Unserious on Warming

Whatever one thinks about the science of global warming (and I accept that human produced CO2 contributes to warming but am agnostic as to whether it does so to a significant degree), the politics are fascinating. In particular, it is quite clear that the politicians waving the scorching shirt on this one are completely unserious about it.

For all the talk about danger and crisis and even apocalypse, the glaring fact is that the politicians are rather uninterested in doing anything about their concerns. To see this, consider a policy maker who took the claims at face value. His reasonable response would be to try to find ways to decrease CO2 production that would be acceptable to the public, consistent with economic growth, feasible with present technology, and economically doable and then to push for those solutions like mad. In other words, he would be screaming for more nuclear and hydroelectric power plants, supplemented by wind, now.

Instead we get moralistic demands for austerity, sacrifice, punitive taxes, fascistic controls over everyday life, and a diminished standard of living coupled with dreamy infatuations over putt-putt cars, corn liquor engines, solar panels, and buses running on bacon grease. Any political realist can tell that the American people are not going to go for being impoverished and regimented to prevent hypothetical contributions to global warming. Yet that is the agenda.

That of course suggests that the people beating the drums don’t really believe what they are saying in any operationally serious way (just as people who whine about the abysmal state of public education but won’t look at serious reforms or challenging the teachers’ unions don’t really care about fixing that mess) and are just grabbing at power and playing to the “green” gallery. This is perhaps another reason not to lose much sleep over global warming. For if its most dogmatic proponents don’t really take it seriously, maybe the rest of us shouldn't either.