Beware the Environmentalists' Devastating Response to Global Warming
October 1, 2007

Irvine, CA--Last Monday, leaders from 150 nations gathered together for a United Nations meeting on climate change. According to Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, the failure to take dramatic action to counter global warming would bring "devastating" consequences.

In fact, said Alex Epstein, an analyst at the Ayn Rand Institute, "The truly devastating thing about the global warming issue is the supposed solution to it: a severe cap on carbon emissions."

"The supposed 'crisis' we face from manmade global warming is completely overblown. Even if the UN's incredibly speculative computer-model projections of 8-degree warming over the next century occurred, they would easily be dealt with by industrialized people with ample energy, transportation, sunscreen, air-conditioners, and sturdy houses; anyone negatively affected would have ample technology to protect themselves from bad weather.

"But this ability to cope with any negative weather patterns depends on abundant quantities of our most plentiful, practical sources of energy--nuclear power and especially fossil fuels. Yet this is precisely the value that environmentalist anti-global-warming leaders, and their sheepish UN-member followers, seek to destroy through drastic caps on fossil fuels. These caps not only threaten our ability to deal with bad weather, they would stunt development of every facet of industrial civilization through energy shortages and higher energy costs in the industrialized world--and they would deprive the third world of the ability to generate desperately needed energy.

"The anti-global-warming crusade is the latest--and most successful--campaign by the environmentalist movement, founded on the belief that man's industrial transformation of nature is evil, to convince us that we will somehow benefit by dismantling industrial civilization. We must respond to this crusade by recognizing the incomparable value of plentiful man-made energy--and the evil of the environmentalist campaign to destroy it."

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Alex Epstein was a writer and a fellow on staff at ARI between 2004 and 2011.