Poverty kills.
In “The Tragedy of Nepal,” aerospace engineer Rand Simberg explains why industry-deniers striving to block economic progress in the name of blocking “climate change” do no favor to the poorest countries of the world.
Human beings cannot prevent disasters like the earthquake that recently struck Nepal. We can, though, mitigate their destructiveness . . . by being as economically free as possible and, therefore, as rich as possible.
And thus able to afford more durable — even antifragile — structures and infrastructure.
The same capital-intensive achievements that protect us when Mother Nature is quiescent also protect us when she’s at her worst. Buildings are more likely to withstand a quake when constructed of the best possible materials and designs. But the most robust safeguards can be the norm only when we are free and wealthy enough to engage in the industrial processes required to produce them.
This is a familiar point. But it bears repeating because it is not familiar enough to discourage foes of a vague threat called “climate change” — nothing new in earth’s history — from also ranging themselves against industrial production.
Industry-deniers assert that we can manipulate climate trends for the better if only we radically curb our carbon-emitting impact on the atmosphere. But attempts to enact this fantasy will only make it ever harder to grapple with vagaries of nature commonplace long before the rise of civilizations.
Human survival requires the opposite policy. It requires full freedom to build nature-transforming industries — and buildings, and all the other man-made bulwarks of our lives and future.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
