By Rich Lowry
Friday, June 14, 2019
The more the climate debate changes, the more it stays
the same.
Polls show that the public is worried about climate
change, but that doesn’t mean that it is any more ready to bear any burden or
pay any price to combat it.
If President Donald Trump claws his way to victory again
in Pennsylvania and the Upper Midwest, his path will likely go through abortion
and climate change, two issues on which the Democrats are most confident in
their righteousness and willing to embrace radical policies that appeal to
their own voters much more than to anyone else.
Joe Biden, the relative moderate, is subject to these
forces. He dumped his longtime support for the Hyde amendment prohibiting
federal funding of abortion last week and released a climate plan that, even if
more modest than the “Green New Deal” (a low bar), is clearly derived from it.
“Climate” is a watchword among the Democratic
presidential candidates — and an enormous downside risk. Once you are convinced
that you are addressing a planet-threatening crisis that will soon become
irreversible, prudence and incrementalism begin to look dispensable.
There’s no doubt that climate is a top-tier issue for
Democrats. In a CNN poll, 96 percent of Democrats say it’s very important that
candidates support “taking aggressive action to slow the effects of climate
change.” It’s doubtful that mom, baseball, and apple pie would poll any higher.
Among the broader public, according to a survey by
climate-change programs at Yale and George Mason universities, 70 percent
believe that climate change is happening, and 57 percent believe that humans
are causing it.
It’s easy to overinterpret these numbers, though. An
Associated Press/University of Chicago poll asked people how much they were
actually willing to pay to fight climate change, and 57 percent said at least
$1 a month, not even the cost of a cup of coffee at Starbucks.
The political experience of other advanced democracies is
a flashing red light. In Australia last month, the liberal opposition lost what
was supposed to be “the climate change” election, against all expectations.
Pre-election polling showed that about 60 percent of Australians thought the
government should address climate change “even if this involves significant
costs.” It turned out that it was one thing to tell that to pollsters and
another to vote to make it happen.
In France, gas and diesel hikes as part of a government
plan to reduce carbon emissions by 75 percent sparked the yellow-vest movement
in car-dependent suburbs and towns, and had to be ignominiously reversed.
The politics of climate change will be problematic for
the duration, for several reasons. The voters most opposed to the costs of
climate action tend to be “deplorables” most easily dismissed by center-left
parties at their own peril: voters in rural Queensland in Australia,
economically distressed residents of unfashionable rural and semiurban areas of
France, working-class voters in the Rust Belt in the U.S.
The real felt urgency of climate change will not, anytime
soon, match the rhetoric of the advocates. There’s currently an effort to make
every natural disaster in the U.S. a symptom of an alleged climate emergency.
This approach may pay some dividends, since there’s always extreme weather, but
it hardly reflects a careful accounting of the data.
Bearing real costs for the sake of the climate will
always be a sucker’s game for any one country so long as there isn’t a global
regime mandating emission reductions (and, thankfully, there isn’t anything
remotely like the political will for such a regime).
Finally, whatever the costs, no one is going to feel any
climate benefits anytime soon, or likely ever. The supposed upside of plausible
policies adopted by the U.S. would be minuscule changes in the global
temperature decades from now.
All this should counsel caution rather than apocalyptic
rhetoric and policies, although Trump has every reason to hope it doesn’t.
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