We live now in the era of the Cult of Climate Change, which arose out of traditional environmentalism but in recent years has metastasized into an entirely different beast. The proponents have become more zealous and shrill, the timelines more dire, and the evidence more questionable, but I would like to take a moment to advocate for a more reasonable, rational stance, one that I remember from my childhood in the 90’s. Being pretty far down the libertarian/free market rabbit hole myself, I am reticent to make any specific policy proposals. I simply want to encourage certain considerations that may have become unfashionable of late, tainted by their association with the Cult of Climate Change. These are things that I think should be appealing to all who value their health, the health of their children, and the beauty of the natural world.

I grew up in a small town, and like many small towns it had a primary industry; namely, a pulp mill. Nowadays, with paper being less in demand and automation rendering many of the jobs obsolete, the entire operation can run on a few hundred people, but back then it employed thousands, a significant fraction of the town’s population. Thus, any perceived threat to the mill was a perceived threat to the town.

That made my parents somewhat unpopular figures. Old-school liberals, they were part of a small coalition fighting for better transparency of the air quality in the town and, if necessary, measures to improve it.

Anyone who has lived near a pulp mill can tell you about the smell. It’s a farty, rotten-eggy smell resulting from volatile sulfur compounds like hydrogen sulfide. While the smell is unpleasant (and that is worth considering in its own right), these compounds are not usually considered harmful to human health in the typical concentrations. Whether or not you choose to believe that (who is asserting they’re not harmful?), this was generally accepted as true at the time. Additionally, the image of thick, white clouds billowing out of the smoke stacks, just a few blocks away from homes and schools, can be repugnant, but this was basically all water vapor. The real battle was about the things that you couldn’t see, and couldn’t smell.

Chief among these were compounds known as dioxins and furans. These chemicals, largely associated with the bleaching process, were being released into the air and settling in the surrounding environment, where they would make their way into the food chain, accumulate in animal fats, and could remain stable for up to a decade. Known to cause numerous cancers, hormone imbalances, birth defects, and many other serious health effects, they were also notable components in the chemical weapon Agent Orange, before it was banned in 1971.

Like most environmentalists, my parents also lamented the clear-cutting of the surrounding forests, which left previously wooded hills looking like the unfortunate victim of a half completed head shaving prank at a frat party. But they understood the economic value this provided to the town, and recognized the replanting efforts of the parent company of the mill. It was planning decades in the future, after all, and had no interest in starving itself to death of its input commodity. Likewise, my parents just wanted to live in a community where the air was safe to breathe; they weren’t trying to shut down the mill or bankrupt the town.

In the vein of rational environmentalism, my parents also strictly forbid littering and encouraged recycling in all it’s forms; composting, collecting and returning refundables (for what it’s worth, we were also quite poor, which probably had some influence on this as well), donating to, and buying from, secondhand stores (again, poor), as well as the recycling of paper, plastic, metal, and glass products generally.

Now, in recent years some of these efforts have been revealed to be little more than theatre. Plastic recycling, in particular, only processes a small fraction of what is collected, and barely makes a dent in reducing overall plastic waste. Metals, such as aluminum, are much easier (and more profitable) to deal with, and so make more sense. Glass is also worthwhile, as is paper.

The point isn’t to put ourselves beneath the concerns of “the planet” (whatever the hell that means), it is simply to cultivate gratitude for the material wealth it affords us, and avoid wasting its bounty where possible, when feasible, without denying ourselves the hard-earned rewards of our labour.

Likewise, applying pressure to industries and infrastructure firms for reasonable controls on the contents of the matter they eject forth into the environment shouldn’t be automatically dismissed as trivial leftist hysterics. Would you want your kids drinking the water in Flint, Michigan circa 2015? Does the air in Beijing look pleasant to breathe? Are you cool with untreated mining runoff being released upstream from your watershed?

Ideologically, I’m not 100% sure how to deal with this yet. The free market capitalist in me is tempted to say that the market should just work these things out over time. Hypothetically, with sufficiently transparent information consumers should choose not to support companies that poison people, and citizens should choose to move away from jurisdictions where real hazards exist, depleting companies of their labour pool and municipalities of their tax base. Meanwhile, public pressure campaigns can be carried out in the interim to try to influence egregious polluters to change their behavior voluntarily, without government intervention, before less forgiving market forces run their course.

But all that takes time, years or possibly decades, access to data can be gatekept, and those of lesser means, the poor, will have their options limited with regards to choice of products and choice of jurisdiction.

The Randian perspective, taken to its coldest logical limit, might suppose that the poor deserve their lot in life, because they didn’t work hard enough to acquire wealth and so, in a twisted version of survival of the fittest, they (and their offspring) in some sense “deserve” to die so that the “fitter,” those adapted to succeed in the modern capitalist economy, can spawn the next generation free of their inferior genes.

I’m a firm believer in personal responsibility , consequences for one’s actions (or inactions), and evolution by natural selection, but even I can’t bring myself to apply that level of cold, Darwinian reasoning to human society in its current form.

The game is at least partially rigged; those of us in the freedom tech space understand that better than most. Working hard and acting morally often lead to material success in life, but they are by no means necessary. Many a man and woman have worked hard and conducted themselves ethically their entire life and died poor, and many have lied, cheated, stolen, and fucked over the people around them and lived long, prosperous lives, leaving behind many descendants.

The axis of success in a system of crony capitalism does not run parallel to the axis of hard work and ethical virtue. Nor does it run perfectly orthogonal. The truth, as it so often does, lies somewhere in the middle.

We should, without question, work hard to provide value to the world and conduct ourselves in a manner that is honorable and fair. Because it is the right thing to do (as decreed by the god you believe in, or your secular moral compass), yes, but also because it really does improve your chances at material success and, by extension, a comfortable life in your later years. But it is not guaranteed.

Bringing it back to the subject of rational environmentalism, I would hope that as a society we can get past the bullshit of the Cult of Climate Change and find common ground in developing reasonable solutions to protect ourselves and our descendants from the worst excesses of our current broken system of perverted capitalism. A system where only the bottom line matters and free market checks and balances can be neutered by and for the incumbent powers, whether they be political or financial.

For those of us with the means and agency to influence change in the world, it seems fitting that we should seek to make it a better place for all, instead of merely retreating to our citadels and watching the rest burn. I’m no scholar of Him, but it seems like something that Jesus fellow might have had an opinion on.

Again, I’m wary of policy solutions, but perhaps if we look at it through the following lens it will seem more reasonable:

The power and purpose of the state should be limited to the collective protection of private property. Nothing more. If we include human life as a form of private property, then perhaps some government regulation in the context of environmental pollutants makes sense, provided it is rigorously evidence-based. Perhaps there can be specific niches where we twist the arm of government to actually protect the children, and other members of society with lesser means to protect themselves.