But I don't know that it's man-made. Trump does not make arguments. There are just But if you rewind or fast forward through the phrases, you can find plenty that do exactly those things. The point here is not to catch Trump in a contradiction. Trump contradicts himself every time he opens his mouth. Nothing divided by nothing is nothing. Rather, the point is that Trump, in this as in so many other areas, is a rawer, truer reflection of right-wing thinking on this subject.
He just says whatever comes to mind in that pursuit, grabs whatever talking point bubbles up from his Fox-informed subconscious. Persuasion is not any part of this, in either direction. The goal is only to deflect, confuse, and mislead, in defense of the status quo. All the denialist talking points — nefarious scientists, sunspots, natural cycles — have their true believers in the base, among the chumps who drink the Kool-Aid and fill up the comment sections.
But the motive force is not any assessment of science. To acknowledge anthropogenic climate change is to empower liberals, open the door to additional taxes and regulations, and threaten the power of the fossil fuel industry.
The Republican Party as currently constituted will simply never do those things. The arguments are secondary. It implies that all those hours spent earnestly arguing about climate science have been, to a first approximation, wasted. But it always should have been obvious that those with power connected to fossil fuels will not give up that power without a fight.
They certainly will not give it up based on scientific or humanistic considerations. They will defend their prerogatives and privileges, as those with power always have, throughout history. And they will always find people who will defend their interests, using whatever language serves the purpose. The arguments offered to the public may be scientific, political, or economic, or some jumble thereof, as with Trump. They may make occasional rhetorical concessions, if the tide of public opinion threatens them.
They will perform substantive engagement, to the extent circumstances demand it. But defense of the status quo is the point, not the arguments. And the only way it can be overcome is through power and money, i. They are gaslighting, not persuading, and it will end when they are beaten and removed from office, not when climate scientists find just the right argument.
Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower through understanding. Hence, the conservative Washington think tanks such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation are among the biggest recipients of oil and gas money. Peter J. Jacques, Riley E. Dunlap, and Mark Freeman have also demonstrated that corporate interests are funding indirectly anti-environmental expertise by bankrolling conservative think tanks: of environmentally-sceptic books written between and , only 11 were not linked to corporate-funded conservative think tanks.
Yet there appears to be more to the climate change denial movement than the mere defence of economic self-interest. The latter have assumed centre stage since the early s, focusing on issues of morality: they have been instrumental in bringing about the so-called culture wars through their positions on a wide range of issues—abortion, same-sex marriage and, more recently, stem cell research.
Although conservative activists sometimes find common ground among themselves, social conservatives ought not to be confused with their fiscal counterparts, also known as small-government conservatives, nor with libertarians whose main political aim is to reduce drastically the size and prominence of the federal government and give business a free rein.
A few notable exceptions notwithstanding, 26 the effort to question the validity of the theory of man-made global warming has been spearheaded largely by the admirers of Barry Goldwater and Jack Kemp rather than the disciples of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.
The Heartland Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, all conservative and libertarian think tanks, have also joined the fray in addition to the well-funded advocacy groups Americans for Prosperity and Americans for Tax Reform.
They claim to disagree with the environmental community on the means, but not on the ends. They argue, in a counter-intuitive way, that the best way to protect the environment is by maximizing economic freedom and eliminating government.
This can be achieved, they suggest, by the consolidation of private property rights which will foster good stewardship since private land owners have more incentives than do government bureaucrats to take care of the land they own. For instance, strong private property laws are often the best ways to encourage people to act in environmentally friendly ways.
We tend to act less responsibly when we are not directly affected by our actions. Over the last few years, no social movement has epitomized this attitude better than the Tea Parties, who came into being in the wake of the financial meltdown in It is undeniable that economic issues are much more central to Tea Party activism than social ones. In order to grasp the stakes of the climate war, it is useful to consider the words of the prominent environmental philosopher J.
Baird Callicott:. It will not suffice … simply to encourage people individually and voluntarily to build green and drive hybrid. On the contrary, the only hope we have to temper global climate change is a collective sociocultural response in the form of policy, regulation, treaty, and law. It was to acknowledge the limits of free-market capitalism. In that regard, the climate denial movement clearly emerges as a case of ideological grandstanding.
As a matter of fact, a significant number of American corporations, by definition dedicated to free-market economics, have already jumped on the global warming bandwagon.
The US Climate Action Partnership, set up by several major corporations in cooperation with various environmental organisations in , is a case in point. Their most zealous proponents are not prepared to surrender without putting up a fight. Bush, has pointed out that the political controversy over man-made global warming is the most recent front in the so-called culture wars.
The climate change denial movement sometimes appears as the extension of Cold War politics by other means. Deniers are prone to dismiss the theory of man-made global warming and all the attendant government schemes to mitigate it as a kind of socialist conspiracy hatched by the enemies of economic freedom. George F. Will, in a Washington Post column, derided the threat of global warming as a convenient strategy used by big-government liberals like Al Gore and Barack Obama to reinforce what he perceives as the pre-eminence of statism in American life and to drive the last nail in the coffin of economic freedom.
Now the experts will regulate your life not in the name of the proletariat or Fabian socialism but—even better—in the name of Earth itself. During the presidential primary contest, each candidate had to pass a number of ideological litmus tests in order to prove his or her conservativeness on key issues like illegal immigration, abortion, and same-sex marriage. Curiously, denying man-made global warming or downplaying its consequences turned out to be one of the requirements foisted on the candidates.
Mitt Romney, who eventually became the Republican nominee, remains a case in point. Neela Barnjee, reporter for the Los Angeles Times , has shown that, although Romney had been pro-active on climate policy at the beginning of his term as Governor of Massachusetts , he had no compunction about changing his position when he first decided to run for president in Once again, the climate controversy is just one arena of contention in the multifaceted effort to protect American corporations and business owners from government regulations.
Ideological intransigence also prompted Maine Senator Olympia Snowe to not seek a fourth term in John McCain, who unavailingly had co-sponsored several climate bills in the Senate before winning the Republican presidential nomination in , did not even mention global warming in his acceptance speech at the Republican Convention in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
The rub for the Republican Party is that although market fundamentalism may play well during some Republican primaries across the country, it is unlikely to be a winner with the larger electorate in the general elections, which Mitt Romney found out in What may be more appealing to the general public, however, is the opposition to climate legislation in defence of the so-called American way of life.
Nevertheless because of mounting scientific evidence 44 it is becoming increasingly untenable to deny reality, which has led conservative and libertarian think tanks to modify their tactics. But then they throw in a variety of arguments that actually undermine the public appetite for action.
First, they assert that the negative repercussions of a global rise in temperatures are being grossly overstated in order to alarm the public and decision-makers into accepting the environmentalist agenda. Second, nondenier deniers argue that actions to mitigate the effects of global warming will be economically destructive and environmentally insignificant. Consider the testimony of Kenneth P. The commitment to adaptation rather than mitigation has been repeated endlessly in recent conservative and libertarian publications and statements on global warming.
Consider, for example, their repeated claim that a unilateral approach to climate change by the American government would make no real difference, an argument often used to discredit efforts by Congress to impose mandatory reductions in greenhouse gas emissions across the nation.
Senators Robert Byrd West Virginia and Chuck Hagel Nebraska issued a resolution blocking the ratification of the Kyoto protocol, invoking the same line of argument.
In his scathing indictment of the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit, Steven Groves, of the Heritage Foundation, took exception to the fact that, under the terms of a Kyoto II climate change treaty, the United States would be required to help emerging economies, including China—its main economic rival, improve their environmental standards by sharing American findings in clean energy research. Developing nations, including economic giants such as India and China, view climate change as a cash cow…and more.
In the context of the economic difficulties faced by the American economy since and in light of the strong Chinese economy, it is at the very least problematic to require the United States to engage in serious measures concerning climate change action with no certainty that the Chinese will also be required to do their fair share.
Steven Groves contends that under the terms of a Kyoto-style treaty, the United States would be marginalised and exploited by other nations:. A committee or committees of international experts—whose members may include representatives from overtly hostile nations—will have the final word on whether the US climate record is up to snuff.
Were the US Senate to ratify a Kyoto-style treaty, it would have to ensure governmental protection of American interests. It is not unreasonable, for example, to demand that emerging economies, and especially the BRICS Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa , not be exonerated from the tremendous efforts necessary to deal with climate change, although the priority of climate change deniers appears to be to find arguments to stall any measure to address climate change.
While they are quick to point out the futility of unilateral action on the part of the United States, they are also reluctant to endorse multilateral action. Taken together, these two positions give one the impression that taking no action continues to be the best course of action. The reason for this is that in matters of environmental policy, American fiscal conservatives and libertarians have tended to subjugate land health and high environmental standards to the imperatives of economic growth.
Bush White House, replied to a journalist who asked him in whether American people ought to make lifestyle adjustments in order to remedy energy challenges, that, to paraphrase George H. Bush, the American way of life was not negotiable:. That's a big no. The President believes that it's an American way of life, and that it should be the goal of policy makers to protect the American way of life.
The American way of life is a blessed one. And we have a bounty of resources in this country. What we need to do is make certain that we're able to get those resources in an efficient way, in a way that also emphasizes protecting the environment and conservation, into the hands of consumers so they can make the choices that they want to make as they live their lives day to day.
This is an aspect of the debate particularly embraced by climate change deniers because it allows them to stand for the creation of wealth and higher standards of living for the American middle class. Senator James Inhofe wrote that his mission was to protect the average consumer from higher prices and regulations in a article in Human Events.
Even though there is little doubt that such an approach will lead to a dead end, it does make political sense in the short term: branding themselves as the intransigent advocates of the American way of life allows climate deniers to attack their adversaries from a position of strength.
In The Assault on Reason , Al Gore seems to imply that the American dedication to high consumption and economic growth will not need to be called into question, that quite the opposite holds true:.
The opportunity presented by the climate crisis is not only the opportunity for new and better jobs, new technologies, new opportunities for profit, and a higher quality of life. It gives us an opportunity to experience something that few generations ever have the privilege of knowing: a common purpose compelling enough to lift us above our limitations and motivate us to set aside some of the bickering to which as human beings we are naturally vulnerable.
Eric Pooley, author of The Climate War , begs to differ. To reduce the amount of CO 2 pouring into the atmosphere means dramatically reducing the amount of fossil fuel being consumed. Even under the best scenarios, this will involve something more like a revolution than a technical fix. Raising public awareness about global warming is one thing, and it is hard enough, but convincing the public to change its behavior in order to avert global warming is quite another.
To be sure it would be unfair to state that President Obama did nothing to address the climate crisis. It also begs one crucial question: were Barack Obama and Rahm Emanuel right in thinking that the public would not have accepted the passage of a cap-and-trade bill?
Given a choice between doing more about the environment and anything else, the environment wins. If in fact most Republicans were dead set against the Waxman-Markey Bill, a significant number of Democrats also proved lukewarm about the bill if not downright hostile to it.
Climate change deniers also illustrate the strong ideological forces that have been shaping Republican politics over the last few decades. Predicting the cost impact of various potential warming scenarios requires us to concatenate these climate predictions with economic models that predict the cost impact of these predicted temperature changes on the economy in the 21st, 22nd, and 23rd centuries.
It is hubris to imagine that these can guarantee accuracy, and it is impossible to validate such a claim in any event. Though three degrees Celsius is the most likely case, competent modelers don't assume that the most likely case is the only case.
Rather, they build probability distributions for levels of warming and their associated economic impacts. The concern is thus with the inherently unquantifiable possibility that our probability distribution itself is wrong. A sense of caution might lead us to suggest emissions caps as a form of insurance against the sort of devastating global warming that lies outside of the IPCC distribution. But standard cost-benefit analysis would suggest that such a precautionary policy is extraordinarily expensive.
Suspend disbelief about the real-world politics for a moment, and assume that we could have a perfectly implemented global carbon tax. That's a heck of an insurance premium for an event so unlikely that it is literally outside of the probability distribution. So what should we do?
On some intuitive level, it is clear that rational doubt about our probability distribution of forecasts for climate change over the next century should be greater than our doubt surrounding the likelihood that a flipped quarter will land on heads around times of 1, Yet we cannot incorporate this doubt into an alternative probability distribution without doing our own armchair climate science in place of the IPCC, nor is it responsible to set a goal and announce "whatever it takes!
It makes sense to try to prepare for the possibility of greater harm than we now project, but that goal has to be pursued in a way that takes account of the actual risks and costs involved. As it happens, the problem of climate catastrophe is not without likenesses.
There are other potential, unquantifiable dangers that are of comparable likelihood and severity to that of outside-of-distribution climate change. Our policy toward these dangers is never one of unreserved caution. Start with the example of an asteroid striking the Earth. The consensus scientific estimate is that there is a 1-in, chance that an asteroid large enough to kill a large fraction of the world's population will hit the earth in the next years.
That is, we face a 0. This scenario seems reasonably comparable to outside-of-distribution climate change. The U. Clearly for some potentially lethal threats we are unwilling to insure ourselves at spending levels that are orders of magnitude less than what is proposed for mitigating climate change. Unfortunately for humanity, we face many dimly understood dangers: bioengineering technology gone haywire; a regional nuclear war in central Asia kicking off massive global climate change in addition to its horrific direct effects ; a global pandemic triggered by a modified version of the HIV or Avian Flu virus; or a rogue state weaponizing genetic-engineering technology.
This list could go on almost indefinitely. To do everything conceivably possible to prevent catastrophic climate change is to become lost in the hot house of single-issue monomaniacs and to ignore the array of dangers and opportunities that we confront. A healthy society is constantly scanning the horizon for threats and developing contingency plans to meet them. We can be confident that humanity will face many difficulties in the upcoming century, as it has in every century.
We just don't know which ones they will be. In the face of massive uncertainty, hedging one's bets and keeping one's options open is almost always the right strategy. Money, technology, and a flexible and creative political and economic culture are the raw materials that will give us the most options to deal with physical dangers.
Markets, democratic political institutions, and economic growth are therefore the means toward greater adaptability in the future. America faces a tradeoff in which neither option is appealing. On the one hand, we could continue to create wealth and, because of carbon emissions, see meaningful reductions in the rate of economic growth in less than a century. On the other hand, we could significantly clip the wings of the American economy, making ourselves poorer now and, because of compounding, possibly poorer later.
When presented with option A or option B, neither being ideal, the entrepreneur chooses to invent C. This is, in a way, what has happened in the energy sector over the past decade and can continue to happen. America has experienced a technology-driven energy revolution with little inducement or guidance from Washington. Within the last decade, the United States has developed a new green-energy technology, leading to the fastest rate of reduction in CO2 emissions of any major country in the world and to permanent reductions in absolute emissions.
The Department of Energy expects that energy-related carbon emissions will remain below levels for decades, despite population growth. This enduring, structural change in the American energy sector is the result of a series of innovations allowing us to extract so-called unconventional fossil fuels. The most important of these innovations has been hydraulic fracturing, often called "fracking," but other important developments include tight-oil extraction, horizontal drilling, and new applications of information technology.
The fracking revolution has shifted American energy sources toward gas and away from coal. Since natural gas emits about half the carbon dioxide that coal does, our impact on the climate has been reduced. The elaborate climate models don't account for this kind of innovation. Although they are, in a sense, models of change, they actually tend to be very static compared to the real world, as they can't predict large structural shifts due to technological innovation.
In the future, radically cleaner fuel sources or technologies that could remove carbon from the atmosphere would be game-changers in the debate about climate policy, just as the fracking revolution has already changed the conversation.
The question is how to bring about such game-changers. The American energy revolution provides an example. It is important to remember that less than a decade ago, virtually no one saw the rapid development of an alternative energy source on the horizon. In , the International Energy Agency projected that U. The discussion of technological solutions focused on far-off, highly speculative, panacea-like technologies such as wind and solar energy. Yet there was something latent in the American economy that allowed it to dramatically and unexpectedly disprove policymakers' lack of imagination.
The United States was able to launch its recent energy revolution for the same reason it has had revolutions in information technology, biotechnology, and certain other sectors. Three core elements undergird all these revolutions: a foundation of free markets and strong property rights; the new-economy innovation paradigm of entrepreneurial start-ups with independent financing and competitive-cooperative relationships with industry leaders; and support by government technology investments.
The primary driver has been the regulatory framework of strong property rights and free pricing. Among the world's key petroleum-producing countries, only the United States allows private entities to control large-scale oil and gas reserves. And outside of North America, hydrocarbon pricing is typically governed by detailed regulatory frameworks that are built around the realities of conventional petroleum production.
Freer pricing, in combination with ownership of mineral rights, allows innovators in America to reap the economic rewards of their imagination and risk-taking. That is a credit to America's more flexible regulatory structure. Finally, government has served the role of catalyst rather than manager.
The Breakthrough Institute has produced reliable evidence that government subsidies for speculative technologies and research over at least 35 years have played a role in the development of the energy boom's key technology enablers, such as 3-D seismology, diamond drill bits, and horizontal drilling.
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