Whole Foods’ CEO John MacKey is profiled in the current issue of The New Yorker.
Having gotten the political left riled up with his Wall Street Journal anti-Obamacare article he riles up the folks again with an anti-climate change opinion.
The New Yorker article quotes him as saying “no scientific consensus exists” about climate change and that we shouldn't allow “hysteria about global warming...to raise taxes and increase regulation, and in turn lower our standard of living and lead to an increase in poverty.”
No libertarian will be surprised that a writer over at treehugger.com is one of the riled.
After stating, "bluntly, Mackey is crazy" and then categorically asserting that global warming is happening "(it is)" and that the scientific consensus on its cause (human activity, presumably) is "nearly 100%," the writer makes this observation:
"The real hysteria, the knee jerk reaction, here is by libertarians such as Mackey who hear the word 'tax' and 'regulation' and have some Pavlovian reaction in the mind and see a direct line, in all circumstances correlation with lower standard of living and increases in poverty."
But many might see this as a knee-jerk reaction in itself, since anyone who disagrees with anyone can be labeled in exactly the same way, for example: "The real hysteria, the knee jerk reaction, here is by treehuggers who hear the word 'climate' and 'change' and have some Pavlovian reaction in the mind..."
What's the point of calling your opponents names when they are simultaneously calling you the same names?
Here's a thought experiment.
Let's say that in some parallel universe libertarianism is in the ascendancy in philosophy, in politics, in social issues, in cultural and media acceptance, and that human-caused climate change has a 100% scientific consensus.
And then let's say that the worldwide socio-cultural-politico movement to solve the problem is to recognize that solutions come from the proliferation of openly free and prosperous societies where governments are minimized, where human minds and imaginations and achievements are unfettered, where laissez-faire free market individualist capitalism is unchained and only those business and non-government entities and individuals that serve the needs and desires of their customers – greenies and treehuggers and naturalists among them – will survive.
It would be a world where science is free to confront and deal with scientific problems rather than being a government-corporatist handmaiden herded through a cattle chute toward a single predetermined politically defined "solution."
Can't you just hear the crazy, hysterical, knee-jerk, Pavlovian reaction from the collectivist left?
Back here in our own universe, once the politicians and bureaucrats who run the world's massively bloated and coercively self-serving governments realized that climate change could be used as a vehicle to pursue their own personal interests, those being as ever wealth, power and ego fulfillment, climate change ceased to be scientific and became wholly political.
But in the name of "nuance," the treehugger writer offers this crumb to libertarians:
"In fact increasing regulation of environmental pollution (taxing carbon emissions anyone? including negative externalities in prices...) could well lead to an economic situation where less nit-picky government oversight of business activities was needed. Something libertarian's like Mackey ought to like."
In other words, accepting the government's boot heel on our necks will result in more personal freedoms.
Someone is truly living in a parallel universe.
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Comments
Pretty sad that a person who is only fit to have a "political" opinion is rendering their flawed judgment on climate change and the role mankind's carbon emissions have on the Earth's temperature.
Libertarian, huh? Can you say "self-serving?" Deny the obvious real world fatal drawbacks so as to hold a morally satisfying simple philosophy. Soon everything is seen through the prism of an idealist political world-view. Grow up, or your children are the ones who will pay the price for your immaturity.
And once again that is exactly how most libertarians see the "self-serving" collectivist left, that it is you who are Denying the obvious real world fatal drawbacks of mind-numbing groupthink big intrusive government that destroys all in its path. Grow up, or your children are the ones who will pay the price for your immaturity. See? You have gained nothing with your name-calling.
Melting glaciers don't have an agenda, shrinking ice caps don't spin the facts, and rising global temperatures don't care about political correctness.
Who does have an agenda? Maybe the fossil fuel industry? Which employs the same denialist propaganda machine that for years fought the scientific evidence that smoking causes lung cancer?
Wake up, use your brain. Take a good dispassionate look at the multiple lines of scientific evidence that support AGW. Think for yourself. Isn't that a libertarian virtue?
Just because Al Gore says something doesn't automatically mean it's not true.
If scientists are wrong on climate change it wouldn't be the first time that scientists have been wrong on a significant scale, but that's no reason to distrust science in this area going forward. The world is flat, anyone?
Whether the earth is warming or cooling in natural or man-made cycles is entirely unimportant, as we will never truly prove or disprove our impact on the earth; what we need to focus on is acting responsibly and reducing our impact on the earth's natural resources and eco-system.
If the effort spent disproving global warming was turned to researching more efficient ways to glean and store clean energy, we'd be another step along the road.
Personally I find it very disappointing that in America, views on saving the natural world are so tightly tied to political agendas. This should be a neutral topic and how anyone can ever be outraged by the changes fulfilling the aspirations for cleaner air for our family legacies is beyond me.
Everyone still seems to be missing the point of this article. It's not about climate change; it's about the political response to climate change. Assuming that climate change is real but the proposed response to it is creating a worldwide libertarian style free society that rejects coercive governments, the progressives would be the ones yelling "hoax" and "junk science" while libertarians would be calling the collectivist left "global warming deniers." True or false, right or wrong, science or fantasy, the realm of "climate change" has been captured by ideology to the point that any discussion of the actual science has become moot. Politicians, not scientists, will determine the future of this issue. "Never let a serious crisis go to waste" – White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. That's the Obama administration's response to climate change and it's an ideologue's politically opportunistic response, not a scientific response.
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