Blame Capitalism

Late, early, or whatever: it's always capitalism all the way down.

Editor’s note: Today Kenneth P. Green joins the stable of contributors to Political Questions—the first of several more writers who will be joining up in the coming weeks. Ken is an honest-to-God environmental scientist, with a Ph.D in environmental science from UCLA. We used to collaborate a lot when we were both resident scholars at the American Enterprise Institute over a decade ago, and it’s great to be able to get the band back together again.

—Steve

Greetings, Political Questioners! My pal/sometimes colleague/sometimes co-author Steve Hayward has invited me to share a few thoughts here, on his newest adventure in bringing enlightenment (and jocularity!) to the masses (or at least, the few thousands of people still capable of reasoned discourse on political matters on the interwebz).

Anyhoo, I’m pleased to make your e-quaintance! Not going to post a bio here, but briefly, I’m an applied biology/environmental engineer type by training; a critic of coercive government policy by vocation (30 years in think-tank land); an avid fan of hard SF (and, admittedly, Urban Fantasy of the Larry Correia/Jim Butcher sort); and of late, something of a home-cooking nut. Oh, and as you’ll discover, I like commas. De gustibus non est disputandum.

So, just in time for my debut, Steve just put up a post observing the latest “blame capitalism” explanation for all things negative in the world, particularly, environmental degradation and (sound horror-chord here) climate change. As it happens, I wrote a piece about this not long ago for Canada’s Fraser Institute, where I hung my policy warrior hat for about 10 years, and still hang on as a Senior Fellow. If you’re a critic of leftist coercive regulation, there are few more fertile hunting grounds than Canada.

In one of four essays on what I call “climate fallacies,” I take on this riff about capitalism being the cause of climate and environmental despoilation. My essay quotes the usual suspects, such as the Thunberg who, in her own broadly anti-capitalist essay collection, The Climate Book, opines “Leaving capitalist consumerism and market economics as the dominant stewards of the only known civilization in the universe will most likely seem, in retrospect, to have been a terrible idea” Her direct quotes are among the more moderate in the collection (and for the record, I suspect the words are someone else’s entirely. I’ve seen little direct evidence that Das Thunberg is capable of coherent speech, much less writing). My favorite anti-capitalist tirade from Das Climate Book is this one from an essay by environmental activist Elizabeth Kolbert, who observes that even though Europeans (apparently the first environmentally malign societies) managed to kill vast populations of animals with sticks, stones, and weapons over their history, (Oh, the Passenger pigeons! Ah, the Bison!), “Our most dangerous weapon would prove to be modernity and its trusty sidekick, late capitalism.” Take that, Buffalo Bill!

Of course, that is all so much bovine excrement, as I show by simply pointing to the evidence that capitalist countries, once past their developmental puberty, are actually the most protective of their environment, including efforts to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. (I know, I know, some people have issues with the term. Might hash that out later). Anyway, as I observe, if you compare rankings of economic freedom (as a proxy for capitalism) by country, with environmental performance by country, you find - hold onto your hats – the countries that rank highest in economic freedom also rank highest in environmental protection, and that’s true even of environmental protection rankings by lefty-environmental entities like Yale/Columbia universities, US News and World Report, MIT, and even the UN Sustainable Development Report.

My conclusion? “The “problem” of GHG emissions and environmental degradation is not capitalism. In fact, looking at countries which are more capitalist and economically free reveals that they are the world’s top performers at protecting their environments, while less capitalist countries are generally extremely poor at protecting their environments.

See y’all in the new Hayward Press funny papers!