In recent weeks, we have argued strongly against any relapse into Malthusianism or any of the other, fashionable Green neuroses which readily afflict those dealing with the more tangible examples of Man’s ongoing fight against scarcity.
Neither the Gaian prophets, fulminating about planetary exploitation, nor the vacationing engineers, misapplying the narrow rigour of their own profession to a wholly different, open-ended problem of ends, not means, are to be paid heed if we are to think at all clearly about such matters.
In propounding this viewpoint—something we might, after Matt Ridley, term Rational Optimism—we have been mocked in some Peak Oil quarters for believing the world can power itself on ‘green unicorn dust’.
Read the rest of this superb article: Exhausted commodities? » The Cobden Centre.
As I have said before, including at a general election hustings, the greatest threat to mankind’s prosperity and progress is not climate change, resource depletion or population growth but bad economics.
