Progress and protest
“Shame on you! Keep it in the ground!”
Protestors at the 24th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change at Katowice, Poland (COP24; from New York Times).
“The United States has an abundance of natural resources and is not going to keep them in the ground.”
Wells Griffith, international energy and climate adviser to US President Donald Trump, at a COP24 panel discussion interrupted by protestors chanting the above (from New York Times).
“The government tells the little people it’s up to them to pay a tax for the ecology.”
A “yellow vest” activist protesting fuel prices increased by taxation of carbon dioxide in France (from National Public Radio).
Finally, discussion about climate change is turning serious.
Until now, United Nations climate meetings have been fright-fests yielding solemn calls for the mass nationalization of economies. Yet the governed, it is increasingly clear, don’t share the commitment. People don’t surrender choice and prosperity today to prevent uncertain calamity in some distant tomorrow. Why is that so hard for elites of diplomacy and journalism to understand?
Climate change is not a hoax. Assertions that it is are regrettable because they turn discussion into a contest of belief. Climate change is not something to believe in or not. It happens. The human contribution is increasing, largely from the combustion of fossil fuels and emanations of methane from animal agriculture.
Much less clear is whether climate change attributable to people will warm the atmosphere dangerously. Some scientists think it will. Some scientists think natural mechanisms, especially those involving water, will moderate heating, perhaps while increasing rainfall. Science encompasses these and other disparate views. Although the climate is complex and resistant to accurate prediction, only the direst predictions receive popular credit as representative of science. This is absurd. Even worse is the repeated insistence that consensus exists about these matters.
A breakthrough occurred at Katowice. The US joined Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait in withholding full support of an October UN prediction of planetary doom. In 728 dense pages, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change attempted to compare future conditions of a world that becomes 0.5°C. warmer than it is now with those of a world 1°C. warmer. The warmer world seems—guess what!—frightening. Instead of welcoming the October report, the breakaway countries called for it merely to be noted. The difference is diplomatically significant.
Meanwhile, some of the energy consumers forced to pay for remedies concocted by climate diplomats burned cars, smashed windows, and battled police in Paris. France now has a full-blown, ground-up, political crisis, which some of the protestors call a revolution. Economic pain imposed for climate remediation has roiled politics in Canada and Australia, too, although people there have not taken their grievances massively into the streets.
Noteworthy in all this is how little effect scientific prophecy has on ground-level politics. The UN climate program has produced thousands of pages of unreadably detailed predictions about the devastating circumstances people will find themselves in if they don’t quit using affordable energy immediately. Yet where governments respond with policy, people revolt when they encounter the costs. The imposed pain seems to harden questions about how accurately committees of doctorate-level scientists, smart though they be and hard though they work, can predict long-term outcomes from confoundingly complex processes.
And hasn’t moralistic extremism by now outstayed its welcome? Griffith deserves applause for refusing to be shamed into foreswearing US resource development.
Climate change can be addressed without the centrally planned overhaul of energy consumption and without leaving oil and gas in the ground. But genuine, sustainable progress must be more gradual than activists want. Forced sacrifice lacks support. Oil and gas will continue to be needed.
COP24, coincident as it was with French disruption, will prove to have been the UN’s most constructive meeting yet on climate change if it finally awakens the parties to political reality.