Pirate's Cove

This opinion piece at the Washington Post from Leftist Charles Lane really lays out the failure of the Cult of Climastrology, which was very much not expected

It’s time to look at the (political) science behind climate change

This year, California recorded its deadliest wildfire in state history. The combined intensity and duration of the Atlantic and eastern Pacific oceans’ tropical storms and hurricanes reached a new recorded high. A group of researchers reported that worldwide fossil-fuel-related carbon dioxide emissions are projected to hit 37.1 billion tons in 2018, yet another annual record. (the wildfire and tropical storms have nothing to do with CO2)

It’s time to take a clear-eyed look at the science behind these developments — the political science.

The data show that, for all the evidence that climate change is real, manmade and dangerous, and despite wide public acceptance of those propositions, people in the United States do not necessarily want to stop climate change, in the sense of being willing to pay the cost — which is the only sense that really matters.

The data coming from actual science doesn’t actually show that climate change, otherwise known as global warming, is anything other than real. It doesn’t prove causation. But his point about not being willing to pay the cost is a big one.

“The public’s level of concern about climate change has not risen meaningfully over the past two decades, and addressing the problem with government action ranks among one of the lowest priorities for Americans,” according to a comprehensive review of public opinion literature published in 2017 by Patrick J. Egan of New York University and Megan Mullin of Duke University.

In a series of open-ended Gallup surveys this year asking Americans to name the “most important problem facing the country,” environmental issues never scored above 3 percent.

The problem here is that ‘climate change’ is stacked in with real environmental issues.

Even before the recent riots against President Emmanuel Macron’s climate-change-related fuel tax hike in France, there was a quieter backlash of sorts in the United States: Anti-fossil-fuel referendums lost in Colorado, Washington state and Arizona during last month’s elections. (snip)

Of course, the climate-change movement was not exactly silent during recent history. What’s crucial, after accounting for the battle between the movement and its opponents, is the inherent nature of climate change as a political issue: It requires voters to accept “up-front costs that, if successful, will stave off never-to-be experienced long-term damage — policy for which election-oriented politicians can easily foresee receiving blame instead of credit,” Egan and Mullin note.

While they were actually primarily anti-carbon tax, people, even Warmists, aren’t willing to pay through the nose for their vehicle’s food. Nor for other policies. They’re cool if it is on That Guy, but, most realized that they will end up getting taxed and fee’d along with That Guy.

Anyhow, Charles continues on in this vein for a bit, highlighting polls that show ‘climate change’ being a very low ranking issue, failures to pass different carbon taxes and other Warmist priorities, and you keep waiting for the authoritarian shoe of the Cult to drop. The closest is this

The most politically feasible climate-change proposals, Egan told me in an email, may be those which “address the problem in a more piecemeal and thus less visible fashion,” such as raising automobile fuel economy standards, or, at the state level, requiring that a minimum share of energy come from low-emission renewable sources.

Dink and dunk their way. But, see, that’s not what the CoC is about. Those measures won’t get them the control of citizens, the economy, and private entities that they want, especially at the federal level.

Either way, the larger point — the inconvenient truth, you might say — remains. It’s not easy to persuade citizens of a democracy to accept real financial sacrifice in the here and now for the sake of a diffuse benefit in the future.

Another of 2018’s lessons, therefore, is that the climate-change movement faces a democratic deficit. It must either overcome that deficit or fail.

The larger point is that the CoC has been pushing this stuff for 30 years, and has mostly failed. We could probably find some common ground measures between the CoC and Skeptics, but, most Warmists are inflexible, and common ground measures wouldn’t get them the political authoritarian dominance they want.