By George Will
April 22, 2016
Authoritarianism, always latent in progressivism, is
becoming explicit. Progressivism’s determination to regulate thought by
regulating speech is apparent in the campaign by 16 states’ attorneys general
and those of the District of Columbia and the Virgin Islands, none Republican,
to criminalize skepticism about the supposedly “settled” conclusions of climate
science.
Four core tenets of progressivism are: First, history has
a destination. Second, progressives uniquely discern it. (Barack Obama
frequently declares things to be on or opposed to “the right side of history.”)
Third, politics should be democratic but peripheral to governance, which is the
responsibility of experts scientifically administering the regulatory state.
Fourth, enlightened progressives should enforce limits on speech (witness IRS
suppression of conservative advocacy groups) in order to prevent thinking
unhelpful to history’s progressive unfolding.
Progressivism is already enforced on campuses by
restrictions on speech that might produce what progressives consider retrograde
intellectual diversity. Now, from the so-called party of science, a.k.a.
Democrats, comes a campaign to criminalize debate about science.
“The debate is settled,” says Obama. “Climate change is a
fact.” Indeed. The epithet “climate change deniers,” obviously coined to
stigmatize skeptics as akin to Holocaust deniers, is designed to obscure
something obvious: Of course the
climate is changing; it never is not changing — neither before nor after the
Medieval Warm Period (end of the 9th century to the 13th century) and the
Little Ice Age (1640s to 1690s), neither of which was caused by fossil fuels.
Today, debatable questions include: To what extent is
human activity contributing to climate change? Are climate change models, many
of which have generated projections refuted by events, suddenly reliable enough
to predict the trajectory of change? Is change necessarily ominous because
today’s climate is necessarily optimum? Are the costs, in money expended and
freedom curtailed, of combating climate change less than the cost of adapting
to it?
But these questions may not forever be debatable. The
initial target of Democratic “scientific” silencers is ExxonMobil, which they
hope to demonstrate misled investors and the public about climate change. There
is, however, no limiting principle to restrain unprincipled people from
punishing research entities, advocacy groups and individuals.
But it is difficult to establish what constitutes
culpable “misleading” about climate science, of which a 2001 National Academy
of Sciences report says: “Because there is considerable uncertainty in current
understanding of how the climate system varies naturally and reacts to emissions
of greenhouse gases and aerosols, current estimates of the magnitude of future
warming should be regarded as tentative and subject to future adjustments
(either upward or downward).” Did Al Gore “mislead” when he said seven years
ago that computer modeling projected the Arctic to be ice-free during the
summer in as few as five years?
The attorney general of the Virgin Islands accuses
ExxonMobil of criminal misrepresentation regarding climate change. This, even
though before the U.S. government in 2009 first issued an endangerment finding
regarding greenhouse gases, ExxonMobil favored a carbon tax to mitigate climate
consequences of those gases. This grandstanding attorney general’s contribution
to today’s gangster government is the use of law enforcement tools to pursue
political goals — wielding prosecutorial weapons to chill debate, including
subpoenaing private donor information from the Competitive Enterprise
Institute, a Washington think tank.
The party of science, busy protecting science from
scrutiny, has forgotten Karl Popper (1902-1994), the philosopher whose “The
Open Society and Its Enemies” warned against people incapable of distinguishing
between certainty and certitude. In his essay “Science as Falsification,”
Popper explains why “the criterion of a scientific status of a theory is its
falsifiability, or refutability, or testability.” America’s party of science
seems eager to insulate its scientific theories from the possibility of
refutation.
The leader of the attorneys general, New York’s Eric
Schneiderman, dismisses those who disagree with him as “morally vacant.” His
moral content is apparent in his campaign to ban fantasy sports gambling
because it competes with the gambling (state lottery, casinos, off-track
betting) that enriches his government.
Then there is Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), who
suggests using the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, written
to fight organized crime, to criminalize what he calls the fossil fuel
industry’s “climate denial apparatus.” The Justice Department, which has
abetted the IRS coverup of its criminal activity, has referred this idea to the
FBI.
These garden-variety authoritarians are eager to regulate
us into conformity with the “settled” consensus du jour, whatever it is. But
they are progressives, so it is for our own good.
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