“On What Principle is it That, When We See Nothing but Improvement Behind Us, We are to Expect Nothing but Deterioration Before Us?”

An essay from a liberal about conservative thought on global warming:

To suggest human beings can’t cope with slow moving climate change is astonishingly pessimistic, and the relentless soundings of the apocalypse have done more to undermine public interest in the issue than the efforts of the skeptical community.

Steven Hayward of the Breakthrough Institute has written a thoughtful essay on the gap between left and right on global warming. While this essay is far too condescending to conservative thought and takes too much of the silly "the science is settled" point of view, it is a useful addition to the conversation. Here are some points I want to highlight:

A few environmental advocates have gone as far as to say that democracy itself should be sacrificed to the urgency of solving the climate crisis, apparently oblivious to the fact that appeals to necessity in the face of external threats have been the tyrant’s primary self justification since the beginning of conscious human politics, and seldom ends well for the tyrant and the people alike. For example, Mayer Hillman, a senior fellow at Britain’s Policy Studies Institute and author of How We Can Save the Planet, told a reporter some time back that “When the chips are down I think democracy is a less important goal than is the protection of the planet from the death of life, the end of life on it. This [resource rationing] has got to be imposed on people whether they like it or not.” Similar sentiments are found in the book The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy by Australians David Shearman and Joseph Wayne Smith. One of the authors (Shearman) argued that “Liberal democracy is sweet and addictive and indeed in the most extreme case, the USA, unbridled individual liberty overwhelms many of the collective needs of the citizens. . . There must be open minds to look critically at liberal democracy. Reform must involve the adoption of structures to act quickly regardless of some perceived liberties.

I can think of no other species of argument more certain to provoke enthusiasm for Second Amendment rights than this. The unfortunate drift toward anti-democratic authoritarianism flows partly from frustration but also from the success the environmental community has enjoyed through litigation and a regulatory process that often skirts democratic accountability—sometimes with decent reason, sometimes not. 

On numerous occasions this blog has commented on the unfortunate, and growing, authoritarian bent of the Big Climate crowd. Finally, a point just about everyone senses,

Despite the fact that all of the molecular biologists of my acquaintance are shareholders in or advisers to biotechnology firms, the chief political controversy in the scientific community seems to be whether it is wise to vote for Ralph Nader this time.” (With political judgment this bad, is it any wonder there might be doubts about the policy prescriptions of scientists?) MIT’s Kerry Emanuel, a Republican, but as mainstream as they come in climate science (Al Gore referenced his work, and in one of his books Emanuel refers to Sen. James Inhofe as a “scientific illiterate” and climate skeptics as les refusards), offers this warning to his field: “Scientists are most effective when they provide sound, impartial advice, but their reputation for impartiality is severely compromised by the shocking lack of political diversity among American academics, who suffer from the kind of group-think that develops in cloistered cultures. Until this profound and well-documented intellectual homogeneity changes, scientists will be suspected of constituting a leftist think tank.”

Even though I disagree with a fair amount of what Mr. Hayward has written, I appreciate his effort in trying to bridge the gap.