This story about the showdown between Robert Redford at the Sundance Film Festival and those who suggest that stabilized energy prices will be critical to the nation’s poor strips the main issue of the day down to its bare bones: which is more important?—keeping our environment in a pristine shape, or continuing to lift the poor within the U.S. and around the globe out of poverty?
When the two goals collide, which should take precedence?
In the days when I listened to NPR, I could not quite wrap my mind around that issue. That was several years ago, and the editorial stance appeared to change with lightning speed from the notion that energy prices should be high, in order to encourage conservation, and the idea that they ought to be low, in order to make life easier for those of limited means.
From both a developmental stance (how do we actively create wealth and lift people out of poverty?) and a public policy stance (how can we attenuate the suffering of those below the povery line here, and the poor people in other countries who live in true squalor?), this is the question. It is not the only question of our time, but it lies at the heart of modern progressivism, and threatens to tear apart the alliance between those who fight poverty and famine, and those who want to “save the planet,” whether it needs saving or not.
Perhaps it does. Though (1) it is difficult to believe that it does, given how much cleaner the air gets as the years go by; young people these days have no idea what air pollution even looks like, much less what it felt like to breathe it in back in the 1970s and 1980s. And, (2) I have a hard time buying the idea that our biggest environmental challenges are in the developed world: rather that crippling any industry, we’d be better off providing current technology to the less-developed nations, so that they could use more environmentally-friendly methods in their own industrial revolutions than the UK and the U.S. did in theirs.
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You want Air Pollution? I grew up in Pittsburgh in the 1940’s.