Climate blather from world leaders isn’t ‘out of context’
As Ronald Reagan prepared for his 1980 debate with Jimmy Carter, his aides fretted that Carter might cite some of Reagan’s indiscreet quips, such as: When Patty Hearst’s kidnappers demanded the distribution of free canned goods, Reagan reportedly said this would be a good time for a botulism outbreak. How might Reagan explain this? An aide drolly suggested: “Say it was taken out of context.”
Terry McAuliffe, the loser in Tuesday’s Virginia gubernatorial race, says his career-ending 12 words (“I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach”) were taken “out of context.” They were, however, congruent with a progressive’s loyalty to teachers unions. His “out of context” alibi was part of a deluge of rhetoric making many leaders look ludicrous.
Before the climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland (this month’s “last, best hope” for humanity), Joe Biden interspersed his warnings about the “existential” threat of global warming caused by fossil fuels with pleas for OPEC nations to increase petroleum production.
“On the surface,” he says, this seems “like an irony.” Biden, perhaps the least ironic person on the planet, cannot know that irony is usually a sardonic use of words, not an incongruity such as that between his overheated rhetoric and his policy accommodations to reality.
In extenuation of himself, he says “no one anticipated” today’s facts: worldwide energy shortages and an unusually cold winter forecast. A president wagering hundreds of billions on complex climate anticipations is complaining about unreliable anticipating.
Earth, Biden says, is careening toward uninhabitability. But drivers, a.k.a voters, are fuming as the digital numbers on gas pumps race to startling sums. So, get Saudi Arabia on the phone. Regarding Americans’ low pain threshold: Nationwide, gas prices just passed $3.30 a gallon, moderately above the inflation-adjusted cost in 1951 ($2.84).
Greta Thunberg, the Swedish Savonarola, scourge of adults who are less alarmed than she about the climate, was in Glasgow. Now 18 and said, “Our addiction to fossil fuels is pushing humanity to the brink.” Well.
Addiction is nonrational — physiological or psychological — behavior. For 250 years, fossil fuels have been sensibly relied on to produce the economic growth that has pulled most of humanity up from the disease and subsistence squalor that had been the lot of almost everyone who’d ever lived.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, for whom the word “blatherskite” could have been invented, says mankind stands “one minute to midnight,” and without commensurate action, “the anger and impatience” of the world will be “uncontainable.” No, anger would end the careers of politicians who implemented measures matching their rhetoric. This winter might provide a foretaste in Europe, where natural gas prices are up almost 500% in a year, and in the half of U.S. households heated by natural gas, where heating costs probably will increase at least 30% over last year’s. U.S. electricity generation by coal will increase this year for the first time since 2014.
Glasgow was as historic as climate campaigners hoped it would be, but not in the way they wanted: It, and the preceding Group of 20 meeting, made clear that sufficient measures will not be taken to keep global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Good. Now attention might turn to physical adaptations, a much more cost-effective strategy than wielding industrial policy to cope with warming.