President Barack Obama, in his inauguration speech Jan. 21, confirmed long-expressed suppositions that global warming has become too intertwined with religion. For years, the rhetoric of global-warming politics has differentiated angelic "believers" from devilish "deniers." Arguments for the immediate imposition of remedies have rested on faith: in warnings from climate models known for predictive lapses, in a supernatural consensus of scientists, in the ability of human beings to manipulate nature. Now responding to climate change becomes a divine directive.
"We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations," the president declared. "Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires and crippling drought and more powerful storms." The US must lead the world in a transition to "sustainable energy sources" in order to create jobs and industries and to protect forests, waterways, crop lands, and "snow-capped peaks," Obama said. "That's how we will preserve our planet, commanded to our care by God."
Who dares to challenge this holy mission?
Well, someone must.
Divine inspiration?
Even discounted for normal inauguration-day headiness, Obama's pronouncement seems grounded in something other than divine inspiration. It contains the tiresome propagandist tricks that litter prophecies of climatic doom: hyperbole, ambiguity, misrepresentation of the opposition, irrelevant evidence.
The climate perpetually changes in response to a large and complex set of processes. Among many observed changes are growing concentrations of greenhouse gases resulting from human activity and, until the last 15 years or so, an increase in globally averaged temperature. The "overwhelming judgment of science" is that human emissions of greenhouse gases contribute something, net of other processes, to observed warming. Much less overwhelming is scientific judgment about whether that contribution is so great that trimming it can meaningfully influence temperature.
The political question should be whether human beings, given the possibility that their efforts will have little or no effect, should take sacrificial precautions anyway. Over that issue, a serious argument should occur without one side claiming to stand on sacred ground. Indeed, the very high costs of remedies necessary just to create hope for moderating observed warning might be no favor at all to "our children and future generations." A foreclosing of the economic means of feeding and otherwise caring for people in service to possibly futile objectives cannot be a prospect that eludes question in heavenly realms. It shouldn't escape attention at baser levels, either.
A worldly question of the moment is why Obama felt compelled to give the politically touchy issue of climate change such sacramental attention at his inauguration. Maybe he was just performing obeisance to environmentalism. More likely, he was laying political groundwork.
But for what? A divided Congress shows no inclination to revisit the cap-and-trade issue. The administration has said it won't support a carbon tax. The Environmental Protection Agency is regulating large-source emissions of greenhouse gases.
A dark possibility is that the president was foreshadowing rejection of the US-Canada border crossing by the Keystone XL pipeline. Opponents of the system have largely abandoned their discredited arguments about threats to drinking water. Now they anchor their case to the increased supply of what they call "tar sand" and "dirty oil," exaggerating the greenhouse gas emissions associated with bitumen produced in Canadian oil sands.
Short-sighted
That strategy is environmentally short-sighted. The oil sands industry is a technical breeding ground for methods for lowering emissions from power generation, for capturing and sequestering CO2, and for environmental improvements on other fronts. But the typical environmental strategy is to resist economic work, and oil sands activity is a big target.
By foreclosing Keystone XL as a precaution against global warming, Obama would surely please environmentalists. But to claim divine sanction for a move so economically backward and environmentally compromising would draw discussion further away from scientific questions yet to be adequately addressed.
