The Grandchildren Are Noticing the Climate Emperor Has No Clothes and Common Sense on Energy Is Returning

Steven F. Hayward, is a conservative author, political commentator, and policy scholar known for his work on a range of topics, including environmentalism, law, economics, and public policy. He has written several books, with a particular focus on Ronald Reagan. He also writes daily for the Powerline blog and has been a vocal critic of climate change alarmism, producing a documentary rebutting Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.

Hayward just wrote an incredibly insightful article for The Civitas Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. It's titled “The Nadir of the Climate Change Movement,”and below is a consolidated version of what I consider the heart of the piece:

I doubt the climatistas know what's about to hit them. Unlike the defensive crouch of previous Republican administrations (including Trump I to some extent), the new Trump team is going straight at the heart of the entire climate change framework. Start with the aforementioned "social cost of carbon" (SCC), an economic calculation of the present value of projected future climate damages if we don't suppress fossil fuel use.

It is an arcane economic analysis, the assumptions of which I won’t delve into here, except to note the variation in the estimate over the last 15 years. The Obama EPA settled on an SCC estimate of $52 per ton; the first Trump EPA calculated the SCC at $7 per ton, and the Biden EPA came up with $185 per ton. In other words, this is all economic flim-flam, with the high numbers necessary to justify monumental energy regulations and subsidies for costly “green” energy.

The biggest problem here, regardless of the number you settle on, is that any estimate of the social cost of carbon should also account for the social benefits of carbon, which vastly outweigh the climate costs that preoccupy the climatistas. This aspect of the matter is understudied because the results would kill off almost all the climate crisis industry at a stroke.

One of the very few to do this is Richard Tol, a highly regarded Dutch environmental economist. In 2017, he concluded that the social benefit of carbon is over $400 per ton, which is a multiple of even the highest cost estimates of the climatistas and the bureaucrats. This is the kind of benefit Wright has in mind with his statement that fossil fuels are responsible for launching "modern medicine, telecommunications, planes, trains, and automobiles, too."

That's only the beginning of the massive benefits of large-scale affordable energy over the last century, but these incredible achievements are seldom seriously considered in the "consensus science" assessments of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

It is necessary to make the sober point that if we ceased using coal, oil, and natural gas instantly, as the most fervent climatistas demand in their street protests and art museum vandalism stunts, hundreds of millions of people around the world would be dead in a week…

Climate change has been the premier environmental issue for almost 40 years now and appears to be running through what the eminent political scientist Anthony Downs identified in a classic 1971 article in The Public Interest as "the issue-attention cycle."

Downs outlined a five-stage cycle through which political issues of all kinds typically progress. Experts and interest groups begin promoting a problem or crisis, which is soon followed by the alarmed discovery of the news media and broader political class. This second stage, significantly, typically includes a large amount of euphoric enthusiasm—you might call this the “dopamine” stage—as activists conceive the issue regarding global salvation and redemption…

Then comes the third or "hinge" stage, where there is “a gradually spreading realization that the cost of ‘solving’ the problem is very high indeed.” This is where we have been with climate change from almost the beginning.

“The previous stage,” Downs continued, “becomes almost imperceptibly transformed into the fourth stage: a gradual decline in the intensity of public interest in the problem.”

Then, in the fifth or “final [post-problem] stage,” Downs concluded, “an issue that has been replaced at the center of public concern moves into a prolonged limbo—a twilight realm of lesser attention or spasmodic recurrences of interest.”

Climate change has arrived at Downs' fifth stage. Despite billions spent for climate crisis agitprop, the backing of a compliant media, the surrender of much of big business (including many fossil fuel companies), and the endless braying of opportunist politicians, opinion surveys consistently find that the public does not buy the "climate crisis," ranking it at the bottom or next to the bottom of their major issue concerns…

Source: Alan Foum, Geophysicist

Led by Germany's "energiewende" ("energy revolution"), Europe spent over a trillion Euros for green energy, only to see their modest decarbonization trends stall and go into reverse, with Germany and other nations having to restart coal-fired power plants and diesel generators, extending oil and natural gas production after having intended to reduce production, and reversing closures of nuclear power plants.

The inability to meet the rising costs of green energy led to the downfall of the German government last fall. If you pay close attention, you can see that European political leaders have been backtracking on climatism for some time now, muting their rhetoric—always the cheapest commodity for all politicians—about the climate crisis and ambitious climate goals.

Even John Kerry, climate catastrophist-in-chief, has made subtle but telling shifts in his climate rhetoric. In 2021, Kerry's standard climate change stump speech claimed, “Currently, as we’re talking today, we are regrettably on course to hit somewhere between 3, 4 degrees at the current rate.” But by 2023, Kerry's numbers changed: “We're currently heading towards something like 2.4 degrees, 2.5 degrees of warming on the planet."

What changed? It turns out that even the so-called "consensus science" of the IPCC has begun to dial back its previous predictions of climate catastrophe, although the media haven't noticed or reported this…

The progress of climate change through Downs's "issue-attention cycle" does not mean that resource extraction industries won't continue to face hostile regulators, protracted litigation from activists, and biased treatment from the media. But for the first time in decades, the prevailing winds are blowing not toward more windmills but toward common sense on energy.

Hayward gets it correct, as I see it. The latest generation, my grandchildren’s, are thoroughly rejecting the excesses of my own, the 1960s generation. We completely blew it with our self-centered rejection of the world created by the Greatest Generation, and now the worm has turned again. Climate obsession was an attempt to be God and create our own religion around it. It seemed existential at the time, but more time has revealed it wasn’t the real thing, and the grandchildren have noticed the emperor has no clothes.

#Climate #StevenHayward #AnthonyDowns #IssueAttentionCycle #Energiewende #AlGore #JohnKerry #GreenEnergy