Reply to “Green Laws. Constitutionality. Does it all Matter?
Louis Swingrover, from the Constellation Hypothesis Blog, cited these excellent points in response to my post.
Fallacy #1: Your argument assumes green laws do NOT make life safer. If they did, you say, you would be willing to foot the bill. Instead you call green practices matters of preference.
The fact of the matter is that green laws based on sound science can make life a crucially safer. I am willing to argue for this claim if need be. Let me know.
Fallacy #2: You say “If I am required to install double paned windows what stops lawmakers from slipping a little farther into “Buy one of those Toyota Prius””. Please cf. Slippery Slope. Let me know if you have any questions.
The reason we have to enforce these practices on other people is twofold:
1. We share the environment. If you want to poison your immediate environment in a way that doesn’t violate my right to life, go ahead.
2. Green laws based on sound science may be more than life safening, they may be life-saving. You yourself admit the benefit of enforcing speed limits! Why not pollution limits?
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1. No. My argument dismisses that argument all together. For you to prove to me that forcing me to install a more efficient water heater will decrease localized climate change is impossible. As it is for me to do the inverse. So we are only left with the moral dilemma. Is it right to force these decisions? Note that I do not argue that it is or is not a good decision to install a more efficient water heater.
2. I don’t believe the Prius reference qualifies as a slippery slope fallacy but that might be me just being dense. I will expand on my argument to ask what gives lawmakers the power or authority to force these decisions. Just because we elected them doesn’t mean they get to run crazy. And just because it is an issue that effects all of us it doesn’t mean laws are the answer. I would argue that politicians would be overstepping their authority to make laws that should be based in science but we don’t even have consensus on this issue.
3. No one wants to poison the environment in a way that effects anyone. The crux of the argument comes when you try and prove the “violation to your right to life.” You cannot link a simple consumer choice in water heaters to your quality of life any more then you can your own car.
4. Pollution limits are not based on sound science or logic. Al Gore proposed an abolition of the income tax to be replaced by a pollution tax with the premiss that it would bring in the same amount of money and encourage green economics. Yet the implications into the business world would be disastrous. Companies that employ thousands of people and contribute hugely to our economy would have to downsize due to carbon emissions while companies in different industries such as telecom and SEO would not be impacted at all. In a sense they would be tax free. Then how do you go about accurately calculating the pollution for a large company? You think a 1040 is tough? Imagine a Pollution 3248. The carbon footprint to balance those tax codes and print the books, not to mention the late nights CPAs will spend studying this development, will kill 492 Jumping Monkeys alone!
All a pollution tax would do is rebalance our economy to favor certain industries and drive others into the ground. It would cripple America and jeopardize your daily mocha.
Currently no lives are in danger of pollution and things are only getting better. How would more governmental interference be a good thing?
November 10th, 2008 at 12:18 am
sorry, forgot about this post. Just found it again!
1. It seems, I suppose, that yours and my communication is suffering from a lack of specificity. When I said “green laws based on sound science”, I meant “those laws whose topic is the environment, that are in fact based on sound science”. I didn’t mean to address water heaters per se, but simply the grouping of laws that regard nature, that are in fact properly motivated and properly written. For example, laws curbing mercury emissions would fit into this category (cf. “Idaho lawmakers are a bunch of dumb-asses.” for a timely treatment of sliding standards on this matter in Idaho, for example).
2. The reason that your Prius reference qualifies as a slippery slope fallacy (the link for which apparently got lost…?) is because you gave no argument or evidence to support your implicit claim that stricter building codes (which, within the actual bounds of my argument as clarified by my previous comment, are, more specifically, those “green” building codes whose purpose is to protect the environment in ways that are scientifically supported to be life-saving), would inevitably lead to very specific and arbitrary governmental prescriptions for vehicular consumption. The window panes aren’t the issue. The issue is your categorically and abstractly dismissing all legislation that you arbitrarily and vaguely label “green” out of hand without specific treatment.
3. This point isn’t applicable to the discourse in light of my previous two.
4. “Pollution limits”? Can you be any more vague, please? If a substance is properly called “pollution”, then yes, limiting it is scientifically warranted! I suppose you and I may have disagreements about which substances are to be labeled “pollution”. I have a history of calling Al Gore and other Global Warming alarmists out on their bogus claims and fraudulent organizations (cf. my Global Warming thread). But that doesn’t mean that suddenly all “green laws” are categorically irrelevant! Surely mankind is laced with the capacity and depravity to adversely affect his surroundings! But surely we also have the, qualified, capacity to check ourselves as well. I agree, we should be reasonable and scientific about it. We should pursue consensus, and we should be outraged by those that hijack environmentalism in order to fear-monger and wrangle votes and carbon credit purchases and nobel prizes. But, like I said, that doesn’t mean that we can’t rebut them with equally forceful but pure and true environmental standards.
Personally I am not committed to defending “pollution tax” categorically in this thread. I am just rebutting your categorical rejection of “green laws”. You seem to take the worst efforts of those standing up for the environment (or disingenuously doing so), demonstrate their absurdity (for surely they are!), then draw an equals sign and chalk all “green laws” up to bad science, fraud, manipulation, and leftist politics. Your arguments here are a bit straw-many, false-dichotomy-y or just generally unparsimonious/uncharitable.
I just don’t want to see us conservatives throwing the baby out with the bath water. Let’s go ahead and rebut specific bills/politicians/organizations, without wholesale disregard for simple good stewardship.
November 10th, 2008 at 12:30 am
As to your claim that “Currently no lives are in danger of pollution”, please cf. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/05/world/asia/05china.html
and/or
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/05/060523000408.htm.
And lastly, I leave you with the following thoughts:
“…the hippies of the 1960s did understand something. They were right in fighting the plastic culture, and the church should have been fighting it too… More than this, they were right in the fact that the plastic culture - modern man, the mechanistic worldview in university textbooks and in practice, the total threat of the machine, the establishment technology, the bourgeois upper middle class - is poor in its sensitivity to nature… As a utopian group, the counterculture understands something very real, both as to the culture as a culture, but also as to the poverty of modern man’s concept of nature and the way the machine is eating up nature on every side.” -Chapter 2
“If God treats the tree like a tree, the machine like a machine, the man like a man, shouldn’t I, as a fellow-creature, do the same - treating each thing in integrity in its own order? And for the highest reason: because I love God - I love the One who has made it! Loving the Lover who has made it, I have respect for the thing He has made.” -Chapter 4
“The man who believes things are there only by chance cannot give things a real intrinsic value. But for the Christian, there is an intrinsic value. The value of a thing is not in itself autonomously, but because God made it. It deserves this respect as something which was created by God, as man himself has been created by God.” -Chapter 4
-”Pollution and the Death of Man” by Christian Theologian Francis Schaeffer
November 10th, 2008 at 12:43 am
PS
I just proof-read my comments and realized how rough my prose is in spots. Sorry about that. I think I got my point across though.
Also I just realized that I am the on who introduced the phrase “pollution limits” into our discourse - sorry for accusing you of being too vague on that count!
November 10th, 2008 at 10:20 am
“Up to 24,000 Californians die from fine particulate pollution each year“