Not too long ago from a reader I got a link to a post suggesting that the "effort to establish climate science as the basis" for cutting down on carbon "lies in ruins":
Climate science, even at its most uncontroversial, could never motivate the remaking of the entire global energy economy. Efforts to use climate science to threaten an apocalyptic future should we fail to embrace green proposals, and to characterize present-day natural disasters as terrifying previews of an impending day of reckoning, have only served to undermine the credibility of both climate science and progressive energy policy.
Citing flatlined public support for belief in climate change, Nordhaus and Shellenberger advocate moving away from using immediate weather events - especially natural disasters - as a basis for supporting good, progressive low-carbon energy policy that's in our nation's "economic, national security, and environmental interest." (However, they never mention what line of reasoning should be used to support said policy.)
I'm down with avoiding using specific weather events to support climate change. That's something I can get behind. But that's not why I received the link. The reader sent the link to discourage me from mentioning climate change at all when I write about energy, as if somehow we've reached a state where the doubt of enough misinformed Americans trumps scientific reality, as if somehow the state of the climate were a battle of wills, not levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Of course, that's a foolish notion. For one, policy should not be based on irrational public opinion. As Todd Tanner writes in New West, most climate skeptics are "past the point where scientists can convince them or where logical arguments can persuade them," and that they've become ideologues, and whether they're driven by religion or politics or their distrust of the science is ultimately irrelevant." Tanner:
Here's what we need to know. The science is clear and unequivocal. We are dumping huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, and all that carbon is warming the planet and making our oceans more acidic. Our dependence on fossil fuels has created a worldwide crisis that threatens every single aspect of our lives.
And, yes, wouldn't it be great if we could find some rhetorical silver bullet that utterly convinced the country that we need to wean ourselves off of our fossil fuel addiction - if not for the carbon, say, but for the deadly air pollution? Of course, I don't even agree that talk around climate change has failed just because a handful of people still claim it doesn't exist. A vast majority of Americans believe the US government should put a "great deal" (pdf) of effort into dealing with global warming, and a plurality believe the US sign on to an international treaty to "reduce significantly greenhouse gas emissions." If this is failure of message, I'd love to see the numbers on a successful public campaign. (Numbers, by the way, courtesy of Tanner.)
But the fact is that there are deep-pocketed people out there who have a strong interest in burning fossil fuels, who will work actively to combat any effort to change our energy infrastructure, and who will sow misinformation and doubt among the citizenry and who will politicize health and safety to thwart reform. That is, it doesn't matter what rhetoric you use to support progressive energy policy, you will be attacked. It's better to ignore the concern trolls and forge on ahead with values that most Americans share, like a clean and healthful environment and a better future for our children.
Climate change exists. We need to do something about it. |
