“Efforts to address the cause of climate change have fallen short so far. That is leading to a big push to treat the symptoms. Government and private money is pouring into plans to control flooding, address extreme heat and shore up infrastructure to withstand more severe weather caused by climate change.”
What a welcome report! It represents a triumph for wisdom and common sense.
Everyone knows that weather periodically becomes destructive and deadly. We all agree that we need to try to protect ourselves against these mighty forces. It would be unconscionable to passively submit to nature’s fury rather than to combat it. Where we disagree—often passionately—is on the best overall strategy for dealing with the challenge of destructive weather events.
For the last several decades, policy has generally been to try to reduce the frequency and intensity of destructive weather events. How? By trying to stabilize Earth’s climate, particularly the average surface temperature, by imposing radical changes in our energy consumption and lifestyles. I call this the idealistic or absolutist approach. Proponents literally want to change the world.
By contrast, the opponents of these policies, including yours truly, join the proponents in accepting the following facts: the climate is changing, violent weather events happen periodically, and humans need to do what we can to minimize the damage inflicted by such events. But like the WSJ article states, we believe that the focus should not be a Quixote-like obsession to control Earth’s climate, but on building and developing technological and physical tools that enable us to survive and withstand inevitable violent weather events. I call this the realistic approach.
There are two major problems with the idealistic approach: enormous costs and uncertain, limited effectiveness. Even the proponents themselves have made it clear that trillions and trillions of dollars ($150 trillion by 2050 according to a Bank of America study) must be spent in order to achieve such idealistic goals as “net zero” (achievable at a cost of $275 trillion by 2050 according to a McKinsey study —more than twice as much as the world’s entire GDP). And for what? To shave a few hundredths of a degree to a tenth or two off Earth’s average temperature. Never before in human history has it been proposed to spend so much for so little. And that assumes, contrary to abundant evidence, that scientists have a correct understanding of how all the various forces that affect the climate work. We certainly may question the accuracy of the calculations, given how wildly inaccurate climate change models have been. In short, we could end up wasting trillions of dollars tackling forces that lie beyond human control.
The realistic approach to combating violent weather events involves building out technologies that work —things like more wind- and rain-resistant structures, more intelligent forest management, improvements to drainage, etc. One advantage these measures have over the idealistic attempt to radically transform human society is that we know that these realistic approaches work. A second advantage is that they cost so much less than the unfathomable trillions that changing human society would cost.
In fact, one of the dangers of the idealistic approach is that in addition to there being no guarantee that they can control Earth’s climate (nor is there any guarantee that curbing CO2 emissions will, in fact, lead to fewer floods, hurricanes, droughts, fires, etc.) the enormous expenses of their experiment would leave human society poorer, hence less able to afford improvements to infrastructure and other known ways of protecting people from nature’s convulsive destructiveness.
We need to remember the lesson of the Kuznets curve, named after the late economist Simon Kuznets. Contrary to 1970s-era environmental alarmism that warned that the more prosperity human beings achieved, the more pollution and environmental damage would accumulate, we found that once societies achieve a certain per-capita income (a level far below our current per capita income) pollution lessens rather than increases. That is because humans value environmental quality, and once they are prosperous enough to afford it, they are willing and able to pay for measures that either remediate prior pollution or lessen future pollution.
Similarly, the wealthier people are in the future, the more safeguards they will be able to afford in the ongoing battle against weather and climate. I have long averred that we need an environmentalism as if people matter. Poverty has long been the most lethal condition for human beings. Conversely, wealth, prosperity, affluence, higher standards of living, a richer society, whatever term you prefer, is what will maximize human protections against adverse weather.
It is highly encouraging, then, to read of the important shift from trying to regulate the climate at astronomical, impoverishing costs to taking practical, more affordable steps to incrementally improve our defenses against destructive natural forces year by year. That is good news indeed.
