Climate turning point

Three excellent essays last month point to a turning point in climate with, I think, a broad political ramification. As people come to the realization that this boy shouted wolf once again, that this emperor has no clothes, that climate change though real is not the civilization-threatening disaster pitched at Davos, Paris, and the media, that hugely expensive climate policies do no good, they will just add one more notch to their view that the elite consensus has been disastrously wrong and politicized about just about everything, and one more impetus to our current global rightward political lurch into the unknown.

The essay that motivates this post is a surprise admission from the New York Times that not all is well, in the form of a magazine article by David Wallace-Wells. Yes search “climate” on the New York Times website, as I did to find the story, and you will be served up the usual sludge of misleading catastrophism. (“Wildfire Smoke Will Kill Thousands More by 2050, Study Finds. Pollution from fires, intensified by rising temperatures, is on track to become one of America’s deadliest climate disasters”; “Can Hybrid Grapes Solve the Climate Change Dilemma for Wine Makers?”; “The Trump Administration Is Dismantling Climate Policies… it flatly denies the science.”;…) But you will also be served this thoughtful essay. When the church starts to doubt the catechism, you know the game is up.

The way we were

Wallace-Wells does a good job reminding us just how the center of opinion has shifted in 10 years, and how weird 10 years ago looks to us now.

Barack Obama, applauding the agreement as president, declared that Paris represented “the best chance we have to save the one planet we’ve got.”…To many, it looked like the promise of a whole new era, not just for the climate but also for our shared political future on this earth. Back then, the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, liked to talk about how sustainability would be for this century what human rights was for the previous one — the basis for a new moral and political order.

At Glasgow,

John Kerry called the conference “the last best hope for the world,” and Prince Charles — now king of Britain — described it as “literally the last-chance saloon.” In his opening remarks, Boris Johnson, then the British prime minister — a conservative, of course, who surfed into office on the nativist tide of Brexit — warned, “It’s one minute to midnight on that Doomsday Clock, and we need to act now.”

How quaint this all seems now.

He documents just how climate became a political and moral cause, not a scientific or technical one, and thus sowed the seeds of its demise once people figured that out.

..the [climate] crisis seemed to offer a kind of redemptive opportunity to the whole technocratic liberal elite, whose social status and moral claim on leadership had somewhat crumbled since the financial crisis. …with the global war on terror long since dissipated into tragic farce and a new Cold War not yet well crystallized in the public imagination, the American-led global order seemed to be missing some sense of purpose, too. Here came the existential project of climate action to fill that semi-spiritual void, at least for some of those who felt it.

The illusions of secular stagnation, stimulus, industrial policy, and free government debt helped

.Looking around for places to invest, a green transition seemed like one obvious choice, which is why anyone trying to blue-sky a brighter economic future for Europe invariably proposed huge increases in clean-energy investment and why American progressives conceived their ideal form of climate action at the scale and scope of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

And, a remarkable (for the Times) admission

There were also moralistic, or quasi-moralistic, elements. In the years following Paris came more and more talk of climate justice… This was just one of many similar reckonings with systemic social inequities in those years, and a green transition may have looked to world leaders like a more appealing and forward-focused way of expiating white guilt than, say, portioning out reparations for centuries of slavery or colonialism.

…rapid warming looked to some like comeuppance for cultural decadence and consumerist excess, with climate attaining sometimes apocalyptic features of a theological morality play

When a technocratic carbon dioxide reduction merged in to the great unicause; when the mantle of “science” was wrapped around de-growth, socialism, decolonization, and, to the almost comical extreme of Greta Thunberg’s flotilla of queers for climate justice in Palestine, the median voter was sure to figure it out sooner or later.

As another example of that still mindset, still existent but accounting for the political demise of this project, Wallace-Wells writes

several of the most prominent architects of the whole diplomatic process that led to Paris published an open letter declaring the agreement’s architecture out of date and in need of major reforms.

I followed the link, which is a fascinating peek in to the part of the world that has not shifted in 10 years. The letterhead is “Club of Rome.” Yes that Club of Rome. You remember, overpopulation, crop failure, resource exhaustion, Soylent green, just around the corner? Most is uninteresting, but this is telling:

6. Recognise the interdependencies between poverty, inequality and planetary instability
New research from the Earth Commission and from Earth4All affirms the important linkages between ecological and social change processes. If the climate COP is to be more impactful, it must acknowledge that the current rate of nature loss (e.g. freshwater scarcity, land and soil degradation, pollination decline, ocean pollution) is affecting the stability of the planet. Moreover, planetary stability, now at grave risk, is impossible without decisive action on equality, justice and poverty alleviation. This is why we call for a Climate-Poverty Policy Envoy to ensure that these critical links are anchored in the negotiations and implementation actions, especially through dedicated spaces for vulnerable communities to advocate for these linkages.

My emphasis. Now I happen to agree that a huge cost of climate catastrophism has been lack of attention to pressing environmental problems, from plastics in the oceans to species extinction to air and water quality in poor countries. They “affect the planet.” But they don’t have anything to do with climate. The emphasized sentence is exactly how the cause lost the sensible middle. “Science,” which anyone who disagrees must be a “denier” of, now tells us that planetary temperature reduction requires “decisive action on equality, justice and poverty alleviation” — the latter through “dedicated spaces for vulnerable communities to advocate” whatever that means, not through the mechanism that has drastically reduced global poverty in our lifetimes, namely capitalist and fossil-fueled economic development.

As one indication of the mindset, HR McMaster tells in his book about being National Security Adviser under Trump 1.0 that previous advisers all counseled him, privately, that the US #1 security problem is… the climate crisis! Not China, Russia, Ukraine, Afghanistan, nuclear proliferation,

Today

A decade later, we are living in a very different world. At last year’s U.N. Climate Change Conference (COP29)… there were few world leaders to be found. Joseph R. Biden, then still president, didn’t show. Neither did Vice President Kamala Harris or President Xi Jinping of China or President Ursula von der Leyen of the European Commission. Neither did President Emmanuel Macron of France, often seen as the literal face of Western liberalism, or President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, often seen as the face of an emergent movement of solidarity across the poor and middle-income wor

The sense that the Great Cause is over is documentable

The retreat from climate politics has been widespread, even in the midst of a global green-energy boom. From 2019 to 2021, governments around the world added more than 300 climate-adaptation and mitigation policies each year, according to the energy analyst Nat Bullard. In 2023, the number dropped under 200. In 2024, it was only 50 or so.

To our north, the former central banker Mark Carney … as his very first act in office struck down the country’s carbon tax, before storming to a landslide victory in the April election

(though that had a bit to do with Trump Tariffs. Pierre Polievre, who campaigned on “axe the tax” was set to win also by a landslide before “liberation day.” As with the Times though, that the former Central Banker for Climate at the Bank of England turns around is perhaps more significant.)

To our south, President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico, a former climate scientist, has invoked the principle of “energy sovereignty” and boasted of booming oil and gas production in her country — and enjoys one of the highest approval ratings of any elected leader anywhere in the world.

“What changed?” asks Wallace-Wells?

…In short, everything but the science, which continued to generate grim warnings about the speed and consequences of temperature rise even as the fever of climate panic appeared to subside.

The science did not change, but Wallace-Wells seems to miss what the actual science says. More on that later. He is more interesting on the social and political changes. A moral crusade runs out of steam faster than a scientific one.

at first, we got the pandemic…[which] seemed eventually to undermine the spirit of global solidarity that lay beneath the broader project. Climate protest almost disappeared, and when it returned a few years later, the numbers were much smaller, the reception much chillier. Climate activists were once venerated as moral authorities by heads of state and a broadly liberal mass media; now they are being given jail sentences stretching multiple years for the crime of merely planning protests that might block up commuter traffic or for throwing paint against plexiglass they knew would protect the artwork hung behind it — a victimless publicity stunt if ever there was one.

I think this misses the point. The pandemic taught people that there might be other more pressing existential threats than a degree of heat in 100 years. The pandemic taught people that another branch of “scientific” consensus was incompetent and polticized. No “science” did not recommend masking 2 year olds outside. And “the pandemic” coincided with George Floyd, and the unicause moving on to a several year obsession with race, decolonization, diversity, and then gender and transgender issues.

Economics (thank goodness)

Amid the pandemic, a surge of inflation soon brought about a spike in interest rates and, with it, an end to the era in which world leaders felt like public spending was free. There were wars in Ukraine and Gaza, which exploded the fantasy that the world had passed into a more stable and peaceful state, and which, in the first case, produced the largest energy crisis since the 1970s — one that Europe managed in part by spending more on direct fossil-fuel subsidies than it did on green-energy investments.

Invasion by Russia and WWIII with China suddenly appeared next to warming 100 years from now as a plausible alternative top threats.

A political delusion fell apart too:

A few common threads of political presumption ran into it and out of it [Paris]: that support for decarbonization would naturally grow over time, especially given an informed public; that a new era of intensifying climate extremes would amplify that trend, rather than flatten it; that large-scale green investment would produce palpable benefits to the public and that those benefits would reliably erode whatever public resistance to climate action remained, at least once the pernicious influence of the fossil-fuel business could be swept out of the public square.

Few advocates believed naïvely in the caricatured versions of those propositions, but even so, it was seductive to imagine a kind of flywheel effect unfolding…. while large majorities in many countries say they support faster decarbonization, other polls show that voters don’t actually prioritize decarbonization and, crucially, aren’t willing to pay much to bring it about.

Put differently, why should Europe, or California, substantially reduce its economic prosperity — double its electricity and gas prices, tax to subsidize uneconomical vehicles, houses, and more — when those efforts have no or minuscule effects on climate? The only argument has to be as a sort of demonstration of moral purity, with the hope that China, India and Africa admire our purity and choose to follow that lead. Good luck.

The good news

Wallace-Wells lands where Bjorn Lomborg and common sense have been all along. Innovation, adaptation, and decarbonization where it makes sense first, and later when costs decline.

on the ground, decarbonization is nevertheless racing ahead. “It’s not about climate politics anymore,” says Christiana Figueres, former head of the U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change and one of the architects of Paris. “It’s about climate economy.”

…the story is one that moderates and skeptics long predicted: that decarbonization could not be reliably imposed from above on moralistic terms and would have to be powered instead by market forces, private investment and the informed consensus of a price-conscious public. These are familiar and somewhat simplistic neoliberal bromides, and if they now look prophetic, it is also a strange kind of prophecy: Global policymakers may be leaving climate increasingly to markets

He adds:

…but they are doing so even as in other realms they are embracing a new language of muscular state capacity and interventionist industrial policy.

We can confidently forecast that to fail too, in a decade or so. My motto: short whatever is popular in Washington and Beijing.

The moonshot is the mistake. New technology always starts where it makes economic sense, and then diffuses. Solar panels make great sense in out of the way places far from the grid or countries that do not have the state capacity to maintain a centralized grid. (Chinese solar panels, or whoever can make them at least cost, not necessarily American solar panels made with union labor under high tariffs!) EVs make great sense as second city cars, not replacements for the Famly Truckster.

In Pakistan as elsewhere in South Asia, the result [of energy turmoil after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine] was rolling blackouts and widespread political discontent. And then, something miraculous happened: Without any coordination or planning, millions of frustrated Pakistanis began buying and importing rooftop solar panels manufactured in China, which had grown so inexpensive that in some global markets they were cheaper to buy than the wood for a yard fence.

Wallace-Wells concludes

it’s hard for me to be quite so optimistic, and not only because warming is proceeding at a terrifying pace and the task of adapting to future risks is growing by the day.

and

I would rather it didn’t seem to be abandoning that secondary aspiration, that beyond the logic of national self-interest we still actually owe one another something: a better, more just, more equitable future for all.

On the former, he should read Koonin and Lomborg. On the latter, a plea for massive government intervention to replace the one known method of making everyone better off with the one known method of making everyone poor and miserable is just how climate policy got derailed in the first place.

*****

Koonin

Steve Koonin writes “At Long Last, Clarity on Climate,” in the WSJ, an impressively concise summary of the Department of Energy Critical Review

These will, of course, be discounted by the climate-industrial complex as usual, but Koonin’s patient recitation of scientific facts is also bearing fruit.

Koonin

There is a disconnect between public perceptions of climate change and climate science—and between past government reports and the science itself.

Koonin’s stock in trade is reading the actual science. Not the “summary for policymakers,” the tables and charts. Koonin, past president of Cal Tech and undersecretary for science in the Obama Department of Energy, is not easy to dismiss as a partisan crank.

Koonin reminds us that there are some benefits as well as costs from carbon dioxide emissions

Elevated carbon-dioxide levels enhance plant growth, contributing to global greening and increased agricultural productivity.

Greenhouses use 1,000 ppm CO2; the atmosphere has 420, up from 280 in pre-industrial times. It is interesting that CO2 reduction is called “green,” as despite its many other potential effects, literal green is not among them.

Koonin reminds us that in the actual science,

• Data aggregated over the continental U.S. show no significant long-term trends in most extreme weather events. Claims of more frequent or intense hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and dryness in America aren’t supported by historical records.

The claim repeated over and over that climate impact is here now in the form of more severe weather (also including wildfire) is simply not scientifically true.

• While global sea levels have risen about 8 inches since 1900, aggregate U.S. tide-gauge data don’t show the long-term acceleration expected from a warming globe.

The units are millimeters per year.

• The use of the words “existential,” “crisis” and “emergency” to describe the projected effects of human-caused warming on the U.S. economy finds scant support in the data.

And, moving to economic policy,

• Overly aggressive policies aimed at reducing emissions could do more harm than good by hiking the cost of energy and degrading its reliability. Even the most ambitious reductions in U.S. emissions would have little direct effect on global emissions and an even smaller effect on climate trends.

If the problem is 5% of GDP in 100 years, don’t spend 10% of GDP on it now. More generally, the policy decision to subsidize battery powered EVs, windmills, and photovoltaics does not help at all. Every gallon of petroleum not burned by you is burned by someone else over the next decades. See corn ethanol, switchgrass and biofuels for the last generation of such enthusiasms.

****

Lomborg

Bjorn Lomborg serves up a steady diet of uncomfortable truths, also coming from actually reading the science and deconstructing how it is misleadingly spun. For this month’s trio, check out his New York Post oped.

It’s a nice summary of how the extremes of the enviromental movement have been catastrophising and fear mongering for 50 years. While, on the other hand

Sensible, life-improving environmental policies over recent decades were rarely sold with fearmongering. Rich countries have dramatically reduced air and water pollution through technological advances and then through regulation. Poorer countries are starting to do the same thing, as they emerge from poverty and can afford to be more environmentally concerned. Forests have expanded globally, with this growth clear in rich countries and increasingly across the world.

Instead,

The first well-known environmental scare story was the 1968 book “Population Bomb.” which warned that the global population was out of control, and argued for widespread, forced sterilization. Given the inevitability of hundreds of millions of hunger deaths, the book also argued we should just stop food aid to basket-cases like India.

Thankfully, the world mostly ignored this misanthropic and amoral advice. Instead, scientists spearheaded the first Green Revolution that led to much higher crop yields and more than a billion more people being well fed. Today, India is the world’s leading rice exporter.

In 1972, “Limits to Growth” projected that food scarcity and pollution would cause global collapse. …

This was the mood that shaped the world’s first UN Environmental Summit in 1972, when chairman Maurice Strong declared that the world had only 10 years to avoid environmental catastrophe. He became the first director of the UN Environment Program and argued that Doomsday was “very probable” unless we ended destructive economic growth. Thankfully, we didn’t heed his advice.

Instead, persistent economic growth means more than 3 billion people — 41% of the world’s population — don’t live in extreme poverty….

The simplistic, alarmist predictions of the 1970s set the tone for decades… Climate change is definitely a real challenge, but just like before, the scares are exaggerated.

… despite fearmongering about weather disasters, the hard data shows that the death toll from floods, droughts, storms and wildfire has declined dramatically over the past century from half a million each year in the 1920s to less than 9,000 annually over the past decade — a 98% reduction….

It is striking to note that the fearmongers’ proposed solutions today are much the same as they were in past decades: repent and turn away from progress. Ivory tower, rich world academics advocate degrowth even as the vast majority of the world is dependent on economic growth to get out of grinding poverty.

…Climate economics clearly tells us that the most effective and cost-efficient approach to climate change is to invest significantly in research and development for low-CO₂ energy. By boosting innovation, we can achieve technological breakthroughs that will eventually make green energy more affordable than fossil fuels. Instead of just rich countries buying expensive green energy to feel virtuous, that can help the whole world to eventually switch because green is cheaper

Exactly where Wallace-Wells ended up, without the remaining fear, based on not knowing the actual science, and socialism nostalgia.

****

Politics

Lots of people rub their hands and bemoan the loss of trust in institutions. Well, when the institutions are over and over spectacularly wrong, whether just incompetent, politicized, or mendacious, there is a reason for loss of trust. The population bomb and the resource bomb. Ending nuclear power. Corn ethanol, fuel economy standards, rooftop solar. Financial crisis, inflation. Transport ratholes. Defund the police. Dysfunctional immigration. No biological difference between boys and girls. Detente with the Soviets. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria.

Climate is next. The “climate crisis” has been taught as gospel for 20 years. Now the average person can see their teachers have been preaching politics in the name of science. The average European and UK voter, once he or she moves on from immigration, will notice how Europe and the UK have made energy unaffordable, stopped its growth—exactly as degrowthers wish—and deindustrialized, on the altar of climate policies that do nothing to improve the climate. They will discover their stagnation, wonder that maybe ac now will address heat waves more than deindustialization. And they will ask who did this to us? Greta Thunberg was perfectly rational. If the world is going to end in 10 years from climate change and zero emissions degrowth and decolonization is the only answer, well we’d better get on it no? She was just the only one in her class who believed what she was being told. The others are now voting for right wing parties.

I do not like where the world is going. But I understand why voters are turning against where it has been.