Environmentalists Will Lose, And That’s Great News For Mankind

[Geee]

The Federalist:

Here is the lede of Jonathan Chait’s long but optimistic piece on climate change (“This is the year humans finally got serious about saving themselves from themselves” says the subhead) in New York magazine:

 

Here on planet Earth, things could be going better. The rise in atmospheric temperatures from greenhouse gases poses the most dire threat to humanity, measured on a scale of potential suffering, since Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany launched near-simultaneous wars of conquest. And the problem has turned out to be much harder to solve. It’s not the money. The cost of transitioning away from fossil fuels, measured as a share of the economy, may amount to a fraction of the cost of defeating the Axis powers. Rather, it is the politics that have proved so fiendish. Fighting a war is relatively straightforward: You spend all the money you can to build a giant military and send it off to do battle. Climate change is a problem that politics is almost designed not to solve. Its costs lie mostly in the distant future, whereas politics is built to respond to immediate conditions. (And of the wonders the internet has brought us, a lengthening of mental time horizons is not among them.) Its solution requires coordination not of a handful of allies but of scores of countries with wildly disparate economies and political structures. There has not yet been a galvanizing Pearl Harbor moment, when the urgency of action becomes instantly clear and isolationists melt away. Instead, it breeds counterproductive mental reactions: denial, fatalism, and depression.

 

Although Chait makes a number of fantastical economic claims, it’s worth focusing on the moral question: Is global warming really a more ominous threat to mankind than communism was—an ideology that, at best, condemned hundreds of millions to rot in poverty under totalitarianism or, at worst, left them to be massacred or starved to death?According to some sources, Mao’s government killed at least 45 million after 1949. An unimaginable number surely suffered. This was an expansionist ideology that fomented war in every part of the world.

 

Is global warming really a more dire threat to mankind than Islamic radicalism, which has convicted millions of people to be subjects of brutal theocracies, and billions more to be the targets of terror? Those thousands of Muslim refugees aren’t risking their lives in the waters of the Mediterranean because there’s been one-degree Celsius change in the temperature over the past century.