As COP27 gets underway in Egypt, I am reminded of the remarks made by world leaders and politicians about what is allegedly at stake:
“We are sleepwalking to climate catastrophe. In our globally connected world, no country and no corporation, can insulate itself from these levels of chaos.” – Antonio Guterres, UN Secretary General
“There’s one issue that will define the contours of this century more dramatically than any other, and that is the urgent threat of a changing climate.” – Barack Obama, former US President
“My “Oh Shit” moment came early in my days as Environment Minister. We need to be absolutely clear-eyed about the accelerating climate crisis while using fear, anger & hope to activate us to do everything needed to ensure a safe climate.” – Catherine McKenna, former Environment Minister of Canada
These kinds of statements by world leaders, high level bureaucrats, activists, and former politicians abound in the media. The central message is that we must move heaven and earth within the current decade and beyond to avoid an absolute climate catastrophe. While these people might believe their rhetoric, the implications and logical conclusions of their statements are terrifying – they implicitly suggest a willingness, if not a desire, to torch liberal democracy while offering our youth nothing but a culture of nihilistic despair.
It is clear that climate change is not a massive world problem. The best economic estimates on climate change loss place the global GDP drag at about 0.15% per annum for the next 80 years if the world warms to the upper end of the IPCC forecast range. That is, if the world warms 5C by 2100, the world GDP will be about 10% to maybe 20% smaller than it otherwise would have been without climate change. As a comparison point, it means that climate change delays our well-being by about 10 to 20 years by the end of the century. It’s a bit like re-living the 20th century with a growth drag that puts the year 2000 at the level of the mid 1980s. Not great, but not quite the end of the world either. I explore the climate change story further in a previous post.
But let us suppose that you are unconvinced by the economic arguments and that you believe people like Catherine McKenna. Perhaps like her, you have had an “oh shit” moment too. In that case, you believe that climate change will make the world nearly unlivable if we don’t make significant changes to our economies right now. The problem now pivots: liberal democracies are slow and incremental with a focus on splintering political power, respecting individual autonomy, and building legitimacy through consensus. Parliaments, congresses, and executive branches face built-in constraints from divisions of power and the rule of law. Through centuries of experience and experimentation, our liberal democracies have given rise to the most successful and prosperous societies the world has ever known. But what if our democracies are too slow to satisfy climate change activists? Even worse, what if our democracies elect, at least from time to time, governments with a tepid view toward climate change mitigation? Seriously, between now an 2050 – the year we must, for some reason, hit net-zero emissions – what is the chance that Western countries will elect and re-elect governments that put climate change well down their priority lists? It’s certainly not zero. And if it is likely, what is the chance that liberal democracy over the coming decades can deliver on saving us from the climate catastrophe that activists tell us awaits?
Therein lies the rub. If activists can’t convince liberal democracies to move quickly on climate change by gluing themselves to famous works of art, setting fires at tennis matches, or making apocalyptic pronouncements at climate change conferences, the next logical move is an attack on liberal democracy itself. The unintended consequence of Catherine McKenna’s rhetoric, and people like her, is a deep disdain for democracy. If the electorate chooses wrong too often, changing the message from fear, anger, and hope to only fear and anger, what should we activate? In that eventuality, only benign authoritarianism can deliver us from the coming climate catastrophe. It’s not Donald Trump or “ultra-MAGA Republicans” I worry about, it’s the climate change catastrophe people who truly frighten me. The penny will eventually drop for them if they come to believe that our democracies can never bring the rapid change they think is necessary to save us from destruction. After all, what good is liberal democracy in a used up world?
In addition to sowing the seeds of authoritarianism, the climate change movement offers nothing but nihilistic despair to our youth. Again, let us suppose you believe the climate change message and that you know it is probable, if not likely, that we won’t do enough to combat climate change. The rational response to that belief is to hedge your life choices. What is the point in making long term investments in yourself with payoffs in a far off future that has a significant chance of never materializing? Why sacrifice the present and why bring another life into a world that has a large chance of being destroyed by inaction? Even if you think that our democracies will eventually choose well, you still must assign some non-zero probability that they won’t, and that non-zero probability should rationally inform your life choices today. It’s a bleak pessimistic worldview, and it’s wrong.
The climate change message terrifies me, not because of the climate change stories that will be told at COP27 over the next two weeks, but because it sets the stage for authoritarianism with all the confidence of religious zeal while simultaneously offering a philosophy of nihilistic despair to our youth. The desire to centralize power is as old as humanity itself; our liberal democracies help us resist that temptation. Let us hope that our democracy will endure the climate change activist tide.
All of this seemed spot-on. The more I hear people my age and younger go on about how the world will literally end if climate change is not stopped, the more I ask myself how anyone goes around believing schools, universities, and graduate studies promote critical thought these days. And the more I wonder how a frankly Bible-derived terror and shame wormed its way so deeply into secularism. I grew up as an immigrant in a deeply evangelical part of the American south, where a lot of the locals remain very convinced that things that haven’t happened in the past 2,000 years are just around the bend, any day now, End Times … that sort of crap. No amount of the world not ending when a modern religious celebrity claims it will prompts most of them to take two steps back and realize they could breathe a sigh of relief and stop listening to the hysterical prophesizing. I am nostalgic for the time when I thought moral scrupulosity OCD was a religious disease, as opposed to something that could be evoked just as easily in most left-wingers. But the tell-tale pattern of falling for claims that amount to “forget all the things we said would already have happened by now that haven’t, THIS TIME, everyone has to repent together, because the apocalypse is really soon!!!” no matter how often previous (identical) claims failed to materialize is unfortunately not limited to conservatives.
And, like you, I can easily see the Climate Crisis mindset degrading into cynicism, desperation, and violence. As other people keep going about exhaling CO2 and having children and using vehicles and eschewing insect meals and voting on issues that they think will impact their life as opposed to averting their (supposedly very imminent) deaths. I’ve already seen that get tense fast as the government in the US exhorted people who believed novel injectable products needed to be inflicted on everyone to *also* believe that those who disagreed with them were disease-ridden evil incarnate, and should be ostracized and coerced into obedience by any means necessary. Aside from the obvious drawbacks of feeding the petty persecution complexes of a lot of conservative nuts, we’re going to be reaping the social consequences of that acrimony for a long time to come. “Science” is not a monolith. And it very certainly wouldn’t have been speaking with a unified voice in 2020 without the mass suppression of dissenting views on social media.
Right now I think the left in the US is deeply divided between the people who were loudly excoriating any deviation from the mandates, and the people who considered themselves leftists because they were well aware that billionaires and pharmaceutical companies have a much longer track record of looking out for their profits than of caring what happens to their fellow humans. It was surreal to go from an environment where Democrats believed we should work with nature, to hearing all this flailing about the need for single-use, plastic masks, the virtues of disinfecting everything, the unquestioning trust in an old, white man who had a dismal reputation for having mishandled the AIDS pandemic (really, how does the party that champions gay rights misplace all cultural memory of what else Fauci is infamous for?) … and the list just goes on.
Get this drivel out of here.
If anyone is still reading this guys nonsense, please check reputable sources.
This is an anonymous blog post with zero sources, fact checking, hell the guy doesnt even put his name or what his real job title is.
If youre using this as a source of legitimate information instead of entertainment, you need to reconsider your education level.
Thanks! I didn’t realize that the “about” section changed to an old version with an update to the widgets on my blog. I have changed it and included my LinkedIn profile, which was also lost in the revert.
In terms of education level, I have a PhD in theoretical physics, taught at Oxford, and lead a pretty smart team of data scientists in Ottawa. If there is something specific that you have found factually incorrect, please point it out. I am more than happy to listen.