Climate: Policy Options Are Not ‘Settled’

By Andrew Stuttaford

Saturday, June 22, 2024

 

In a typically interesting article for the New Statesman, the British philosopher John Gray turns his attention to a British election that he sees as “a historic collision between technocratic government and political legitimacy, still not clearly perceived, since Labour’s shipwreck is yet to come.”

 

Gray defines technocratic government as follows:

 

[B]ypassing politics by outsourcing key decisions to professional bodies that claim expert knowledge. Their superior sapience is often ideology clothed in pseudo-science they picked up at university a generation ago, and their recommendations a radical political programme disguised as pragmatic policymaking. Technocracy represents itself as delivering what everyone wants, but at bottom it is the imposition of values much of the population does not share. A backlash was inevitable.

 

Gray sees technocracy at work in a number of areas. One of them — oh dear — includes “the declining free market model to which all mainstream parties are committed,” which is a view that both overstates the extent to which that model is truly in operation (or ever has been) and the degree to which it is protected by technocratic fiat. Gray is writing about Britain, but so far as I see it, technocrats (as he defines that term) on both sides of the Atlantic have been gnawing away at the somewhat freer Reagan/Thatcher market model for years. More on that to come, as it’s a topic worth looking at in more detail.

 

Gray is on firmer ground, particularly in a European context, when identifying two other areas, immigration and climate, where technocracy applies, and on firmer ground still on offering a (partial) definition of populism as “the re-politicisation of issues the progressive consensus deems too important to be left to democratic choice.”

 

Indeed.

 

And then there’s this:

 

In functioning democracies, technocracy rarely works for long. Relying on scraps of academic detritus, its practitioners struggle to keep up with events. Even when their theories are sound, they do not legitimate their policies. Anthropogenic climate change is a scientific fact, but science cannot tell you what to do about it. Conflicting values are at stake, some of them involving major losses. What entitles a caste of bureaucrats to make these tragic choices for the rest of us?

 

Gray is touching on a critical point that is too often brushed aside by today’s climate policy-makers and those who cheer them on. Even if the science is “settled,” the best policy response to it quite clearly is not. For example, it is not inconsistent to believe that man-made climate change is real at the same time as thinking that the “race” to net zero by 2050 is both reckless and counterproductive. Policy-making in this area is, as in so many others, a matter of choices — sometimes hard ones — and in a democracy those should be left to voters to decide, a process, incidentally, in which discussion should be free, not confined within limits that someone somewhere has ruled should apply.