I Won’t Vote for a Party That Would Bring Back Famine

I have trouble with the main plank of the Green platform. The Greens want less CO₂ in the atmosphere. Why is that a problem?

Almost 80% of the earth’s atmosphere is nitrogen and about 20% is oxygen. Greenhouse gases comprise about 1% of our atmosphere, and most of that is water vapor.  CO₂ is only a very small portion of the 1%. In fact, carbon dioxide is about 400 parts per million parts of atmosphere.  How much of that carbon dioxide is produced by processes under man’s control?  About 5%. So, if you have a million units of atmosphere, the stuff the Greens wants us to stop producing accounts for 20 of those million units. Let’s suppose we doubled our carbon dioxide emissions. Now CO₂ would be 420 parts per million. And if we stopped altogether, then what?  380 parts per million. Somehow it doesn’t look like what we are doing matters a whole lot. Climate is changing with or without us. We do not control solar activity, and this seems to be mainly what drives climate change. I am all for facing the fact that we live in a country that has at various times been covered by glaciers and at other times by jungles. Men didn’t stop previous climate changes, and they won’t this time.

I have an even bigger problem with the Green doctrine. We are a carbon based life form at the top of a carbon based food pyramid. The foundation of that pyramid is plants. Plants grow through the process of photosynthesis, which requires CO₂. It is not mere coincidence that mankind has basically ended famine (other than famine contrived through military or political action) in the last 3 decades. In that time, the earth has warmed and living plant mass has increased substantially as a direct result. People eat plants and animals that people eat also eat plants, so we have more food to go around.

Don’t misunderstand. I am not in favor of polluting our air, water and soil: those are precious and we have a responsibility to guard them, but Green doctrine is to have the government interfere in the economy to cause massive price dislocation and corresponding resource misallocation. There is ample evidence in the works of von Mises, von Hayek, Rothbard, Hazlitt and others. The standard of living (i.e.: availability of resources) of Canadians will sharply fall if the country was to enact the Green platform, and the climate would keep right on changing anyway.