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A conversation with Richard Lindzen, for Association des Climato-réalistes

by Grégoire Canlorbe · Juin 19, 2018

Richard Siegmund Lindzen is an American atmospheric physicist known for his work in the dynamics of the atmosphere, atmospheric tides, and ozone photochemistry. He has published more than 200 scientific papers and books. From 1983 until his retirement in 2013, he was Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a lead author of Chapter 7, “Physical Climate Processes and Feedbacks,” of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Third Assessment Report on climate change. He has criticized the scientific consensus about climate change and what he has called “climate alarmism.”

In May 2018, Prof. Lindzen had a conversation with Mr. Grégoire Canlorbe, who interviewed him on behalf on the French Association des climato-réalistes—the only climate-realist organization in France.

Grégoire Canlorbe: Your early work dealt with ozone photochemistry, the aerodynamics of the middle atmosphere, the theory of atmospheric tides, and planetary waves. How do you present to the layman the several scientific discoveries you were responsible for in these areas?

Richard Lindzen: My work is mostly about ‘explaining’ rather than ‘discovering’, and I doubt that my achievements would mean much to laymen. With respect to my early work, I provided the explanation for the Quasi-biennial Oscillation of the tropical stratosphere. This phenomenon refers to the fact that the wind between 16 and about 30 km in the tropics blows from east to west for approximately a year, and then reverses and blows from west to east for about another year.

A conversation with Willie Soon, for Heartland Institute

by Grégoire Canlorbe · Avr 15, 2018

Willie Soon is an independent solar physicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who has been studying the Sun and its influence on the Earth’s climate for more than a quarter of a century. In September 2017, he had a conversation with Grégoire Canlorbe. Here Dr Soon speaks for himself.

Polar bears – the poster-child of climate panic

Canlorbe: You say polar bears are far less endangered by global warming than by environmentalists dreading ice melt. Could you expand?

Dr Soon: Yes, indeed. I have argued that too much ice will be the ultimate enemy for polar bears. Polar bears need less sea ice to be well fed and to reproduce. Why? Think about this for a minute: Polar bears eat a lot. Any large colony will need a great deal of food. The bears’ staple diet is seal blubber. But seals are a long way up the food chain. So a fully functional and healthy eco-system is required. And that means oceans warm enough to support the lower links in the food chain from plankton all the way up to seals.

Indeed, a good puzzle for polar–bear science is the answer the question how polar bears survived during the ice ages, when ice covered coastal zones and large parts of the global ocean. Ice was piled miles deep on land, making it extremely difficult for eco-systems to provide enough food. Of course, areas of relative warmth, which population biologists call refugia, always exist. They may well the key to explaining how polar bears survived the Last Glacial Maximum about 21,000 years ago.

The so-called “environmentalists”, who seem to allow unreasoning emotion and political prejudice to stand in place of rational thought and sound science, became very angry when I asked them whether they would prefer to see a billion polar bears instead of the 20,000-30,000 living now. The real threat to polar bears was unregulated hunting, which reduced the population to perhaps as few as 5000 bears in the early 1970s.

After the November 1973 agreement to regulate hunting and outlaw hunting from aircraft and icebreakers, the polar bear population rebounded. By 2017 it was approaching 30,000. In 2016 a survey by the Nunavut government found a vulnerable population in the western Hudson Bay region to have been stable for at least five years.

I should say categorically that this polar bear fear-mongering is evidence of mass delusion promoted by group think. As a physical scientist rather than a biologist, I am generally reluctant to get involved in such topics as the influence of climate on polar-bear population, health and biology. But in 2002, Markus Dyck asked me to examine independently these strange and insupportable claims by environmental extremists that polar bears are threatened with extinction by global warming.

Consider the facts. From 6000 to 10,000 years ago, the Earth was considerably warmer than today. Yet the polar bears survived. In fact, they had evolved from land-based brown bears some 150,000 to 200,000 years ago, and to this day they rear their cubs in land-based dens burrowed into the snow.

Readers curious about Al Gore’s false statement that a scientific survey had found polar bears drowning because they could not find ice should see my talk on how environmentalists are the real threat to polar bears: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmoKRz5VcbI. The survey cited by Gore in his sci-fi comedy horror movie in fact found that just four polar bears had drowned, three of them very close to land, and they had died because of high winds and high waves in an exceptional Arctic storm. The authors of the paper were later victimized by their academic colleagues at the instigation of environmental extremists because they had stated – correctly – that it was the storm, and not global warming, that had killed the bears.

What is more, in the dozen years before the survey, the sea ice extent in the Beaufort Sea, where the survey took place, had actually increased slightly. At no point was Al Gore’s story true. In 2007 the High Court in London condemned Gore for his false statements about polar bears, whose Linnaean classification is ursus maritimus – the Bear of the Sea. It is now known that they can swim for more than 100 miles over periods of several days. Al Gore could not even ride a pushbike that far.

One positive aspect of my work in science is that I have befriended many seekers after truth. A polar bear expert, Professor Mitch Taylor of Lakehead University, told me late in 2017:

“Just finished up in Davis Strait with 275 DNA samples. The bears were in better condition this year than they were during the 2005-2007 study years. The Wrangel Island bears in the photo are in good condition, but the Davis Strait bears were even fatter. Markus [Dyck] has found the same in the Cape Dyer area. Local people confirm the bears are very fat this year and are also reporting a big increase in ringed seals (immigration, not local productivity).”

Keen readers who may want solid information and frequent scientific updates about the overall health and trends of all 19 subpopulations of polar bears should visit the website of another friend of mine, Dr. Susan Crockford: http://polarbearscience.com.

Is climate change naturally cyclical?

Canlorbe: Climate change is surely nothing new. It is a long-established, cyclical behavior of our planet, which has long been oscillating between glaciations and interglacial warm periods. Should we diagnose Mother Nature with a bipolar disorder?

Dr Soon: Earth’s climate system dynamically oscillates between icehouse and hothouse conditions in geological time or, to a lesser degree, between the glacial and interglacial climates of the last 1-2 million years. But, as with many interesting questions about the Earth’s climate, there is no certain answer. The data do not support over-simplistic accounts.

Sea level rise – mother of all scares

I was fascinated to discover that changing sea levels, including extremely high global sea levels 65-250 feet (20-75 m) above today’s mean, occurred during the “hothouse Earth” era. One does not need an enormous ice sheet for sea level to be high, chiefly because the Earth’s coastal zones and ocean basins may be more porous and capacious than one would imagine. Indeed, deep geological studies proffer good evidence to support my position. I included this empirical evidence in an essay I recently co-wrote with Viscount (Christopher) Monckton of Brenchley.

In addition to the ever-changing shape and depth of the ocean basins and coastal zone boundaries, one must also bear in mind the “leaky Earth”: there appears to be a continuous exchange of water between the ocean bottom and the Earth’s crust, as Professor Shige Maruyama of Tokyo Institute of Technology has shown.

Sea level has risen by 400 feet over the past 10,000 years. For the past 200 years it has been rising at about 8 inches per century, and that rate may well continue. It has very little to do with global warming and much more to do with long-term climate cycles. In fact, so slowly has sea level been rising that environmental-extremist scientists have tampered with the raw data by adding an imagined (and imaginary) “global isostatic adjustment”, torturing the data until they show a rate of sea-level rise that has not in reality occurred.

My own examination of the Earth’s climate system extends beyond the solar system to include our place in the galaxy. When the solar system was born, we were 1–3 kiloparsecs closer to the galactic center than today. We are now 8 kiloparsecs from the galactic center.

The solar system drifts along the spiral density wave that orbits the center of the galaxy about every quarter of a billion years. Sometimes, the solar system has lain above or below the plane of the galactic disk. Also, we need to consider the evolution of the Sun from its thermonuclear-burning core to its outer thermosphere. Furthermore, for 4.5 billion years the planets have continued to push and pull the Sun around the barycenter of the solar system.

It was 13.82 billion years ago that, at the moment of creation that we now call the Big Bang, God said, Let there be light, and there was light. The solar system, including our planet, is thus one-third as old as the known universe. Our place and time in the universe cannot be ignored in assessing the climate. The original proposition to resolve the Faint Young Sun Paradox by WeiJia Zhang of Peking University concerned the relevance of Hubble expansion flow in affecting the mean distance between the Sun and the Earth over geological time. One must even consider our galaxy’s interaction with passing stellar systems, especially the coming merger (in a few billion years) between the Milky Way and the M31 Andromeda galaxy to form the Milkomeda cluster. This very likely event will occur within the five billion years of the Sun’s lifetime. Gravity rules even over very large distances.

These are just a few of the considerations that lead me to insist on being open-minded in pursuing my scientific study. I study the Sun mainly to improve my own understanding. As A.E. Housman’s Greek chorus used to put it, “I only ask because I want to know.”

It’s the Sun, stupid!

Canlorbe: You suggest that the Sun’s behavior is the driving force of climate warming, not factory smokestacks, urban sprawl or our sins of emission. Would you like to remind us of the keystones of your hypothesis?

Dr Soon: For a quarter of a century I have studied the hypothesis that solar radiation is causing or at lest modulating climatic variations over periods of several decades. The most up-to-date report of my sun-climate connection research is in a chapter I and my colleague Dr. Sallie Baliunas contributed to a book in honor of my late colleague Professor Bob Carter of Australia (1942–2016). For the more serious science geeks, a fuller paper, with my two excellent colleagues from Ireland, the Connollys pere et fils, is worth reading. If your readers have any difficulty in finding these works, just contact me.

A conversation with Patrick Moore, for the Association des Climato-réalistes

by Grégoire Canlorbe · Mar 13, 2018

Patrick Moore is a Canadian activist, and former president of Greenpeace Canada. Since leaving Greenpeace, which he helped to found, Moore has criticized the environmental movement for what he sees as scare tactics and disinformation, saying that the environmental movement “abandoned science and logic in favor of emotion and sensationalism.” He has sharply and publicly differed with many policies of major environmental groups, including Greenpeace itself on other issues including forestry, biotechnology, aquaculture, and the use of chemicals for many applications.

Grégoire Canlorbe: The beliefs and values of an individual generally reach such a degree of interdependence (regardless of the poorly or rigorously logical character of this interconnection) that challenging a particular aspect of his worldview sets the whole edifice in motion, and not just that particular belief or value. When you finally decided to distance yourself from Greenpeace, how much had you been evolving in your personal philosophy?

Patrick Moore: Well, I have to say even at the beginning of Greenpeace, I didn’t share all the same values and opinions of my comrades. I was doing a PhD in ecology, so I was involved in a science education and, although there were a few people in the original group who had some science education, in the end, science was lost altogether in the Greenpeace evolution, to where during my last 6 years as a director of Greenpeace International, none of my fellow directors had any formal science education. In the beginning, we had a very strong humanitarian orientation to save human civilization from all-out nuclear war.

That was basically the main focus of Greenpeace. The “peace” part was really what we were emphasizing in the beginning. Our theme was that all-out nuclear war would also be extremely damaging to the environment, the “green” part. So “green” and “peace” being put together in one word was a revolutionary concept and one of the reasons it gained so much authority and power, because it resonated with people that humans and the environment were one thing closely related to each other. As time went on, the peace kind of got lost when we shifted to “save the whales,” “save the baby seals,” “stop toxic waste dumping,” and “anti-nuclear energy”, instead of anti-nuclear weapons. And so the thinking shifted to where we were focusing more on nature, and that caused the “peace” to drop off the end of Greenpeace, a little bit, and by the time I left in 1986, Greenpeace and much of the rest of the environmental movement was characterizing humans as the enemies of earth, the enemies of nature. And this does not resonate with me.

Being an ecologist, I see all life as one system on the earth. Ecology is about the interrelationships among all of the different forms of life, including humans of course. We came from nature, we evolved from nature in the same manner, evolutionarily, as all of the others species did. So, to see human as separate and, in a way, the only evil animal, is how it is now projected. We’re the only bad animal, the only bad species. Even weeds are better than us, disease agents are not evil, they are just there, part of nature. While humans in a sort of original sin kind of fashion, have become characterized as the enemies of nature, so that’s why I left Greenpeace on the broader front, because I don’t believe in that even for one second, that we are the enemies of nature, and you’ll understand why later in the interview, but, for me, my distancing from Greenpeace began about four years before I left.

In 1982, there was a meeting of international environmental with about 85 of us, I believe, from all over the world chosen on geographical criteria. I was from Western Canada, the one person from Western Canada in that meeting in Nairobi, Kenya. After the first UN Conference on the environment in 1972 in Stockholm, the first United Nations agency to be in a developing country, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) was founded in Kenya. And in order to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Stockholm conference, we 85 environmental were brought together by the Environmental Liaison Center, which was the environmental NGO’s liaison with UNEP. It was at that meeting that I heard for the first time in my life the term “sustainable development.” That term had been coined earlier in the day at a meeting between environmentalists from the industrial countries and environmentalists from the developing countries.

Most people think sustainable development was a compromise between environmentalists and industrialists, the development part, but no. It was a compromise among environmentalists, because if you’re an environmentalist in a developing country, you cannot be against development. Whereas most of the environmental people from the industrial countries were basically against mega-projects and developments like large dams and nuclear power plants, huge construction projects they were always opposing, and still do today. But in developing countries, if you’re against development, you are laughed away from the room, because developing countries are developing and that’s all there is to it, they’re trying to have a better life for their citizens and more wealth for their countries.

So that’s when I first began to realize, this term “sustainable development” told me that the challenge for environmentalism going forward would be much larger than just awareness of the environment. It includes the social and economic dimensions. Sustainable development means you have to take into consideration the fact that there are more than 7 billion human beings, who every day need food, energy, and materials to survive. Food, energy, and materials, all come from the environment. So I saw things in a completely different picture as a result of this new approach. I too, in the campaigning of the environmental movement that what we did 24/7, all we did was think about our campaigns, I kind of had the blinkers on, a little bit and only seeing the ecology and the environment and nature, and not seeing the relationships with the social and economic factors that govern our daily lives, and so I realized that the incorporation of environmental values into the social and economic fabric had to be taken.

You can’t just say, “Ok, we’re going to save the environment, never mind the people, just let them die, because they can’t have anything anymore, because it will affect the environment.” That’s not a correct approach and I think too much today, if you take for example, the movement against oil, and pipelines to carry to refineries and all of this. It’s basically being proposed that we commit economic suicide. If you look at the environmental movement position on energy today, they are against fossil fuels, they are against nuclear energy, they are against hydroelectric energy, they are against 98.5 % of the world’s energy. This would be suicide, not just economic suicide but really suicide, like dying. So, over 4 years, not knowing or understanding what I could possibly do next after being in Greenpeace for 15 years, right out of university, right out of my PhD, I had no chance to have a “normal” life in industry or government, at this point I was far, too far gone along my way of thinking to do that. So I left Greenpeace.

Why did I leave Greenpeace finally? Because they adopted a campaign to ban chlorine worldwide. And of this I thought how ridiculous, I’m in this group where all the other directors have no science and they’re saying we should ban the element chlorine from existence in human affairs. They didn’t seem to understand that chlorine was the most important element for public health and medicine and when I saw this I realized they really didn’t care about people. They would ban an element which is so important in healthcare and in medicine, adding chlorine to our drinking water has been the biggest advance in the history of public health in swimming pools and spas where it prevents bacteria from killing us, and most of our synthetic medicines, pharmaceuticals or drugs are made with chlorine chemistry. Chlorine is important, precisely because it’s toxic to bacteria and other disease agents that are trying to kill us.

So in the end, that was the sharp point of the stick for me. I could not stay in an association, as an international director, that was against the use of chlorine for medicine and public health. And so I left and began a salmon farm in aquaculture at my childhood home on Northern Vancouver Island and, within a year or two, was being attacked by Greenpeace for growing fish. Then I really knew I was smart to get out, because aquaculture, of course, is one of the most important future methods of food production for this world. Producing healthy proteins and fats better for you in a diet than land animals, not that I don’t eat those but that’s a long winded explanation of why I left Greenpeace.

Patrick Moore (on the left), in the company of Grégoire Canlorbe,
in December 2017 in Paris

Grégoire Canlorbe: President Trump makes no mystery of his climate skepticism, thus echoing the own language elements of his Russian homologue. It was revealed that Mr. Putin’s skepticism dates from the early 2000s, when his staff did very extensive work trying to uncover all aspects of the alleged anthropogenic climate warning. Do you believe the Kremlin, along with the Trump administration, has become a front-runner in the fight against climate change totalitarianism?

Patrick Moore: Yes, it’s been very obvious for some time that the Russians, particularly Russian scientists, do not believe that man-made climate change has been a catastrophe of some kind. I mean, most scientists will say, yes of course, there are over seven billion humans and our missions and our activities, especially the clearing of ecosystems for agriculture, it’s obviously having some effect on the world but whether it’s having a huge effect on the climate is very much debatable, and I don’t really believe it is true. Microclimates, yes, cities have made changes that had make it warmer inside, for example, the “urban heat island effect” as it is called. So everywhere you go where there is a city with a lots of concrete and lots of heat being used in the buildings, you will find that it is warmer in the city than it is out in the country right nearby.

A conversation with István Markó, for Watts Up With That

by Grégoire Canlorbe · Oct 28, 2017

István Markó (1956 – 2017) was a professor and researcher in organic chemistry at the Université catholique de Louvain. Prof. Dr. Marko was an outspoken defender of the skeptical view on the issue of human-caused/anthropogenic global warming, appearing in numerous French-language media on the Internet, in public debates and diverse English-language blog postings. He also joined with Anglo-Saxon climate skeptics, publishing several articles together on Breitbart News.

Grégoire Canlorbe: Climate activism is thought of as Marxism’s Trojan horse, a way for its followers to proceed with their face masked, in the never-ending holy war that Marxism claims will be necessary to establish communist totalitarianism. Yet it was actually Margaret Thatcher, the muse of conservative libertarianism, who kick-started the IPCC. How do you make sense of this?

István Markó: More precisely, Margaret Thatcher, although a trained chemist and therefore aware of the mendacious character of such an allegation about carbon dioxide (CO₂), was the first proponent to use the excuse of climate implications posed by CO₂ to achieve her political ends. At the time, that is, in the mid-1980s, Thatcher was waging war with the almighty coal union. In those days, the UK coal unions were remunerating themselves with public monies and by lobbying via the Labour Party had managed to pass an enormous number of laws and subsidies to keep an industry afloat that was no longer profitable on its own.

While facing a strike by the British miners, chaired by Arthur Scargill, (nick-named “Arthur the Red”) who was later to found and lead the Socialist Labor Party, Thatcher thought it worthwhile to enshrine the thesis of warming linked to CO₂ emissions to wind up the trade unionists holding her country hostage. But she was not really the initiator of the IPCC. The “kick-off,” as you call it, came more from personalities who were involved in hard ecologism,[1] such as Norwegian Gro Harlem Brundtland, who chaired the UN Commission responsible for the famous 1987’s report “Our Common Future,” or Canadian Maurice Strong, who ranks among the founding members of the IPCC.

The belief in a catastrophic greenhouse effect due to CO₂ emissions provided Thatcher with an additional asset, in her arm wrestling with the union, to set up the United Kingdom to get out of coal and to transition to nuclear energy. It was a belief she knew to be unfounded, but one she largely helped to entrench and popularize. One can, admittedly, deplore Thatcher’s strategy based on a perversion of science. The fact remains that, at that time, the electric power generation industries, notably that from coal, did not do so under very clean conditions. Even though CO₂ has absolutely nothing to do with a poison, there existed then a real pollution associated with coal burning due to a lack of modern emission control technology.

Indeed, the combustion of coal not only produces innocuous CO₂ emissions, it is accompanied by sulfurous and nitrogenous waste, produces SO₂ emissions, SO₃ emissions, and NOx emissions, ejects fine particles, and leaves nominally radioactive ashes (despite the fact that the epidemiological evidence and data for any serious health harms are still very controversial and hard to come by). Since the 1980s, the treatment of industrial pollution has however evolved. Today an electrical utility power generation plant that uses coal as a raw material now results in very little environmental pollution.

Grégoire Canlorbe: According to you, a person sensitive to pastoral charms, smitten with lounges of greenery and variegated grass beds, can only celebrate the increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air. Could you come back to the necessity to stop demonizing CO₂ as a “Satanic gas” in view of the objective data of chemistry?

István Markó: Again, CO₂ is not, and has never been, a poison. Each of our exhalations, each of our breaths, emits an astronomical quantity of CO₂ proportionate to that in the atmosphere (some >40,000 ppm); and it is very clear that the air we expire does not kill anyone standing in front of us. What must be understood, besides, is that CO₂ is the elementary food of plants. Without CO₂ there would be no plants, and without plants there would be no oxygen and therefore no humans. The equation is as simple as that.

Plants need CO₂, water, and daylight. These are the mechanisms of photosynthesis, to generate the sugars that will provide them with staple food and building blocks. That fundamental fact of botany is one of the primary reasons why anyone who is sincerely committed to the preservation of the “natural world” should abstain from demonizing CO₂. Over the last 30 years, there has been a gradual increase in the CO₂ level. But what is also observed is that despite deforestation, the planet’s vegetation has grown by about 20%. This expansion of vegetation on the planet, nature lovers largely owe it to the increase in the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere.

If we study, however, what has been happening at the geological level for several million years, we realize that the present period is characterized by an extraordinarily low CO₂ level. During the Jurassic, Triassic, and so on, the CO₂ level rose to values sometimes of the order of 7000, 8000, 9000 ppm, which considerably exceeds the paltry 400 ppm that we have today. Not only did life exist, in those far-off times when CO₂ was so present in large concentration in the atmosphere, but plants such as ferns commonly attained heights of 25 meters. Reciprocally, far from benefiting the current vegetation, the reduction of the presence of CO₂ in the atmosphere would be likely to compromise the health, and even the survival, of numerous plants. To fall below the threshold of 280 or 240 ppm would plainly lead to the extinction of a large variety of our vegetal species.

In addition, our relentless crusade to reduce CO₂ could be more harmful to nature as plants are not the only organisms to base their nutrition on CO₂. Phytoplankton species also feed on CO₂, using carbon from CO₂ as a building unit and releasing oxygen. By the way, it is worth remembering that ~70% of the oxygen present today in the atmosphere comes from phytoplankton, not trees: contrary to common belief, it is not the forests, but the oceans, that constitute the “lungs” of the earth.

About the supposed link between global warming and CO₂ emissions, it is simply not true that CO₂ has a major greenhouse effect. It is worth remembering, here too, that CO₂ is a minor gas. Today it represents only 0.04% of the composition of the air; and its greenhouse effect is attributed the value of 1. The major greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is water vapor which is ten times more potent than CO₂ in its greenhouse effect. Water vapor is present in a proportion of 2% in the atmosphere. Those facts are, in principle, taught at school and at university, but one still manages to incriminate CO₂ alongside this learning, in using a dirty trick that presents the warming effect of CO₂ as minor but exacerbated, through feedback loops, by the other greenhouse effects.

A conversation with Tsutomu Hashimoto, for Revue Arguments

by Grégoire Canlorbe · Oct 19, 2017

Tsutomu Hashimoto is a Professor of Economics at Hokkaido University in Japan, obtained a Ph.D. at Tokyo University, and published various books on liberalism and philosophy of economics in Japanese. He was a visiting researcher at New York University from 2000 to 2002 and at Aix-Marseille University in 2016. Contact: hasimoto@econ.hokudai,ac,jp

Grégoire Canlorbe: Among the major quests of your lifetime, one project that is dear to your heart consists in constructing an original theory of liberalism from the angle of a “philosophical anthropology of the social sciences.” Could you develop the origin of this vocation and the present lines of force of your perspective?

Tsutomu Hashimoto: So far, I have published nine and edited five books in Japanese, all related to the theme of liberalism. You mention “philosophical anthropology of social sciences,” which is actually the title of my second book. In this book, I developed my philosophical foundation of liberalism, focusing on the concept of “person” in the context of philosophical anthropology since Max Scheler (1874–1928).

However, before explaining this, let me discuss my experiences on three epoch-making or breaking crises of our age, since all of these led me to a new consideration on liberalism. The first was the Revolutions of 1989 that lead to the fall of communism in Eastern European countries. The second were the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, which actually happened during my stay in New York. The third was the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan, in 2011.

First, the Revolutions of 1989 gave me the starting point of my study. At that time, I was 22 years old and was simply shocked by the corruption in Eastern European communist countries. Many Japanese intellectuals who influenced me in the 1980s were sympathetic to Marxist ideologies and they investigated new possibilities or frontiers on Marx’s text in terms of developing contemporary philosophy. In fact, many creative social theories in Japan emerged from this line of investigation. However, in 1989, I realized that these theoretical contributions were entirely useless in terms of normative issues.

At that time, I also had the chance to read F. A. Hayek’s Law, Legislation and Liberty during a seminar at my university in 1989. However, since the professor was a stubborn Hayekian and talked about Hayek authoritatively, I came to read Hayek critically. Meanwhile, I happened to find M. Rizzo and G. O’Driscoll’s stimulating book, Economics of Time and Ignorance, in my college library. When I found this book, I intuitively realized that it would be very important for both my life and research. In fact, after 10 years, I translated it into Japanese and, thanks to Professor Mario Rizzo, I had the chance to be a visiting researcher with New York University from 2000 to 2002.

My first book, The Logic of Liberty: Popper, Mises and Hayek, published in 1994, is about my investigation on liberalism as anti-communism. During the entire 20th century, the most important issue in the field of economic thought was “which regime is better or more desirable between capitalism and socialism?” Since this question cannot easily be settled at a theoretical level, the debate proceeded up to the stage of scientific methodology, and many people examined which side’s methodology or epistemology was scientifically legitimate between capitalism and socialism. This was a unique situation, because methodological statements carried some normative implications of these ideologies.

For example, methodological individualism carried implications on normative individualism. However, in my analysis, this situation gradually collapsed or faded. As such, methodological debates between capitalist and socialist camps have ceased to represent normative conflicts, partly due to their logical endogenous problems and partly due to historically exogenous elements. In other words, methodological investigation became de-ideologized or eliminated its “thought-ladenness.” In order to show what happened with the methodologies of the 20th century, I developed my “functional theory of methodology” and presented a thesis in which I call upon the “thought-ladenness of methodology.” This is, in short, the theoretical core of my first book.

The second book, as I already mentioned, is a philosophical investigation, in which I proposed a new model of what I call “problem-subject.” In this book, I analyzed the achievements of Max Weber and the subsequent Weberians and constructed an original system of philosophical anthropology.

After working on this book, I went to New York for two years as a visiting researcher and experienced the 9/11 terrorists attack in 2001 there. I was frightened not only by this incident, but also by the subsequent situation in New York. For example, I was stuck in an underground car a number of times for reasons unknown to me. Since I was alarmed by this situation in New York, I changed my research interests from Austrian economics to international political economy in general. The achievement of this change was reflected in the publishing of my third book, The Conditions of Empire, in 2007.

In this book, I first developed the ideas of “trans-conservatism” and “spontaneitism” as certain types of liberal enterprise in a global context. From this original perspective, I proposed two policies. One is how to create “world money” through Tobin’s tax and associated avoidance activities. The other is how to promote a liberal society by adjusting tariffs.

After writing this book, I published several other books on liberalism. Finally, in 2011, Japan experienced the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. This was the third crisis for me and a crisis of the legitimacy of the Japanese government as well. Facing this disaster, I conceived the nature of the problem from an Austrian perspective and pointed out that the constructivist formation of the electricity supply is at issue. From a broad perspective, capitalism in the 21st century would be driven by people’s ecological concerns.

In my book, Lost Modernity, published in 2012, I tried to answer the following question: what type of driving force is possible in our age for capitalism? Theoretically, I divided contemporary history after World War II into three periods: modernity, post-modernity, and lost modernity. Then, I investigated the driving force of capitalism in the age of lost modernity. The answer would be neither “modern diligent work,” nor “post-modern expanded desire.” I will talk about my investigation later during our interview but, in any event, this book was based on my observation on the contemporary Japanese society.

Therefore, I have developed my idea on liberalism by facing the three epoch-making crises: the Revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe, the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York, and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan.

I call my original theory of liberalism “growth-oriented liberalism” or “spontaneitism.” More recently, I developed a theory on liberalism by extending the implications of Dogen’s masterpiece, Shouhou Genzou (Treasury of the True Dharma Eye), written in 13th century Japan. I am still trying to broaden my original perspective, especially in the field of economic philosophy.

For example, I am targeting a theory of “capability as potentiality,” as opposed to Amartya Sen’s “capability as ability,” a “vita activa” model of interventionism, as opposed to Cass Sunstein’s libertarian paternalism, and so forth. Hopefully, I would systematize these theoretical studies and present a new image of the liberal ideal. Overall, this will be a work on the art of governance from the perspective of a Hayekian horticultural expert, which I am still working on.

Grégoire Canlorbe: In economics, you esteem the Austrian methodology and Weltanschauung very highly. When it comes to enlightening the specificities of Japanese capitalism, how do you sum up the conceptual advantages of Austrian economics over other approaches such as Weberian sociology or Marxian theory?

Tsutomu Hashimoto: Considering the idea of catching up with western capitalism, I think that there is no great worldview or Weltanschauung that has contributed to explaining it in detail. This is true in the Japanese case as well. Neither Max Weber nor Karl Marx provides us with any significant theory on this topic. Austrian economics, however, might have a normative answer. This school would propose that developing countries be incorporated into the global network of market economy through deregulation of the domestic market and acceptance of capital from advanced countries as much as possible.

This type of normative perspective would explain the successful history of capitalism in small countries such as Singapore, but would not explain other successful economic developments in large countries such as Japan. In fact, the Austrian worldview has begun to influence the Japanese society after Japan has economically caught up with the western countries in the 1980s.

In order to look into the specificities of the success of Japanese capitalism, we need to refer to some innovations in management, such as “just-in-time inventory management” and “quality control circle.” In this respect, Ikujiro Nonaka’s work on shared tacit knowledge in firms is worthwhile mentioning, since this theory explains why Japanese firms have competitive advantage in the global market economy in terms of knowledge. Nonaka’s work is best placed in the context of Austrian economics, as an application of the Hayekian theory of knowledge.

It is also worth mentioning that Katsuichi Yamamoto, the founder of Austrian economics in Japan, became active in the political area as well. While he wrote a comprehensive book on socialist calculation debate in 1939 and several related books on anti-socialism, anti-totalitarianism, and anti-welfare state, he became a member of parliament for five mandates. His political stance was based on moral nationalism and he sought national integrity for the Japanese spirit by means of education. It would be interesting to study his contribution to Austrian economics and his politically conservative message.

What I utilize from the Austrian worldview are some contemporary issues on social policies in Japan. For example, I have presented my reform proposals on national universities. In Japan, national universities have finally transformed into “national university corporations” in 2003. During this transformation, I proposed the following ideas: free mergers and acquisitions among universities, free use of university brand names, acceptance for those who passed a low standard of common entrance examinations in every university and college, additional examination to select students starting the third grade, and so on. It is interesting to see that some of my proposals have been accepted and institutionalized in the reform process of universities.

Other proposals of mine are related to the following issues: privatization of post offices, counter-arguments on the criticism of neoliberalism in Japan, reform proposal on the NHK (National Broadcasting Corporation), reform proposal on the tariff system, proposal to create a world currency, etc. In these proposals, I am, to some degree, inspired by Hayek’s way of thinking rather than by Marxist, Weberian, neoclassical or institutional economics.

A conversation with Deirdre McCloskey, for Man and the Economy

by Grégoire Canlorbe · Juin 28, 2017

Deirdre Nansen McCloskey taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago from 2000 to 2015 in economics, history, English, and communication. A well-known economist and historian and rhetorician, she has written 17 books and around 400 scholarly pieces on topics ranging from technical economics and statistical theory to transgender advocacy and the ethics of the bourgeois virtues. She is known as a “conservative” economist, Chicago-School style (she taught in the Economics Department there from 1968 to 1980, and in History), but protests that “I’m a literary, quantitative, postmodern, free-market, progressive-Episcopalian, Midwestern woman from Boston who was once a man. Not ‘conservative’! I’m a Christian libertarian.”

Her latest book, out in May 2016 from the University of Chicago Press—Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World—argues for an “ideational” explanation for the Great Enrichment 1800 to the present. The accidents of Reformation and Revolt in northwestern Europe 1517–1789 led to a new liberty and dignity for commoners—ideas called “liberalism”—which led in turn to an explosion of trade-tested betterment, “having a go.”

The earlier book in the trilogy, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World (2010) had shown that materialist explanations such as saving or exploitation, don’t have sufficient economic oomph or historical relevance. The first book in the Bourgeois Era trilogy, The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (2006), had established that, contrary to the clamor of the clerisy left and right since 1848, the bourgeoisie is pretty good, and that trade-tested betterment is not the worst of ethical schools.

Grégoire Canlorbe: Could you start by reminding us of the lines of force of your libertarian case in favor of the principle of unhampered market economy and against the belief that state intervention is virtually omnipotent?

Deirdre McCloskey: One principle and one consequence. The principle is the liberal one that persuasion and trade are better for humans than violence and compulsion. The liberal principle fosters the bourgeois virtues, as against the aristocratic/bureaucratic vices. It has long been praised—by the Blessed Smith, by Mill, by Herbert Spencer, by Mises and Hayek and Friedman. Smith wrote of “the obvious and simple system of natural liberty,” and declared in 1755 that “little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice: all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.” He did not realize how very true his deduction from the liberal principle would prove to be, when slowly adopted in the nineteenth century, against the old and new pressures of mercantilism—as old as the Navigation Acts and as new as the Trump administration.

The consequence is that adhering to the liberal principle, as China has in economic policy since 1978, and India in both economy and polity since 1991, yields a Great Enrichment, a rise of real income per head in a couple of generations from horrible poverty to reasonably comfort—on the order not of 100% or even 200%, but 3,000%. The consequence of liberalism after 1800 was that masses of ordinary people were encouraged to have a go. The having-a-go resulted in steam power, plate glass, autos, containerization, and the modern university.

Grégoire Canlorbe: One of your favorite fields of study, in which Vilfredo Pareto may have been a precursor with his theory of “residues” and “derivations,” is the rhetoric of economics. A salient feature of our epoch, in this regard, seems to be the invasion of anticapitalist fallacies. “Every mystery, past, present, or future, wrote Pareto sarcastically in The Mind and Society, yields to the magic password ‘capitalism.’ Capitalism, and capitalism alone, is the cause of poverty, ignorance, immorality, theft, murder, war.” How would you account for the persisting attractiveness of anticapitalist rhetoric? How do you respond, in particular, to Thomas Piketty’s highly popular claims about the worsening of income inequalities?

Deirdre McCloskey: I myself was a long time ago a mild-mannered Marxist. I think the attractions of socialism arise from our experience as children in a loving family, in which income falls myserteriously from Dad, and Mom is the central planner. Unless we are raised on a farm or in a small business, we get no early instruction in the charms, and terrors, of voluntary exchange. We think commands rule the economy, the way commands do rule the family or firm inside—though the child does not realize that prices in markets outside rule all. It is shocking to a child of the bourgeoisie such as Marx and Engels and Lenin, to find that he or she cannot command the rich to relieve poverty. It does not occur to the child that voluntary exchange, and having a go under a liberal ethic, are what has in fact relieved poverty. The relief has not come out of redistribution by state violence from the rich to the poor.

As to Piketty, I wrote a 50-page, respectful review of his book, concluding that it was a brave attempt, but mistaken in ethics and economics and history. I listened in October of 2016 in Shanghai to a paper by Samuel Bowles, an ex-Marxist economist at the Sante Fe Institute, in which he showed that in fact the income distribution is notably similar in all societies, old and modern. That Sam then suddenly concluded that we need to massively redistribute income shows merely the persistence of the leftward lean acquired as a child, against the evidence of its failures accumulated as an adult. A policy of redistribution does not follow naturally from Sam’s amazing historical findings. Rather the contrary.

A conversation with Majid Oukacha, for Gatestone Institute

by Grégoire Canlorbe · Juin 1, 2017

Majid Oukacha is a young French essayist who was born and grew up in a France which he recognizes less every year. « A former Muslim but an eternal patriot, » as he sometimes likes to describe himself, he is the author of Face to Faith With Islam, a systematic critique, without value judgments, of the most inconsistent and imprecise Koranic laws.

Grégoire Canlorbe: Could you start by reminding us of the circumstances and motives of your abandoning Islam — and of your decision to take up your pen to unravel your former religion for the public at large?

Majid Oukacha: Like all Frenchmen who were born and grew up in France in the late twentieth century, I am fortunate to belong to a peaceful nation that allowed me to enjoy rights and freedoms for which I never personally had to fight. My parents, French citizens of Algerian origin and Muslim persuasion, provided me with a religious education, which destined me to remain a devout Muslim. They also gave me a civic, social and ethical education based on respect for France and its values, as embodied in its motto, « liberty, equality, fraternity. »

I started going to the mosque at the age of eight. The first imam who taught me, and who came from a foreign country, had a perfect French accent, a big, cheerful smile, and he was careful never to give orders to his students outside the walls of the mosque. The courses I took quickly led me to see that what I thought was a blessing — to be born into a faith able to save me from Hell, which, according to the Koran, spares only Muslims — would also become a permanent burden.

When one is a Muslim, every trivial action of daily life is codified, from how to drink a glass of water upon waking to how to go to bed. I submitted to Allah to avoid the torments of His wrath in the afterlife; I obeyed codified rituals that sometimes seemed a waste of time or a nonsense. My non-Muslim friends were accustomed to hearing me tell them I had to interrupt a game of football or cards to go to the mosque. There, I essentially learned to do the salat, the Muslim five-times-a-day prayers, as well as the bottomless pit of behavioral codes established as virtues by the romanticized figure of the prophet Muhammad.

In the middle of the uniform flock — blindly imitating a distant spectrum imposing its obligations and prohibitions — I was not afraid to ask « hard » questions.

« Why in Koranic law about the need to cut off the hand of thief (Surah 5, verse 38), does Allah not say which hand is to be cut off (the right one or the left one)? Why does He specify no minimum value for the theft from which the hand of a thief can be cut off? Stealing an apple for the first time in one’s life, does it really deserve to have a hand severed? And why does Allah not say the minimum age of a thief who must have a hand cut off? Should a 12-year-old who has never stolen before really be held as responsible as a 40-year-old repeat offender? »

« Why should one walk seven circles around the Black Stone during the Hajj and not six or eight? What will happen if I walk around it eight times? »

« The Prophet Muhammad explains in his Sunnah that a woman, a black dog or a donkey passing in front of a praying Muslim can cancel his prayer; but, as usual in the Sunnah, Muhammad merely advances a judgment without explaining why it should be that way. To someone who does not believe in Islam, such a statement sounds like a superstition. Why not give the intellectual journey linked to it, instead of just a dogmatic sentence? If it is Allah Himself who gave him this knowledge, why didn’t the Hadith that mentions this prophetic story become a verse of the Koran? The Koran is supposed to represent the messages of Allah which the prophet Muhammad passes on to his contemporaries to inform them about what their creator expects of them. If a woman passes one kilometer from someone who is praying, is the prayer canceled then? What is the maximum distance from which a prayer is cancelled altogether? »

The logical « domino effect » of these questions is only a small part of the many thoughts that can, and should, keep one’s mind alert — far from the corset of indoctrination that is closed to doubt. I never heard satisfying answers to the limits of this juridical Islam to which I had always pledged allegiance, so I decided to seek them directly from Allah himself. Just before entering university, I tried to understand Islam with an unbiased look, rather than to learn it as an unquestioning believer.

I had decided to read the entire Koran, from the first to the last sentence, and to register impressions, doubts, and questions in a notebook. Reading the Koran that way not only forced me to have to admit that almost all Islamic laws and dogmas had no scientific or rational basis, but it also highlighted that Islam, under its founder, was a misogynistic religion, preaching slavery, and an enemy of freedom of thought. I had fallen. My trust in what was both obvious and intangible had deceived me all this time. It is the libertarian and egalitarian values of secular and humanist France — which I have learned to love and respect — which gave me the strength to refuse to give in to the fear of blackmail in the form of eternal Hellfire.

Leaving Islam confirmed my longtime fear that one day I would witness the French people lose all these freedoms and this lifestyle that make France a beloved and envied country throughout the world. All revolutions do not necessarily begin or end in a bloodbath. In a democracy, the majority has the power to make or break a revolution, away from anarchy and war. The day an Islamic majority in France will vote for a president and parliamentarians able to define for all of us what separates right from wrong, good from evil and fair from unfair, what choices then will remain for us?

You cannot flee from problems indefinitely. You have to fight them at one time or another. I need to convince the maximum of my contemporaries that Islam is a threat to our individual rights and freedoms, and I choose to fight using words, because communication (through writing, speech) is the weapon that gives me my strength. I am, as far as I know, the only author who has made a comprehensive critical study of the principal legal and doctrinal aspects of Islam, by addressing the technical inaccuracies of the laws but without ever stating any moral or value judgment. I have no taboos so I dealt with explosive topics: slavery, pedophilia, criminalization of freedom of conscience… I think this is the most effective method to demonstrate to the widest possible audience the obscurantism and danger of Islam: a universal legislation that cannot coexist with difference.

Grégoire Canlorbe: This objective look at the technical limitations of Koranic laws seems rare. Is it possible to do the same work with religious books from Christianity or Judaism?

Majid Oukacha: For Muslims, every sentence in the Koran is meant to be a tale whose author is Allah Himself, the creator of the world, and who is an omnipotent, omniscient and perfect God. This God proclaims many draconian universal laws that are not limited by place or time.

This base makes analyzing the Koran far simpler than analyzing some of the sacred texts of Judaism or Christianity. The Talmud cites original narratives and interpretations thought by humans. It is up to today’s Jews to decide whether to adhere to these passages or to question them. We can say the same of the New Testament, which is dear to Christians.

Today, the countries where one lives best, if one is a woman or a free thinker, are precisely the countries with Christian and Jewish roots: France, the United States of America, Israel, Australia, England… These countries defend the individual freedoms of the weakest and the most varied people more than any Muslim country in the world has ever done. If a Muslim wants to criticize a misogynistic passage from the Bible or the Torah for example, good for him!

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