The Empty Spectacle of the U.N. Climate-Change Summit

A s President Joe Biden limps into Glasgow, there are only two things holding back his big, showy climate agenda: politics and economics.

If you happen to be one of those people who insists that climate change should be “beyond politics,” then you are certainly entitled to the sentiment — but spare us any lectures about “democracy” in the future, because politics is how liberal-democratic societies go about their public business.

And the politics here do not favor dramatic action, whatever is said or notionally agreed to in Glasgow.

Joe Biden and his Democratic allies face the same problem as other would-be climate saviors throughout both the developed world and the poorer countries: There is very little popular support for radical social and economic change in pursuit of climate goals. Even a sharp-as-a-doorknob goofus such as President Biden understands this, which is why his anti-coal program was the first thing the White House put on the altar when negotiating with Senator Joe Manchin for universal pre-K and tuition-free community college. Climate change, they tell us, is an existential threat, against which bold and radical action must be taken — but not if it means Democrat-voting millionaires in Greenwich, Conn., and Cambridge, Mass., have to pay for their own babysitters.

For the same reason, the Biden administration is expected to end up approving more oil-and-gas development on federal lands. You may think that’s a good policy — I think that’s a good policy. But if you believe, as the people we’ll all be hearing from in Glasgow do, that the end is nigh unless there is fundamental change that includes a dramatic reduction in the use of fossil fuels, then there isn’t any acceptable tradeoff there. The reason Green New Dealers insist on attempting to foist upon us these fantasies that their climate agenda will produce millions of new, high-paying industrial jobs is the unspoken fact at the center of this issue: The Biden administration and other like-minded governments around the world are not going to sacrifice some large share of 10 million energy-industry and energy-adjacent jobs in pursuit of climate goals — especially when U.S. action is expected to have approximately squat in terms of global climate impact without comparable measures from governments no sane person trusts to implement them.

You’ve probably seen the polls: Americans say they care about climate change — until it comes time to pay for climate policy. Some 68 percent of Americans — more than two-thirds — say they would not be willing to pay $10 a month in order to fund measures to prevent or ameliorate climate change. They are not going to support paying more for gasoline, for heating and cooling their homes, or for food.

Maybe they should. But they won’t.

Hence the retreat into climate moralism. “It’s not your fault the world is getting hotter,” the apologists say, “it’s the wicked, naughty 1 percent. So why should you” — we — “be on the hook to pay for it?” You know it’s true — all the fashion magazines say so. The climate doesn’t care if a molecule of carbon dioxide comes out of Jeff Bezos’s tailpipe or if it comes out of the fire over which some penniless rustic cooks his dinner; greenhouse gases are greenhouse gases. But left-wing moral hysterics insist that every issue is, in some ineffable way, every other issue. You’ve heard it all: “Climate is a racial-justice issue. Climate is an economic-justice issue. Climate is a trans-rights issue.” Etc. That’s teapot radicalism, a hobby for bored youngsters in the rich countries, the sort of thinking that produces the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

If what you care about is human flourishing rather than gross emissions, then you might consider greenhouse-gas emissions per unit of economic output. But you don’t hear about that very much, because many of the rich countries (Switzerland, the United Kingdom, France, Norway) do pretty well by that metric, while the worst performers include many poor countries (Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Moldova). The United States is not an outstanding performer by that standard (better than Canada, not as good as Germany), but it produces just a little more than half as much carbon dioxide per dollar of economic output as Russia.

If you care about both the climate and human prosperity, then, presumably, you’d want a world with policies that look more like those of Western Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States than like those of Turkmenistan. But ask the climate activists what the real problem is and they’ll tell you it is capitalism. “Ending climate change requires the end of capitalism,” Phil McDuff writes in the Guardian. “The fight against climate change is a fight against capitalism,” say the activists at Open Democracy. In the New York Times, Benjamin Fong writes: “The Climate Crisis? It’s Capitalism, Stupid.” What can save the world from climate change? “Only socialism,” says John Molyneux.

When I ask what can be done to help with climate change and someone lobs a copy of Das Kapital at my head, the conversation is over.

John Kennedy famously declared that Americans would “pay any price, bear any burden” in the cause of liberty. In the cause of climate change, Americans are pretty adamant that they won’t bear the cost of two frappuccinos a month. That counsels modesty in our policy ambitions. But at the same time, the hysterics and the moralists have staked out a maximalist position that makes working toward consensus with responsible parties all but impossible. Republicans in the United States don’t want to hear about climate change, but, in much of the rest of the world, the mainstream center-right parties are open to climate action and interested in it. What they aren’t interested in is neo-primitivism, anti-humanism, or Marxism — which are, experience has shown us, ultimately all the same thing.

So, expect some real Sturm und Drang in Glasgow.

And then expect — not much.

A note from the author: In the original version of this article, I unintentionally took Mark Jaccard’s “We must abolish capitalism” out of context. As a reader points out, Jaccard was using this as an example of what I was talking about — attaching socialist or other radical agendas to the climate issue — rather than making that case himself. I regret the error.