By Kevin D.
Williamson
Tuesday, August 10,
2021
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, a U.N. body, has released its most recent report on global warming.
Those of you who follow the climate discourse will already know that these
reports are handed down with a great deal of ceremony and that they are
received as though they had originated at Delphi, Hira, or Corinth.
A familiar part of the ritual is the
report’s moral amplification by the press, which is always a couple of more
degrees further gone into hysteria and lamentation than the IPCC report itself
is. Not that the report is all rainbows and sunshine. (Well, sunshine.)
It continues the longstanding IPCC trend toward certainty: that the
consequences of climate change are going to be catastrophic; that the current
disturbance in the climate system is the product of human action, largely the
consumption of fossil fuels; that a radical change in the whole pattern of
human life is required to slow down climate change and prevent its becoming
even more dire. In fact, the gradual evolution of the IPCC’s estimates of
confidence (a five-point scale: very low, low, medium, high, very high) in its
assumptions and in its forecasts (which are graded from exceptionally
unlikely to virtually certain) is one of the most-studied
aspects of the report.
As is proper, much of the report consists
of technical scientific discussion that will be of very little practical use to
the lay reader, even those with reasonably good general-science education. In
this case, sola scriptura just won’t do. But then, this has
always been more of a sola fides matter, at least for the
general public.
A word that does not appear in the report
is democracy. And democracy is the specter that haunts climate
activism.
Climate change is not a new issue. It is
an issue that seems to grow in urgency each year if we judge by taking the
temperature of the political rhetoric. But it is an issue that does not seem to
grow in urgency each year if we consider the actions of governments, democratic
and otherwise, around the world.
The first meeting about climate change was
held in 1963, and by the end of that decade much of the basic science of
climate change was in place. Cesare Emiliani and Edward Norton Lorenz (father
of the “butterfly effect”) argued from geological evidence that relatively
small changes in the climate situation could produce very large effects, while
the possibility of polar ice melts, rising sea levels, etc., were part of the
scientific discussion before the moon landing. At the same time, other theories
of climate change — notably that anthropogenic aerosols would lead to
catastrophic global cooling — also were part of the discussion and, at times,
dominated it.
But by the 1990s, the climate-change
discourse had taken on, more or less, its modern form: 1992 saw the failed Rio
Conference, 1997 witnessed the creation of the Kyoto Protocol and the first
Prius to roll off the assembly line — the climate agenda has always been, in no
small part, a shopping list — and much of the debate by that point consisted of
arguments over the validity of evidence.
Some 20 years ago, the third IPCC report
called it “very likely” that, barring an effective program of mitigation, we
were in for the most disruptive period of climate change since the last ice
age.
What you or I or anybody else believes
about the cause or reality of climate change shouldn’t matter in evaluating what
I am going to discuss next, but, for the record, I will note here that I have
more or less conventional views about climate change — that while there is a
good deal of distortion and exaggeration in the popular press, I have no reason
to believe that the facts regarding the state of the climate and its likely
course of evolution are appreciably different from what you will read in the
IPCC reports and similar documents. I do not think that climate change is a
hoax or a plot or anything like that, though it often functions as a pretext
for groups with other, generally illiberal, agendas.
(I suppose that I also should note for the
record that, as announced a few months ago, I will be doing a project on
climate change in partnership with the Competitive Enterprise Institute over
the course of the coming year.)
Climate change as a potential public-policy
issue has been with us since the 1960s, while climate change understood in at
least some quarters as an urgent public-policy issue has been with us since at least
the 1990s. And in that time, the major governments of the world have decided to
do . . . not very much. There has been a great deal of talk, agreements entered
into and abandoned — and then reentered into, at least notionally, in the case
of the United States and the Paris agreement.
We have seen some progress: In the United
States, emissions not only of carbon dioxide but also of other greenhouse
gasses such as methane and nitrous oxide have declined, if the
Environmental Protection Agency is to be believed. And that’s not because poor addled Hunter Biden has been huffing the
nitrous oxide out of the sky, or because we have cut back on fossil fuels — in
some considerable part, the improvement in the U.S. greenhouse-gas situation is
the result of one fossil fuel — coal — having been partly supplanted by another
fossil fuel — natural gas, which produces fewer emissions when used to produce
electricity. Wind and solar have made a difference in electricity, too.
But, for the most part, the liberal
democracies (to say nothing of China and the other authoritarian states) have
said, “No, thanks!” to the kind of radical climate policies dreamt of by Green
New Dealers, “climate justice” activists, and socialists such as Representative
Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D., N.Y.) who wish to use the climate issue as an
excuse for imposing political regimentation on market economies.
Progressives generally argue that this is
because our democracy isn’t a real democracy, that it is distorted or captured
by big money from Big Oil and other self-interested business concerns. But that
isn’t political analysis — it is foot-stamping, insisting that democracy is only
democracy when it gives the blessed caste what it demands.
Beyond the American scene, you can take
your pick of democratic models — Western Europe, Scandinavia, India, Japan —
and you will see similar results. The United States is a bit of a rhetorical
outlier and a bit less inclined to keep up appearances by going through the
motions with international agreements that no one has much interest in or
intention of enforcing. Norway is producing about as much oil today as it did a
decade ago, and about as much as it did in the late 1990s, though well under
its turn-of-the-century peak. The United States is producing more. As in the
United States, the biggest change in countries such as France has been the
displacement of coal in electricity generating by natural gas, along with wind
and solar.
Because progressives are at heart
utopians, they have a difficult time acknowledging tradeoffs. On Mondays,
Wednesday, and Fridays, climate change is the most important consideration in
the world. On Tuesday, Thursdays, and every other Saturday, the top issue is
“democracy,” vaguely and inconsistently defined. In fact, Democrats care so
much about democracy that they have shut down the democratic process in the
democratically elected legislature in Texas in the name of “democracy.” Instead
of tradeoffs, progressives embrace a practically mystical model of the unity of
all virtues. And so it is practically impossible for the Left to think
intelligently about the tradeoffs involved. If you doubt that, read this transcript
of Ezra Klein trying to lead a discussion on the question “What If
American Democracy Fails the Climate Crisis?” You’ll notice that the headline question never really even enters the
conversation.
We use the word democracy as
though it signified something sacred rather than merely procedural. But it does
not make democracy any less precious to forthrightly recognize that it is one
value in a world of values that are sometimes complementary and sometimes
rivalrous. Progressives ought to be grappling with the fact that one of the
things they put forward as a nonnegotiable and absolute good — democracy — is
at odds with something they insist is an existential threat to human
civilization — climate change.
Rather than deal with that honestly,
progressives have fallen into a number of obvious alternatives: hysterical
moralizing, in which those who do not concur with their agenda must be
denounced as moral monsters, because there can be no honest disagreement;
aggressive indoctrination, in which affirming various aspects of the
climate fides as a precondition of participating in
educational or business life, including the cynical ploy
of indoctrinating children as a means to getting at their parents; “lying for
justice”; and, of course, using the levers of the
state to subvert inconvenient democratic realities.
The most likely solution to this conundrum
will be found — very likely — in the words “science says.”
Progressives have long struggled with the tension between their desire, often
genuine, to be democratizers and their desire to give experts (however
unreliably identified) a larger role in the administration of public affairs.
The democratizing aspects of progressive reform often end up being catastrophic
for democracy — see the sorry state of radically democratized contemporary
political parties and shed a quiet tear for the smoke-filled room of old — and
government-by-expert is a hit-or-miss affair — remember that during the “global
cooling” scare there were people talking about covering the polar ice caps in
soot or taking other radically invasive measures to bring up the temperature of
the planet. All sorts of bad science and pseudoscience — eugenics, the
grain-based diet, “scientific” racism — have enjoyed expert support at various
times.
The great danger on climate change is that
frustrated progressives, unable to win the argument and move the democratic
states with their two favorite phrases — “studies prove” and “science says” —
will take it upon themselves to liberate the demos, whose members
either won’t or can’t understand what “science says,” and unburden them from
the responsibilities of self-government. There are times to overrule the will
of the people (as I wrote, democracy is one good among many competing goods),
but attempting to forcibly reorganize the material life of the entire human
race without consent or buy-in is to leap headlong into certain disaster. To
accomplish this would require a program of coercion unprecedented in human
history. Believing that this would be done with the very best of intentions
does not provide a moral get-out-of-jail-free card.
On the matter of climate, progressives
insist that President Biden must achieve his climate goals even if the
democratically elected representatives in Congress disagree — even though it is
Congress, not the president, that has the power to make law. Biden himself has
threatened to act over and above Congress, the matter being, in his words, a “moral
imperative.” Progressives such as Christy Goldfuss
of the Center for American Progress argue that Biden should act “without
Congress,” if Congress will not comply with his demands.
Why do we elected congresses and
parliaments if not to make decisions of precisely this kind? The fact that
progressives have not got their way on this issue is not an indictment of
democracy — it is a reflection of the fact that different people have different
priorities. Maybe Americans and Europeans and Japanese should have different priorities
— but they don’t. This is a matter of stated preferences (“Go green!”) being at odds with revealed
preferences (for inexpensive energy and the bounty that comes with it). The
democracies have had plenty of time to adopt the more radical version of the
climate agenda — and they have, for the most part, said, “No.”
And so the missives keep coming, from IPCC
and from other quarters. “The report leaves me with a deep sense of urgency,”
Jane Lubchenco, deputy director of the White House Office of Science and
Technology Policy, tells the New York Times. That’s what it is
meant to do.
More heat doesn’t mean more light.
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