Tips for Earth Day

Steven Horwitz

As Earth Day is upon us, I offer you my "Tips for Earth Day."

Tip #1 - How to Most Efficiently Reduce Your Carbon Footprint:  Commit suicide.[ADDENDUM:  Adam Martin points out, via FB:  "You're forgetting higher order goods. The
best way to reduce your total carbon footprint is to kill the multitudes
you rely on for your daily breakfast."]

Tip #2 - What to Watch to Properly Celebrate Earth Day:  George Carlin on who's really in charge of things and why much environmentalism is about human beings not recognizing how little they know about what they imagine they can design.

Tip #3 -What to Read to Properly Celebrate Earth Day:You can start with our friend Pierre Desrochers' nice op-ed in this morning's National Post called "Humanity:  Earth's Best Friend."Then you should read Aunty Deirdre on the Industrial Revolution.Finally, you should start on Julian Simon's The Ultimate Resource 2.  Tip #4 - Celebrate Humanity not "The Earth":While large portions of the population celebrate "the earth," take a few minutes and hoist a glass of fine wine or good scotch and give a quiet toast to the millions, if not billions, of human beings whose ability to tame the earth has enabled it to support six billion humans and taken humanity as a whole out of the misery and poverty that has characterized most of its history.  And then toast the great liberal thinkers who understood that economic freedom and the end of privilege was the key to unleashing human creativity and ingenuity as the "ultimate resource" for extending life and liberating increasing numbers of men, women, and children from the solitary, nasty, brutish, and short lives of the pre-industrial era.  It was capitalism's ability to tame and control nature that gave us the very wealth it takes to be able to afford to celebrate "earth day," so don't be an ingrate.  Celebrate markets, freedom, and human creativity because they, as Desrochers points out, are the earth's best friend.