A radical in one area generally thinks radically in every other area. Witness utilitarian bioethicist Peter—let’s permit infanticide—Singer, who has now weighed in on global warming. Predictably, it is an extreme view. From the story:
We asked Australia’s best-known philiosopher, Peter Singer, how people should think about carbon emissions and climate change. He was unequivocal. He likened Australia’s production of greenhouse gases to a country dropping bombs on Bangladesh. Professor Singer, professor of bioethics at Princeton University in the United States, said the government had a moral duty to reduce Australia’s emissions, no matter the cost to the country’s energy-intensive industries, such as coal. “Australia doesn’t have a right to continue to harm other nations,” Professor Singer said.
How does Singer get to Bangladesh?
Professor Singer referred to Bangladesh and Kiribati, the Pacific republic facing inundation on current climate change projections. “Suppose we were waging aggressive war on Bangladesh, let’s say, and we were dropping lots of bombs and somebody said we should stop this war, ‘we have no justification for declaring war on Bangladesh’,” he said. “And somebody else said ‘well, but Australia has a big industry manufacturing bombs and if we stop the war we’ll harm the economy because there won’t be all these jobs’. Now I don’t think even the [EVIL] conservatives would support that argument but what we’re doing is not really very different. Now that we know the effects of our greenhouse gas emissions, we are harming people in Bangladesh almost as surely as if we were dropping bombs on them.”
A typical Singer false analogy. Bangladesh is not facing “inundation” any time soon even if there is global warming. But it is currently mired in terrible poverty. The real harm would be to disable our economies, which would have a cascading effect, including increasing suffering to countries like Bangladesh, both by making less aid available and inhibiting such countries from developing their own resources. So, which is the problem we should most urgently address? Current destitution or a fantasy future global warming “bombing” that may (probably will) never arrive?
Global warming hysterics have the potential to cause tremendous harm as they seek to gather power into the hands of an international bureaucratic scientocracy. How unsurprising that Singer—who would kill the weak and vulnerable because they are supposedly not persons—would support the agenda.
