Ambient Panic

"I myself am a pessimist and I feel that by 2050, 2080, 2100 for sure, the Earth’s population will have been decimated by catastrophic climate events that will see more than 8 billion people die and leave only 200,000 souls eking out a sad existence in those regions above 45 degrees latitude."

That's Dan Bloom in a letter published in the Taipei Times today.

With fairly precise 100-year predictions like that conditioned by the expression "I feel that... for sure", he has clearly spent too much time listening to Radiohead records ("We're not scaremongering, this is really happening!"); even the IPCC themselves estimate sea level rises of only a foot or two - with over a century for people to adapt.

The constant repetition of this kind of argument in newspapers and TV shows - essentially, that the bad effects of global warming are not only certain but that they will also be catastrophic and far outweigh any possible benefits - is surely intended to induce an ambient sense of panic. Ambient panic is necessary to build up local popular support for the participation of local, national governments in a systemic attempt to manage the global economy so as to mitigate this "certain" and "catastrophic" externality.

Yet the Left have never learned from the collapse of Soviet Communism**: attempts by governments to manage the economy in a top-down fashion always necessarily induce distortions that, the worse they become over time, make systemic collapse more likely*.

Since people all over the world will be affected by global warming differently (some negative, some positive), and will need to adapt in different ways, the meta-contextual solution to the problem is simple: freedom. People will need freedom to adapt to any climatic changes just as we require freedom to adapt to economic and social changes now - the necessity of freedom to the human condition is not "ahistorical", as some "scholars" would put it, but rather, trans-historical: people have always needed freedom and have usually sought to deny it to each other. This evil has got to stop. We must de-engineer the Statist apparatus everywhere to allow more political-economic freedom.

The longer people cling to this idea that an expansion of State powers is necessary to prevent catastrophe, the more distant will the value of freedom become and the more likely it is that little pools of freedom like Taiwan will be sucked up in the drought imposed by newly calibrated forms of the fascist impulse.

And freedom is the only real defense policy for Taiwanese people.

*We are seeing this now as a consequence of debased monetary systems having been rigged to fiscal expansionism for decades. The Left will of course simply lie about it and blame the coming chaos on "evil bankers" and "evil consumerism" and so on.

**I think it is because they have a blindspot; a very specific form of madness: the sociopathic need to control other people's lives. The proposition that society (i.e. other people) must be managed is simply axiomatic to them - I can only suppose this is because of that psychological blindspot they seem to have, which enables them to denounce slavery in one breath and then argue for capital controls in the next.