Diary of an Acclimatised Beauty: Beetling

I was set to enjoy a much-needed holiday in Marbella when I was called back over a small crisis. How small? One centimetre to be exact. I had worked tirelessly to help get a theme park built along the Thames, and then along came a spider, and sad down beside her.

I was an obvious hire to find the exact language to please even the peskiest environmental groups but moments after they inked the deal… a group of nobodies from nowhere threw a spanner into the works and we were all introduced to England’s new sovereign—the jumping spider. And not just any jumping spider…lord no, this creeper was being touted as the ‘distinguished jumping spider’ and the ‘favourite of nature lovers’. But just who were these nature lovers? I certainly was not one of them, nor had any of this spider-love shown up in the impact studies. Sadly, I smelled a rat.

We’d done exhaustive research in preparation for what was being dubbed ‘U.K. Disney’ but at the end of the day it was BEETLES that we found—a whopping quarter of all the water beetles in the U.K. were going to happily reside next to an Arthurian kingdom, a sci-fi ‘starport’, and a fairytale land. The surveys said so, I said so, and even the BBC said so. But then the complaints began about potential risk to this beloved spider, and the BBC pulled out—followed by others.

Ladies and gents, Salticus scenicus, the Distinguished Jumping Spider.

As I said, there had been nothing about this in our audit but since when did spiders mind buildings? It seemed to me that all they ever did was was get into homes and hide in corners and behind hatboxes. Without sponsors, the whole project was nearing extinction—just like the much-anticipated dinosaur land, and fastest rollercoaster in Europe. Oh why did we need these spiders anyway? It’s not like they spun silk or made honey.

Just then I clicked on ‘Save the Swanscombe Peninsula’—a website dedicated to killing my project. Just who were these people? And save the peninsula from what? It was not in danger of not being a peninsula. And any third-grader knew that all of Britain had once been a peninsula until an ancient tsunami separated it from Europe. But of course they were trying to sound scary. I knew this because it was a tactic I’d employed myself. No one was going to care about killing off the hairy four-eyed beast we’d all been happily squishing in our kitchens and bathrooms. So instead they went bigger… claiming the peninsula itself was in danger! Incredible.

The entire site was madness. They’d hidden the pictures of the ugliest creature to set foot on English soil since the Visigoths, and instead showcased fancifully illustrated butterflies, and angelic buffalo asking you to stop the destruction of ‘the most precious place for wildlife and people alike.’ I wondered then if they were actually trying to get a dig in against the Scots because the area was a swamp. And a swamp that had already been heavily mined of clay and chalk to support a network of cement plants that now lie crumbling along the estuary. And there were shipping ports, and hydraulic lifts, and abandoned quarries as far as the eye could see.

Swanscombe is lovely this time of year.

I assumed that spiders, unlike the spotted owl, couldn’t just be relocated to appease these obstructionists. Ugh. I longed for the suite I’d left in Marbella in order to come here and sort this out. I thought to call my father who, as a geophysical engineer and oil executive, surely would know the people who know the people who could save my project. But I dreaded asking him. He was sure to mock me as it’s my people, (the green-niks as he calls us), who cause him all of his trouble. But my project was set to be done in a responsible manner, and create jobs and… eek. I realised I was borrowing his argument. Out of ideas, I gave in and called him.

‘Yes, Jennifer’, he answered. ‘How’s Spain?’

‘No Spain’. I said. ‘I had to come back to deal with Swanscombe’.

‘Reviving the concrete industry?’ he asked.

‘No daddy. The park—the amusement park. We’re being shut down by a spider.’

‘An actual spider?’

‘No daddy, the people who love spiders. YOU KNOW THE PEOPLE! Those… people.’

‘Yes, I do.’

Of course he did, but I could hear him gloating.

“So you called to ask me how to fend off the environmentalists? Do I have that right?’ he asked.

UGH! “Yes! I mean no! I mean… I just want to finish my job! This place is an industrial wasteland, the spider thing is a ruse, the park will actually improve the environment and it will create jobs’.

Let us reason together.

‘Ah, then the bulk of your work is done’, he said. ‘You now know you can’t reason with these folks because reason is the last thing they understand—present company excluded of course. But I suggest you just get round them. They’ve scared off the BBC, so offer the space to a competitor, offer them a good deal, and keep offering until you find a client who isn’t a squish'.

He had a point. I couldn’t win a fight with a phantom. And I decided the best way to show them they didn’t scare me was to get right back on a plane to Marbella. It was a real power play. It showed them we knew we had the upper hand and would not dignify their rants with any response. Besides, nothing like a Zoom call with the Marbella Club in the background to give them what for.

Ringing in the Climate Changes

It’s been an eventful year, and there are many candidates for the title of 2021’s most momentous event. But the winner has to be the failure of the U.N.’s Climate Change conference in Glasgow in November. That is in part because COP26—its formal title—was billed as the event that would save the world from an existential emergency crisis of global warming that would otherwise consume civilization in a massive conflagration. Or something like that.

If you bothered to read the fine print in the reports of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, you would find that the situation was really not as dire as that. As is the way with such things, however, the press handouts (which are written by government and U.N. officials rather than by scientists) went straight to the “worst case” scenarios and proceeded to exaggerate them—as The Pipeline has demonstrated on numerous occasions. Then the media devoted its famous skepticism to suggesting that these doom-laden forecasts might well be rosy scenarios.

On top of this the British government—which was the main host of COP26—had arranged a massive propaganda barrage extolling the world-historical importance of the Conference and of Boris Johnson’s role in it. Its theme was that COP26 could not be allowed to fail, and the BBC told us this repeatedly.

Who are these masked men?

Alas, fail it did, not only in the predictable sense that it could not possibly reach its promised target of reducing the world’s carbon emissions to Net-Zero (compared to late 19^th century levels) by 2050—that’s always been obvious—but in the much more embarrassing political sense that some of the most important countries at Glasgow more or less said so.

Admittedly, this was done with a kind of bureaucratic hocus-pocus: every pledge came with a get-out clause. Countries will meet next year to agree on more cuts to carbon emissions, but previous pledges haven’t been met, and these pledges won’t be legally binding. One such pledge was that coal was to be “phased out,” but when China and India objected, that became “phased down.” There was talk of a trillion-dollar-a-year fund to finance a switch by developing countries from fossil fuels to cleaner ones, but earlier pledges of a fund one-tenth of that amount have not been fulfilled. Richer countries will phase out subsidies to fossil fuels domestically but, ahem, no dates have been set for this.

Or as the BBC analysis observed wearily, most such pledges will have to be “self-policed.”

A heavy sense of déjà vu clings to these proceedings. It wasn’t the first failure of the U.N. “Kyoto process”—the 2009 Copenhagen conference had a similar outcome—but it was the most disappointing because it was meant to be the moment when the world not merely endorsed Net-Zero but also made it legally enforceable on nation-states. Its failure was therefore the collapse of a passionate delusion.

The Clown Prince of Net-Zero.

Or perhaps several delusions. There is the recurring belief among climate alarmists that developing countries like India and China will be prepared to give up the cheap energy that is the only way their populations will emerge from grinding poverty. That’s remarkably similar to the delusion that oil-rich countries like Saudi Arabia will give up selling energy and so force their populations back into the grinding poverty from which they have only recently emerged. Neither group of countries (whatever they say at COP conferences) will plunge their countries into poverty merely to please Europe’s Green parties. And indeed they disappoint the climate alarmists at every COP.

Another delusion of climate alarmism is the following logic: if global warming is an existential emergency crisis for the world, then any solution to it must be a good one. But a solution that imposes heavier costs on the world than the costs of living with global warming is no solution at all. That’s what Net-Zero does. But attempting to replace fossil fuels—which now provide the world with about eighty-five per cent of its energy—with more expensive and less reliable energy sources is the opposite of a solution. It’s choosing to create a problem voluntarily. And as Net-Zero moves from the realm of rhetoric into that of real life, more and more people are realizing that.

That’s why the failure of COP26 has led to public lamentations by climate activists but also, more quietly, to governments looking for alternative energy policies that reduce emissions without crashing the economy and living standards. These usually turn out to be some mix of nuclear power, natural gas, and encouragement of technical innovation.

Michael Shellenberger recently reported that Britain, France, and the Netherlands are reviving plans for nuclear power to be a larger part of the mix. Even in Germany, with powerful Green parties in its new left-wing government, “resistance is growing . . . to closing nuclear plants, and a new YouGov poll finds that over half of Germans say nuclear should remain part of their nation’s climate policy.”

The way forward, again.

Not everyone is taking the failure of COP26 so sensibly, however. I am grateful to the newsletter of the Science and Environmental Policy Project SEPP for drawing my attention to one particular academic program at the University of Bern in Switzerland designed to make us take climate sustainability more seriously than we apparently want to do. It’s worth quoting at some length: Published in the journal Cortex, the abstract reads:

While many people acknowledge the urgency to drastically change our consumption patterns to mitigate climate change, most people fail to live sustainably. We hypothesized that a lack of sustainability stems from insufficient intergenerational mentalizing (i.e., taking the perspective of people in the future). To causally test our hypothesis, we applied high-definition transcranial direct current stimulation (HD-tDCS) to the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ). We tested participants twice (receiving stimulation at the TPJ or the vertex as control), while they engaged in a behavioral economic paradigm measuring sustainable decision-making, even if sustainability was costly. Indeed, excitatory anodal HD-tDCS increased sustainable decision-making, while inhibitory cathodal HD-tDCS had no effect . . . Shedding light on the neural basis of sustainability, our results could inspire targeted interventions tackling the TPJ and give neuroscientific support to theories on how to construct public campaigns addressing sustainability issues.

In short: we have ways of making you think sustainably.

A Tale of Two Emergencies

For the last few years the peoples of the Western world have been repeatedly warned in the most frightening terms that they are facing a vast climate “emergency,” but they’ve had the greatest difficulty in keeping their eyes open when the emergency was explained to them. Worse than that, when their eyes have been opened forcibly by election campaigns, they have generally voted to reject the solution—namely, carbon taxation—proposed to them by their governments. And where there’s been a realistic choice, they’ve often rejected the governments too.

In response to this climate skepticism, Greta Thunberg, the anti-establishment protesters of Extinction Rebellion, and the woke Left have joined governments in ramping up the pressure on ordinary citizens to support extreme solutions (see below) to climate change because if we don’t, the world will end in twelve years. Even so the main public response to the protests—disrupting city centres, glueing themselves to roads, and blocking pipelines and mines—taken by the activists and tacitly supported by the authorities has been public anger and demands that they protesters be restrained and prosecuted.

It’s almost as if most of the public don’t really believe there’s a climate emergency.

Now, it’s certainly not because the public doesn’t believe in emergencies in general, or in taking them lightly when they occur, or in shrugging their shoulders and letting governments get on with coping with them. All that has become panic-shriekingly clear in the last two weeks as the Coronavirus emergency has burst into the public mind and provoked supermarket rioting across the world. So it’s worth looking at the two emergencies and what the differences between them tell us about the politics of emergency in the wider context.

The first and most obvious difference is that whereas governments struggle to make the people care about climate change, it’s the ordinary people who are demanding faster action, more effective medical responses, and bolder intervention by governments, even limits to civil liberties, to halt the spread of the Wuhan coronavirus. The former emergency has been one in which governments put pressure on the people, usually to little or no avail; the latter is one in which the people pressure the governments, sometimes having an impact either in policy or on national life.

Of course, the reason for this is not mysterious. There really is an emergency over Covid-19 (to give the virus its full official title): people are contracting the illness almost everywhere, dying in large numbers in some countries, and the numbers of both infections and deaths are increasingly daily. The Johns Hopkins Tracking Map keeps an up-to-the-minute score which currently shows 136,929 infected people and 5058 deaths worldwide. China, Italy, and Iran have suffered the most of both so far, but other countries are catching up. Europe looks like it's replacing East Asia as the worst hit region. People everywhere feel that the virus may soon come to a street near them. And as Dr. Johnson might have said, the prospect of catching a potentially fatal illness concentrates the mind wonderfully.

That’s led in turn to a second difference: attitudes to the experts and their advice. On climate change, experts have been elevated to a position of near-omniscience. Those who dispute the orthodox “consensus” of climate scientists, including skeptics who are themselves climate scientists, are labelled “climate deniers,” and media outlets such as the BBC and the Guardian either exclude them from the discussion or attach a “health warning” to their contributions. Debate is discouraged. Only one version of scientific truth is regarded as respectable, even though the underlying basis of science is that truth is always provisional. Something is true until it's displaced by another truth, usually one that can be demonstrated by experiment.

In the coronavirus debate, however, public concern over the imminent risks to them have led to a more skeptical attitude. Experts and the governments they advise have come under severe criticism for not seeing the warning signs of the epidemic—now classed by the World Health Organization as a pandemic—early enough and for not advising sufficiently strong measures to contain it when they realized it was happening. They cite reasons for the first failure: the Chinese government, with the World Health Organization turning a blind eye, kept the seriousness of the coronavirus outbreak under wraps and allowed it to spread beneath the radars of most other nations.

The second failure—if it is one—is more complicated, and we probably won’t know the full truth about it until after the pandemic is over. There's a broad division of opinion between the experts on how to deal with a pandemic once it’s no longer “contained.” The expert view adopted by most countries (and which also sounds like commonsense to most people) is that you should pursue an active policy of “social distancing:" encouraging individual citizens to self-isolate, and banning large gatherings, closing cinemas, restaurants, and most shops, and restricting passage over borders. That will hinder the spread of the virus, even if it can't prevent it.

The other expert view, exhibited most clearly in UK policy, is that these measures won’t really work but instead will mean that mass infections are likely to "peak" all together at a particular time and to overwhelm health services when they do. We see something like that in Italy today. The UK view is that it’s better for infections to be stretched out over a time so that hospitals can cope with the several smaller “peaks” as they occur in succession. This delaying effect will also push the spread of the virus into the summer months when it’s less dangerous and a vaccine is more likely to have been developed.

Now, I don’t know which of those two theories is correct. But I do know that the UK version has been developed by expert professionals over many years of studying earlier epidemics. It wasn’t dreamed up by Dominic Cummings over lunch in Whitehall. Other experts in the UK disagree, however, and want a more aggressive shutdown and a tougher approach to social isolation. And, understandably, they have a lot of support from a worried public.

I don't intend to decide between these two expert views. The course of the coronavirus pandemic will eventually do that. But I do conclude that when an emergency is real, experts will likely differ on how to deal with it, and the public will want to hear the arguments of both sides fairly thrashed out. If the climate emergency ever becomes real in the public mind, then the scientific consensus won’t last long. People will want answers to a lot of questions, and both climate scientists and economists who question the prevailing orthodoxy will be given a hearing.

Many other differences between these two emergencies illuminate how policy-making inevitably changes when it ceases to be theoretical and becomes a matter of hard choices. One of the important but rarely emphasized elements in the 2018 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on mitigating global warming is that it will incorporate a massive re-distribution of resources from the West to the developing world, including China. Well, a sacrifice is easy to endorse when it’s many debates away from implementation. But the hostility to China over its Chernobyl-like censorship of the rise and spread of the virus suggests that most Western countries—Trudeau's Canada perhaps excepted—won't be too keen on transferring their resources to a great power that sometimes seems to be a hostile one. Nor will they be happy to do so under the auspices of the kind of international civil servants who in WHO allowed Beijing to keep the epidemic under very non-transparent wraps. And even without these recent incentives to national self-interest, governments will be much more nervous about sending out more public money abroad when the voters are paying the kind of attention to climate policy they now give to the pandemic.

So the best question about the most important difference between the two emergencies was posed—though he thought he was answering it—by the former Greek Finance Minister, Yanis Varoufakis, when he tweeted as follows about the coronavirus crisis:

A silver lining: Climate activists have been told again & again that people will never consent to major changes in their lifestyle. Well, Covid-19 changed all that! Once the epidemic ends, we must demonstrate that a better, green, post-capitalist lifestyle can be fun!

Good luck with that, as the saying goes. For it glosses over some very important distinctions--or perhaps I should call them inconvenient truths.

Have people really consented to major changes in their lifestyle in the Covid-19 crisis? Sure, they’ve been prepared to accept some voluntary social isolation and to impose isolation on their reluctant neighbors because they want to be safe. And living is not a trivial part of any lifestyle. But the restrictions they accept or demand are strictly temporary. It has needed a deathly threat to persuade them to go as far as that. And the experts advising the UK government don’t think social distancing and self-isolation, either voluntary or enforced, will be fun either. In fact the reason they propose a policy depending much less on that approach is that they think people will get tired of it quite soon, after about a month, start breaking their semi-quarantine and reverse its earlier gains.

Those modest sacrifices, however, don’t begin to compare with the massive impoverishment that would follow the proposals of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to keep the rise in world temperature to 1.5 degrees between now and 2050. This would require a massive reduction in carbon emissions in the West’s economies, which in turn that would mean far higher prices of the energy that powers every aspect of our lives and working lives -- industry, agriculture, transport, communications, travel, and the kind of homes we can afford to live in. Governments have assented to this—it's an intergovernmental organization, after all—but it’s doubtful if even senior ministers have grasped what it would mean for their economies, let alone their voters.

And the IPCC report does not exactly spell it out. Advocates of Green politics and net-zero emissions policy rarely go into detail on it. And the IPCC's 2018 executive summary—turgid and verbose though it is compared to the clarity of the UK medical experts—devotes very little space to the proposed economic shutdown and none at all to what it would cost. As it writes sotto voce: “The literature on total mitigation costs of 1.5°C mitigation pathways is limited and was not assessed in this Report.”

And that impoverished lifestyle is not for one or two months. It’s a forever thing. If I had a more suspicious nature, I’d think Varoufakis was proposing this in revenge for what the EU, the IMF, and then ECB did to Greece.

But if not: Have fun, Yanis.