Those Trees Don't CountBrit-blogger Tim Worstall has an
excellent and funny piece over at Tech Central Station on the MTV environmental show with Cameron Diaz & Drew Barrymore
previously discussed here.
It's worth reading all the way through, but I wanted to riff on this bit:
They enjoyed the benefit of advice during filming from the World Wildlife Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council so there's really no excuse for things like this, talking of Bhutan:
"[The] only country in the world where forest cover is increasing."
Which is I am sure something of a surprise to those in the US, where such cover has been increasing since 1920, also to those of us in the UK where we know very well that there has been an increase since 1940. A lot of very nice Germans took photos of the place for us and handed them over in 1945, that's how we know.Rush Limbaugh remarked on the great reforestation of the Northeastern US in one of his books. But you know why that doesn't count with the global warming crowd? Because there is no chance those trees would be cut down. Those trees don't count because they aren't part of a woods that could be efficiently turned into lumber.
What is the nature of capitalism? The nature of capitalism is to do things more efficiently and cheaper. Capitalism looks at the business of timber and says "How can I get those logs and make lumber out of them at the lowest possible cost?" The answer, obviously, is clear-cutting. If you cut down all the trees, you get the most lumber, and you have the least headaches in terms of obstruction for your equipment and for removing the cut-down trees.
But you can't clear-cut in the Northeast because it's very much developed and most of the trees growing there are on individual lots. So the capitalists look to the Northwest, to Oregon, Washington, and California. But there the environmentalists battle them tooth & nail. Why? Well, I'm sure a lot of them legitimately don't like the look of a clear-cut forest, and that's a legitimate negative to be weighed by government. But many of the environmentalists are also driven by a hatred of capitalism. Ironically, their efforts quite frequently result in the impoverishment of the working class they claim to support. After all, if capitalists can't wring excess costs out by clear-cutting, they either find themselves non-competitive in the market and fire their employees, or they find ways to wring the costs out of the workers.
