By Kevin D. Williamson
Friday, March 27, 2020
What will happen next with the coronavirus epidemic is
unknown, but it seems certain to claim one very high-profile victim: the
so-called Green New Deal.
Good riddance.
The current crisis in the U.S. economy is, in miniature
but concentrated form, precisely what the Left has in mind in response to
climate change: shutting down large sectors of the domestic and global
economies through official writ, social pressure, and indirect means, in
response to a crisis with potentially devastating and wide-ranging consequences
for human life and human flourishing.
What is under way right now in response to the epidemic
is in substance much like the Green New Deal and lesser versions of the same
climate-change agenda: massive new government spending, political control of
critical industries, emergency protocols modeled on wartime practice, etc.
But the characters of the two crises are basically
different.
Set aside, for the moment, any reservations you might
have about the coronavirus-emergency regime, and set aside your views on
climate change, too, whatever they may be. Instead, ask yourself this: If
Americans are this resistant to paying a large economic price to enable
measures meant to prevent a public-health catastrophe in the here and now — one
that threatens the lives of people they know and love — then how much less
likely are they to bear not weeks or months but decades of disruption
and economic dislocation and a permanently diminished standard of living in
order to prevent possibly severe consequences to people in Bangladesh or
Indonesia 80 or 100 years from now?
For years, we’ve been hearing, “This is climate change”
and “That is climate change,” every time there’s a flood or a storm. If that’s
the fact, then climate change is, relatively speaking, manageable. There is no
way Americans—or people around the world—are going to agree to endure anything
like the current economic downturn in order to prevent problems of that nature.
Without failing to appreciate the severe immediate
economic consequences being felt by Americans in this episode, asking retail
and service-industry workers to forfeit their incomes for a few months until
their establishments can reopen is a relatively manageable thing even if we are
(as I believe we should be) very liberal in doing what we can to protect them
financially in the meantime. Telling everybody who works in coal, oil, natural
gas, petrochemicals, plastics, and refineries — and a great many people who
work in automobiles, aviation, shipping, utilities, construction, agriculture,
manufacturing, food processing, utilities, and dozens of other fields — that
their companies and their jobs are going away forever is a much larger thing.
Telling everybody who does business with those people that they’ll have to
consult Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for solvents and industrial polymers — and, you
know, lights — would send waves of chaos rippling around the world hard and so
fast that you’d need Tom Araya to properly give voice to them.
“Oh, but we’ll find them jobs in the new green economy!”
comes the response. “It’ll be a net positive!” As though petroleum engineers
were lumps of labor that could be reshaped at will by a committee of lawyers in
Washington, if only we gave them the power. Nobody is buying that. Not many
people are that stupid.
As I wrote at the beginning of this outbreak, Americans
are hard to quarantine. We may yet end up paying a very heavy price for that —
in some circumstances, a non-compliance rate of 20 percent (i.e., if every
fifth person is a knucklehead) will have effects quite similar to a
non-compliance rate of 95 percent. A 51 percent majority works in a
city-council election, but an effective social-distancing regimen requires much
more.
Those spring-break clowns down in Florida and the
“coronavirus party” doofuses in Kentucky are We
the People, too, and if they are not willing to spend a couple of weeks
watching Netflix to save grandma’s life — or their own lives — then do you
really think they’re going to take an economic bullet over the prospect of
losing 3 percent of world economic output a century from now to global-warming-mitigation
costs?
What we are seeing right now is what it looks like when
Washington tries to steer the economy. There are times when that is necessary,
and this is one of those times. But emergencies do not last forever, and
emergency measures should be, by nature, temporary. The attraction of the
climate-change crusade is that it creates a permanent state of emergency. The
Left wants very much to convince Americans that climate change presents an
emergency of the same kind requiring the same “moral equivalent of war”
worldwide mobilization.
One suspects that the people who are missing their
paychecks right now, and the ones who worry that they may be missing them soon,
are going to need some convincing. The adverse effects of climate change are
likely to be significant and may prove severe — as noted, many of our
progressive friends insist that they already are. But we have a new point of
comparison, and those challenges feel relatively manageable if the alternative
is an extended version of the coronavirus shutdown — and no amount of marketing
will change the fact that that is precisely what is being advocated.
A couple of months of this is going to be very hard to
take. Nobody is signing up for a lifetime of it.
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