The Strange Reasoning Of Climate Alarmists
One of the oddities of climate alarmism is that, despite its mantra of “follow the science”, most of its adherents know little of climate science including the physics behind alternative energy or lack of same
But they also seem to know very little about economics and to be unpleasantly surprised when it or physics shakes gory locks at them.
For instance Canadian columnist Kelly McParland just wrote that:
“The great electrification crusade is getting complicated. The first emissions-free day has yet to dawn but the costs and contradictions of getting there are starting to accumulate.”
Specifically, “The end result of electrification is that demand for electricity goes up” and when it does “competition for an essential product has a way of causing friction.”
“Like, d’uh” because those are his words. And we do, indeed, wonder why it took the enthusiasts so long to get to this very elementary starting point.
Or not, because they don’t exactly seem keen to reach such troubling places. Canada’s parachute Prime Ministerial candidate Mark Carney actually claims inefficient carbon taxes on heavy industry alone will make Canada “more competitive” in ways he doesn’t even dare try to explain.
The legacy media seem to have decided that Donald Trump’s ataxic efforts to streamline the U.S. government are an affront to democracy, decency and yes of course the environment; in the New York Times “Climate Forward” Austyn Gaffney shrills that:
“Public lands in the United States have long been considered a national treasure. But, since Thursday, at least 3,000 employees have been laid off across the United States Forest Service and the National Park Service, part of a wave of Trump administration cuts to the federal work force.
Together, these agencies oversee 278 million acres of land, roughly the size of Texas and Montana combined. With whole teams slashed and fewer staff to provide basic functions like cleaning up trails, emptying pit toilets, carrying out trash and staffing visitors centers, employees say these vast public lands are in danger of falling into disarray.”
And everybody knows that the most dispassionate, objective and detached judges of whether a public sector job is critical to national well-being is the person currently holding it. Unless, say, they studied economics or something equally dull.
It gets worse. Also in the New York Times, David Wallace-Wells decides now is a great time to ask whether we’ve forgotten umpty-trillion dollar “climate justice” in our silly quest for something that might actually work.
No, really.
After peddling clichés about record temperatures, mounting damage and looming doom, he peddles a book “Climate Justice: What Rich Nations Owe the World — and the Future” written not by an economist or physicist but “the legal scholar Cass Sunstein” who evidently “helped run and reshape the federal government as Barack Obama’s head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs”.
Which is apparently totally different from Elon Musk trying to do it, not least because saving money or getting back to practicalities apparently wasn’t even on the agenda.
But money is.
Wallace-Wells calls the book: “a measured meditation on our obligations to one another in a warming world, and a reminder that, among all its other dizzying and distressing features, global warming is a red-hot problem from moral philosophy, asking of us, who counts and who doesn’t?”
But measured might be an inappropriate word here in two senses. First, the book is clearly deep-end loopy not middle-of the road.
And second, he flings vast sums about with abandon:
“Sunstein cites one estimate that, since 1990, carbon from the world’s five largest emitters is responsible for $6 trillion in income loss around the world. Some researchers have suggested that damage from that already-emitted carbon could grow 80-fold over this century.
According to calculations by Joe Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency, the ‘social cost of carbon’ from the United States alone reaches $1 trillion in yearly damages globally. Other estimates run higher. What are you supposed to do with numbers like these?”
Well, throw them out the window is one obvious solution because they’re obviously made-up nonsense.
The idea that the U.S. is losing a trillion dollars a year, nearly four percent of its GDP, to “carbon” alone is rubbish, to say nothing of other estimates that run even kookier.
Or that one where the world is already losing nearly six percent of its GDP, but by 2100 might be losing over 400 percent of it annually.
And indeed Wallace-Wells has some notion that he’s gone off the edge:
“They are simply too large to be metabolized into policy, as climate diplomats have often emphasized (including to me). They make any American effort to alleviate climate suffering abroad look pathetically tiny.
It’s as though they were beamed from another universe, in which wonky technocrats could solve any problem if we gave them the right data and applied the proper discounting rate.”
Yeah, that and mere trillions a year to play with as if cosmic justice were a snap for them unlike, say, algebra.
Fortunately however he and Sunstein agree that Trump is bad.
And no sum is too high for that kind of wisdom.
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