A real problem for US: Right to deal with, but Wrong how we are doing so. / Climate Change Myopia

Climate Change Myopia — in Glasgow and in DC

We stubborn humans seem to think we can change the climate.

NOVEMBER 2, 2021 By Jack DeVine

This week, world leaders — our president among them — are congregating in Glasgow, Scotland, for the 2021 United Nations Climate Change summit meeting, called COP26.

Perhaps that’s a good thing, but the mere fact that there have already been 25 of these summit meetings is one hint that the entire global climate initiative involves a great deal of virtue signaling, wheel spinning, and empty promises — and not much tangible progress.

It would be nice to see a bit of balance in these proceedings, but don’t bet on it. The underlying premise of the Glasgow meeting is that mankind can and must “fix” climate change. Even reasoned disagreement with that parochial view will surely be tarred as “denial” and summarily rejected.

As a rule, these climate summit meetings pursue the same shortsighted agenda. They focus narrowly on the projected time until we reach an arbitrary critical point in average global temperature and how that threshold might be forestalled if the world community were to drastically reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.

That’s OK as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. What’s entirely absent is consideration of the consequences of those proposed actions on real people. Those consequences are very real — probably more real than the touted threat of climate change — and uniformly bad.

In short, the actions proposed in COP summit meetings to combat climate change — and being crammed into legislation here in the U.S. — will do little discernable good for the planet and a great deal of harm to the planet’s inhabitants.

The following are a few climate perspectives — call them “inconvenient truths” (borrowing climate opportunist Al Gore’s famous phrase) — likely to be lost in the shuffle of COP26 summit speechifying:

1.) Changing climate is an ongoing reality of life on earth, not an existential crisis. We live on a planet that’s been hurtling through space for billions of years. We know that its climate has been cyclically warming and cooling throughout that entire time, and we know that mankind’s actions in the past century have, to some degree, accelerated the current warming cycle.

But we also know that a technologically advanced society such as ours has many tools at its disposal to cope with the effects of those inevitable changes.

2.) The proposed fix comes at a frightfully high human cost. Economics 101 makes it clear that when something costs more, we get less of it. Large-scale rapid shift to wind and solar will simultaneously increase the cost of electrical power and diminish the reliability of our electric grid. That means that more people worldwide will do without electricity, that those who can afford it will pay a substantial premium for it, and that the overall economy — ultimately jobs and wages — will suffer accordingly.

Right now, about 750 million human beings — more than twice the population of the United States — do not have access to electricity. For those unfortunate people, most already in poverty, the lifetime consequences are horrific: chronic health issues, malnutrition, and significantly shorter life spans. Our world needs more electrification, not less.

Even in parts of the world where most can cope with higher energy costs, the consequences of a rushed, wholesale shift from fossil fuels to renewables are severe. That shift is still in relative infancy (arguably the easy part, while there is still fossil fuel backup), but we’re already seeing cracks in the façade. The U.S. is no longer energy independent; gasoline and electricity prices are skyrocketing; and Western Europe is facing a long hard winter with widespread natural gas shortages and sky-high prices.

3.) The proposed fix doesn’t solve the problem. The same ultra-complex computer models that project catastrophic temperature increases also tell us that even a substantial shift to non-emitting sources will do nothing to reverse the existing damage to the earth’s atmosphere. Moreover, at best that shift will only delay — not prevent — reaching the supposedly critical 2.5°C temperature increase.

4.) Ultimately, we must deal with climate change by adapting to it, not by fixing the climate. The earth’s flora and fauna do so instinctively, altering their habitats, food and water supplies, habitat, etc. to take best advantage of what the changing world has to offer. We stubborn humans, however, seem to think we can change the climate rather than living with it. That’s a foolish and consequential bet.

Transition to non-emitting, renewable electricity production is beneficial from an environmental and resource conservation standpoint. In the long term, it is essential. But we should do so in a way and on a time frame that poses minimal harm to our fellow inhabitants of planet earth.

Of course we all know how important this is to ol’ Joe