ACZoom  ·  Archive-2016

The Civil Heretic - Freeman Dyson is a long but good article on Dyson's view of the some of the popular environmentalists out there.

The environment certainly is to be treated with care - so everyone should try to minimize their carbon footprint - "do not trash the earth" - is how someone put it and that is the core of the matter. Whether global warming will cause untold damage is not the main question - the question is simply whether humans have disrupted the balance in the environment (answer is a resounding yes) and so it behooves us to try to undo the damage.

But this does not have to be cloaked into the conclusions that Al Gore and others throw out, and it was especially great to read the article on Dyson above.

There are many ways to reduce the impact on the environment - use less resources is the number one way - far better to reduce number of things and amount of energy one consumes. The sticking point is that this must be done in an economically viable manner. As pointed out by Krugman - An Affordable Salvation it is possible to do this on a large, business scale too. It would be bad for the US to ignore these opportunities since someone or the other will lead and eventually profit from these businesses. Coal may be plentiful, oil may still be around for 50 years, but the Sun and the Wind are going to be around for much much longer than that, so makes good sense to start taking advantage of alternate energy sources.

As to Dyson - "Dyson may be an Obama-loving, Bush-loathing liberal who has spent his life opposing American wars and fighting for the protection of natural resources, but he brooks no ideology and has a withering aversion to scientific consensus." - from the NYT article.