Heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, deluges, and hurricanes have beset the Northern Hemisphere in the past couple of years, devastatingly in places. Promoters of climate doom, therefore, have been busy reminding everyone they’ve warned for decades that greenhouse gases accumulating in the atmosphere amplify global warming and aggravate natural ferocity. An unquestioning press propagates the alarm. Typical is this headline from USA Today on July 30: “Climate change: Hellish July validates forecasts of extreme weather.”
Much about the doomsayers’ message is correct. Global average temperature is higher now than it was when industrialization began to accelerate in the mid-19th Century. The combustion of fossil energy that empowered industrial progress contributes to the warming, which affects weather. But where were headlines about the absence of hellish weather during the dozen or so years before last year’s fatefully located monsters, when no major Atlantic Basin storms made landfall? Where now are headlines about the failure of nature to warm nearly as much as predicted by the climate modelers said to represent scientific consensus?
Other warnings?
Where, indeed, are headlines about other warnings coming true more decisively than those about weather disturbance? Those would be caveats against demands for precipitous response to distant, uncertain threat.
Climate advocacy poisons itself politically by separating elites from more-populous others. It enables wealthy celebrities, liberal politicians, ambitious diplomats, and haughty academics to assert moral superiority by preaching the need for prompt, bold action heedless of cost. But it promises economic pain for the many more people to whom cost greatly matters. Asked to incur sharply higher energy prices now for preventive benefits that might or might not become evident at some point in the future, most cost-wary people—which is most people, including many elites—decline.
In Australia, to cite a recent example, Prime Minister Malcom Turnbull, who wanted to expand the solar and wind subsidies raising Australian electricity costs and install a cap-and-trade system to control greenhouse gas emissions, was deposed by Scott Morrison, a party colleague who wants none of that. Although other issues were involved, the interplay of climate mitigation and energy cost was a strong factor in this latest change in Australia’s government.
Canada, too, is veering off the course its federal government set toward climate “leadership” born of economic sacrifice. Amid political turmoil at the provincial level is the recent election in Ontario of a premier promising to dismantle expensive climate remedies installed by his predecessor. And even the federal government, led by a prime minister who made big promises at the Paris Climate Summit at the end of 2015, is moderating its program as Canadian energy costs rise, oil production suffers, and an election approaches.
European governments, the real leaders of climate activism, also have been chastened. Many of them have trimmed or eliminated the generous subsidies for renewable energy that made electricity painfully expensive and bred political resistance. Earlier this year, the European Union again intervened in its vaunted Emissions Trading Scheme to rescue the program by raising the price of carbon credits. Reaction to that imminent blow to energy consumers should be enlightening.
Then, of course, there’s the US, where a presidential candidate whose policies would have made fossil energy unaffordable lost the 2016 election to a candidate who called global warming a hoax. Although President Donald Trump was wrong about that, his election says much about the political acceptability of climate righteousness blind to economic consequence.
A better goal
The stern logic of politics makes this clear: Nothing constructive can happen on climate when the only options are rushed and possibly ineffective overhaul of whole energy systems, on the one hand, and inaction, on the other. Climate evangelists err by demanding energy repentance when the better goal is progress. Politics never was going to permit a forced pivot away from affordable energy—and never will. It might, however, accommodate practicable change.
About climate change, preaching needs to give way—finally—to genuine problem-solving.