“… if you make a living doing left of center climate and energy policy, there are strong social, political, and professional incentives to get climate risk wrong…. There is little tolerance on the Left for any expression of materialist politics that challenge foundational claims of the environmental movement.”
Ron Clutz of Science Matters [1] is one of many “talented amateurs” who has worked to correct climate exaggeration and check the excesses of the United Nations’ IPCC/COP process. His post, Why Climate Alarmists Can’t Recant, is an example of his work. Clutz’s recent comment at MasterResource is worth publishing here, after which I add my observations on the reasons for the futile, wasteful crusade.
Ted Nordhaus explained why, unlike Gates, doomsters can’t recant [in his] paper:
Why I Stopped Being a Climate Catastrophist…. In “Why Climate Doomsters Can’t Recant,” I offered [several] reasons [for] why do so many smart people, most trained as scientists, engineers, lawyers, or public policy experts, and all who will tell you, and I say this not ironically, that they “believe in science,” get the science of climate risk so badly wrong?
The first [reason] is that highly educated people with high levels of science literacy are no less likely to get basic scientific issues wrong than anyone else when the facts conflict with their social identities and ideological commitments. Yale Law Professor Dan Kahan has shown that people who are highly concerned about climate change actually have less accurate views about climate change overall than climate skeptics and that this remains true even among partisans with high levels of education and general science literacy.
Elsewhere, Kahan and others have demonstrated that on many issues, highly educated people are often more likely to stubbornly hold onto erroneous beliefs because they are more expert at defending their political views and ideological commitments.
The second reason is that if you make a living doing left of center climate and energy policy, there are strong social, political, and professional incentives to get climate risk wrong. The capture of Democratic and progressive politics by environmentalism over the last generation has been close to total. There is little tolerance on the Left for any expression of materialist politics that challenge foundational claims of the environmental movement.
Meanwhile the climate movement has effectively conflated consensus science about the reality and anthropogenic origins of climate change with catastrophist claims about climate risk for which there is no consensus whatsoever.
Finally, there is a widespread belief that one can’t make a strong case for clean energy and technological innovation absent the catastrophic specter of climate change. “Why bother with nuclear power or clean energy if climate change is not a catastrophic risk,” is a frequent response. And this view simply ignores the entire history of modern energy innovation. Over the last two centuries, the world has moved inexorably from dirtier and more carbon intensive technologies to cleaner ones. Burning coal, despite its significant environmental impacts, is cleaner than burning wood and dung. Burning gas is cleaner than coal.
But as a practical matter, there is no evidence whatsoever that 35 years of increasingly dire rhetoric and claims about climate change have had any impact on the rate at which the global energy system has decarbonized. And by some measure, the world decarbonized faster over the 35 years prior to climate change emerging as a global concern than it did in the 35 years since.
To this I can add: Natural scientists do not understand economics (opportunity cost) well and have political biases toward Statism, which is the great employer of experts as “the smartest guys in the room“. Deep Ecology reigns high: the belief that Nature (capital N) is optimal and fragile. So any human interference cannot be good, only bad or worse.
Not true! As Alex Epstein memorably put it:
“The popular climate discussion … looks at man as a destructive force for climate livability … because we use fossil fuels. In fact, the truth is the exact opposite; we don’t take a safe climate and make it dangerous; we take a dangerous climate and make it safe. High-energy civilization, not climate, is the driver of climate livability.” (- The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, pp. 126–127)
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[1] Ron Clutz has more than 30 years experience leading projects analyzing and transforming organizational processes and structures. Ron has designed and administered change management programs involving small groups of executives, as well as organizational interventions involving several hundred people. He has given seminars and lectures and has written manuals and articles on task-group leadership and on strategic planning. As a KPMG partner until 1997 he led that firm’s work in Organizational Effectiveness in Canada. He developed and promoted internationally a computer-based performance improvement program called SPANS. Ron is a graduate of Stanford University in Chemistry and has been a member of the Canadian Institute of Management Consultants (C.M.C.), the Association of Human Resources Professionals, and the American Society for Training and Development. Mr. Clutz holds BA, BSc, and MDiv degrees.