Thirty Years of the ‘Now or Never’ Climate Cry

T he 2,913 pages of the United Nations’ “Climate Change 2022” report make clear only that nothing is clear. Written in the incomprehensible language of climate science, there are only two things that are easily understood: the word taxes, which appears 270 times, and the word costs, which appears 1,585 times.

The entire report, full of technicalities, cross-references, and incomprehensible tables, generates more headaches than alarm. This is not for public consumption, quite obviously. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change keeps the taxes and the costs confined to the report — but it reserves the artillery of apocalyptic words for the press release. The headline reads, “The evidence is clear: the time for action is now.” (The “evidence” is the 2,913 pages that no one will read.)

In short, the apostles of the climate apocalypse are once again summarizing their strategy with the “now or never” war cry, the same one they screamed nearly 30 years ago in 1995 at the first climate summit in Berlin. “We are at a crossroads,” IPCC chair Hoesung Lee says in the press release. “It’s now or never, if we want to limit global warming to 1.5°C (2.7°F). Without immediate and profound emission reduction across all sectors, it will be impossible,” Jim Skea, IPCC Working Group III co-chair, adds, building tension.

Here we go again. In 2007, another IPCC report assured that the irreversible climate apocalypse would come within eight years and demanded action “now or never.” We did not act enough, I suspect; there was no reduction in emissions, yet temperatures were stubbornly stable between 1997 and 2012, leaving the scientists behind those models in a very bad light. Yes, the temperatures rose again later, but the climate is as fickle and capricious as Joe Biden’s political opinions.

Given the IPCC’s track record of inaccurate predictions, and considering that the world has not yet ended, I think, my assessment is that it is just as likely that their models are right this time as it is that they are wrong. But their solutions to something as uncertain as climate have serious consequences for humanity before they have serious consequences for the planet. In fact, they are already having them: Just look at the West right now, on the brink of a cataclysm because of dependence on Putin’s dirty energy, after having managed to eradicate much of its own dirty energy thanks to pressure from the climate lobby. By the way: That dirty energy now so reviled has considerably improved our quality of life, has lifted thousands of people out of poverty, and has enabled a succession of technological revolutions; perhaps we should be a little less contemptuous of it. But, as my grandmother would say about vegan environmentalists, it is difficult to ask for respect for coal from those who are incapable of respecting grilled meat.

No matter the costs, progressive globalism has decided to bet everything on alarmism and the persuasive power of language, following the model popularized by the environmentalist associations of the ’90s. What turned out to be a kind of fringe circus created to attract the attention of the media (you know, all those people chained to nuclear power plants) has now been turned into parliaments, and the result is that the highest climate authority is Greta Thunberg, who shouts at world leaders: “How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.” In the end, everything seems to be a struggle to attain childhood dreams: I dreamed of a world with government reduced to a minimum and mask-optional Mass. Oh well.

The alarmist language is crucial to the warmologists’ plan. Without climate hysteria resonating in all corners of the media, no one would accept green taxes and the levels of ecological interventionism that the EU suffers, for example, without first storming the European Parliament in Brussels. It is a suspicious coincidence that since the 19th century all the ecological apocalypses announced offer a single recipe for salvation that coincides exactly with the economic programs of the Left; that is, more taxes, more interventionism, less capitalism, and less freedom. Thus, in the “Strengthening the response” section of the latest IPCC report, you will not be surprised to see that scientists call for “economic instruments which consider economic and social equity and distributional impacts; gender-responsive and women-empowerment programs as well as enhanced access to finance for local communities and Indigenous Peoples and small landowners.” Evo Morales likes this.

For the rest of it, environmentalism has become an extraordinary marketing tool. Most of the big corporations that boast about making “small gestures that change the world” when it comes to global warming know that their small gestures are irrelevant to something as immense and complex as climate, but they are quite relevant to their profits. Between them, they’ve managed to make you feel like you’re saving the planet by drinking your coffee through a nasty cardboard straw.

The scheme envisioned by the U.N. panel, however, is hardly a small gesture. The coronavirus pandemic should have taught us two things — that science is neither exact nor infallible, and that institutional fearmongering can lead the masses down a desired path without actually solving any problems. This one happens to lead to a hell full of high taxes, skyrocketing government spending, inflation spirals, and electric everything.

So let’s go. It’s now or never.