Human Achievement Hour

This Saturday during Earth Hour various people around the world will shut their lights off for sixty minutes as a symbolic gesture to raise awareness about climate change. Hopefully if enough people do so they will scare the bejeezus out of unsuspecting astronauts. Watching Houston inexplicably pretend to be Pyongyang for forty-five minutes is surely an off-putting sight from the stratosphere.

Alternately, folks over at the Competitive Enterprise Institute will be celebrating Human Achievement Hour. An event which applauds mankind’s innovations that have made life livable. Electricity, indoor plumbing and laser tag come to mind. It is a celebration of capitalism and technology. I plan to merrily flip my own lights on and, if I’m feeling festive, toss some confetti in the dryer.

This behavior may strike some readers as deranged. Am I one of these science deniers who thinks climate change is an Al Gore conspiracy? Hasn’t consumption led us into this mess? Actually I think climate change is real, and I also think we’re contributing to it. That’s why we need to hold onto capitalism for dear life. Guilt isn’t going to get us out of this mess, but IBM might.

A popular response to climate change is to suggest that if we cap our emissions and mandate everyone to tighten their belts, play less Angry Birds, and join carpools, we can ease back on the nastier gasses and save the ice caps from melting. This is nonsense. Here’s why:

As P. J. O’Rourke put it, “There are 1.3 billion people in China, and they all want a Buick.” As the bottom two to five billion folks living on our rock climb out of poverty and start living like Iowans, they will guzzle electricity, drive cars, and eat methane-farting cows. There’s not much we can do about that.

To put things in perspective for you, if every residential light bulb on the planet were turned off for an hour, the carbon saved would equal about four minutes of China’s carbon footprint. A footprint which grows fatter every year. Add the rest of the developing world to that, and their carbon footprints turn into a sooty foxtrot.

We can wreck the global economy to slow this process down (Congress is trying its darndest), but eventually India or Westeros or another developing country will catch up when we’re not looking. So the idea that we can save the planet by legislating away our exhaust fumes simply won’t work. We can’t control two billion other people, and we shouldn’t ask them to wallow in poverty indefinitely, either.

When I was a kid we had this stuff called “paper.” Every year millions upon millions of squids were hunted and squeezed to death for their ink to produce physical books. Publishing a book on forestry required leveling a small forest. Yet, despite a larger population, we have not run out of trees. Arbor Day didn’t save them. Private enterprise did—it invented USB flash drives, Kindles, and enough addictive video games to permanently dissuade children from ever touching a book.

Earth’s best hope is human innovation. We have to think our way out of this mess, not go on a diet. It is incumbent upon the developed world to invent cheaper, cleaner and smarter forms of energy, so that populous developing nations don’t resort to powering their homes with coal or whale blubber. A vibrant free market is the engine which funds innovation.

I respect that so many concerned people want to stop global warming. I hate sweating. For now, I’m glad that private enterprise has come up with air conditioners. We can’t stop half the planet from polluting its brains out, so we had better hope the free market keeps on innovating.

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