Environmentalism: Climate change expert Arnold Schwarzenegger recently declared that he will be suing oil companies for murder because use of their product is warming the planet. Here's a better idea: Thank the oil industry for contributing to unprecedented prosperity around the world.
X Speaking to Politico during the SXSW festival in Texas, Schwarzenegger said that he will be mounting a lawsuit against oil companies "for knowingly killing people all over the world."
"This is no different from the smoking issue," Schwarzenegger said. "The oil companies knew from 1959 on, they did their own study that there would be global warming happening because of fossil fuels, and on top of it that it would be risky for people's lives, that it would kill."
"If you walk into a room and you know you're going to kill someone, it's first degree murder; I think it's the same thing with the oil companies," he said.
You don't have to look very hard to see that Schwarzenegger's tobacco analogy completely breaks down.
First, tobacco's contribution to cancer, for example, is a well-documented scientific fact.
In contrast, the claim that global warming will kill people sometime down the road is entirely theoretical, based on unreliable computer models that have trouble predicting what's already happened with climate, let alone what will take place 100 years from now, compounded by unreliable doomsday scenarios peddled by environmental extremists.
As we noted in this space recently, the journal Nature published a study recently that cast serious doubt on any doomsday scenario.
Those global-warming-will-kill-people horror stories also overlook the far more likely outcome: That mankind will adopt and continue to thrive, even if the climate does noticeably change.
That point was made compellingly by science journalist Will Boisvert, who argues that "climate change will barely slow our progress in the effort to raise living standards."
Boisvert isn't a climate "denier" — he thinks climate change will have real environmental consequences — but he's not a history denier, either.
"Throughout history," he notes, "humans not only weathered climate crises but deliberately flung ourselves into them as we migrated from our African homeland into deserts, mountains, floodplains and taiga."
In addition, the number of lives lost to environmental disasters has steadily declined over the past century, as science, technology and engineering have improved. There's no reason to think these advances will suddenly stop over the next 100 years.
And yes, that includes dealing with drought, heat, bad weather, rising oceans and whatever else might come to pass.
"We built the whole world in the last two centuries — much of it in the last two generations," Boisvert writes. "Rebuilding a waterlogged fraction of it over the next two centuries, with the help of incomparably better technology, will hardly tax us."
It should go without saying that most of that progress over the past two centuries — the vast reduction in poverty, improved nutrition, longer lives, better health, vast increases in prosperity — is largely the result of the discovery and production of vast amounts of cheap, reliable, easy-to-transport, multiuse, energy-dense fossil fuels.
Indeed, if there's one single discovery that has contributed the most to the betterment of mankind, it is arguably the very product that Schwarzenegger now describes as a killer.
As Alex Epstein, author of the "The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels," puts it "by every measure of human well-being, life has been getting better and better," thanks in large part to these supposedly murderous oil companies.
If Schwarzenegger wants to sue someone, he should sue environmentalists for conning millions of people into believing that the world will end if we don't stop using oil.
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