The 400pp/m Milestone: A Time to Rage? Or Stop and Think?

Our world just reached a scientific and strategic milestone: humanity was told to do whatever it takes to avoid reaching atmospheric concentrations of CO2 gases of 400pp/m. That ceiling was exceeded last week. No plan has been launched—with the necessary champions—to get us back under it. We’re sailing along in unchartered heavens and seas.  

For the time being, however, the surest voices in the climate change movement are content to rage: to deploy the same divisive excuses that have been dividing us for centuries. We are facing a transformative threat and that threat’s prophets read like 19th-century pamphleteers.

Here’s Britain’s environment author George Monbiot:

“The problem is simply stated: the power of the fossil fuel companies is too great. Among those who seek and obtain high office are people characterized by a complete absence of empathy or scruples, who will take money or instructions from any corporation or billionaire who offers them, and then defend those interests against the current and future prospects of humanity.

“This new climate milestone reflects a profound failure of politics, in which democracy has quietly been supplanted by plutocracy.”

Al Gore offered an easier and simpler message, telling Torontonians, “There is only dirty oil and dirtier oil.” Presumably, we can continue to use the stuff—or try to stop it—whether our actions profit friends or foes, or not.

After comparing the policy effectiveness of the United Nations to “a small boy with olive oil on his hands trying to pull a whale from the water,” Nicholas Thompson of the NewYorker presents a more imposing concern:

“We can ask that China do a little better; there are a million little things that make emissions lower and our lives better. But the West created this problem through gluttony; we can’t solve it by demanding the asceticism of others.”

Our politicians are all on the take and we are gluttons. Plutocrats block our ears to reason; we can’t save our own skins, let alone give others a helping hand. If most of this were true—and not just the toxic possibilities of high-definition television and Netflix—our civilization would have collapsed long ago. Baby booms, passenger jets, family cars, air conditioning, global tourists, and Al Gore’s lecture circuit wouldn’t exist. Consequently, greenhouse-gas levels would be fine and life expectancy levels would still be stuck in the 50s.

The doomsday milestone at hand, however, is not the exhaustion of our ability to solve big problems. Rather, what is at hand is the failure of a set of grandiose calculations by climate change bureaucracies and advocates. People today are not unable to reason; they’re simply being offered unimpressive solutions.

The movement hoped that multilateral diplomacy, atmospheric science, and abstemious documentaries would eventually shame North Americans into state-imposed reductions of fossil fuel consumption. Sometime after we’d squealed in public long enough, China and the rest of the developing world would start to restrain their consumption as well. (All this global restraint, of course, would have to be sufficiently severe as to accommodate over a billion more consumers in this century, joining the ranks of hundreds of millions already desperately hungry to secure residential electricity, central heating, and practical ways to get to work in today’s mega-cities.)

The movement has now realized that North Americans aren’t ready to leave the table. It has retreated, therefore, into euphemisms about “putting a price on carbon” and damning oil producers for continuing to produce the stuff. (Needless to say, a wicked capitalist without a ready buyer is already on the way to become a harmless bankrupt.)

What to do? 

When the problem of global climate change comes up, question talk of global plans and personal sacrifice. 

Saving the planet is more important than saving the face of the United Nations. Thousands of new bike lanes may save thousands of lives, but they won’t save the planet.

North Americans have been global problem-solvers before—when they were acting like North Americans. We succeed by finding solutions not by practicing and selling restraint. We didn’t abate the AIDS epidemic or significantly reduce world hunger by eating less or asking Africans to join us in having less sex.

The world would be best served if our scientists and engineers stayed away from the pulpit and concentrated on affordable alternatives to fossil fuels and more efficient ways to use energy generally.

North Americans won’t be shamed into acting on climate change. Furthermore, they will want to treat each other fairly in doing their share internationally. On the other hand, Washington and Ottawa politicians should be able to talk openly about a harmonized carbon tax, in the context of a simulative fiscal policy, along with an unprecedented commitment to energy R & D, if their proposals were actually designed to solve the problem.

Canada’s Keystone Pipeline Project: Al Gore’s “Big Bird”

It used to be easy for Republican politicians to warn that runaway government spending would destroy the American Dream and global progress too. Then, along came the awkward elections of 2010 and 2012, when the whole country started to take them seriously. Churchillian rhetoric found itself at war.

During his first debate with that appeaser in the White House, Romney announced with fatherly finality that he’d fire “Big Bird.” An illusion of children and a yellow body costume would have to be sacrificed.

In not asking anything from voters with any propensity to vote Republican, he trivialized his campaign and made fiscal probity a laughing matter.

Stopping the Keystone Project that proposes to transport crude oil from Alberta’s oil sands to under-utilized Texas refiners is the environment movement’s “Big Bird.” Opposing the project generates great visuals, but it offers no strategic value in the fight to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions.

On behalf of the young science of climate change, the project’s opponents ignore nearly three centuries of science on how economies work. They insist the globe’s health is at risk and then aim their guns at Canadian enterprise that won’t alter global prices or fossil fuel consumption, neither globally nor in the US.  They single out a high-cost producer of fossil fuels rather than the cheaper sources of oil that actually allow for excessive consumption.

They say politicians have to start acting globally, in concert, while lobbying the President to divide the continent’s energy market and, in effect, abrogate trade agreements with Canada. They say corporations are polluters and that the middle class is innocent, while complaining that their adversaries are ideological.

They tell Washington politicians to take extreme action against Canadian interests and Albertans who can’t vote and look the other way as US swing states undertake a “renaissance” in fossil development.

There is nothing wrong with playing politics to save the world or, for instance, just a piece of Western civilization. Al Gore and the chief strategists of the climate-change movement, however, appear no smarter or more sincere than Mitt Romney.

Ultimately, we’ve got to do something about entitlements, hard-faced Republicans insist. But first let’s cut off PBS. Ultimately, we have to put a significant price on carbon, Al Gore concedes in the Guardian. And first let’s threaten to burn Barack Obama in effigy if—after all the proper environmental reviews are complete—he doesn’t kill the Keystone pipeline project.

Cynicism doesn’t make climate change or public debt smaller problems. It can, however, crowd out constructive discussion and serious problem-solving.