‘What the heck went wrong?” That, apparently, is the question roiling the environmental community as it realizes that the fight against climate change has fizzled.
As Brad Plumer writes in The New Republic, everything was looking great in 2008 for a sweeping effort to make good on candidate Barack Obama’s pledge to start turning back the rising oceans. The Democrats held Congress. Both John McCain and Obama had promised to push for capping carbon emissions. Corporations had gotten on board. Al Gore and An Inconvenient Truth had seemingly softened up the public to the point where it might go along with whatever a popular president promised.
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“Instead, the climate push was . . . a total flop,” laments Plumer.
And, of course, Plumer’s right, though not entirely for the reasons he claims.
Climate change is dead as a major political issue for the foreseeable future. Don’t believe me? Check out Obama’s remarks in his weekly radio address last weekend. It was all about energy policy, and yet not once did he talk about climate change.
In one sense that’s odd, given that without global warming, his energy policy goes from merely misguided to outright bonkers. After all, if you wanted to create non-exportable jobs, wean America off foreign oil, or pursue energy independence from the Middle East, absent any concerns about climate change or releasing CO2 into the atmosphere, you would unleash America’s massive energy reserves in coal, gas, and oil. According to the Congressional Research Service — hardly a mouthpiece for Big Oil — the U.S. has the largest energy resources of any country, Saudi Arabia and Russia included.
But in another sense it’s not odd, because telling voters that they have to pay high gas prices in order to ineffectually fight climate change would be honest but incalculably dumb politically. Recent polling shows that Americans care about the economy more — a lot more — than global warming. Skepticism about the existence of a problem or its scope has been rising in the U.S. and Europe. When a Pew poll in January asked voters what their biggest priorities were, climate change ranked second to last. Only obesity was deemed less of a priority. (Don’t tell Michelle Obama.)
Even Madison Avenue has noticed. The New York Times reports that increasingly budget-conscious consumers are no longer willing to shell out extra for self-described “green products.” As a result, the number of new earth-friendly products has plummeted. Meanwhile, Wal-Mart has largely abandoned its failed experiment with becoming a proletarian purveyor of green goods no one wants to buy.
Why has climate change lost its oomph? Plumer lays out some of the reasons, though he minimizes the damage greens have inflicted on their own credibility thanks to the 2009 Climategate e-mail scandal and wildly overstated predictions. For instance, the United Nations predicted there would be 50 million “climate refugees” by 2010. Notably, the islands of the Caribbean would see massive population losses as denizens fled for their lives. Never happened. (Meanwhile, the U.N. Environment Program has removed the map of predicted devastation from its website.)
No wonder Obama constantly insists that switching to vastly more expensive and less-efficient energy sources will create jobs. No wonder he promises that if we all get on board the high-speed-rail bandwagon, we’ll win the future. No wonder he’s trying to change the subject to as-of-yet-nonexistent gas-station price gouging and allegedly outrageous subsidies for the oil industry.
Obama’s claims are dubious at best. In supposedly pioneering China, high-speed rail has been a boondoggle of biblical proportions. Green jobs destroy more jobs than they create, and pay less. In Spain, Obama’s favorite clean-energy innovator, one study found that 2.2 jobs were destroyed for every one that was created. Indeed, across Europe, massive investments in wind and solar simply haven’t paid off.
One suspects that Obama would dearly love to drill a lot for more oil and gas, simply for the political windfall in jobs and economic growth. But after he flipped on offshore drilling, then flopped after the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, he cannot flip again without infuriating his base. So he brags about how much more drilling there is today, even though that’s the result of policies already in the pipeline.
Obama and the greens are in an exquisite bind. Without economic recovery, Americans won’t support Obama’s “investments,” but Obama’s investments are a hindrance to recovery.
— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. You can write to him by e-mail at JonahsColumn@aol.com or via Twitter @JonahNRO.
Amazing to think that in his zeal to destroy capitalism for its sins, Obama managed instead to remind everyone why ample low-priced energy and jobs are actually important to living well.
I'm ok with this. One of two things will happen when we start running low on fossil fuels:
1. We will have developed an alternative or two, and all will be well.
2. We will not have developed any alternatives, and we'll be in the same position with fossil fuels as we are now on the budget -- no more time to spare.
Either way, it won't hurt me now, and I'll be dead then.
Mike,
The problem with your analysis is that it ignores the fact we are not the only players in the game. Sure, we can drill 5-10 years down the road and the oil will still be there but what of the jobs that depend on cheap energy?
Can anybody tell me of a climate change/global warming prediction that has actually come true? I don't want that to come across as snarky, since I'm legitimately open to the idea that there have been a few accurate predictions...but I can't think of a single one.
I suggest we should start drilling now, everywhere that oil companies want to drill (ok, maybe not *everywhere*). But we could regulate the output to support a more stable energy price. Pick a per-barrel oil price and buy from foreign sources when they sell for less. Pump from our own sources when they want more.
Most people don't care about the environment when they are unemployed and can't afford to pay their bills. People want to survive, and climate change can be adapted to, as it will affect you in a hundred years. Unemployment is now, today.
Al Gore flew in private jets and rode in limousines to make a movie about flying in private jets and riding in limousines to tell people that it's bad to fly in private jets and ride in limousines. A judge ruled that only 20 minutes of this movie dealt with any kind of science (accurate or otherwise) and the rest was filler.
Then, despite urging Americans to cut back, Al Gore used more energy in a month than the average US household uses in a year. He compensated for this by buying carbon credits from himself, to fund "green" projects that would have happened whether or not he paid himself to do them.
Then James Cameron used every bit of technology available to make a movie decrying the use of technology.
And the East Anglia emails got released, despite their best efforts to violate the freedom of information laws. "Environmentalists" refused to debate the content of the emails.
Thirty years ago, leftists would have been correct in thinking that people wouldn't be able to figure this stuff out, but we no longer have to rely on the "mainstream" media. Dan Rather is no longer "the" news.
Meanwhile, coffee prices are going through the roof as climate change limits the ability of coffee producers to keep up with demand. Nothing to see here. Move along and drill, that will solve everything!
The "scammers'" evaluation of the causes is fascinating:
"What we have here is a failure to communicate."
Question:
What is the unique, broadly accepted, clearly articulated goal of the Administration, or even of the climate "science" community (scammers), with regard to climate? I am unaware that such a goal exists, which makes planning and execution rather difficult.
OK Smithers Jones, I'll call. Since we haven't done that before ("move along and drill", in your parlance), why don't we try it and see if it works? It would have the added benefits of buying us time to develop more "renewable" sources, keep us from having to continue subsidizing our oil supply in nasty places with our military, and provide jobs for the "little people", to name three left wing "causes" right off the top of my head. What's the matter, ideological blinders in the way? Beholden to "Big Environmental"? Or is it just not your idea and lefties wouldn't be able to run it?
Coffee prices going through the roof? Oh dear. Can't be climate change...must be those evil Big Coffee corporations. We need a Justice Department investigation of price-gouging and an end to their tax subsidies so we can invest in developing a healthier alternative and wean ourselves from foreign suppliers.
Blaknsam, actually yes, global warming theory predicts a cooling stratosphere which has been clearly confirmed with satellite data. The stratospheric cooling is due primarily to the direct radiative effect of the increased CO2, and is above the part of the atmosphere where the water vapor/clouds are which is what muddles the effects we expect at the surface where the predictions are highly dependent on the extent of amplifying feedbacks.
I think a few commenters are confusing things by mentioning the price surge in coffee. The last time I checked, coffee was a commodity (like sugar, wheat, beans, gold, crude oil, corn, and cotton. The prices of almost all commodities have surged in recent months). With the flood of over $2 trillion in dollars into our financial system during the last 2 years the dollar has dropped in value. Ergo, it is currently better to own coffee (or gold) than it is to own dollars. Ergo, the price spike.
But back to Climate (or was it CAGW, Climate Change, or Climate Disruption?). The air was already going out of the Global Warming balloon when the IPCC published thier last TAR (circa 2007). The Climate Alarmists overplayed thier hand big-time. One could point to the nearly joyful response from people like Dr Trenbeth, AlGore, et als during the aftermath of the 2005 Hurricane season. You see, they made the foolish correlation of tropical cyclone activty and GHG (Greenhouse gas concentration). They predicted that the record number of tropical cyclones that hit the North and Central Atlantic in 2005 was only the beginning. As global GHG concentrations go up, so do the number of Hurricanes. For 6 months climatologists, enviormentalists raced to the presses to get thier new "studies" published that warned of the End Times. Not to be out done, biologists, earth scientists, and various "scientific experts" predicted everything from the "end of winters as we know it", massive species extincition, global droughts, floods, and cataclysmic heat waves. It was all such fun, and the press was great. The only problem is, none came to pass. The following 2 Atlantic Hurricane seasons were boring. No death and destruction.
But the real clincher of the whole climate debate was the release of the emails from East Aglia, aka Climategate. We are still sifting through the morass of mendacity and fraud that many (not all) Climate Scientists subjected the public to. It got so bad that even Climate Change Lukewarmer Dr Judith Curry (one of the more reasonable proponents of the AGW movement) washed her hands of it all.
One person who has benefited from the Climategate fiasco is Steven McKyntire. A retired mining engineer and statistician, McKyntre and fellow Candadian, Dr Ross McKitrick uncovered the fallacies and statistical errors of Dr Mann's MBH9x temperature reconstructions (aka The Hockey Stick). For almost a decade these 2 men persisted in thier audits of many of the paleo-dendro temperature reconstructions that men like Biffra and Mann concocted. They also uncovered the errouneous methods NOAA and NASA use to plot recent global temperature trends. The Climategate Emails showed how far the Team (McKintyre's name for the Alarmists) went in covering up thier fraud. After Climategate, no thinking person will accept the word of our established climate "experts"
I think Obama is secretly following the dictates of Big Oil: Since oil is a finite resource, it makes sense to preserve our own supply and drain the rest of the world first. Big Oil takes their cut. Then, when world supply is exhausted (and prices have risen stratospherically) we tap our own reserves, Big Oil makes out like bandits, and Government hauls in massive royalties.
When is that "peak oil" thingy gonna become news again, I wonder...
"Blaknsam, actually yes, global warming theory predicts a cooling stratosphere which has been clearly confirmed with satellite data."
@fc-don,
The IPCC issued a number of AGW signatures. One of the main signatures is the tropical mid-tropespheric hotspot (a pocket of warm air located in the tropics at about 15000 ft AGL). Rawinsonde data for the last 20 years (as well as satellite sondings) failed to pick this up.
BTW, various places of the stratosphere have always warmed or cooled. But I've never seen any definitive study that indicates the kind of stratopheric cooling that AGW theory demands.
Also, the Alarmists have moved on. It is no long AGW, but Cimate Change. And thier focus is on the polar regions (chasing small changes in polar ice). As a matter of fact they've been obsessed with the poles for 4-5 years now that the rest of thier theories failed to materialize.
MikeB, since we have somewhere between 500 and 1000 years before fossil fuels begin to run out, we'll all be long dead before it becomes a problem.
(Can you imagine the people who lived in 1000AD trying to figure out how to solve the problems of 2000AD, using 1000AD technology? It makes as much sense as demanding that we come with alternate forms of energy now.)
rimfel: That's what happens whenever the govt stays out of the energy market. Everyone buys from the low cost producer first.
There's no need to mandate what people do naturally.
Smithers: As usual, you pipe in with evidence that has nothing to do with the topic at hand.
Can you provide even the slightest bit of evidence that coffee production is down, and that non-existant warming is to blame?
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