Connexion
Climate scientists have been hounding dissenters for years. In a D.C. courtroom, they scored a crowning victory for censorship.
In July 2012, I came within a hair’s breadth of ruining my life. I escaped, but the very talented Canadian writer Mark Steyn did not. My mention of his name will rightly signal to many readers that this is a story about the infamous verdict in a D.C. Superior Court earlier this year. It will signal to others who care about such things that this is also a story about the hollowness of much of what passes as “climate science.” But let me tell the story in my own convoluted way.
For those for whom the words “infamous verdict” and “Mark Steyn” fail to ring a bell, here is a short course. Steyn was sued by the climate “scientist” Michael Mann, who had taken umbrage twelve years ago when Steyn likened him to convicted child molester Jerry Sandusky. On February 8, a Washington, D.C., jury agreed with Mann and found Steyn and co-defendant Rand Simberg guilty of defaming Michael Mann. It was an extraordinarily odd verdict. The jury assessed “compensatory damages” of one dollar each from Steyn and Simberg—which is to say they found no real harm to Mann in his ability to make money. But the jury didn’t stop there. It added a fine of $1,000 for Simberg and a cool $1 million for Steyn for “punitive damages.” This was retribution for their supposedly making statements with “maliciousness, spite, ill will, vengeance or deliberate intent to harm.”
It took a dozen years for Mann’s defamation suit to reach a trial court. What the case was really about was Mann’s reputation as a liar and a hack who had nonetheless gained wide influence in the political world for his promotion of the idea of runaway man-made global warming.
Mann had risen to international fame beginning in 1999 by propounding his “hockey stick graph,” which purported to show that global temperatures had risen very little until 1900, then began to rise rapidly. In 2001, the International Panel on Climate Change put Mann’s hockey stick chart in the prominent summary of its Third Assessment Report. This conferred on Mann the science (or pseudo-science) equivalent of rock star status. After that, Mann would throw a tantrum when skeptics—of whom there were many—criticized his work. Rather oddly, he refused to divulge the data out of which his famous graph was constructed.
Steyn was only one of the many who mocked Mann and his pretensions to scientific rigor. The Jerry Sandusky jibe was just colorful rhetoric, i.e. Sandusky molested children; Mann molested data.
The court case was closely watched and nearly all observers thought that Mann was thoroughly defeated. He was shown indeed to have made numerous false claims and to have suffered no material damage at all from Steyn’s satire. Mann had instead prospered in the years that followed.
But in the closing minutes of the trial, Mann’s lawyer, John Williams, turned the case into a referendum on Donald Trump, who of course had no part in what Steyn had said in 2012 and as far as anyone knows had no opinion at the time on Michael Mann’s career. Williams urged the jury to award punitive damages to send a message to others who might engage in “climate denialism,” which he likened to Trump’s “election denialism.”
“Denialism” appears to be Williams’ term for disagreeing with the left’s established views. Such denialism has to be obliterated like the dangerously invasive lantern fly wherever it is encountered. And the D.C. jury did what Williams asked. It came back with a crushing punitive judgment against Steyn.
This happened in early February. Since then, we have had several lessons on how juries in unfriendly cities can be relied on to impose preposterous fines on Trump and to use “lawfare” to destroy the lives of innocent people who have some connection to Trump. Even those like Steyn who are not connected to Trump can be targets of this legal maliciousness.
Let’s go back to the beginning. In July 2012, former FBI director Louis Freeh released a 250-page examination of how Penn State University had handled child molester and former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky. What had university officials known? What had they done or failed to do? Freeh had been commissioned in November 2011 by the university’s board of trustees to lead this study, immediately after they fired President Graham Spanier. Freeh’s report blamed Spanier and Penn State’s revered football coach Joe Paterno for concealing what they knew about Sandusky from “the Board of Trustees, the University community and authorities.” Freeh blamed them as well for allowing Sandusky to continue to molest children. Spanier disputed the findings and to this day continues his attempts to claw back his reputation, but it is a stiff climb. In 2017, he was convicted in state court of endangering the welfare of children and spent two months in jail.
I wasn’t especially interested in the Sandusky scandal, but I had had my eye on Graham Spanier since 2010 when he had orchestrated the Penn State branch of the coverup of the “Climategate” affair of 2009. Professor Mann had been caught red-handed in the suppression of scientific findings that ran counter to his own. Penn State had quickly rallied to Mann’s defense, but public doubt remained intense, and to put it to rest Spanier established a committee to look into the matter. The committee in short order determined that “Dr. Michael E. Mann did not engage in, nor did he participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community.”
By 2009, I had begun to follow closely stories that dealt with “climate science” and its overlap with higher education. My interest grew out of finding that the dean of residence life at the University of Delaware had imposed a Stasi-like regime on students in the name of “social justice.” The planning documents for this Delaware dorm-based indoctrination called it a “sustainability program.” As I peeled back the layers, I found that “sustainability” took its intellectual warrant from the supposed crisis of global warming. At the bottom of all this, “climate science” and climate scientists were promoting a vision of impending catastrophe caused by humans recklessly burning fossil fuels. I initiated a project called “How Many Delawares?” aimed at documenting how far this effort by university administrators had penetrated American higher education.
Global warming hysteria was truly launched way back in 1988, but it was not one of those movements that first poked up on college campuses. It was, rather, a combination of government bureaucrats and grant-hungry scientists who invented it and politicians who marketed it. The International Panel on Climate Change was formed in November 1988. The Rio Summit (“The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development”) was held in 1992. It would take almost two decades before climate hysteria became epidemic in American higher ed.
In time, I caught up with this history, and later I co-wrote a book about it with Rachelle Peterson, Sustainability: Higher Education’s New Fundamentalism (2015). Global warming hysteria finally caught on with students when college presidents, rallied by John Kerry, took up the cause, attracted by the potential for vast amounts of new federal funding to support “climate research.” President Spanier was one of the early adopters; Michael Mann joined his faculty in 2005, after leaving the University of Virginia.
Mann’s sojourn in Virginia bears telling as well. It was there that he developed his “hockey stick.” In the wake of Climategate, in 2010, Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli attempted to force the University of Virginia to divulge records of Mann’s research on the grounds that Mann may have committed fraud against the state’s taxpayers. The university refused to cooperate and the press smeared the investigation as a violation of academic freedom. The case had various twists and turns but eventually landed before Virginia’s Supreme Court, which ruled that Cuccinelli had no right to see the records.
To this day, the actual data that Mann supposedly used to construct the hockey stick remains hidden away. This hasn’t gone unnoticed. Mark Steyn, for one, compiled a 300-page book in 2015, A Disgrace to the Profession, which consists entirely of statements by “The World’s Scientists in Their Own Words on Michael Mann, His Hockey Stick, and Their Damage to Science.” It was an audacious conceit on Steyn’s part to gather so much salt to rub into the wounds in Professor Mann’s sensitive ego. It was possibly not the gentle balm with which to convince the partisan public that he meant no harm to Mann’s career.
Any sensible person who cares about the integrity of science and good public policy should want to cure the problems presented by Mann’s odd ways of conducting “science.” There is no lack of earnest efforts by well-informed writers to do just that. A. W. Montford’s The Hockey-Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science (2010) is a classic of the genre, but there has been a steady stream of expert deconstruction of Mann-ian science in the last decade. My favorite among recent ventures is Stephen Einhorn’s Climate Change: What They Rarely Teach in College (2023). These are not polemics. They are efforts to synthesize the scientific data that bears on the questions of what has happened and what is happening to the Earth’s temperature. And it just so happens that Michael Mann’s testimony on these matters does not come off well.
Many climate researchers have not been shy in devising more and more terrifying forecasts. Global warming circa 2010 (not yet rebranded “climate change”) was supposedly taking off like a sky rocket or, ahem, a hockey stick.
Back in 2009, when I was new to the subject, I expected the news of “Climategate” would desolate the field. Here were esteemed researchers emailing one another about ways to bury the findings of other researchers who had discovered deep discrepancies in the warmist narrative. Here were researchers discussing a “trick” they could use to make the existence of warm medieval temperatures disappear. (It was awkward that the Earth had warmed before the invention of the internal combustion engine or indeed the Industrial Revolution.) And at the center of the Climategate scandal stood one redoubtable figure: Michael Mann.
The scandal, however, failed to dethrone him, thanks in considerable part to Penn State’s determination to prop him up. Mere months after Climategate broke, President Spanier appointed the committee to look into it and early in 2010 the committee came back with its finding that Mann was clean, honest, and reliable—or something like that.
So when Penn State convened another special committee in 2011 in the Sandusky matter, I had trepidations. Was another cover-up in progress? It turned out not, but when the Freeh report was issued I saw an opportunity to remind readers of my weekly columns in The Chronicle of Higher Education that Spanier’s decision to cover up Sandusky’s lewdness and Paterno’s indifference was nothing new. I possessed no first-hand knowledge of either the Sandusky case or the Mann matter, but from a distance the evidence of a look-the-other-way attitude among Penn State administrators with Sandusky and a protect-our-asset attitude towards Mann seemed awfully convincing.
How close could I dare draw the parallel? In my article, “A Culture of Evasion,” I decided to tread lightly:
Then there was the Michael Mann case, the well-known advocate of the theory of man-made global warming, accused in the wake of the Climategate memos in 2009 of scientific misconduct. Penn State appointed a university panel, headed by the vice president for research, Henry Foley, to investigate Mann. According to ABC News Foley’s committee asked:
whether Mann had 1) suppressed or falsified data; 2) tried to conceal or destroy e-mails or other information; 3) misused confidential information; or 4) did anything that “seriously deviated from accepted practices” in scholarly research.
The committee exonerated Mann on the first three and punted on the fourth. Make of this what you will, but a review by the university’s vice president for research, who oversees grant-funded projects, does not have exactly the same standing as an investigation carried out by the former director of the FBI. Penn State has a history of treading softly with its star players. Paterno wasn’t the only beneficiary.
Even this bland summary raised the ire of the famously thin-skinned Professor Mann. He strikes me as the sort of person who drags a heavy load of guilt through life. The evidence is indirect: He viciously attacks anyone who impugns his intellectual integrity but utterly refuses to divulge the data and other details that would go far to clear his name. The points that have prompted others to express their doubts about his honesty are matters of fact that simple candor could settle once and for all.
When I published that passage in 2012, I already knew about and had grazed Michael Mann’s litigious wrath. In August 2011, I published an article, “Climate Thuggery,” in which I cataloged some of Mann’s “nuisance lawsuits,” including one against a Canadian geographer, Tim Ball, who had joked that Mann “should be in the state pen, not Penn State.” Mann had also threatened a Minnesota group for a satiric video, and he had won the allegiance of a handful of admirers who were making it their business to harass his critics. One of these was a fellow named John Mashey who was praised in the pages of Science for “trying to take the offense” against global warming skeptics. Mann praised Mashey for “exploring the underbelly of climate denial.”
Mashey came after me, and I was told by my editor at the Chronicle that Mann himself did as well, but nothing much came of it. The Chronicle soon dropped its experiment in having a handful of conservative columnists, but I had already been sternly warned off writing about climate change.
As it happened, I wasn’t the only writer who conjured a connection between the Sandusky and Mann cases. Mann sued Rand Simberg and the Competitive Enterprise Institute for publishing Simberg’s comment that Mann had “molested and tortured data” and sued Mark Steyn and National Review for referencing and expanding upon Simberg’s statement.
I certainly do not want to be sued by Michael Mann or get The American Conservative drawn into such bother. So I will continue to mind my words. It is my personal opinion that Michael Mann’s research, especially on reconstructions of global temperature, is profoundly flawed. It is also my opinion that the theory of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming is a compound of leftist ideology, mass delusion, biased, self-confirming pseudo-science, and over-interpretation of fragmentary and ambiguous data. What relative proportions of these four factors go into the mix depends on the individual and the situation. Millions of people go along with so-called climate science because they don’t know any better. A fair number of scientists are so psychologically invested in the theory that they are literally unable to question it. Others have doubts but make their peace with it because it has become their livelihood. Still others are straight-on radicals intent on “decarbonization” as the shortest route to their anti-capitalist revolution.
Put all this together, and we have the figure of Michael Mann alongside a few others such as Greta Thunberg, Al Gore, and Bill McKibben as our latter-day Jeremiahs pronouncing world-ending doom as punishment for modern prosperity. They enjoy the backing of most of the world’s governments and a huge number of foundations.
For all that, they have failed to create the crisis mentality on a mass scale that they hope for. Last year, Pew Research Center reported that only 27 percent of Americans say fighting climate change “should be a top priority for the president and Congress.” Another 34 percent say such a fight is important but not a priority. Among Republicans only 13 percent say it is a “top priority.” That makes it by definition a political issue, which in turn means that the apocalyptos have not prevailed. If a world-ending catastrophe were in the offing and people really believed that, these numbers would look very different.
Where then does Mark Steyn stand? He is a hero to many who, like me, count ourselves among the climate skeptics. There are others, especially many scientists who have risked their reputations and careers by coming out as climate skeptics. There are organizations such as the Heartland Institute and the CO2 Coalition that put real intellectual muscle into gathering and analyzing facts that belie the prevailing climate-change narrative.
All of us need a Mark Steyn who with cussed determination and quick wit has stood up against climate thuggery and its most self-important champion. Steyn will appeal the absurd verdict and the outlandish penalty. May he win. In the meantime, I recommend the excellent day-by-day recreation of the trial by the Irish documentarians Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer. Their podcast, “Climate Change on Trial,” presents the whole debacle.
The post The Long Road to the Steyn Verdict appeared first on The American Conservative.
A failing campaign isn’t stopping Haley from getting in tight with Wall Street.
It is now clear that President Trump will win the Republican Nomination for President. Nevertheless, Nikki Haley’s last-ditch effort to change the trajectory of the race has given rise to a concerning development. Republicans across the nation should take note. As her candidacy has looked increasingly tenuous, Haley has resorted to courting the well-heeled advocates of environmental extremism on Wall Street.
Haley has long accepted at face value the climate cult’s framing of environmental matters, even calling climate change a national security issue. Allowing the left to frame arguments about America’s future presupposes assumptions we should treat with suspicion and even disdain. Some politicians adopt these frames either instinctively or because they don’t know better. Others do so as a subtle way to let their donors know they don’t intend to rock the boat. But regardless of which explanation applies to Haley—and we have good reason to think Haley falls into this second category—her rhetoric should be a red flag for those of us on the right.
Conservatives have waged an intense struggle against radical social engineering schemes cooked up in federal agencies and corporate boardrooms alike, and often in concert. These efforts—known broadly as ESG for “environmental, social, and governance”—seek to revalue financial risk based not around the market forces of supply and demand, but rather on liberal social goals like decarbonizing the economy, imposing anti-family orthodoxy, and empowering unelected bureaucrats. Access to capital, in the world of ESG, hinges on obedience to progressive ideology, not on expected future returns.
ESG has had no greater advocate than Larry Fink, the CEO of the behemoth fund manager BlackRock. BlackRock, with more than $8 trillion in assets under management, throws a lot of weight around trying to coerce firms and governments into toeing Fink’s preferred political line. That political line has one consistent aim: to cripple the backbone of our domestic energy production by denying the fossil fuel industry access to capital.
Here in West Virginia, I led the charge to kick BlackRock out of our state government because its Fink-led efforts to strangle our coal jobs presented a clear threat to the well-being of my constituents. More than a dozen states have, to varying degrees, followed suit. We have rejected, out of hand, the argument that we simply have to submit to funding our own impoverishment. And we have succeeded. Thus, we can say with confidence that no conservative public official should have anything to do with Larry Fink.
Still, raising money isn’t easy. Campaign finance limits keep those running for federal office on the road and on the phones, seeking out sufficient resources to power our campaigns. Yet in fundraising, there comes a time for choosing: whether or not to accept money that undermines our values and objectives as conservatives. When major financial institutions and renewable energy interests back up a proverbial Brinks truck, the temptation can be overwhelming.
Given the opportunity to hobnob with Fink and take his ill-gotten gains at a fundraiser, Nikki Haley was all in. In other words, she failed the test. The pursuit of power has made her dependent on those who would harm the very people whose votes she would need to win. It’s an untenable situation.
While it’s easy to call out Nikki, she’s not alone in this. Countless Republicans across the nation continue to seek out and accept this dirty money. Can we really count on these Republicans to stand up to the radical green agenda? No, we can’t. Conservatives need to wake up to the threat posed by woke corporations—and we need to make sure that those politicians who cross the line and seek support from ESG’s champions pay the price at the ballot box.
When we choose to stand up to woke corporations, we can win. They have money, but we have people. By electing anti-ESG fighters, we can secure the economic, cultural, and social wellbeing of the people who elect us. Those on Wall Street who want to destroy our fossil fuel industry, and put thousands of hard working Americans out of a job in the process, do not have the political power on their own to overcome us. That is, unless we surrender the power to them.
Nikki Haley chose to do just that, to hand power back to the banks, and put herself out of consideration by serious conservatives in the process. Donald Trump, by contrast, fought for our energy jobs in his first term and will do so again in his second. He has repeatedly raised issues of ESG and debanking. He gets it. Let’s send him back to the White House and get back to making America great again.
The post Nikki Haley Is All-In on the Climate Cult appeared first on The American Conservative.
As usual, elites are pushing a radical change so they can line their own pockets.
Around 2.6 million years ago, humans started eating meat and, up to today, we have not stopped. Thanks to this, our brains became bigger and more developed. Under the guise of slowing climate change, environmentalist campaigns, the U.N., the Davos Club, and lots of progressive governments’ efforts against the livestock industry and meat consumption have grown. They claim that, after the burning of fossil fuels, the livestock industry is largely responsible for the climate apocalypse they trumpet. The Washington Post gives a taste of the collective vegan madness that has seized our media and political classes.
The origin of this new offensive against meat comes in the form of a recent study published in Nature Communications that proposes a 50 percent reduction in meat and milk consumption by 2050. The study claims that this course of action will almost completely halt deforestation and reduce greenhouse gasses and land use by 31 percent.
Notwithstanding the dubious correlation, it is interesting to look at who is behind this study.
The author in question is Marta Kozicka of Integrated Biosphere Futures (IBF), an organization dedicated to the “development of transformations in food and bio-based sectors that enable satisfying human needs while ensuring the sustainable use of terrestrial and marine environments.”
“We can have a real impact by replacing our meat and dairy consumption with plant-based alternatives—even just partially,“ says Kozicka in the Washington Post, leading the journalist to compare the imperative of changing diets to smoking. “Going cold turkey on turkey is hard,” they point out, “but even if you’re unwilling or unable to go fully vegan, you can still craft a diet much better for the environment.”
“We need much more than ‘Meatless Mondays’ to reduce the global GHG emissions driving climate change,” says Eva Wollenberg, a co-author of the study. Wollenberg works for the Biodiversity Alliance and Gund Institute, two organizations that lack credibility when it comes to analyzing climate-meat relations because their raison d’etre and premise is precisely to change the world’s food supply. Biodiversity Alliance says on its website that its plan is “a unified strategy to solve global crises, turning food systems around,” while Gund Institute bases its strategy on partnering with governments and companies, not to research, but to promote change, including food change: “research is not enough to solve our environmental problems; we also need action.”
The Gund Institute for Environment is part of the University of Vermont, which is behind the study and which, in turn, is distinguished in its environmental militancy and vegan catechesis. In a document published in 2021, the university openly admitted the reason for this green fervor:
University of Vermont’s students today are earth and health-conscious, with 42% of students choosing UVM because of the institution’s commitment to these values. Often these values translate to the food choices students make. Working closely with students, UVM Dining has shifted food offerings to meet increasing requests for plant-based food options in the dining halls. More vegetarian and vegan options are now available to students at all meals.
But if all those involved in the study still seem credible to you, no matter how much they support a single conclusion in the research, it gets worse: The third contributor to the report published in Nature Communications is Impossible Foods, one of the largest companies dedicated to the production of laboratory meat, whose investors include Peter Jackson, Serena Williams, Katy Perry, and of course, Bill Gates.
To no one’s surprise, the conclusion this research reached was that it is urgent to abandon meat consumption (at least up to 50 percent before 2050) and that a vegan diet would solve our problems—specifically, a diet based on products from Impossible Foods. In other words: to slow down climate change and avoid death by roasting, freezing, or flooding (the danger changes depending on the decade), we urgently need to consume Impossible Foods products.
It should be noted that what all these organizations seek is, in effect, to secure that position. Their plan is not to convince people but to compel them. That is why they admit that they work closely with governments and international bodies to ensure that their research drives real action.
Needless to say, no one has bothered to ask the opinions of the livestock sector, which employs millions of people around the world and upon which many more millions of consumers depend. Nor have environmentalists explained why global warming is due to methane gas from cows in the United States and Europe, and not to the 12,466,316 megatonnes that Chinese communism emits each year. (The Nature Communications study quietly admits this problem, recognizing that “the main impacts on agricultural input use are in China.”)
The study has other holes. On the one hand, it proposes to plant the same amount of crops and reduce livestock farming by half without explaining how it will prevent millions of people from starving to death. On the other hand, it also fails to explain how it will be possible for the middle and lower classes to gain access to synthetic meat, which is much more expensive than real meat, without radically accentuating economic inequalities, as is already happening with regard to the imposition of electric cars in European countries.
Davos, the U.N., and the globalist left are behind studies that seek to promote real and profound changes. In the case of the fake meat lobby, it is clear that the environmentalism of the elite is an excuse to plunder and worsen the lives of the middle classes.
The post No Surprises Behind the Fake Meat Lobby appeared first on The American Conservative.
“Eco-anxiety” may stem not just from prevalent climate scaremongering, but also from the decline of religion.
In a recent opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal, the editorial board’s Allysia Finley argued that the tendency of politicians, editorialists, and activists to treat exceptional weather events as proof of looming environmental collapse is creating serious emotional problems. “Alarmist stories about bad weather…are fueling mental derangements,” she wrote.
Finley’s data suggest that young people are especially vulnerable to this kind of scaremongering, even though many purported “proofs” previously used to enlist their support for net zero policies—such as claims that the polar bears were becoming extinct, that the Great Barrier Reef was dying, and that India would soon be wiped out by famine—have proved false. She cited a 2021 study published by Lancet Public Health, which found that 59 percent of 16- to 25-year-olds in the U.S., England, Australia, and seven other countries are “very or extremely” worried about climate change. And nearly half say they cannot function normally because of weather-related anxieties.
Finley is not the only journalist to warn of what has been variously termed “climate anxiety,” “weather anxiety,” “climate hysteria,” “eco-anxiety,” and “ecological grief.” All that weather alarmists have accomplished is to “alienate and depress” everyone else, cautioned the London Telegraph’s Janet Daley in a column late last month. Daley noted that even England’s Meteorological Office, which generally favors strong action to reduce atmospheric carbon, has come around to believing that dramatizing weather events is counterproductive, producing “despair and resignation in a population that is being urged to become proactive.”
Allie Volpe, a reporter who covers mental health for Vox, is sufficiently convinced of the harm caused by today’s climate coverage that she recommends people scrupulously limit their exposure to the news in general. “Give yourself a set schedule for when you will read the news,” she advised in early July, “perhaps for 10 minutes at a time in the morning, afternoon, and evening.”
Climate anxiety or some similar phrase may not yet appear in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), psychiatry’s official listing of emotional complaints, but it is clearly a widespread problem, and one that is rapidly growing. According to a special 2020 issue of the Journal of Anxiety Disorders, instances of panic attacks, insomnia, obsessive thinking, substance abuse, and depression are increasingly associated with fears of an environmental catastrophe that many people feel powerless to stop.
The problem is clearly real. My only question is whether the blame for this development can be entirely ascribed to politically motivated hyping of weather reports. Or has something more profound happened to our culture which makes such catastrophic prophesying seem more credible than it otherwise would be?
After all, this is not the first time the world has had to cope with a seemingly science-based prediction of planetary catastrophe or with the tendency of activists to exaggerate every conceivable indication of its coming. Before the current concern with climate change, there was fear of overpopulation. Before overpopulation, there was the fear of global thermonuclear war. And before nuclear apocalypse, overpopulation again, that time courtesy of an English scholar named Thomas Malthus.
This is not even the first time that major sectors of the economy have had a vested interest in aggravating the general population’s concerns about what will happen to humanity “if something isn’t done immediately.” Just as today’s car companies, solar panel producers, and windmill manufacturers stand to make billions from President Biden’s misnamed Inflation Reduction Act, so did American defense contractors from bloated Pentagon budgets during the Cold War, as President Dwight Eisenhower famously pointed out in his “military-industrial complex” speech.
How is it possible, then, that school children in the 1950’s, despite being regularly drilled to scramble under their desks in the event of a sudden atomic blast, could go on with seemingly normal lives, while kids today experience clinical symptoms after a mere heat wave in Texas or a cold snap in Florida? Is it really just about too many green ideologues interpreting the weather?
We cannot overlook the fact that what historically has been a powerful antidote for scientific pessimism—the biblical belief that while material knowledge is a useful tool (Genesis 1:28), it should never be accepted as a complete picture of the universe (Corinthians 3:18–19)—has clearly lost its force in the West. With declining religious affiliation, the legalistic purge of even the most ecumenical spiritual sentiments from public institutions, and the banalization of popular culture, is not the hope for a better outcome than green pessimists predict harder to hold fast to than it would have been in times past?
Admittedly, one does not necessarily need religion to believe in a brighter future. The history of science is full of unexpected technological breakthroughs, as Thomas Kuhn observed in his landmark study of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions; and many critics of net zero activism have cited this fact to argue for a less monomaniacal response to atmospheric carbon.
But as the German philosopher Max Weber (1864-1920) famously worried, playing even favorable odds is never an adequate substitute for a sense of deeper reality, when it comes to living with confidence in uncertain times. American Psychological Association president Donald T. Campbell made much the same point when he warned colleagues that their profession’s insistence on a materialistic view of human behavior could prove very harmful to the larger culture. There are “good reasons for modesty and caution in undermining traditional belief systems,” he said in his leadership address to the 1975 annual convention.
The emotional damage currently wrought by net zero activism is unlikely to prompt a search for meaning that will reverse the present secular trends in Western culture. But one thing that could clearly be done to alleviate climate-related fear is for believers themselves to be more open in the public sphere about their religious convictions, strengthening both themselves and others against undue pessimism.
As the late novelist Saul Bellow argued in his acceptance speech for the 1976 Nobel Prize in Literature, most people receive enough glimpses of God’s universe to build some kind of faith on, providing they get sufficient external reinforcement. It is verbal confirmation, or even permission, from others that they increasingly lack.
But as Romans 10:17 reminds us, “So then faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.”
The post Fearful Worship of a Climate Idol appeared first on The American Conservative.
A Wall Street Journal report published this morning found that some of the main beneficiaries of the so-called Inflation Reduction Act are foreign-owned corporations, who have finagled unimaginable sums in green technology subsidies.
The Inflation Reduction Act has spurred nearly $110 billion in U.S. clean-energy projects since it passed almost a year ago, a Wall Street Journal analysis shows. Companies based overseas, largely from South Korea, Japan and China, are involved in projects accounting for more than 60% of that spending. Fifteen of the 20 largest such investments, nearly all in battery factories, involve foreign businesses, the Journal’s analysis shows.
This report is instructive on a number of points: the difficulty of reshoring supply chains, and specifically the degree to which China is eating our lunch on battery production, even when that production occurs outside China; the fact that massive, unfocused subsidy programs are subject to abuse; and, ultimately, how the ongoing imbalance of trade hamstrings domestically owned industry.
The past few years have been all about splashy budget numbers and expansive subsidies. Rebuilding American industry—the creation and execution of industrial policy—is the foremost economic task before us today, but, as with all things, it can be done well or poorly. The IRA, for all the good intentions behind it, seems to tend toward the latter.
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