The problem with being president of the United States is that the holder of the office must balance priorities, make ultimate compromises, and still lead. No president gets it all right. So here’s a tip for President-elect Barack Obama: Keep the nation engaged by respecting dissent.
Obama made a video address to the Bipartisan Governors Climate Summit in Los Angeles this month that sounded like a harangue from the back benches of the Senate’s liberal wing. “Few challenges facing America—and the world—are more urgent than combating climate change,” he said. “The science is beyond dispute, and the facts are clear.”
Mischaracterizing science
Well, no. To assert that the science of any subject is beyond dispute is to mischaracterize science. Dispute exists over many facets of climate change, although supporters of vigorous precaution want to pretend otherwise. Some scientists, for example, note the poor correlation between temperature and greenhouse-gas records and argue that the gases can’t have caused much of the observed warming. They tend to attribute observed warming more to solar activity than to greenhouse gases. Other scientists say energy flux, not temperature, is what really matters and discount the effects of solar radiation. The former group sees problems with how the latter group calculates the discount. This is a scientific dispute—and hardly the only one at play in this subject.
Statements about indisputable climate-change science thus conflict with observable reality. They are propaganda tricks, attempts to foreclose discussion, tactics unbecoming the US presidency. They also provide reason to be suspicious about appeals for urgent political response.
Nor are facts about climate change as clear as the president-elect makes them out to be. Here’s just one example, from an August report on low and high-latitude climate sensitivity by David Rind of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies: “Skeptics feel the warming itself, and therefore the consequences, will be small. Most scientists, however, feel that significant warming is pretty much assured unless we limit the growth of greenhouse gases. But even researchers in the field cannot specify with confidence impacts that will arise outside of providing some generalizations.” This is from someone who believes the uncertainty “should make us even more cautious about disturbing the system.”
To brush aside the uncertainty and rush into expensive climate remedies offering limited hope for warming mitigation would be historically irresponsible, especially now. Obama will inherit a calamitous economy. The aggressive cap-and-trade program he espouses would be extremely costly. The “green” jobs he promises wouldn’t replace jobs lost to the economic problems his program would create. He must broaden his view of the climate-change issue and its relationship to economic health. He’s not a junior senator from Illinois anymore.
And he must, if he’s to live up to his promise to be a unifier, recognize the alienating effects of condescension. To the governors in Los Angeles he declared, “Denial is no longer an acceptable response.” Dissent thus becomes a psychological impairment. Like assertions about indisputable science, this is a distortion, not an argument suitable to serious conversation.
It is not denial to worry that the US can’t afford the aggressive climate-change remedies with which Obama the candidate wooed environmental supporters. It’s legitimate concern for national prosperity. And it won’t be denial to question the judgment behind hundreds of billions of dollars of federal spending on commercially weak and quantitatively unpromising energy forms. It will be responsible resistance to potentially massive waste.
Degraded debate
The climate-change debate has been degraded by the type of rhetorical smack-down Obama employed for the crowd in Los Angeles: argumentative dodges aimed at turning a complex and important issue into a simplistic joust between believers and infidels. Politically, the strategy has worked. Obama has profited from it.
But he’s not a candidate anymore. He won’t be a senator much longer. He’ll soon have executive responsibility for the welfare of a nation. He’s smart enough to adapt isolated positions to the enmeshed urgencies that define his new job. He also must learn to articulate his stances without seeming to want to quash discourse.
