Climate Change and the Importance of Skepticism: Sydney Williams
We live in strange times. We don’t think through the consequences of ending “endless wars.” We don’t debate what it means for our children and grandchildren to add trillions of dollars to a national debt that already, as a percent of GDP, is the highest since the Second World War. We permit hundreds of thousands of immigrants, many of whom are infected with COVID-19, to enter our country illegally through our southern border, while limiting the number of legal immigrants. We have replaced free-thinking skeptics with acolytes for big government. The dark arm of progressivism is aimed at increasing the power of government and decreasing the role of the individual. When it comes to climate change, progressives borrow from George W. Bush: Either you are with us, or you are against us. There is no room for debate.
In part, this is because of the leisure time we have gained through economic success. The technological advances and the increased wealth of our nation and its people – results of free market capitalism operating under the rule of law – would be unimaginable to our grandparents. Included in our well-being is the environment, which is far healthier than it was twenty, fifty and a hundred years ago. It was individuals, not government agencies, that led that change – through eleemosynary organizations like the Sierra Club and Audubon Societies. New York City began to migrate from coal to oil in the 1930s and Los Angeles recognized the problem of smog in the 1940s, both long before the advent of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in December 1970. Government regulations have hastened the move to a healthier environment, but they were not the instigator. It is the wealth produced through capitalism, operating in a society that encourages individual initiative, which has afforded us the ability to focus on climate. It is ignorance of that past that helps feed the myth that it is government, not free market capitalism, that has been the principal force for the good of our environment. In seeking political power, progressives pander to the electorate on soft issues – “wokeness,” inclusion, identity, equity, critical race theory and hurtful words – while they fail to encourage those traits that historically led to success: merit, aspiration, competition, diligence and hard work.
On August 10, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its latest report on climate and projections for the future. How many people have read its 4,000 pages? Not many, I suspect. I, for one, have not. According to summaries, the Earth has experienced a two-degree Fahrenheit rise in temperature since industrialization began about two hundred years ago. We know man has been responsible for some of that increase, but the exact level remains in question. Nevertheless, a recent lead editorial in my local paper, The Day, expressed no doubt as to the cause: “Humans have heated the planet about 2 degrees Fahrenheit since the dawn of the industrial age.” The next day Steven Koonin, director of the Center for Urban Science and Progress at New York University wrote in The Wall Street Journal: “As is now customary, the report emphasizes climate change in recent decades but obscures, or fails to mention, historical precedents that weaken the case that humanity’s influence on the climate has been catastrophic.”
The recent storm, Henri, was a reminder that climate and weather, while related, are inherently different. When then President Donald Trump, on a cold day, joked he could do with more global warming, Anthony Leiserowitz, director of Yale University’s project on climate change, denounced the comment as “scientifically ridiculous,” and added: “There is a fundamental difference in scale between what weather is and what climate is.” Yet the liberal media cites anthropological causes for today’s “extreme” weather. Predictors of climate doom have been with us for decades. In an August 10, 2021 op-ed in the New York Post, Bjorn Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center (and in my opinion the most rational voice in the climate wars), wrote: “The first U.N. environment director claimed half a century ago that we had just ten years left, and the then head of the IPCC insisted in 2007 that we had just five years left.” Nevertheless, here we are, with climate Cassandras still shouting from rooftops.
Progressives like to tell us to follow the science. But science is (or should be) innately skeptical of scientific “facts.” The motto for the Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of sciences founded in 1660, is nullus in verba, which translates as “take nobody’s word for it.” The qualities of skepticism and independence of thought that Professor Gilbert ascribed to scientists, in the rubric that heads this essay, should also apply to journalists who too often display a religious-like devotion to their favorite politicians and policies. Too many are deficient in curiosity, behaving like acolytes for narratives they accept on faith. This indifference by Leftists to facts is not new. In his 1970 book, Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding: Community Action in the War on Poverty, Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote: “Somehow liberals have been unable to acquire from life what conservatives seem to be endowed with at birth: namely, a healthy skepticism of the powers of government agencies to do good.” Little has changed in fifty years.
Yet, much has changed for the better, in terms of carbon emissions, at least here in the United States. Using numbers from Statista, a German company specializing in market and consumer data, The United States reduced its carbon dioxide emissions 30% between 2007 and 2020 (6.003 million metric tons to 4.571 million metric tons), while expanding its GDP by 48% ($14.45 trillion to $20.9 trillion). But you would not know that from reading the Washington Post or The New York Times. The real culprit, in terms of carbon dioxide emissions is China, the worlds largest producer of rare earth minerals, raw materials on which many “green” industries are dependent. Their carbon dioxide emissions increased 49% between 2007 and 2019 to a level 123% above that of the United States. However, during those years, China’s economy expanded 420% to $14.3 trillion; so even in China there has been improvement. The message from the media should be one of hope – political leaders should applaud what the U.S. has accomplished, while encouraging it to do more, and they should point out China’s opportunities. We have no need for scolds.
What we need is less hyperbole and more acknowledgment of what has been accomplished in terms of climate change. As well, we should talk about adaptability, which is the only option most species have, and which we tend to ignore. The single biggest factor in the U.S.’s reduction in greenhouse gasses over the past dozen years was the substitution of natural gas for coal. Again, free markets led the way. Today, in the U.S., according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), renewables (wind, solar and water) account for 19.8% of electricity generation, up 224% since 2007. In the same period, natural gas has increased by 180% and now accounts for 40.3% of electricity generation. Over those thirteen years, the use of coal in electricity generation declined from 40.5% to 19.3%. While we have further to go, we have come a long way. Our success should be hailed as a marker for other developed and emerging economies.
Human progress has always been most productive and most equitable when based on millions of individuals making tens of millions of decisions. It is always least productive and most inequitable when a few bureaucrats make decisions on behalf of the people. One has only to look at countries that have adopted central planning, from Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union to China, Cuba and Venezuela. The politicization of climate serves no one, other than those industries and individuals who benefit and the politicians who do their bidding. What is wanted are skeptics, not group-think conformists.
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