A good article and no one can deny that it would be beneficial if those on the right and left sides of the political divide agreed on such a divisive topic as climate change. But as the author points out, the focus of the climate change lobby has encountered mission creep and now involves itself with many of those ideologies that are those of the Woke.
It is undeniable that the inability of the climate science community to predict the future does not mean that climate change is not happening, that changes in climate are insignificant, or that humans are not influencing the climate system. The IPCC is very clear that humans are influencing the climate system through greenhouse gas emissions, land use change, particulate air pollution and other factors — and those changes poses “risks.”
But pouring billions and billions of $$$$’s into useless alternative energy sources – Green Energy, Hydrogen, Renewables, Government subsidies for EV’s , setting target dates to reach Net Zero, for the banning of gas driven cars, phasing out oil and LNG as an energy source – is sheer lunacy perpetrated by ideologically deranged elite authoritarians of the ruling classes.
Such a calamitous rush to “transition” from oil and fossil fuels as the major supplier of the Planets’ energy source is going to bankrupt nations, have millions of those in the Third World starve to death and worse. Such deprivation of hunger, history tells us, lays the fertile ground for continuing chaos, mass migration and may well lead onto armed insurrection, before the World returns to a path of stability, adopted after the liberal Enlightenment.
The real problem is "climate alarmism" with Thunberg frightening children with her unfounded utterances.
How can people be so dishonest? Is the profit model so great that the ruling classes will waste trillions doing the wrong things? Extremely frustrating. Read Bjorn Lomborg, he certainly believes so.
The human influence on climate is thus not about certainties and crystal balls, but risk management and no regrets.
Great response! The current fervor is truly " sheer lunacy perpetrated by ideologically deranged elite authoritarians of the ruling classes." Even drastic action in the West will have little or no impact because of the trajectory of China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, etc. Furthermore no serious response can ignore the elephant in the room, population growth. The soft ball survey questions cited those with little or no understanding of the ineffectiveness and huge risks to the overall economy. The answer to the question :If you had a campaign budget to drive government action on climate change in the United States, what would be the most effective way to spend it? The answer would be to start speaking factually and stop amplifying histrionics.
I think this is a great article. One of the big lessons of the rise of populist political views has been the role of liberal elites in implementing policies that may have overall benefits, but have had specific and targeted collateral damage--e.g. the rust belt in the US. Success with the energy transformation will not mean everyone living happily on Jeffersonian organic farms.
We need a massive increase in invention and technology, which requires a huge industrial and creative base. And that means lots of work for lots of people, many of whom have missed the recent ill-distributed progress. And it means lots of place for private corporations and investors.
But the lessons of the past make it clear that there needs to be some central control to keep self-serving behavior to a dull roar. Finding a consensus interpretation of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution may allow people to agree on the critical things that are in (almost) everyone's interest to pursue together. And leave the remainder of political differences to be worked out in an important but separate arena.
This article seems similar to pieces I have read by Bjorn Lomberg. In particular his statements that we can't expect people who are already poor to become poorer or stay poor to reduce climate change. Solutions exist that can reduce poverty and reduce carbon emissions. He seems to focus a lot on the need for more research money into reducing the cost and increasing the scale of green energy solutions. I admit that I haven't read much of his work so there may not be that much overlap between him and Simon Glynn.
Climate science because it is science is controvertible and can be debated and fine tuned. Unfortunately, many people, especially those on the left, espouse a climate dogma in which by definition all of the principles must be accepted as incontrovertible. Whereas people with many different beliefs can work towards a better future based on the study of climate science, climate dogma appeals to a more narrower band of true believers.
I agree with your dogma reference, but I see the dogma issue less to do with climate science (the problem) and more to do with climate action (the solution). Yes, climate science is controvertible, because it is science. And there are uncertainties about the pace of change, local effects, etc., because of feedback loops and instabilities we can’t model well enough. (I live in the UK, which doesn’t know if it is more likely to get hotter or colder, depending on what happens with currents in the Atlantic.) But directionally the science is usefully clear; you can follow it without being dogmatic. Climate action, however, is full of societal choices. Actions we take at the scale we need will have societal consequences, creating winners and losers, which we can choose to correct for (to ensure a “just transition”), or not, or do in some cases but not others. Those are legitimate political choices. What I am seeking to challenge is the way ‘climate dogma’ sometimes suppresses those choices by assuming and asserting what it sees as the only palatable answer – because doing that can alienate large swathes of the population who have legitimate political views and whose support we need for the transition.
There are many problems with our discourse on the environment, but two stand out. The first is money. There are big bucks to be had in environmental projects, a fact that should be reinforced every time we put ethanol in our vehicles. There is no benefit to this costly ritual, a fact that Al Gore admitted almost fifteen years ago. Yet, no politician can get elected without supporting the farm lobby. Thus, a complete waste continues and we are all forced to support it.
The threat of being denounced as a climate denier means that we must abandon economics. Cost-benefit analysis is not allowed because the crisis is too great. Opportunity costs no longer exist. The broken window fallacy is supercharged by bad policy. So, we must engage in the second problem, which is the noble lie. We pass bills and lie about their costs, falsely claiming that they reduce inflation. Economists generally agree that carbon taxes are the most efficient means available for reducing emissions, but politicians, the public, and direct beneficiaries of bad policies love wasteful subsidies. We need only look to the current debacle in Canada to see what happens to those who prefer carbon taxes. Better to borrow trillions from our grandchildren in order to enrich the privileged than stand in the way of those who will benefit. If you don’t think so you are a denier and should be canceled.
I think you discount the active measures taken by the likes of the oil producers in the US to slander global warming as a scientific conspiracy. Note the renaming of "global warming" to "climate change". We see the likes of Fox News and Trump calling it all a hoax. You have to grapple with this and not pretend it's not there.
Thanks for your comment. The denialism is there – I wouldn’t pretend otherwise. But:
1. It’s a minority (although a loud one) even within the U.S. – and a very small minority elsewhere.
2. It’s not a separate bit of grappling. One of the reasons that some on the right deny climate change is a reaction to the cognitive dissonance they would face if they accepted it, if accepting it means accepting the narrative and policies of a progressive climate movement. If a more politically inclusive choice of climate-action solutions were on offer, there would likely be less denial of the problem.
Appreciate your reply! And I agree about some things like the de-emphasis of nuclear power being counterproductive. At the same time the active lobbying is real.
For example, I got one of those Ford Mustang Mach-E cars when they came out and for a while they were novel and fun. However about 6 months in there was a concerted lobbying effort across right wing media to trash electric cars as literally a vanguard of socialism -- I had Fox News watchers in my family express this very sentiment.
What sort of inclusiveness can break that ideological bubble -- these folks just don't hear alternative stories? They aren't presented to them at all. It's not a question of discussions, etc., but one of ideological gatekeeping on the parts of these media outlets like Fox News. How do you propose to deal with this gatekeeping?
I don’t have an easy answer to the gatekeeping question. But two thoughts.
First, it happens on both sides. I just went to a climate conference where the first keynote speaker said, setting out the terms of the climate agenda, “We’re not going to survive if we don’t focus on poverty and inequality.” This is clearly false, since poverty and inequality have been with us since the dawn of civilization. Yet it is normal for such progressive stances to be asserted in supposedly objective climate gatherings and accepted without question. This is part of the problem I am trying to highlight.
Second, I see it as a vicious circle we need to break. On both sides, the closed, ideological narrative is unpalatable to outsiders, and so they stay outside. Breaking vicious circles is hard, but when you do, the opportunity to turn into virtuous ones is real.
"Both sides" minimizes just how isolated people in the Fox News/conservative bubble are, tho. That's what I'm saying. This sheer isolation has become a qualitative problem, which is not nearly as extensive as in other places. And it's a deliberate gatekeeping, not just a social convention.
Old eco warrior here. In London in the 1970s all of us ecologically active individuals were targeted by a special under cover Metropolitan police unit. It was part of a ruling class state funded UK wide crackdown on any social democratic movement that might economically threaten the expansion of UK’s corporate North Sea and ex African colonial fossil fuel expansion.
There was also a tight control of the public ecological narrative by placing agents within ecological organizations who would act as gatekeepers on any of their publications. All protests and real ecocide information was effectively greenwashed. The fact that many governments, at the behest of the oil industry, chose to cover up the fatal global environmental damage for decades, needs to be fully exposed and openly apologized for before the political left and right (such simplistic either/or social divisions are also played to further oil interests) can trust working together with each other and state agencies on any shared ecological future. The issue of the importance of economy of scale in regard to the viable equable sustainable economic delivery of power for all should also now be at the centre of any future engagement.
"They argued that the best way to drive government action on climate change is for the Democrats to hold power, and the best issue to campaign on to achieve that outcome is not climate, but abortion."
I didn't read here a convincing case that that's wrong. Sadly, it seems about right to me.
I very much agree that climate pitches should be grounded in multiple points of view. In theory, it is a great opportunity for what Cass Sunstein has called "incompletely theorized agreements," which is to say, agreement on action based on widely varying, sometimes even opposing, justifications and motivations. For example, climate action can be justified on tree-hugger grounds but also on economic grounds, on social justice grounds but also on nationalist grounds, on secular grounds but also on religious grounds. What used to be called environmental "conservation" once commonly had a right-ish tinge. Think of T.R., hunting, glorification of the wilderness, and so on. So long as climate action has such varying sorts of appeals, all should be on the table, and all should be used. The author is absolutely right that nobody should insist on ideological purity here, on agreeing not only on action but on reasons too, which only gets in the way of action.
On the other hand, the Republican Party, whatever 40% of its members say, is strongly committed to opposing pretty much all climate policies, including the most market-friendly of them. The article sort of suggests that government action, i.e., climate "policy," may not be necessary. But it doesn't come close to demonstrating that proposition. Perhaps it's true, but I don't know it's true.
We thus come to the fundamental problem with climate action. It is difficult to get a handle on the costs of a changing climate, both in terms of severity and pace, as well as the effectiveness of various actions to address it. Meanwhile, policies typically entail costs that at least some, including influential interests, will face right now and would rather not. Perhaps multinationals and entrepreneurs will do much to save us here, but that would be in no small measure due to their responses to government policies and interventions, just not our own.
We can and should be a leader in this area, and I appreciate the incompletely theorized pitch offered by Harris, for example, that America should not cede this technological territory to our competitors. But it does seem that climate talk has been so poisoned by the right and the left alike, so associated with a lefty attitude that most reject generally, that an emphasis on abortion may very well be the better path to climate action, at least in the short term and at least in this country.
Focusing too much on party and president. Focus on the specific bills. Make sure both sides get a W (not easy, but it's the price of admission when you work across party lines). Actually listen to everyone, instead of each side assuming they have all the answers, figure out where ideas overlap entirely, and where compromises can be made.
You know, the governance we elect and pay our congress to carry out.
A good article and no one can deny that it would be beneficial if those on the right and left sides of the political divide agreed on such a divisive topic as climate change. But as the author points out, the focus of the climate change lobby has encountered mission creep and now involves itself with many of those ideologies that are those of the Woke.
It is undeniable that the inability of the climate science community to predict the future does not mean that climate change is not happening, that changes in climate are insignificant, or that humans are not influencing the climate system. The IPCC is very clear that humans are influencing the climate system through greenhouse gas emissions, land use change, particulate air pollution and other factors — and those changes poses “risks.”
But pouring billions and billions of $$$$’s into useless alternative energy sources – Green Energy, Hydrogen, Renewables, Government subsidies for EV’s , setting target dates to reach Net Zero, for the banning of gas driven cars, phasing out oil and LNG as an energy source – is sheer lunacy perpetrated by ideologically deranged elite authoritarians of the ruling classes.
Such a calamitous rush to “transition” from oil and fossil fuels as the major supplier of the Planets’ energy source is going to bankrupt nations, have millions of those in the Third World starve to death and worse. Such deprivation of hunger, history tells us, lays the fertile ground for continuing chaos, mass migration and may well lead onto armed insurrection, before the World returns to a path of stability, adopted after the liberal Enlightenment.
The real problem is "climate alarmism" with Thunberg frightening children with her unfounded utterances.
How can people be so dishonest? Is the profit model so great that the ruling classes will waste trillions doing the wrong things? Extremely frustrating. Read Bjorn Lomborg, he certainly believes so.
The human influence on climate is thus not about certainties and crystal balls, but risk management and no regrets.
Great response! The current fervor is truly " sheer lunacy perpetrated by ideologically deranged elite authoritarians of the ruling classes." Even drastic action in the West will have little or no impact because of the trajectory of China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, etc. Furthermore no serious response can ignore the elephant in the room, population growth. The soft ball survey questions cited those with little or no understanding of the ineffectiveness and huge risks to the overall economy. The answer to the question :If you had a campaign budget to drive government action on climate change in the United States, what would be the most effective way to spend it? The answer would be to start speaking factually and stop amplifying histrionics.
I think this is a great article. One of the big lessons of the rise of populist political views has been the role of liberal elites in implementing policies that may have overall benefits, but have had specific and targeted collateral damage--e.g. the rust belt in the US. Success with the energy transformation will not mean everyone living happily on Jeffersonian organic farms.
We need a massive increase in invention and technology, which requires a huge industrial and creative base. And that means lots of work for lots of people, many of whom have missed the recent ill-distributed progress. And it means lots of place for private corporations and investors.
But the lessons of the past make it clear that there needs to be some central control to keep self-serving behavior to a dull roar. Finding a consensus interpretation of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution may allow people to agree on the critical things that are in (almost) everyone's interest to pursue together. And leave the remainder of political differences to be worked out in an important but separate arena.
This article seems similar to pieces I have read by Bjorn Lomberg. In particular his statements that we can't expect people who are already poor to become poorer or stay poor to reduce climate change. Solutions exist that can reduce poverty and reduce carbon emissions. He seems to focus a lot on the need for more research money into reducing the cost and increasing the scale of green energy solutions. I admit that I haven't read much of his work so there may not be that much overlap between him and Simon Glynn.
Climate science because it is science is controvertible and can be debated and fine tuned. Unfortunately, many people, especially those on the left, espouse a climate dogma in which by definition all of the principles must be accepted as incontrovertible. Whereas people with many different beliefs can work towards a better future based on the study of climate science, climate dogma appeals to a more narrower band of true believers.
I agree with your dogma reference, but I see the dogma issue less to do with climate science (the problem) and more to do with climate action (the solution). Yes, climate science is controvertible, because it is science. And there are uncertainties about the pace of change, local effects, etc., because of feedback loops and instabilities we can’t model well enough. (I live in the UK, which doesn’t know if it is more likely to get hotter or colder, depending on what happens with currents in the Atlantic.) But directionally the science is usefully clear; you can follow it without being dogmatic. Climate action, however, is full of societal choices. Actions we take at the scale we need will have societal consequences, creating winners and losers, which we can choose to correct for (to ensure a “just transition”), or not, or do in some cases but not others. Those are legitimate political choices. What I am seeking to challenge is the way ‘climate dogma’ sometimes suppresses those choices by assuming and asserting what it sees as the only palatable answer – because doing that can alienate large swathes of the population who have legitimate political views and whose support we need for the transition.
Thank you. As with all problems, the question should come down to "Well, what are we willing and able to do about it?"
There are many problems with our discourse on the environment, but two stand out. The first is money. There are big bucks to be had in environmental projects, a fact that should be reinforced every time we put ethanol in our vehicles. There is no benefit to this costly ritual, a fact that Al Gore admitted almost fifteen years ago. Yet, no politician can get elected without supporting the farm lobby. Thus, a complete waste continues and we are all forced to support it.
The threat of being denounced as a climate denier means that we must abandon economics. Cost-benefit analysis is not allowed because the crisis is too great. Opportunity costs no longer exist. The broken window fallacy is supercharged by bad policy. So, we must engage in the second problem, which is the noble lie. We pass bills and lie about their costs, falsely claiming that they reduce inflation. Economists generally agree that carbon taxes are the most efficient means available for reducing emissions, but politicians, the public, and direct beneficiaries of bad policies love wasteful subsidies. We need only look to the current debacle in Canada to see what happens to those who prefer carbon taxes. Better to borrow trillions from our grandchildren in order to enrich the privileged than stand in the way of those who will benefit. If you don’t think so you are a denier and should be canceled.
I think you discount the active measures taken by the likes of the oil producers in the US to slander global warming as a scientific conspiracy. Note the renaming of "global warming" to "climate change". We see the likes of Fox News and Trump calling it all a hoax. You have to grapple with this and not pretend it's not there.
Thanks for your comment. The denialism is there – I wouldn’t pretend otherwise. But:
1. It’s a minority (although a loud one) even within the U.S. – and a very small minority elsewhere.
2. It’s not a separate bit of grappling. One of the reasons that some on the right deny climate change is a reaction to the cognitive dissonance they would face if they accepted it, if accepting it means accepting the narrative and policies of a progressive climate movement. If a more politically inclusive choice of climate-action solutions were on offer, there would likely be less denial of the problem.
Appreciate your reply! And I agree about some things like the de-emphasis of nuclear power being counterproductive. At the same time the active lobbying is real.
For example, I got one of those Ford Mustang Mach-E cars when they came out and for a while they were novel and fun. However about 6 months in there was a concerted lobbying effort across right wing media to trash electric cars as literally a vanguard of socialism -- I had Fox News watchers in my family express this very sentiment.
What sort of inclusiveness can break that ideological bubble -- these folks just don't hear alternative stories? They aren't presented to them at all. It's not a question of discussions, etc., but one of ideological gatekeeping on the parts of these media outlets like Fox News. How do you propose to deal with this gatekeeping?
I don’t have an easy answer to the gatekeeping question. But two thoughts.
First, it happens on both sides. I just went to a climate conference where the first keynote speaker said, setting out the terms of the climate agenda, “We’re not going to survive if we don’t focus on poverty and inequality.” This is clearly false, since poverty and inequality have been with us since the dawn of civilization. Yet it is normal for such progressive stances to be asserted in supposedly objective climate gatherings and accepted without question. This is part of the problem I am trying to highlight.
Second, I see it as a vicious circle we need to break. On both sides, the closed, ideological narrative is unpalatable to outsiders, and so they stay outside. Breaking vicious circles is hard, but when you do, the opportunity to turn into virtuous ones is real.
"Both sides" minimizes just how isolated people in the Fox News/conservative bubble are, tho. That's what I'm saying. This sheer isolation has become a qualitative problem, which is not nearly as extensive as in other places. And it's a deliberate gatekeeping, not just a social convention.
Old eco warrior here. In London in the 1970s all of us ecologically active individuals were targeted by a special under cover Metropolitan police unit. It was part of a ruling class state funded UK wide crackdown on any social democratic movement that might economically threaten the expansion of UK’s corporate North Sea and ex African colonial fossil fuel expansion.
There was also a tight control of the public ecological narrative by placing agents within ecological organizations who would act as gatekeepers on any of their publications. All protests and real ecocide information was effectively greenwashed. The fact that many governments, at the behest of the oil industry, chose to cover up the fatal global environmental damage for decades, needs to be fully exposed and openly apologized for before the political left and right (such simplistic either/or social divisions are also played to further oil interests) can trust working together with each other and state agencies on any shared ecological future. The issue of the importance of economy of scale in regard to the viable equable sustainable economic delivery of power for all should also now be at the centre of any future engagement.
"They argued that the best way to drive government action on climate change is for the Democrats to hold power, and the best issue to campaign on to achieve that outcome is not climate, but abortion."
I didn't read here a convincing case that that's wrong. Sadly, it seems about right to me.
I very much agree that climate pitches should be grounded in multiple points of view. In theory, it is a great opportunity for what Cass Sunstein has called "incompletely theorized agreements," which is to say, agreement on action based on widely varying, sometimes even opposing, justifications and motivations. For example, climate action can be justified on tree-hugger grounds but also on economic grounds, on social justice grounds but also on nationalist grounds, on secular grounds but also on religious grounds. What used to be called environmental "conservation" once commonly had a right-ish tinge. Think of T.R., hunting, glorification of the wilderness, and so on. So long as climate action has such varying sorts of appeals, all should be on the table, and all should be used. The author is absolutely right that nobody should insist on ideological purity here, on agreeing not only on action but on reasons too, which only gets in the way of action.
On the other hand, the Republican Party, whatever 40% of its members say, is strongly committed to opposing pretty much all climate policies, including the most market-friendly of them. The article sort of suggests that government action, i.e., climate "policy," may not be necessary. But it doesn't come close to demonstrating that proposition. Perhaps it's true, but I don't know it's true.
We thus come to the fundamental problem with climate action. It is difficult to get a handle on the costs of a changing climate, both in terms of severity and pace, as well as the effectiveness of various actions to address it. Meanwhile, policies typically entail costs that at least some, including influential interests, will face right now and would rather not. Perhaps multinationals and entrepreneurs will do much to save us here, but that would be in no small measure due to their responses to government policies and interventions, just not our own.
We can and should be a leader in this area, and I appreciate the incompletely theorized pitch offered by Harris, for example, that America should not cede this technological territory to our competitors. But it does seem that climate talk has been so poisoned by the right and the left alike, so associated with a lefty attitude that most reject generally, that an emphasis on abortion may very well be the better path to climate action, at least in the short term and at least in this country.
Focusing too much on party and president. Focus on the specific bills. Make sure both sides get a W (not easy, but it's the price of admission when you work across party lines). Actually listen to everyone, instead of each side assuming they have all the answers, figure out where ideas overlap entirely, and where compromises can be made.
You know, the governance we elect and pay our congress to carry out.