covered.
“Useful” is subjective. “Labor of others” is a weasel phrase. Merely transforming something is a really weak and non-intuitive requirement.
This is a non-sequitur:
““Useful” is subjective.”
The point was to rule out simply walking on something as being sufficient for claiming ownership.
““Labor of others” is a weasel phrase.”
Slavery is in view, here.
Therefore, not a weasel phrase.
You are out of your mind.
“You are out of your mind.”
By taking something that someone else has worked on, you have effectively comandeered their labor.
You don’t have a right to another’s labor, therefore that unowned thing which is transformed by another becomes their property.
Does the fish have rights? It is an individual.
Nope.
Work is an action, not a thing.
“Work is an action, not a thing.”
Do you have a concept of slavery in your worldview?
If so, please describe it.
If not, then I don’t see how you could have a problem with the concept of homesteading, even in principle.
“Does the fish have rights? It is an individual.”
I was wondering if I was going to get to avoid this one. Heh.
Fortunately, you and I, as well as everyone else who has a position on rights, are in the same boat.
Ultimately, rights will have to be grounded in a theistic worldview.
But since so many of us already accept that humans have rights and fish don’t, this issue hardly ever needs to come up.
I try to avoid it because it opens up a new can of worms.
I don’t really feel like going down this road on this blog, but if you’ve got an itch, we can see where it goes.
“Ultimately, rights will have to be grounded in a theistic worldview.”
I don’t see why.
Roughly, “forced work”.
Because it’s used by libertarians as an arbitrary one-size-fits-all rule who stretch the concept to try and apply it to every physical thing in existence (and some non-physical things).
Ooh, you built a house in that forest. Maybe you weren’t allowed to do so to begin with.
“Roughly, “forced work”.”
Same here.
But whether you force me to produce something for you now, or take something I’ve produced, after the fact, is a distinction without a difference.
You’ve forced me to produce for you in both cases.
“Ooh, you built a house in that forest. Maybe you weren’t allowed to do so to begin with.”
That position presumes that there is, in fact, someone with authority that can prevent someone from building a house there.
So, we both believe someone gains legitimate authority over the forest, at some point.
Except that the libertarian position isn’t that there’s a birthright to it, and it doesn’t make slaves of others.
There is a huge difference and frankly I’d be forced to wonder if someone who believes this has it all together.
That is false.
No more than any other political system. IOW, no, it doesn’t.
Oops. Response is here.
“There is a huge difference and frankly I’d be forced to wonder if someone who believes this has it all together.”
That is not a rebuttal.
Same with the other two responses.
Taking something someone made is not slavery. End of story.
As I said: A distinction without a difference.
If only your fairy tale were *just* a story.
Harold,
You wrote “Grane does not get it, because Grane fails to distinguish between cooking a fish and killing all the fish in a river or lake.”
First, I said “a man cooking fish” not “cooking a fish”.
In your example all the fish are killed by being cooked. There is no distinction to be made between cooking and killing per your example.
If you want to complain that there is a distinction between cooking some amount of fish and cooking all the fish then, by all means, lets hear it. I would love to know how it is that you consider cooking 98% of the fish to be fine but cooking 100% of the fish pollution?
I am betting that you consider cooking 98% of the fish to also be pollution. The failure to distinguish is your creating a distinction where there is none.
I don’t think anyone here is trying to redefine anything. The problem here is that you are trying to make a case predicated by spongey terms like, harm, and pollution.
Major.Freedom absolutely gets it. what you don’t get is that what you think you are trying to do can be distinguished from what you are actually doing.
OK – I accept your fish / a fish distinction.
Definition of cook: “prepare (food, a dish, or a meal) by mixing, combining, and heating the ingredients.”
The fish were not cooked, they were killed by heat.
One may use the word “cooked” as a metaphor, as in “the room was so ho I was cooked!” but we should be clear that that is what it is. You were using the word metaphorically, or in a slang or informal sense. There is clearly a distinction between cooking and dying of heat.
Harold, go tell that to a lobster.
Cook is to do with preparation of food. Whilst we are on the topic of weasel words, I believe your argument boils down to “I didn’t mean cook in THAT sense.”
Harold,
I see you only intend to waste my time. You said the fish were killed by the hot water they were in, that sure sounds like cooking to me. I was not trying to trick you, Harold. If you had said they died from a factory leaching chemicals I would have said poisoned instead of cooked. You chose to read into what I said instead of reading what I said so you wouldn’t have to answer any of my questions. Go skip rope.
You said: “Harold, since you think a man cooking fish is pollution, what isn’t pollution?”
I apologise if I read you wrong, but to me a man cooking fish implies a useful domestic activity, whereas what I described was something completely different.
So, to answer your original point, no I don’t think a man cooking fish is pollution. Neither do I think a power station discharging thousands of tons of hot water to be a man cooking fish.
Buddah,
If a man cooks all the fish but no one is around to eat them did he really cook
Grasshopper, the path to wisdom is not straight. Do I lie when I say something I believe to be untrue, but it turns out to be true, or when I unwittingly speak falsely, believing my statements to be true?
Is it wise, to answer every question with another question?
Environmentalism can be many things, just like all personal preference. For example, in a city you have a lane that could either be used to park cars or else parking could be outlawed and the same lane could be reserved as a bike path. It cannot do both jobs so you have a scarce resource and two groups of people who both want that resource. It’s largely a case of collective ownership being allocated to one use or another.
Personally, I’d often favour the bike path, since nearly every city has plenty of space for cars, but not much space reserved for bicycles. On the whole, bikes are cleaner, healthier, cheaper and less dangerous than cars. I think there’s a reasonable case.
The modern environmental movement has started down the track of justifying bigger and bigger government intervention in our lives, then searching for justification with an environmental pretext. Communism never helped the environment, the industry of the USSR was filthy. It’s just one more area where people are duped into believing that government is their benefactor.
Er, no. Environmental protection laws are not “government intervention”.
Er, yes. They are.
No more than any other laws.
Samson Corwell,
Snore
Senator Sanders repeatedly states that he respects you professionally…every time he says that the Koch brothers own you. How can you not trust a politician like that? Likewise, Senator Boxer makes it clear that the global warming speakers are pure as the driven snow (however much of that is still left) while, again, you are just the mouthpiece of the Koch brothers. I think I need to find a blog where the author is not nearly as tainted as you.
Quite a lot of snow seems to still be around, despite the earlier announcements. Although I wouldn’t want to play around in that stuff from Boston.
http://realclimatescience.com/2015/06/thing-of-the-past-buries-both-hemispheres/
Did you see the last line of that post?
“It is becoming obvious that the planet is cooling, but government experts are paid to lie about the climate and generate propaganda.”
The language here is stronger than what Bob is complaining about. It is pretty common for those that disagree with AGW to accuse those that agree of being liars.
Anyway, I will definitely take a bet on that one. Since the existence of snow in some parts of the world (some in their winter) make it obvious the world is cooling, I would be a fool to ignore that conclusive evidence. Yeah.
Look at the post for June 5th if you want a classic example of a climate denier using information very selectively to misinform. The first graph shown is for coastal zones masked off – not total sea ice, as the source clearly shows. Looking at the total sea ice graph (also shown on Watts Up With That), the key points are that sea ice is tracking 2012 very closely – which was lowest sea ice extent by a long way. Second graph shows thickness for those areas covered by 15% ice only, so tells us nothing about the amount of ice on its own. You could in principle have an almost ice free Arctic and still have an average thickness the same as 2006. The statement that sea ice has been getting thicker for the last 8 years is wrong, as a quick glance at the graph shows 2012 is the thinnest.
Sorry to be off topic, but if you didn’t point me at these sites I wouldn’t mention them.
There’s a full explanation of the ice thickness here.
http://psc.apl.uw.edu/research/projects/arctic-sea-ice-volume-anomaly/
If you look at Fig 1 and draw a horizontal line back from the peak this year you get to equivalent years 2008 or 2009, but there’s anomaly calculations in that so it attempts to remove seasonal variations.
Fig 4 down the bottom left includes seasonal details. It gets calculated from both thickness and area.
This is just wrong, you are trying to tell me that back in 1980 there was 2.5 meters of ice stacked at only 15% coverage? That doesn’t make sense.
My phrasing was not clear – the 15% was unnecessary. The ice thickness tells us nothing about the amount of ice, since reducing (or increasing) the area by a factor of 10 or even 100 could have the same average thickness.
“It gets calculated from both thickness and area.” This is my point, showing a graph of only thickness is not much use.
Using RICO against fossil fuel companies is a horrible idea. Then again, using RICO against tobacco companies was also a horrible idea. So maybe there is an analogy there.