The precautionary principle demands that we shut down our energy infrastructure, and replace it with some sort of renewable energy.
A guy on YouTube said that there is plenty of renewable energy, and Obama repeated that in a speech, so it only makes sense to take multi-trillion dollar meaningless token action against some imaginary future apocalypse which Bill McKibben had a dream about once.
The precautionary principle applied to the precautionary principle would result in its elimination.
It is inherently dangerous to do things based upon the lack of knowledge, evidence, or possibility of demonstration. You will most likely do the wrong things, at the wrong time, in the wrong way and encounter far too many deleterious unintended consequences. The reason is really quite simple. Since you do not know the right thing to do let alone the right way to do it, the action taken will only have an accidental connection to the thing feared. Clearly, there are far more wrong things to do and even more wrong ways to do them than right ones done the right way. Hence there is an almost certainty that things will turn out worse than simply waiting until you do know what to do and how to do it. Hence, it stands to reason that by the precautionary principle, one should never use the precautionary principle.
Unfortunately, the users of the precautionary principle do not use reason and plow forward without knowledge, evidence, or experience of what will or won’t work. Then, they expect the rest of use to pay for the wreckage that their irrational policies create. After all they had good intentions and felt they and we had to do something even if it turned out worse than if we had done nothing. They think “what could go wrong?” It turns out just about anything and everything.
You saved me some typing! Thanks!
Lionell, that was a fantastic explanation! It’s funny how you can think of something in the abstract but just can’t seem to put it into words but you did it beautifully!
As for my thoughts on the precautionary principle it’s a bit more simple. If there’s any chance that the prescribed solution could be used to advance communistic or socialistic principles, then that’s reason enough not to do it. Seeing as how all these goals do exactly that then it becomes not what we do to combat climate change, but what do we do to purge the com’s/soc’s from any and all positions of power.
Thanks,
You rightly identify that the evil use of the precautionary principle should be denied for every case. The “com’s/soc’s” know the policies they propose don’t work. They have the bulk of the 20th century for evidence of that fact. That being the case, they intend for their policies not to work so they can double down on then and thereby destroy the economies to which they are applied. They actually want the ends they achieve and desperately hope that no one finds out soon enough to do anything about it. It gives them the only sense of accomplishment they are capable of: deception and destruction. As such, it is a fraudulent application of the principle to seduce the the unwilling and uninformed to go along with their nefarious plan.
My discussion pertains to the best and most appropriate use of the principle by generally good people who have the best of intentions. I have shown it won’t and can’t work even by their own standards of working. The evil here is the refusal to think, identify, know, and then act upon that knowledge. They are driven to do something – anything. That thought eclipses the use of reason leading to right action and thus it can only end in failure.
Europe is experiencing that failure now and will for the foreseeable future! It is starting to hit home in America also.