By David Harsanyi
Friday, June 02, 2017
Whenever the United States fails to adopt climate-change
policy favored by the Left, advocates like to point to polls that allegedly
illustrate how a vast majority of Americans support “fighting climate change”
or “reducing carbon emissions” or “believe in global warming.” These vague,
feel-good moral declarations are equivalent to voters saying they are in favor
“reducing poverty” or “helping children.” The more useful question is what are
you willing to do? Give up one of your cars? Pay more for energy, food,
housing, and everything else? Do you want to empower government to run the
economy to help fix the problem?
When it comes to perfunctorily treating global warming as
an evil, Democrats have won. The importance of “greening” everything has
saturated society. Everyone gets it. When it comes to policy that supposedly
mitigates climate change, though, they lose. Mostly, because they’ve hijacked
“science” in pursuit of ideologically driven economic policies.
The Paris Agreement is substantively
a joke. The widespread rage about President’s Trump’s withdrawal is, as
many people have already noted, a case of mass virtue signaling. But the
episode does reflect a larger problem for the Left.
The cycle goes something like this: Americans are
marginally (or what some of us believe, appropriately) concerned about carbon
emissions. For Malthusian progressives, and increasingly the rest of the
Democratic Party, this won’t do. So they ratchet up the apocalyptic rhetoric in
an effort to scare those people into embracing a slate of economic policies.
The problem, of course, is that many people don’t like progressive economic
policies. So liberals ratchet up the doom and gloom, to the point where they’re
talking about this as an extinction-level event. Lots of people ignore these
hysterics. Progressives then go from scaring to attempting to humiliate and
bully those who won’t accept that progressive economic policies are tantamount
to “science.” Half the country goes from being increasingly immune to becoming
increasingly angry.
Many people comprehend – either intuitively or in stark
terms—what tradeoffs mean. On one hand, liberals claim that our massive
overindulgences have created a catastrophic future, and on the other, they act
like it can be fixed with minimal pain or change. Those two positions do not
align.
When people who hop on planes every other day lecture
people about living more prudently, they react accordingly. Like human beings.
Take this typical fare from New York
Times columnist David Leonhardt, who writes that “Climate change, clearly,
is real. It’s already doing damage in our country and abroad.” The statement is
factually true, but woefully incomplete. For whatever harm they accept global
warming is doing – which by now means any weather-related event – they plug in
the massive benefits of fossil fuels.
I often hear pundits claim that science-denying voters
either don’t understand the long-term consequences of global warming, or are
selfishly ignoring the future. Maybe they see the future as a choice between a thriving
free economy or an economy that runs through a centralized worldwide
climate-change agreement? Maybe they choose the former for their grandkids? I
do.
Moreover, many voters don’t see Democrats acting like
people who believe we’re facing an extinction level event. For instance, why
aren’t we talking about adding hundreds of new nuclear power plants to our
energy portfolio? Such an effort would do far more to mitigate carbon emissions
than any unreliable solar or windmill boondoggle –certainly more than any
non-binding international agreement. Maybe there are tradeoffs, who knows.
Or take prospective presidential hopeful Andrew Cuomo.
Setting intentions aside, in all practical ways, he’s been worse for the
environment than Trump. Cuomo claims he “is committed to meeting the standards
set forth in the Paris Accord regardless of Washington’s irresponsible
actions.” Yet as governor, he’s blocked natural gas pipelines and banned
fracking, which has proven to be one of the most effective ways to mitigate carbon
emissions. U.S. energy-related carbon emissions have fallen almost 14 percent
since they peaked in 2007 according to the OECD – this, without any fabricated
carbon market schemes. The driving reason is the shift to natural gas. Why do
liberals hate science? Why do they condemn our grandchildren to a fiery end?
Fact is, Obama—as was his wont—tried to shift American
policy with his pen rather than by building consensus (which was also an
assault on proper norms of American governance, but the “Trump is destroying
the Constitution!” crowd is conveniently flexible on this issue.) It’s not a
feasible or lasting way to govern, unless the system collapses. It is also
transparently ideological.
This, I suspect, is one major reason climate change isn’t
really a salient politic issue. No amount of hysteria is going to reverse this
dynamic. Because, in the end, Malthusianism is no better than denialism – it is denialism, in fact. It is a belief
that ignores history, human nature, and most importantly tradeoffs. Lots of
people seem to understand this, either in stark political terms or intuitively.
Sure, they say the things expected of them, but their actions betray a trust in
human adaptability and technology more than in guesstimates. Many of them have
lived through the eco-scaremongering of the 70s and 80s, and yet, they now see
innovation spreading in a cleaner world where poverty has dramatically fallen
and, by almost
every quantifiable measure, human existence is improving.
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