Diplomacy and energy clash prominently over climate change. US President Donald Trump calls global warming-as he insists on labeling the phenomenon-a hoax. His undiplomatic clarity evokes cringes in the high-level international forums where climate policy is made. It also aggravates a stifling problem: Level-headed debate about climate change remains rare.
In propaganda advocating urgent response, "climate change" means not natural variation within a complex system but rather warming induced by humans certain to become catastrophic without costly manipulations of human behavior. The formulation, amplified by gullible news media, acknowledges only two views on climate change: belief and denial. Trump springs the trap with his hoax allegation. He's a denier, believers say, unworthy of attention. They parry all questions about their extreme goals this way.
Energizing diplomacy
The president's brashness also energizes diplomacy, the mechanism of international climate agreements, such as the 2015 Paris accord. Negotiations invariably proceed from a determination to do something about climate change, leaving little room for discussion about genuine risk, the likely effectiveness of mitigation proposals, or a full range of responses. When the diplomats of climate begin negotiating, too many of them begin with worst-case assumptions and turn immediately to saving the planet, certain about impossibilities such as "settled science," confident in predictions based on computer modeling of the climate, and intolerant of suggestions that the planet might save itself.
By conventional standards of diplomacy, Trump scores low and seems not to care. Yet he apparently senses that high-minded diplomacy has pushed climate-change mitigation into a politically fragile and scientifically dubious mire of imposed sacrifice. He's right. Around the world, political support for management of the climate is dissolving as energy bills leap.
What's needed, however, is not categorical rejection of a political belief system. What's needed is better understanding of the physics of climate change. Model projections still depend on crucial variables, such as climate sensitivity, about which uncertainty remains great. Negotiators of international climate agreements should know much more than they can know now about the problem they're addressing and what-within the practical confines of economics and politics-might be done about it.
Trump would perform a world-scale service if he moved discussion about climate change past its believer-denier snag. He can do so by agreeing to reconsider US participation in the Paris agreement on the condition that negotiations reopen and begin seriously to examine a full range of views on the nature and extent of warming risk and to consider responses other than panicky abandonment of hydrocarbon energy-which won't happen.
True believers groan condescendingly at such suggestions, of course. That's because true believers would rather disparage the sources of dissent than face dissent itself. Dissent, after all, carries the risk of disproving the need to respond drastically to climate change or of suggesting solutions that do not empower governments to dictate economic choices.
Propaganda tricks
While Trump might be tactically ill-advised to call the issue a hoax, he's not altogether wrong. Propaganda tricks have become tiresome and self-discrediting-from codification of "climate change" into a touchstone of political orthodoxy, to the supposed urgency to act now and wonder why after payment comes due, to the suppression of healthy skepticism about received wisdom. In only the latest example of climate-change distortion, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio wants to extract billions of dollars from five major oil companies via a lawsuit holding them accountable for supposedly measurable damage from climate change. Hoax, indeed.
In the heady strata of international relations, Trump's dismissive pronouncements on climate change receive scorn for harm they certainly do to American diplomacy. It's time, however, for the practitioners of climate diplomacy to consider the damage they'll do to energy consumers if they don't deal more critically than they have so far with activist fabrication. On this, energy consumers, through recent elections, show much clearer judgment.
