Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Sunday [11/15/15] reiterated his claim that climate change will lead to terrorism by destabilizing regions affected by droughts, floods, and other natural disasters.
Yea, right! I guess Sanders didn’t see the news accounts of the Paris attacks. When Islamic terrorists attacked Paris, they yelled "God is Great." Not, "It's too damn hot." What was he thinking?
“The reason is pretty obvious: If we are going to see an increase in drought and flood and extreme weather disturbances as a result of climate change, what that means is that peoples all over the world are going to be fighting over limited natural resources,” Sanders said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
“If there is not enough water, if there is not enough land to grow your crops, then you’re going to see migrants of people fighting over land that will sustain them, and that will lead to international conflict,” he added
What’s obvious is that Sanders is quite ignorant of human progress. Droughts and floods and extreme weather disturbances have always plagued mankind. Yet today, we are safer from these events than ever before, thanks to capitalism, which brought freedom to produce and trade, and reliable, economical, plentiful energy, mainly fossil fuels. As a result, extreme weather-related deaths have DECLINED 98% worldwide in the last hundred years—the very era of global warming Sanders whines about.
The claim that “peoples all over the world are going to be fighting over limited natural resources” is particularly laughable. First of all, there are no “natural resources,” only natural raw materials waiting to be turned into resources by human ingenuity (which requires freedom and energy). And these resources are not limited. The supply of resources available to be turned into life-enhancing goods and services are constantly being expanded. The American fracking industry recently turned massive amounts of previously unreachable oil and natural gas into usable resources, driving down the price of reliable energy. As long as freedom reigns, there is no need for people to fight over resources. They can peaceably trade for the things they need and desire. But free trade, a feature of free market capitalism, is anathema to Sanders.
Not enough water? The Earth is 75% covered in water. But very little of it is practically usable. Only human thought, ingenuity, and work, unshackled by capitalism, can produce and deliver plentiful supplies of clean, healthy, usable water for dwellings and crops. The problem is obviously not a shortage of water, so long as there is no shortage of freedom.
Fighting over land? Today, weather-related food shortages are quickly ameliorated by modern agriculture, which produces plentiful food, coupled with modern transportation, which provides the means to quickly transport food to where it is needed. If drought strikes one region, the reduction in agricultural output can quickly be replaced with imported foods. Famines from droughts are a thing of the past, thanks to modern agriculture and transportation, each driven by human ingenuity, freedom, and fossil fuel energy. Hunger today, to the extent it exists, is a political problem, not an economic problem—and always in socialist countries, not in and among countries where free markets allow trade and transport of goods to flow freely across political boundaries. California is currently experiencing an “historic” multi-year drought. Are Californians dieing of starvation and thirst? Is California invading its neighbors?
What’s obvious is Sanders’ demagoguery. Even if we are going to see an increase in drought and flood and extreme weather disturbances as a result of climate change—and that’s huge if, since no evidence yet exists that extreme weather is worsening—the obvious solution is the very thing that Sanders rails against, capitalism. Basically, there are only two ways for people to deal with one another—voluntary association or force. Sanders sees only force.
The Left's latest mantra that climate change causes people to turn to terrorism is more proof of the climate catastrophists' growing desperation, as their perpetually wrong computer model predictions fly in the face of the fact that capitalism and fossil fuels keep making people’s lives better and better the more of them they employ.
The Capitalist Manifesto: The Historic, Economic and Philosophic Case for Laissez-Faire—Andrew Bernstein
The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels—Alex Epstein
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