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September 11, 2023

The self-righteous leftists among us suffer from the streetlight effect, “a type of observational bias that occurs when people only search for something where it is easiest to look.”  This refers to an old joke:

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A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys and they both look under the streetlight together. After a few minutes the policeman asks if he is sure he lost them here, and the drunk replies, no, and that he lost them in the park. The policeman asks why he is searching here, and the drunk replies, “this is where the light is.”

Consider the self-styled environmentalists in the Biden administration successfully strangling the fossil fuel industry in the U.S.  If they looked beyond the streetlight, they might notice that China was giving permits for two new coal plants a week, and that [in 2022] “the coal power capacity starting construction in China was six times as large as that in all of the rest of the world combined.”  

Another fashionable belief is “systemic racism”, the idea that racism is structurally built into our society.   The streetlight here is pointing at whites in America, and telling them to cleanse themselves of racism, while there are problems much worse than racism out of sight of the light.  Presumably the diversity consultants and Woke authors don’t know or don’t care about the recent “Great African War“, which began in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in August 1998 and eventually got fighters from all over Africa involved.   “The International Rescue Committee estimates that the war and its aftermath caused 5.4 million deaths.”
Do you remember any demonstrations for the non-fashionable idea of getting involved in an African war?   I don’t.

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Whatever ingredients make for a fashionable cause, the idea of fighting in the rain forest of the Congo does not.   The idea of saving the planet, just by changing to renewables and haranguing the oil companies, does make for a fashionable cause.

Talking of environmentalists and Africa, have our advocates of green energy expressed any concern about the following?

Global cobalt demand … [has] exploded with the arrival of electric vehicles and now is skyrocketing in tandem with government EV mandates and subsidies. … Cobalt mining involves unimaginable horrors. “Cobalt Red”, by Nottingham University associate professor of modern slavery Siddharth Kara, exposes the excruciating realities that Stop Oil and Net Zero campaigners strive to keep buried – along with the bodies of parents and children killed in cave-ins or dying slowly and painfully after being maimed or poisoned in cobalt mines.

Professor Kara took multiple trips to the Democratic Republic of Congo, risking his health and life to document conditions for desperate Africans in a region that holds 72% of the world’s known supplies of cobalt. He estimates that 70% of this cobalt (half the world’s entire supply) involves some measure of child labor, while much of the rest involves near-slave labor.

Maybe someone should glue himself to the U.S. Capitol building in protest!   On second thought, not the Capitol building. 

What’s wrong with a cause being “fashionable”?