Loyola Econ Prof Walter E. Block Again Shows He's a Blockhead In WSJ Op-Ed

                                                                       

                                                                       Walter E. Block - Loyola Prof

In his  June 23rd letter in The Loyola Maroon   ('An Open Letter To Loyola Students Who Want Me Fired')    Economics professor Walter E. Block wrote:

"There are quite a few Loyola professors who, as I do, approve of economic freedom, private property rights and laissez faire capitalism, but none “who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them” to the extent that I do. I’m pretty rabid on these issues. So, you students who want me fired: if you really want to even understand your own positions on political economic philosophy, let alone defend them competently, you need me to continue my employment as Harold E. Wirth Endowed Chair.."

That Wirth -endowed chair has enabled Block to spout no end of bollocks and twaddle in the name of economic freedom, including (in 2014) that restaurant owners today ought not be forced to serve a possible patron (whether white, black, red or brown) against their will.  Just as it is morally wrong to force someone to work for you against their will, so also- argues Block-  it is morally wrong to force someone to engage in a trade transaction against their will. And the latter, of course, includes being forced to serve customers a proprietor may not like. 

At the time Block's contentious codswallop first came out I wrote in an extended comment reply (to a Block defender), that even if Block isn't directly supporting slavery he was still upholding a subtle form of discrimination and giving a dubious justification.  As I wrote at the time (Jan. 31 post, 2014):  "The restaurateur or trader is afforded certain privileges (via licensing) to provide services such as food in the public domain. But this freedom to trade is governed by certain rules so they cannot do whatever they want, trade with whomever they want- while excluding other customers.  Hence, they can't exclude service unless a customers behavior is disorderly or drunk and in any case undesirable - and for which any person with common sense would concur. The trader doesn't have the latitude to refuse service on the basis of race, skin color or any other subjective basis."

The Loyola community - including other professors - correctly interpreted Block's arguments as a defense of racial bias, or preferential treatment - which is what it was.  The claim that a lunch counter owner has a "right" to choose his clientele is merely a smokescreen to hide the inherent prejudice. Just like the Colorado cake maker who refused to make wedding cakes for gays, the "right" only applies if one is operating solely in the private sphere.  A cake maker or food preparer can make as many delicacies as he wants - and exclude others -  so long as it's only a private hobby,  not a public operation for which a trade license has been issued. Once the latter exists all bets are off and your right to pick and choose your own customers is no more. 

Anyway, Block has now gone off on a new jeremiad in a WSJ op-ed, this time against one David M. Graber who he compares to "an uneducated drunk"   for writing a review of Bill McKibben's 'The End Of Nature'.   Therein, Graber questions the value of surplus human lives on this planet, and how so many excess billions are not only destroying the environment but making life degraded and unlivable.  In other words, human numbers need to be pared down if humanity is to survive.

This shouldn't be rocket science, but for Prof. Block-head, it evidently is since Graber is "eager for masses of human beings to drop dead."    Well, uh, no. Only to stop reproducing!

Why?  For starters, our little planet is not infinite so has a limited carrying capacity. 

Carrying capacity =

(usable land-water resource base providing water + food + fuel) / (individual food, fuel + water requirement)

If the numerator is » 11.4 x 10 ⁹  hectares of usable aggregate equivalent land-water resource base and if 6 hectares is the ideal "mean individual requirement" over a lifetime (e.g. meet all basic needs and have a few private luxuries) , that means:

CC = (11.4 x 10 ⁹   hectares) / 6 hectares/person » 2 billion

Obviously, this can be increased if the numerator can be increased or the denominator (each individual's ecological footprint) decreased. The problem is how to achieve it? (Especially if the total population continues to increase at 2-3% per year)    The point is we're rapidly approaching the threshold at which there will simply be too many people to feed given existing resources: water, arable soil, fertilizers etc.. The projections now are for at least 10 billion people by 2050, and an 80 percent probability of 12.3 billion on Earth by 2100. Simply put, there simply aren't the resources to support even the lower addition. At root, the issue is sustainability - especially for water which is needed for crops. NO water, no crops to feed a growing population. The graphic below puts this into perspective; 

                                              

The interpretation of the graph (upward) is straightforward. By June, 2030 TWO full Earths - that is the resources therein - will be needed to support the then population. Already we are at 1.5 Earths. Every year Global Footprint Network raises awareness about global ecological overshoot with its Earth Overshoot Day campaign. Earth Overshoot Day is the day on the calendar when humanity has used up the resources that it takes the planet the full year to regenerate.   This means that if planet Earth has an excess population - over carrying capacity - that will be hostage to the limited resources, and almost certain face mass destitution and death.

Block, despite these hard facts, writes (ibid.):

"This third rock from the Sun can now support seven plus billion people prosperously - or could if everyone would adopt the principle of free enterprise.  "

Which, of course, is a fairy tale because capitalist free enterprise depends on multiple bounties of  available resources to churn out products through which a "free" enterprise person can compete.  Since the resources (copper, palladium, silver etc.) are now waning then the creation of separate enterprises is a dead end, i.e. infeasible.   Unless perhaps we get to the closer asteroids and manage to do some asteroid mining, but does anyone want to bet the poorest current Africans or Brazilians will benefit from that bounty to start their own "enterprises"?

Minus asteroidal resources here are sobering facts for Block and his blockhead brigade:

-  Every day humans permanently remove 3.2 billion gallons more water from aquifers than nature can't replace. If  "human ingenuity" was as great as advertised it would be able to compensate for the losses nature is unable to. But it can't!  Just multiply world population by per capita consumption and - unlike the lazy Block - you can estimate levels of resource depletion and waste generation.

- U.S. consumption of energy grows every day despite half-hearted efforts to conserve it.  This is important because each energy use is accompanied by entropy or degradation in the quality of energy remaining  which also impacts our environment.

- To accommodate growth we pave over an area equal to the state of Delaware every year.

Common sense ought to inform one that this is unsustainable and can't go on indefinitely.

The Cornucopians get it wrong because they don't see population growth  as the toxin it is, and can't put 2 plus 2 together to see how it leads to the Malthusian nightmare.  A nightmare playing out now before their eyes if they'd only look!  Pick any country in the world suffering from a civil war, a famine, insufficient water or a massive die off from natural disaster - you will invariably find it to be one with excess fertility.  Hence, one which is already overpopulated. Check out the sample birthrates per woman in any of these countries, e.g. 6.8 for Somalia, 5.5. for Afghanistan, 6.2 for Burundi, 6.3 for the Congo, and 6.5 for Mali.  The same depressing story repeats over and over.  

All of this comes back to net energy which is that energy humans need to survive. If the oil taken from the ground, say by fracking, only has a ratio of 1:1 (for energy produced to energy consumed) then it is barely of use to extract it. The same amount of oil-energy you are using up to get it, is basically what it carries. There is no net gain.   

Block's failure to grasp the fundamental  limits to human growth - whether in population or the economy -  is  arguably tied to  his belief that proprietors can refuse dealing with any customers if they so choose.   In Block  World, just keep all those black, brown and red people out of the critical supply chains (whether for food or fuel)  by your own subjective choice of customer and watch how fast they disappear.  We see some of this even now as millions of the poor - mainly minorities - are forced to live in "food deserts".   All they can access are Burger Kings, McDonald's, Taco Bell, but no supermarkets stocking veggies.

By such limitation those inhabitants are prone to much higher obesity and then become fodder for Covid to take them down at disproportionate rates.  Does Block care? Clearly, from his arguments defending absolute proprietor preference of customers, he does not.  This does not mesh with Loyola's own humanist Christian tradition so yeah, Block ought to get the heave -ho.  Where to go? I am sure George Mason University in Virginia would love to have this guy, given we read in the school's Wikipedia entry:

"In 2018, a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit revealed that conservative donors, including the Charles Koch Foundation and Federalist Society, were given direct influence over faculty hiring decisions at the university's law and economics schools."

How Will Humans Manage In A CO2 World That Hasn't Existed For 3 Million Years? Ans. They Won't

Exxon's own graph showing CO2 concentration increase with temperature as a function of time, from this Exxon paper


"The attack on science is underway throughout the government. In the most recent example, the White House-appointed director of the United States Geological Survey, James Reilly, a former astronaut and petroleum geologist, has ordered that scientific assessments produced by that office use only computer-generated climate models that project the impact of climate change through 2040, rather than through the end of the century, as had been done previously. Scientists say that would give a misleading picture because the biggest effects of current emissions will be felt after 2040."   - NY Times, May 27


The news this past week that the CO2 concentration has now reached 415 parts per million, which hasn't been the case for 3 million years, ought to alarm everyone with a pulse and brain wave.  We are basically talking about atmospheric conditions that characterized our planet before the species Homo Sapiens emerged.  A time when sea level was 50 feet higher as well.

Indeed, the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere has accelerated from 400 ppm in 2013 to 415 ppm now. That is an approximately 6 year interval for a per year change in concentration of :

(415 ppm - 400 ppm)  / 6 yr  =   15 ppm / 6 yr  =  2.5 ppm/  yr.

This is 25 % higher than the previous average rate of increase, i.e. 2.0 ppm/ yr. Given we know that every increase in CO2 concentration by 2 ppm increases the radiative heating effect by 2 W/ m²,  we also know that the associated radiative heating is now significantly higher.  This accounts for a major part of the increase of atmospheric temperature with CO2 concentration.

While it is true that  there is a yearly rise and fall   in CO2 concentration and May is usually the peak month for atmospheric CO2, we have also seen each yearly peak is inexorably higher than the last one.  This behavior has been noted for decades and hearkens back to the well -known Keeling curve, e.g.


In the wake of the findings, especially the graphs shown above, it is not at all beyond the realm of plausibility that the violent weather experienced in the past month: over 150 tornadoes in the plains, massive flooding, and triggering temperature extremes between eastern and western U.S., (we just had 6 inches of snow where we live in Colorado Springs three days ago, is tied to the higher CO2 concentration.

In the case of the above phenomena, start with repeated intrusions of destabilized polar air,  leading to frigid temperatures in the west - accompanied by massive snowstorms the past 3 weeks.  The frigid systems then moved to the east and met much warmer Gulf air, triggering violent circulation, thunderstorms, tornadoes and flooding of the Mississippi not seen in years.

And this is not novel at all.   The summer of 2018, for example, was truly apocalyptic, Across the Northern hemisphere railroad rails warped and pavement cracked. Nuclear plants cut power output when their water sources became too hot. Reideer sought relief inside Norwegian tunnels as as temperatures above the Arctic Circle approached 90 F.   Meanwhile, historic rain in Japan caused deadly floods and record breaking wildfires burned in California and Sweden.


On the Gulf coast of Florida, as my youngest brother Mike approached his end with terminal, stage IV liver cancer in May last year, he'd email me about the reeking dead marine life. Near the Gulf living in Port Charlotte, he was on the front lines  of a red tide invasion that generated more than 400 tons of manatee and fish carcasses.  The killer, as he informed me from the Port Charlotte papers?  A marine algae called Karenia brevis, which releases a potent class of neurotoxins called brevotoxins.  In high enough concentration it debilitates and kills manatees and other native marine species.

This climate -related havoc then spilled into the new year with polar vortex intrusions and super freezes, e.g.

Brane Space: Once Again: The Current "Super Freeze" Doesn't Mean ...

brane-space.blogspot.com/2019/01/once-again-current-super-freeze-doesnt.html

 No one could have foreseen at the time that the  intrusions would- by degree - become a repeated phenomena through the spring- as they have been. 

All this now as we've beheld (see middle graph)  daily atmospheric CO2  concentration cross above 415 ppm to 415.26 as measured at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii.  To provide perspective,  this is the first time for this dubious milestone since humans walked the earth — perhaps since  our ape-like ancestor Australopithecus.  

Even more confounding, Exxon climate researchers  predicted the current CO 2 threat as far back as 1982.   When Exxon Corporation was studying climate change seriously, its scientists produced papers predicting atmospheric CO2 and global warming under a number of scenarios, including a "high case" scenario  (well elucidated by Bill McKibben of  350.org ) in which fossil fuel burning would increase and previously unavailable carbon resources, from shale for example, would become extractable.

Look at the last chart at the top of this post, which is a chart from one of those Exxon papers (pdf). It extrapolates and projects  from a 1980 baseline, ultimately arriving at almost 620 ppm by 2080.  That level of CO2 concentration has been the threshold for the runaway greenhouse effect, as often expressed by the late Carl Sagan, and former Geophysical Inst. climate specialist Gunther Weller. .  The near term Exxon prediction has been startlingly accurate, at least so far. It put atmospheric CO2 (upper line) just below 420 ppm in 2019 and global warming (lower line) above 1.2°C after we add in the amount of global warming, 0.4°C, that occurred between the pre-Industrial low and 1980 [Hansen, 2018].  But even now many climate physicists indicate these values are low-balled and the actual temperature rise is far higher. See e.g.

Climate report understates threat

Excerpt:

"So far, average temperatures have risen by one degree Celsius. Adding 50 percent more warming to reach 1.5 degrees won’t simply increase impacts by the same percentage—bad as that would be. Instead, it risks setting up feedbacks that could fall like dangerous dominoes, fundamentally destabilizing the planet. This is analyzed in a recent study showing that the window to prevent runaway climate change and a “hot house” super-heated planet is closing much faster than previously understood."

The question of whether Americans - or any nationality- can manage in a full out greenhouse world has been fairly well answered in the past week with its devastating tornadoes, flash floods and now - we are informed - a "death ridge" with triple digit temperatures ready to hatch over the southeast.  Now take all these calamities and multiply their intensity by two orders of magnitude to arrive at what life will be like in 2080 with the CO2 concentration at 620 ppm.

Such a projection is what awoke Greta Thunberg to the fact she and her young cohort may not have a future. It may even be gone before 2080.  As we read in the current TIME  (May 27, p. 38) on how she achieved climate wokeness:

"While Thunberg was studying climate change in school at he age of 11, she reacted in a surprisingly intense way: she suffered an episode of severe depression."

In her own words, quoted in the next paragraph:

"I felt everything was meaningless and there was no point going to school if there was no future."

Which catapulted her to become a climate activist, now addressing - and shaming - the rich and powerful everywhere she appears,  from the World Economic Forum in Davos, to the UN Climate Change Conference in Poland.  

Will Thunberg's activist push,  getting others of her generation on board halt or slow the hurtle toward climate catastrophe? Probably not, but at least she is making a last stand for her generation and shaming those energy-guzzlers who have squandered the planet for them.

The Earth Is Shrinking From Climate Change - But Is Anyone Paying Attention?

Scene of devastation amidst California wild fires.

"Already, even in affluent areas, many of us hesitate to walk across a grassy meadow because of he proliferation of ticks bearing Lyme disease - which have come from the hot weather. We have found ourselves unable to swim off beaches because of jellyfish - which thrive in warming seas- have taken over the water. The planet's diameter will remain eight thousand miles and its surface will still cover two hundred million square miles. But the Earth, for humans, has begun to shrink - under our feet and in our minds."  Bill McKibben,  'How Extreme Weather Is Shrinking The Planet',  The New Yorker)

The more intelligent and sensible citizens agree the horrific California wild fires were largely spawned by climate change.   Indeed, the Camp Fire  has become "the deadliest and most destructive fire in the state's history", according to a main section (p. A3)  WSJ piece yesterday.  Most ominously is what it portends for the future given the California wild fire season is typically waning by November. But now, with ever higher yearly temperatures and drier conditions expected, this may be only the beginning- and  there's every chance these monster fires will not be confined to the Golden State.

The spread of such horrific wild fires with tornadic qualities, is also making large areas of land uninhabitable - as the northern California town of Paradise has found. Over the planet this means less habitable land for housing, for water and to grow food crops- not to mention recreational activities.  Point of fact, we've now learned the accessible Earth is shrinking because of the ravages of climate change. (See the quotation at top of post).  What does this mean?  It means that because of the effects of  rampant global warming and expanding human population there is now less of the planet that is livable.

This conclusion is from Bill McKibben, founder of the website 350.Org, in his New Yorker piece, 'How Extreme Weather Is Shrinking The Planet', e.g.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/26/how-extreme-weather-is-shrinking-the-planet

Writing:

"In 1988, George H. W. Bush, running for President, promised that he would fight “the greenhouse effect with the White House effect.” He did not, nor did his successors, nor did their peers in seats of power around the world, and so in the intervening decades what was a theoretical threat has become a fierce daily reality. As this essay goes to press, California is ablaze. A big fire near Los Angeles forced the evacuation of Malibu, and an even larger fire, in the Sierra Nevada foothills, has become the most destructive in California’s history. After a summer of unprecedented high temperatures and a fall “rainy season” with less than half the usual precipitation, the northern firestorm turned a city called Paradise into an inferno within an hour, razing more than ten thousand buildings and killing at least sixty-three people; more than six hundred others are missing. The authorities brought in cadaver dogs, a lab to match evacuees’ DNA with swabs taken from the dead, and anthropologists from California State University at Chico to advise on how to identify bodies from charred bone fragments."

I also appreciated that McKibben took on the pie -in- the sky optimists - like Steven Pinker  and more recently Matt Ridley (WSJ, 'The Pessimism Reflex', Nov. 17-18, p. C19)- who attempt to convince us that pessimism is merely an aberrant "reflex" -  which is "disproven" when one consults actual statistics - i.e.  telling us everything is "getting better".   (Such as the proportion of people in poverty worldwide, leaving out the fact eight multi-billionaires boast of more wealth than the lowest paid 3.8 BILLION on this planet!)

No things are not getting better,  and this is apart from the fact I agree with Ridley that the news - yes - mostly contains the 'bad' because it is that which grabs attention.  But this doesn't reckon in that if the climate collapses, as we are now witnessing,  so does civilization. Duh!  As McKibben writes:

"For the past few years, a tide of optimistic thinking has held that conditions for human beings around the globe have been improving. Wars are scarcer, poverty and hunger are less severe, and there are better prospects for wide-scale literacy and education. But there are newer signs that human progress has begun to flag. In the face of our environmental deterioration, it’s now reasonable to ask whether the human game has begun to falter—perhaps even to play itself out. Late in 2017, a United Nations agency announced that the number of chronically malnourished people in the world, after a decade of decline, had started to grow again—by thirty-eight million, to a total of eight hundred and fifteen million, “largely due to the proliferation of violent conflicts and climate-related shocks.” In June, 2018, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N. found that child labor, after years of falling, was growing driven in part by an increase in conflicts and climate-related disasters."

And yet we are continually confronted with balderdash such as appeared in the weekend WSJ,  as Ridley writes:  "For us New Optimists, however, it's an uphill battle. No matter how persuasive our evidence we routinely encounter disbelief and even hostility."

As it should be because your "evidence" is nowhere near persuasive, as McKibben clearly shows.

McKibben's take of a shrinking planet  is not exaggeration. McKibben himself points out that the "last thirty years have seen all twenty of the hottest years ever recorded.   Also, "the melting of glaciers and ice caps, and rising sea levels have arrived decades early".   Most mind -blowing, a climate team fro Univ of Illinois reported in May that the UN's "worst case scenario" for global warming effects was "too optimistic".  A point I've made over and over, e.g.

To fix ideas, by the end of this century some parts of the world could face as many as six climate-related crises at the same time, according to a paper published Monday in Nature Climate Change,   The paper shows the effects of climate change across a broad spectrum of problems, including heat waves, wildfires, sea level rise, hurricanes, flooding, drought and shortages of clean water.

Lead  author Camilo Mora of the University of Hawaii at Manoa,  noted that Florida had recently experienced extreme drought, record high temperatures and wildfires — and also Hurricane Michael, the powerful Category 4 storm that slammed into the Panhandle last month. Similarly, California is suffering through the worst wildfires the state has ever seen, as well as drought, extreme heat waves and degraded air quality that threatens the health of residents.

Things will get worse, the authors wrote. The paper projects future trends and suggests that, by 2100, unless humanity takes forceful action to curb the greenhouse gas emissions that drive climate change, some tropical coastal areas of the planet, like the Atlantic coast of South and Central America, could be hit by as many as six crises at a time.  

The paper explores the ways that climate change intensifies hazards and describes the interconnected nature of such crises. Greenhouse gas emissions, by warming the atmosphere, can enhance drought in places that are normally dry, “ripening conditions for wildfires and heat waves.". In wetter areas, a warmer atmosphere retains more moisture and strengthens downpours, while higher sea levels increase storm surge and warmer ocean waters can contribute to the overall destructiveness of storms.

In a scientific world marked by specialization and siloed research, this multidisciplinary effort by 23 authors reviewed more than 3,000 papers on various effects of climate change. The authors determined 467 ways in which those changes in climate affect human physical and mental health, food security, water availability, infrastructure and other facets of life on Earth. The paper concludes that traditional research into one element of climate change and its effects can miss the bigger picture of interrelation and risk.

The paper includes an interactive map of the various hazards under different emissions scenarios for any location in the world, produced by Esri, which develops geographic information systems.  According to Dawn Wright, the company’s chief scientist:

 “We see that climate change is literally redrawing the lines on the map, and revealing the threats that our world faces at every level,” 

Michael E. Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University who was not involved in the paper, said it underscored the urgency for action to curb the effects of climate change and showed that “the costs of inaction greatly outweigh the costs of taking action.”

Dr. Mann published a recent paper suggesting that climate change effects on the jet stream are contributing to a range of extreme summer weather events, such as heat waves in North America, Europe and Asia, wildfires in California and flooding in Japan. The new study, he said, dovetails with that research, and “is, if anything, overly conservative” — that is, it may underestimate the threats and costs associated with human-caused climate change.

Not mentioned yet is the extent to which new species of ticks and other parasites - including brain-infecting amoebas and parasitic worms - will make large tracts of the country uninhabitable. This is likely within the next 1-2 decades. Schistosomiasis? As the Wikipedia entry notes:

"The manifestations of schistosomal infection vary over time as the cercariae, and later adult worms and their eggs migrate through the body. If eggs migrate to the brain or spinal cord, seizures, paralysis, or spinal cord inflammation are possible."



 In the years ahead, look for it in lakes from Florida to North Carolina and possibly even New York state and Vermont. What was once a horrific parasitic malady in the Caribbean will now become endemic in the US of A.    The takeaway is that hundreds of square miles may become uninhabitable as assorted pests take over, including dengue fever -spreading mosquitoes.

Meanwhile, ordinary worm infestations are spreading, with increased incidence of brain invasions, e.g.

 As I wrote in my Aug. 30, 2012 post:

"Parasitic worms  seem to be proliferating and causing an epidemic as global warming intensifies. Mainly one species, identified as Taenia solium, or the tapeworm. Best known for inhabiting the human intestine, where they can reach a length of 21 feet - and make the victims feel as if they're constantly hungry.

Less well known is that before the worms become adults they spend time as larvae in large cysts, which may find their way into the brain (see image) and cause a condition known as neurocysticercosis. Lowball estimates suggest 5 million cases of epilepsy arising from this condition, worldwide. The numbers seem to be increasing as the worm -cyst invasion of the human body is increasing. Most of the cases, understandably, are in the less developed world.    But once the larvae migrate to the brain the cysts can live there indefinitely feeding off nutrients.

Has this likely been the agency affecting Trump's own mental state? Is he the victim of worms digesting essential nutrients in his brain? We don't know- but it would be the height of irony given how often he's dissed human-caused climate change.

For the rest of us,  we need to recognize the planet we once had is no longer. This, as our growing population combined with the deleterious effects of rampaging global warming - manifests. This is the disabled  world we will now have to bequeath to our kids and grand kids. Let us hope they don't curse us for doing too little!

Environmental Pol

See also:
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/judith-schwartz/82177/concerned-about-climate-change-nature-wants-to-help