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Oh, Good Grief, I Found My Topic
Nov. 29th, 2017 01:04 am I'm going to be busy the next couple of days, but I've just discovered something astounding.
Robert Zubrin has been a theorist of space exploration and a practical designer of the means to do it. A couple of days ago I saw that he has recently made a new breakthrough in the ability to make rocket fuel out of the Martian atmosphere. He is someone who should, on these topics, be read and understood.
But I have just found out that he believes that environmentalism and modern liberalism are part of an anti-human philosophy that needs false crisis in order to justify control and restriction. He links the belief in limits to such things as letting Ireland starve, the concern with population growth, and Hitler's murderous desire for Lebensraum.
He believes that global warming will in fact be good (he puts great weight on the fact that plant growth is increasing in accordance with the increase in atmospheric CO2) - but the real foundation for his standpoint is my old nemesis, Julian Simon. Simon believed in a world in which human intelligence, spurred through economic incentives, will always expand the amount of resources we have, inventing new extraction methods and entirely new substitutes and technology with different needs and so on . . . forever. There are problems with this "forever", at the extremes, but more immediately there is a problem with the certainty. Any environmental caution is evil. There is no reason to fear.
I give Zubrin some credit for perhaps having been driven mad with frustration over concerned Greens who rejected nuclear power as vehemently as they insisted that global warming was a terrible threat. This is a problem. But Zubrin hallucinates his opposition. Environmentalists don't want the worry forever so that they can have their nice safe limited regulated world; they want an end to the worry. They've been celebrating the ramping up of solar tech. They could use a new ambitiously technophilic approach, with heavy emphasis on science funding and R&D, in fact over near where Zubrin is, but Zubrin is much more wrong than they are. (And apparently somewhat carelessly. He's blaming Malthus for ruthless lifeboat economics and Charles Darwin for social Darwinism and perhaps Hitler, which is ridiculous.)
And the heck of it is, I cannot relegate Zubrin to the crank pile. We need him! His writings on space exploration and expansion should be read! Our actual space trajectory has been in a coma by comparison. We don't really have a replacement for Robert Zubrin. He's only a moonbat from the outer atmosphere on down. His ideas need to be salvaged.
The thing that strikes me is - I know this territory. I had hoped (and somewhat regretted - our path has not been an optimal one) that the old conflict of ideas between Herman Daly and Julian Simon had become simply a dusty section of my bookshelf. But the matter is evidently alive. It certainly is if it lives on in Zubrin, who is lamenting, for example, that targets of the environmentalists still think that they are under attack for separate reasons, instead of realizing that they are simply facing a unified proto-totalitarian anti-humanism.
Robert Zubrin has been a theorist of space exploration and a practical designer of the means to do it. A couple of days ago I saw that he has recently made a new breakthrough in the ability to make rocket fuel out of the Martian atmosphere. He is someone who should, on these topics, be read and understood.
But I have just found out that he believes that environmentalism and modern liberalism are part of an anti-human philosophy that needs false crisis in order to justify control and restriction. He links the belief in limits to such things as letting Ireland starve, the concern with population growth, and Hitler's murderous desire for Lebensraum.
He believes that global warming will in fact be good (he puts great weight on the fact that plant growth is increasing in accordance with the increase in atmospheric CO2) - but the real foundation for his standpoint is my old nemesis, Julian Simon. Simon believed in a world in which human intelligence, spurred through economic incentives, will always expand the amount of resources we have, inventing new extraction methods and entirely new substitutes and technology with different needs and so on . . . forever. There are problems with this "forever", at the extremes, but more immediately there is a problem with the certainty. Any environmental caution is evil. There is no reason to fear.
I give Zubrin some credit for perhaps having been driven mad with frustration over concerned Greens who rejected nuclear power as vehemently as they insisted that global warming was a terrible threat. This is a problem. But Zubrin hallucinates his opposition. Environmentalists don't want the worry forever so that they can have their nice safe limited regulated world; they want an end to the worry. They've been celebrating the ramping up of solar tech. They could use a new ambitiously technophilic approach, with heavy emphasis on science funding and R&D, in fact over near where Zubrin is, but Zubrin is much more wrong than they are. (And apparently somewhat carelessly. He's blaming Malthus for ruthless lifeboat economics and Charles Darwin for social Darwinism and perhaps Hitler, which is ridiculous.)
And the heck of it is, I cannot relegate Zubrin to the crank pile. We need him! His writings on space exploration and expansion should be read! Our actual space trajectory has been in a coma by comparison. We don't really have a replacement for Robert Zubrin. He's only a moonbat from the outer atmosphere on down. His ideas need to be salvaged.
The thing that strikes me is - I know this territory. I had hoped (and somewhat regretted - our path has not been an optimal one) that the old conflict of ideas between Herman Daly and Julian Simon had become simply a dusty section of my bookshelf. But the matter is evidently alive. It certainly is if it lives on in Zubrin, who is lamenting, for example, that targets of the environmentalists still think that they are under attack for separate reasons, instead of realizing that they are simply facing a unified proto-totalitarian anti-humanism.
Damn, man, this is all fully reconcilable. The path of hope is. Why does Zubrin have to be going off in this direction? The bastard's written a book "revealing" everything. I guess it's like running into your heroes on Twitter and discovering that they are big-egoed argumentative contrarians, which probably explains how they got to be your heroes, but damn.
This is tangent to two different lines of concern and hope.
Yeah, I'll be busy the next couple of days, but my head will be fully occupied.
