In separate posts, I will have to look more closely at how little most of the powers actually exercised by a democratically elected government are in any meaningful way related to the will or the approval of the majority or most others among the voting population.
For the time being, let me talk about the ominous twin requirements of gaining a majority and, to that end, creating the impression that the power-seeking party is the champion of issues everyone must have an inescapable interest in supporting. Democracy is supposed to represent the people, but as institutionalized and practised today, it requires their manipulation, their becoming overawed and fervent followers of the ideas of trend-setting luminaries. Or just hordes that cannot look as fast as they are being showered with faits accomplis. Of course, this is the result of disdain for the individual and her personal freedom - once the respect of the individual is superseded by the assumption of his depravity and the ensuing doctrine that demands the alternative of orderly collectives, spoon-feeding and patronization assume the quality of worthy duties.
Enter environmentalism - a sub-species of the alarmist road to unrestrained power. Environmental fearmongering is a variant of the trick by which a "state of emergency" serves to persuade the public to grant extraordinary powers to the government.
Real concern for the environment requires non-trivial resources of dedication, careful investment and the incentive to come to grips with matters that can be rather counter-intuitive, intricate and in need of long-standing familiarity. In fact, stewardship of nature will be exercised with maximum responsibility, competence and skill if people have a genuine stake in the environment, which is when they are twinned to it by property rights, instead of being incited to act as vicarious hecklers relieving themselves of frustration and hatred in the manner of an inveigled mob.
'He who would do good,' wrote William Blake, 'must do so in minute particulars. General good is the place of the scoundrel, the hypocrite, and the liar.'
The dichotomy of man and nature is spurious; self-responsibility is the greatest contribution that man, as part of nature, can make to its thriving. A society marked by self-responsibility creates the cognitive diversity, the moral discipline and the material wealth that best help us adapt fruitfully to and advance along with the rest of nature.
The problems start, once the natural incentives of our political order envelope the issues, effectively biasing the chances for success in terms of sensationalist, apocalyptic and totalitarian messages.
By totalitarian I mean the desire or ability to force general subordination to a given scheme - the restriction of freedom under the pretext that superior needs cannot be met unless extraordinary powers are granted to government. Hence, the analogy with the suspension of liberty under war conditions.
Once in a position of power, large clientèles can be moulded, pressurized or served under the double justification of democratic legitimation and apocalyptic license ("this government has been elected to stop climate change - will you oblige, please"), which explains the increasing politicization, i.e. corruption of science, the media or public agencies portrayed as disinterested servants of a neutral cause.
Volk ohne Raum (a people without enough space to live) was a powerful slogan used by the Nazis. The imagery of a people suffocating in an endangered environment and being forced to seek relief of the most radical form remains highly evocative to this day. It is a great means of persuading people that collective needs are pressing and meritorious enough to be put ahead of egotism, to which personal freedom, the sine qua non of a modern civilization, is demagogically reduced.
Our political system does not reward discernment but crudeness. It reserves success, recognition and power to the demagogue and has had ample time to transform the institutions of society and the minds of people to systematically pursue adverse selection in favour of radical distortions of reality.
Preposterously, yet understandably, elected leaders of powerful democracies, Merkel of Germany and Blair of the United Kingdom e.g., consider it their duty, mandate and capability to reduce global temperature by 2 or 3 degrees centigrade, earning widespread applause , even though the proposed procedure (reducing anthropogenic CO2 emissions) is ineffective, because anthropogenic CO2 emissions are as good as negligible compared to non human sources of CO2, and the by far largest reservoirs of CO2, the oceans, emit the substance as a consequence of higher temperatures rather than CO2 causing global temperature to rise. All evidence suggests that there is no greenhouse effect, as the regions of the atmosphere where it should be measurable have not heated up in the predicted manner. The same leaders denounce other nations, especially the USA, as scoundrels for not complying with Kyoto resolutions, while the USA has performed much better in terms of the treaty's aims, and European countries, including Germany, have fallen short of the benchmarks they had committed themselves to.
Nonetheless, the need for even higher and more stringent standards (of pretending to achieve the useless) is being dramatized by the very laggards, who have a sound record of making promises and not keeping them. (In another post, it will be necessary to investigate contemporary democracy's numbing effect of accustoming the population to an inexhaustible tolerance of the breach of promises.)
Pious commitments to world saving environmental action turn out to be all about a desperate or a reckless straining after effect. They are all about looking or sounding good with no concern for substance. They are not about the environment - or else, the green zealots would care to consider that if all icebergs of the world were to melt, by the laws of physics, the sea level would not change a bit (just to mention one of countless vulgarizing distortions that are used to scare people into concurrence). They are about power. They are about controlling what is "politically correct" - a precise sounding phrase to describe the fashion of the day, the fleeting outcomes of unprincipled politics, the eternal nexus of the bully and the coward, the conning and the conned.
Little wonder that an experienced political salesman, Al Gore, has become the hero of environmentalists.
Our mind is part of the environment. Let us be protective of it.
For a laudable exemplification of the point in question do take a look at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8f8v5du5_ag
PS
From: http://www.freemarketnews.com/Analysis/178/8125/landfair.asp?wid=178&nid=8125
"I got an email from John Wilder, who wrote a paper titled GLOBAL WARMING CLAIMS REFUTED. Wilder puts a pencil to the claim of seas 20 feet higher by virtue of ice melt.
Let us look at what it would take to raise the ocean’s surface by a mere one foot, which certainly does not constitute flooding. One foot of depth is a cubic foot. We know by definition that a cubic foot of water is 7.48 gallons. Knowing this we now can simply calculate the numbers. You first figure how many square feet there are in a square mile of ocean surface. It is in excess of 17,000,000 square feet. You then multiply that times 7.48. You then take that figure and multiply it times 130.5 million square miles. This gives you a total number of gallons of water or ice it takes. To put that into perspective, you can then take a known land size like the Continental United States of 3.5 million square miles and calculate how much ice it would take to raise the world’s oceans by one foot.
Here's the math:
One Square Mile one foot deep: 5,280*5,280*7.48 = 208530432 Gallons of water or ice
208530432 Gallons of water or ice*130,000,500 Square miles of Ocean = 27,023,756,105,216,000 Gallons of water or ice
((27 023 756 105 216 000 / 3 500 000) / 7.48) / 5 280 = 195 497.923 miles.
Here's Wilder's conclusion:
After having done the math, it would take ice covering the United States over 196,000 MILES HIGH! Space starts at 62 miles high. Clearly there is not enough ice on the planet to raise the world’s oceans by one foot much as less having flooding like the ridiculous 20 feet that Al Gore claims."
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