Rather than cower in fear, we should regard climate change as a challenge to be confronted with human ingenuity.
Humans have adapted to a changing climate before, and we can do it again.
T he world is careening toward a climate crisis, and by that we do not mean nasty weather or impending human extinction. The real challenge lies in adapting to a changing climate without undermining an already stressed global order, not to mention imperiling democracy.
The West’s current policy agenda, based almost entirely on the promotion of “renewable” energy, seems likely to produce only marginal gains while (according to McKinsey) costing $6 trillion annually for the next 30 years, equal to a quarter taxes collected and half of all annual profits worldwide. The question is not so much how we can “fight” climate change but how to do so in a way that does not create other, arguably more disruptive, changes in society and the economy.
Perhaps the biggest obstacle lies in geopolitical realities. In China, India, Vietnam, and much of Africa, the demand for affordable and reliable power has clear priority over achieving “net zero” in the near future. Ultimately what the West does may matter more to its own self-righteousness than the planet itself.
This Is Nothing New
When talking about climate change, there is an assumption that the problem started with industrialization and mass use of fossil fuels. Yet as Voltaire noted in 1740, climate, along with government and religion, are among the three things that “exercise influence over the minds of men.” The current temperature increases, notes environmental historian Peter Frankopan, “are modest in the grand scheme of climate change.”
Civilization first arose during a period with an exceptionally mild climate. Between the seventh and third millennia b.c., notes historian Edward Barbier, the Sahara was green, and the Mediterranean had rain most of the year. In contrast, a shift to colder and drier periods was not caused by SUVs and steel plants, but increased vulcanism, deforestation, overgrazing, and changes in sunspot activity and ocean temperatures.
The “Roman Warm Period,” notes Kyle Harper in The Fate of Rome, was marked by warm weather and ample rainfall. “The climate,” he writes, “was the enabling background of . . . what is known as Pax Romana.” A salubrious climate allowed the Romans to introduce winemaking in England, with vineyards as far north as Northamptonshire and Lincolnshire.
The lower temperatures and greater aridity that characterized the world in the later years of the empire played a key role in its end, relates Harper. The cold weather undermined farming, weakened trade, and made the world’s population more vulnerable to epidemics, creating what Frankopan calls a “cocktail of catastrophe.”
Later on, the period known as the Medieval Warm Period set the stage for the Renaissance. But when temperatures dropped once again, what is known as the Little Ice Age — traced to such factors as volcanic activity and the low sunspot cycles — ushered in a particularly bleak and bloody period, epitomized by major conflicts such as the Thirty Years’ War.
How Humans Adapted
Faced with changing temperatures and precipitation, our forebears managed, with difficulty but some success, to overcome climate challenges. Mesopotamia’s irrigation system and improvements in agricultural techniques developed, notes Barbier, to meet the challenge of a climate that was getting drier. The Great Persian empire saw the construction of qanats that allowed for agricultural surpluses, the cotton trade, and Persia’s urbanization.
Chinese farmers developed new technologies to boost yields in the dry northwest. Mayans, also faced with drying conditions, expanded their irrigation systems, until these could no longer sustain their society at the levels it had reached at its peak, until late in the first millennium. As its climate got colder, Rome managed to maintain its imperium for centuries — longer still in the East — through its massive waterworks and efficient transportation system.
Before the Little Ice Age, economic expansion was limited by high-entropy energy sources, such as wind, photosynthesis, draft animals, and slave labor. In the colder conditions, countries with stagnant social systems and technology, such as India, the Ottoman Empire, and China, suffered greatly. By contrast the Dutch, with much of their land below sea level, built dikes that not only kept water out, but also created new fertile land for farming. “Scarce land,” suggests historian Fernand Braudel, “had to stake everything on productivity.” New land created wealth, and in the drive to counter nature, the Netherlands became capitalism’s first great modern bastion, with a farm economy that thrives — increasingly against a harsh regulatory assault — to this day.
The big breakthrough occurred in the late 18th and early 19th century, largely by tapping shallow coal deposits in the United Kingdom. The key players were engineers, people such as Thomas Telford, the “Colossus of Roads” (and bridges and canals). Other engineers such as Lord Kelvin, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and James Watt worked to overcome the limitations of agrarian Britain’s unhelpful climate and create the industrial revolution that took Britain to the zenith of its global power.
As industrialization took place, in Das Kapital, Karl Marx wrote that the steam engine was “the prime mover, whose power was entirely under man’s control.” Humans achieved carbon combustion that would set the stage for exponential growth. Humans survived the colder weather by adapting to it.
State of the Climate
Today, humans seem far less willing to confront changes with bold initiative. Instead, we seem to prefer to wallow in coming doom, so much so that the majority of young people in the world believe the planet’s future is bleak. Some even believe it would be unfair to bring children into the world.
Human beings have long played a partial role in increasing the Earth’s temperature through such things as deforestation. But human impact grew with the onset of the industrial revolution, and in recent years with the rapid industrialization of developing countries, notably China, which now emits more GHG than Japan, the EU, and North America put together.
How extreme will these changes in temperature be? Likely not worse than those experienced in the Little Ice Age. The world’s average temperature, as best as scientists can tell, has increased by about one degree Celsius over the last century and almost 1.5 degrees Celsius since the Little Ice Age. About half of a degree has been due to increased carbon dioxide. Despite the endless talk of catastrophic results, including mass starvation, and a rapid growth in weather-related fatalities, many of the predictions of impending, unalterable doom have often proved more theatrical than accurate. “Climate science,” notes 2022 Nobel Prize for Physics laureate John F. Clauser, “has metastasized into massive shock-journalistic pseudo-science.”
Certainly, warming has not impacted food production, as is frequently suggested. Past warming has led to an increase in food production and the greening of the planet. Since 1960, wheat production, due to improved agricultural techniques, has quadrupled. Sea-level rise remains a concern, but it has not accelerated substantially in recent decades. Even the IPCC’s own report, argues Roger Pielke Jr., concludes that a signal of climate change has not yet emerged beyond natural variability. With the notable exception of more heatwaves, the Working Group 1 of the IPCC notes no statistically significant effect of carbon dioxide on other forms of extreme weather, including river floods, heavy precipitation, landslides, droughts, severe wind storms, tropical cyclones, sand and dust storms, heavy snowfall, ice storms, hail, snow avalanches, coastal flooding, or marine heat waves.
The Net Zero Impossibility
Simply put, “net zero” is a fantasy that can never occur, certainly not on a global level, in large part due to demand from developing countries. By 2100, 80 percent of the world’s population will be Asian or African. Using only consumption rates to simply rival the United States, China will increase its electricity consumption by a factor of 2.5, India by ten, Europe by a factor of two, and Africa by a factor of 72.
Some proponents of climate mitigation insist that renewable energy can meet this demand, through what they call the Nanowatt Revolution, based on full electrification, energy efficiency, and Amory Lovin’s concept of a “soft path.” Maybe so, but the case for scaling renewables at present is a poor one, particularly in the developing world. Africa has limited grid capacity and the larger solar and wind potential are often located far away from the population centers. Because of the integration costs involved, half of the renewable projects in South Africa have failed to date. In addition, Africa has very limited catchment areas left for hydropower or pumped storage, and the most advanced African country, South Africa, has suffered a water shortage since 2008, effectively limiting the continent’s potential for industrialization.
The basic problem lies in physics. Renewables suffer from low power density, which means they require much more material to work, as the CEO of Siemens Energy recently pointed out. Economic realities are asserting themselves, despite the massive subsidies for wind and solar and the costs of expanding battery-storage technology. Already, companies such as Siemens are cutting back on green investments to save their bottom line, while Shell is shifting from a renewable focus to investing heavily in new finds in places such as Algeria. BP is continuing to tap new fields in the North Sea. The petrostates of the Middle East aren’t very keen on changing course, with Qatar and Saudi Arabia both expecting record profits in the coming year. At the same time, other green firms, such as Lordstown Motors, have gone out of business, and others are teetering. Realist investors such as Warren Buffett continue to pour billions into fossil fuels.
The Global Political Conundrum
What the West does is less and less relevant. Amidst calls for draconian cutbacks in emissions, developing countries such as Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and Vietnam have all boosted the use of fossil fuels, and notably coal, for their baseload capacity. Fossil-fuel use, even greens admit, remains steady at over 80 percent of all global energy use, and continues to grow despite the green funding of alternatives. China’s Xi Jinping has said that climate goals “can’t be detached from reality. . . . We can’t toss away what’s feeding us now while what will feed us next is not in our pocket.”
Such pragmatic sentiments are widely shared in Sub-Saharan Africa, home to most of the world’s population growth over the next three decades, according to United Nations projections. According to polling conducted by Afrobarometer, a pan-African research network, the most pressing issues facing Africa are unemployment, health and education. Climate change did not make the list. A U.N. global poll of nearly 10 million people found climate to be the lowest policy priority among the poor, far behind education, health, and nutrition.
Some Africans see efforts to stop fossil-fuel or nuclear development in their countries as “climate colonialism.” As Nigerian vice-president Yemi Osinbajo has noted, “No country in the world has been able to industrialize using renewable energy.” South Africa’s energy minister Gwede Mantashe has said, “South Africa cannot work on the basis of a program developed in the Developed North.” Developing countries will become dominant emitters, following the past already forged by China and India.
In the West, a Climate Class War Looms
Some climate activists say that the West must compensate for the emissions growth in the developing world with draconian reductions in energy consumption at home. This is conceived as climate “reparations.” But for most middle- and working-class people living in the West, the climate agenda means living in smaller homes, enjoying less mobility, less air-conditioning, and a more austere diet. In Britain, over 10 million households fell behind their energy payments last year due to soaring bills, up from 3 million the year before.
Nonetheless, some Wall Street investors, tech oligarchs, and inheritors hope to cash in on the “green” bonanza. This may well help explain why green lobbies have been so successful in raising money. To take one example, Robert Bryce has calculated that the top 25 green NGOs outspent NGOs supporting the fossil-fuel and nuclear industries by four to one in 2021. Such groups tend to oppose middle courses that may be more practical in terms of resources and cost, such as embracing hybrids or investing in carbon-free, and economically viable alternatives such as hydro and nuclear power. Instead they put their energy, so to speak, helping foster climate hysteria, by funding the campaigns of climate activists and suborning supposedly “objective” media such as the Associated Press and National Public Radio with cash grants. Even ChatGPT basically offers only the green party line to inquiries relating to energy.
Yet despite the incessant climate campaigning, most people in developed countries are more focused on other, more mundane matters such as the economy, crime, or the future of their children. A recent Gallup poll shows that just 3 percent of the U.S. population considers climate change and the environment the most important problem facing the country. Most Americans support the notion of climate mitigation but a large majority seems unwilling even to pay $10 per month to “save” the planet.
There is also growing opposition to green policies across an increasingly distressed Europe. Europe may have some of the world’s strictest climate policies, but even on the left, social democrats are having to face the reality that these actions impose huge costs on the middle and working classes.
This grassroots opposition was expressed by the gilet jaunes movement in France in 2018, whose weekly protests were initially sparked by green taxes. The EU’s commitment to draconian cutbacks in agricultural production recently sparked protests by Dutch and other European farmers in recent years, angry at restrictions on fertilizers that will cut their yields. The pushback, along with rising concern on immigration, also has contributed to the rise of populist parties in a number of countries, notably Italy, Sweden, Greece, and France. Even in ultra-progressive Berlin, a referendum on tighter-emissions targets recently failed to win over enough voters.
Climate Adaptation: The Only Realistic Approach
A war on human aspiration and living standards, whether in Africa or America, is a losing proposition. Adaptation of various kinds — flood control, dams, tree-planting, using more heat-resistant materials — already has worked to reduce climate-related fatalities dramatically over the past century, despite a massive increase in the global population and higher temperatures.
One good example can be seen in how Galveston, Texas, recovered from a devastating hurricane in 1900. To save itself, the city created a Sea Wall that has kept it safe through numerous major storms since. Texas is now considering building an even bigger seawall, called the Ike Dyke, to withstand future storms.
There is also much we can learn from the original New Deal, as opposed to the less well-considered green version. The Roosevelt administration also faced a climate that was possibly warmer than ours as measured by the annual heat index that saw more intense periods during the 1930s than today. But it did not seek to address the “dust bowl” of the southern Plains by purposely reducing people’s incomes and quality of life. Instead it developed new water and power systems as implemented intensive tree-planting. It managed to mitigate climate problems, such as heatwave, devastating dust storms and crop failures, while over time reducing the extensive poverty common to much of rural America.
Whatever its limitations, and mixed legacy, the New Deal built things to last, much as did the Romans or the Dutch. Its legacy still powers much of America and will be critical as well in adaptation. Great projects such as the Hoover Dam and scores of others, protected large parts of the country from floods and droughts, and often created carbon-free electricity. The rise of California, its growth concentrated in arid regions, would have been impossible more difficult without the massive infrastructure initiated by Governor Pat Brown, a disciple of the Roosevelt ethos. This year’s surge in hydro from the very wet winter may protect California, this year, from a new wave of blackouts.
Overall, if we face a hotter, drier future, we cannot wait for the miracle of “net zero.” Instead, we can draw on historical experience such as developing more water storage, creating drought-resistant crops, building more effective irrigation systems, and, if necessary, building higher sea walls.
Adaptation strategies are also being adopted in the developing world, where climate-resilient infrastructure projects are on the rise. They include shelters that provide, according to the World Bank, protection for over half a million people in vulnerable coastal communities. South Africa and Lesotho’s highlands water project allows for water to be transported to Johannesburg. Similar efforts are being made in Brazil to redirect water from the Amazon for hydroelectric schemes and flood control.
Dealing with climate change is not incompatible with greater prosperity. A recent Breakthrough Institute report suggests it is poverty that causes most climate-related deaths. And as Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore points out, ten times as many people die from cold as from heat.
The Future Climate Heroes
Rather than cower in fear, we should regard climate change as a challenge to be confronted with human ingenuity. The mandated switch to “renewable” solar is currently largely benefitting China and other countries that are critical to providing the necessary resources, notably Africa, that have close ties with the Middle Kingdom.
The Chinese, Russians, and Koreans are building far more nuclear plants than we are doing in the west, and for much lower costs. There are also investment opportunities in the fuel cycle, that France is already a leader in, and the development of advanced nuclear reactors, such as the helium-cooled Pebble Bed Reactor, that would serve ideally for the American West and most of Africa.
Ultimately, the climate heroes of the future will not be hysterical teenagers or preening billionaires, but civil engineers and blue-collar workers who can build the systems — walls, dikes, reservoirs, nuclear and gas plants — that can reasonably confront the challenges of global warming. This could also employ millions of Americans at a time when 7 million men aged 24 to 54 are neither working nor looking for work. There is work to be done simply to repair dams and other infrastructure built during the 1960s and 1970s. Many of these projects are now coming to the end of their life, resulting in an almost $1 trillion backlog.
If the 17th-century Dutch or 20th-century Texans could adjust to climate changes, it seems reasonable to believe that with today’s vastly more potent technologies, so can we. No degree of hysterical catastrophism will do much to alleviate any potential climate damage, as we can see by the utter failure of IPCC agreements, such as Rio, Kyoto, Paris, Glasgow, and Sharm El-Sheik. It seems far more prudent to strike a balance between climate mitigation, the reduction of carbon emissions, and climate adaptation, in preparation for a warmer world rather than set up our descendants for a bitter harvest of poverty, despair, and squashed aspirations.
Joel Kotkin is the presidential fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., Washington Fellow at the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life, and the executive director of the Urban Reform Institute. Hügo Krüger is a South African–born YouTube podcaster, writer, and civil nuclear engineer who has worked on a variety of energy related infrastructure projects ranging from nuclear power, LNG, and renewable technologies. He regularly writes on energy and geopolitcal matters.