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Good WSJ Essay on our limitless natural resources.
How many times have you heard that we humans are “using up” the world’s resources, “running out” of oil, “reaching the limits” of the atmosphere’s capacity to cope with pollution or “approaching the carrying capacity” of the land’s ability to support a greater population? The assumption behind all such statements is that there is a fixed amount of stuff—metals, oil, clean air, land—and that we risk exhausting it through our consumption.
“We are using 50% more resources than the Earth can sustainably produce, and unless we change course, that number will grow fast—by 2030, even two planets will not be enough,” says Jim Leape, director general of the World Wide Fund for Nature International (formerly the World Wildlife Fund).
But here’s a peculiar feature of human history: We burst through such limits again and again. After all, as a Saudi oil minister once said, the Stone Age didn’t end for lack of stone. Ecologists call this “niche construction”—that people (and indeed some other animals) can create new opportunities for themselves by making their habitats more productive in some way. Agriculture is the classic example of niche construction: We stopped relying on nature’s bounty and substituted an artificial and much larger bounty.
Economists call the same phenomenon innovation. What frustrates them about ecologists is the latter’s tendency to think in terms of static limits. Ecologists can’t seem to see that when whale oil starts to run out, petroleum is discovered, or that when farm yields flatten, fertilizer comes along, or that when glass fiber is invented, demand for copper falls.
That frustration is heartily reciprocated. Ecologists think that economists espouse a sort of superstitious magic called “markets” or “prices” to avoid confronting the reality of limits to growth. The easiest way to raise a cheer in a conference of ecologists is to make a rude joke about economists. …
Ship breakers in Bangladesh reported on in Daily Mail, UK.
The sad beauty of these incredible images cast a light on the shipbreaking industry in Bangladesh, where workers face death and injury from accidents and environmental hazards for just a few dollars a a day.
Chittagong Ship Breaking Yard is the largest of its type in the world. Around 80 active ship breaking yards line an eight-mile stretch of the coast, employing more than 200,000 Bangladeshis and accounting for half of all the steel in Bangladesh.
Ship breaking is the dismantling of ships for scrap recycling. Most ships have a lifespan of a 25-30 years before there is so much wear that repair becomes uneconomical, but the rising cost to insure and maintain aging vessels can make even younger vessels unprofitable to operate. …
The Cliven Bundy stand-off with the Feds never seemed to have a foundation we could understand. So, other than John Fund’s piece on the proliferation of SWAT teams at all levels of government, we have ignored the kerfuffle. Thank God. Jonathan Tobin posts on Commentary’s reluctance to champion that cause too.
You may have noticed that among the many and varied topics touched upon by COMMENTARY writers in recent weeks, none of us chose to weigh in on the Bundy Ranch controversy that attracted so much notice on cable news, talk radio, and the blogosphere. The reason was that none of us considered the standoff between a Nevada tax scofflaw and the federal government over grazing rights fees to rise to the level of an issue of national interest. The government may own too much land in the West and may have acted in a heavy-handed manner in this case but anyone with sense understood that stiffing the feds is likely to end badly for those who play that game, something that even a bomb-thrower like Glenn Beck appeared to be able to understand. Moreover, there was something slightly absurd about the same people who froth at the mouth when “amnesty” for illegal immigrants is mentioned demanding that Cliven Bundy be let off the hook for what he owed Uncle Sam. …
… The Bundy ranch standoff is a teachable moment for libertarians and conservatives. We don’t need to waste much time debunking the claim that a belief in limited government and calls for an end to the orgy of taxing and spending in Washington are racist. These are risible, lame arguments that fail on their own. But like liberals who need to draw a distinction between their positions and those of the anti-American, anti-capitalist far left, those on the right do need to draw equally bright lines between themselves and the likes of Cliven Bundy. If they don’t, spectacles such as the one we witnessed this week are inevitable.
Jennifer Rubin has more on the subject with warnings for the GOP.
Even before uttering his disgusting, racist remarks, Cliven Bundy was bad news. He waged a legal fight over a fee for grazing rights for more than a decade – and lost everywhere. His solution? Meet federal officials with guns when they tried to enforce a lawful court order to remove his cattle from government land. Why in the world would talk show hosts and U.S. senators Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Dean Heller (R-Nev.) think such a character was admirable?
On this I am in full agreement with the Weekly Standard’s Scrapbook: “Cliven Bundy is no hero of any kind. No conservative would pick and choose the laws he intends to obey, defy the rest, and challenge the rule of democracy with guns. No hero would adopt the terrorist’s tactic of placing innocents in harm’s way. Any fool can pick up a weapon and aim at an officer of the law; the moral power of civil disobedience lies in the willingness to defer to the law and accept punishment on principle.”
The Bundy situation is not an isolated one. The far-right — including talk show hosts, bloggers and some elected officials — often show zeal for bad causes because they imagine harebrained or illegal ideas are true expressions of liberty and opposition to the scourge of big government. These are the people who thought the shutdown was a great idea because it is “important to fight.” Many of them perpetrated the falsity that the National Security Agency was “listening to your phone calls” and that a surveillance program with zero instances of abuse that was helpful to our national security had to be dumped.
They are drawn to unsavory cranks like a moth to a flame. Not only did Rand Paul, for example, embrace Bundy before his racist comments, he also hired on the pro-Confederate “Southern Avenger” and dubbed Edward Snowden a modern-day Martin Luther King Jr. Others in the right-wing groups spent hundreds millions of dollars and climbed on the bandwagon for crank Senate candidates who challenged strong conservative incumbents. …
Where did they come from? In Pickerhead’s factory they’re called “ghost turds.” The NY Times calls them packing peanuts.
In 1960, a research chemist named Maurice Laverne Zweigle packed a raw egg and a few handfuls of skinny, bendy, polystyrene noodles into a small cardboard box, sealed the flaps and tossed it off a third-floor roof. His invention worked: The egg was unscathed.
‘‘At first we called it ‘spaghetti,’ ’’ said Zweigle, now 88 and still living near his former employer, the Dow Chemical Company, in northern Michigan. The tubular shape was Zweigle’s key discovery: Whereas plastic spheres would have slid around the fragile item and let it fall to the bottom, the noodles tangled together to form a secure nest. …