Environmentalism is Dead

Lubos cites a Harvard Crimson story with the title as above. The undergraduate who wrote it is no doubt destined for a highly profitable future flacking for various agents of the Devil - he demostrates a nice mastery of the classic big lie technique. The pattern goes as follows: Doom was predicted because of pollution in LA, eutropification of Lake Erie, DDT, or whatever. Here we are 40 years later and all those things are better, so all the alarm was for nothing. Of course, the truth is that the alarms led to action, action that was fought as bitterly by the polluters of 40 years ago as the deniers fight action on global warming today. Depite the opposition, government took action, auto and lake pollution were minimized, use of DDT was banned, and the predicted recoveries happened . Of course this reality is 180 degrees out of phase with the message, but if you are addressing deluded nuts and idiots, who cares?
The patient had such severe angina that he was confined to a wheelchair and could do no work. His doctor and wife pleaded with him to have a bypass, but he resisted. As his condition worsened, he finally relented, and had the surgery. Two years later he's playing golf with his surgeon, who asks: "So how are you feeling?" "Great, just great, doc! See, I told you I didn't need that surgery."

Comments

  1. Delicious12:39 AM

    Also, will someone tell me again why Harvard is hard to get into? Is this really the best and the brightest in action?

    ReplyDelete
  2. CapitalistImperialistPig7:39 AM

    Well, it is the oldest, richest, and most prestigious American University, and lots of people want to go there, but the brightest actually go to Caltech (by "objective measures," as Lubos would put it).

    There are feedback mechanisms at work. People want to go to Harvard because Harvard graduates make a lot of money, which means Harvard can be very selective about picking only students who are likely to make a lot of money (or otherwise distinguish themselves).

    ReplyDelete

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