After 'Net-Zero,' A Different Kind of Deluge

When The Pipeline was launched more than three years ago, it was among a small minority of websites specializing in energy topics that warned the world it was heading for catastrophe in embracing the dogma of Net-Zero carbon emissions by 2050. We pointed out that even if one were to accept the belief that the world is facing a “climate emergency”—it isn’t—moving from a world eighty percent reliant on fossil fuels for energy to a world reliant to the same extent on renewables such as wind and sun would impose a drastic collapse in the world economy and living standards far worse than the impact of “climate change.”

Such arguments almost never got a serious government response or public attention. Mostly they were ignored—but not entirely. One occasional response was to concede that implementing Net-Zero would require some sacrifice on the part of ordinary people which, however, would be compensated for by a new Green Industrial Revolution, green jobs, and various environmental benefits.

But the degree of sacrifice required of everyone if we were to abandon fossil fuels entirely was never made clear. Financial estimates of its costs in higher taxes and energy prices were hard to find, and when found they were either unreliably low or so vast as to be hard to grasp. Undeterred, however, the Net-Zero caravan moved impressively forward from Copenhagen to Cairo to Glasgow with the U.N. and the world’s governments at its head, corporations, and investment houses dragged along in regulators’ wagons behind them, and loud angry crowds of NGOs and activists shouting “faster, faster” if anyone paused or questioned the direction of travel. Not many did. It was, after all, an inevitable matter of saving the world.

Fascism with an inhuman face, heading your way.

That was only yesterday. But with every revolution of the 24-hour news cycle, it seems more and more remotely in the past. “’Outraged and furious’: Germans rebel against gas boiler ban,” proclaimed a recent Financial Times headline on a story that householders were being forced by Germany’s energy transition policy —dubbed die Energiewende— “to install hearing systems power by renewables dubbed the ‘heat hammer.’”

“Treasury idiocy is killing North Sea Energy,” was the title the U.K. Times’s editors put on a column by the paper’s economic columnist, Juliet Samuel, that went on “The North Sea is critical to British energy security. Oil and gas supply more than two thirds of our overall energy. If the government has its way, North Sea industry will soon be in irreversible decline.”

It takes time for such stories to fight their way to the top of editorial agendas in major newspapers. But the technical and specialist media are full of them. Here, for instance, is Reinsurance News: “German reinsurance giant Hannover Re has opted to leave the Net-Zero Insurance Alliance, making it the third high profile re/insurer to leave the U.N.-convened alliance in less than a month. Unravelling, step by step...”

Unraveling? Maybe that’s a slight exaggeration, but the discipline that the U.N. and government regulators have been able to exert over Wall Street and U.S. corporations in the form of ESG and fossil fuel disinvestment is certainly coming under pressure. Exxon is a fossil fuel company, which might cast doubt on the importance of the slow turning of its tanker towards defending its core business. As the website ZeroHedge grasps, Exxon’s pushback against the financial regulations designed to suppress fossil-fuel investment sounds unusually firm: Exxon “said the prospect of the world achieving net-zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 is remote and should not be further evaluated in its financial statements.”

And Exxon is not alone. Other oil and gas corporations—notably Beyond Petroleum—are scaling back their climate policy commitments to reflect the fact that they are in the oil business, not climatology, and that high and rising energy prices have been signaling the need for more investment in energy—and were doing so before Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine.

(No comment so far from former Bank of England governor and advisor to the U.N. and Boris Johnson on climate policy, Mark Carney, who wanted to place a fiduciary responsibility on corporate managers to avoid fossil-fuel investment on the grounds that it was at risk of losing their clients’ money because of risks that seemed to include the disapproval of regulators such as himself.)

Carney: not a peep.

Now, you might suppose that all these different reactions reflecting nervous “second thoughts,” even opposition, to Net-Zero policies indicate how savagely the lack of fossil fuels is biting voters and consumers. But according to the U.K. website tracking the composition of U.K. energy, the mix of British electricity on May 21 this year at 9.00 pm was 33 percent gas; wind and solar 20 percent between them; nuclear 19 percent; and imports of electricity 22 percent. The author’s main concern was shock that Britain relies on imports for more than one-fifth of its electricity which is certainly a valid concern. What is more important for our purposes here, however, is his revelation that renewables still amount to only one–fifth of the U.K.’s electricity generation after twenty years of multi-party backing of Net-Zero orthodoxy.

In other words, unless the British Net-Zero obsession is junked, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Net-Zero will have to be junked. So why hasn't it happened yet? The answer is that the British governments, its media, cultural, and scientific establishments, and all major political parties have imposed a uniform Net-Zero orthodoxy, sustained by a deep bureaucratic groupthink, on public debate and scientific discussion. Only a handful of people—notably the late Lord Nigel Lawson and the Global Warming Policy Foundation he founded—have sustained a serious and respectable intellectual critique of it over the years.

As a result there is a strong national consensus, especially among highly-educated people, in favor of the policy which at the extreme calls for punishment of dissenters and suppression of inconvenient evidence. We see the consensus operating not only in the unlawful obstruction of public order, traffic, and lawful economic activity such as mining or road-building by groups like Extinction Rebellion, but also in the failure of public authorities, including judges, to restrain or punish those illegal acts in pursuit of a cause generally regarded as good. And the fact that the consensus is strongest among the highly educated should be no comfort because recent psychological research suggests that well-educated people are less willing to change their minds and more able to defend their erroneous opinions than others.

It’s a class war, of course, at least potentially since blue-collar workers are less committed to Net-Zeroism, most likely to be adversely affected by it, and less resistant to changing their minds in the face of real-world evidence. Already, we see signs of this coming conflict in the fights breaking out between activists blocking the road and people needing to get to work or even to hospitals and in the tendency of the police defending the activists rather rather than the motorists. More to come...

Diary of an Acclimatised Beauty: Hardworking

Happy Easter from the Bahamas where I’m still working very hard. Not everyone who left the pandemic to take advantage of the Bahamas pro-business work environment is really all that focused on work—but I certainly am. I’ve made the determination about others based on the fact that they are having breakfast at 11—about the time I’m finishing up.

Thanks to Instagram I’ve found out I have several more friends visiting here than I’d ever dreamed possible, and they are mad-posting and hashtagging. All day long it’s ding-ding—#lyford #albanyyacht #catcayyacht #eleuthra… ding, #pandemic ding-ding.

In the interest of work, (and despite looking so tanned and rested), I’ve decided not to post until I have at least three new clients. Or maybe one really juicy new client. My focus, since I now have time to focus, is going to be to search out only the clients whose sensibilities are most closely aligned with mine.

All work and no play, that's productivity.

Daddy said if I made self-sufficiency my priority I’d find I’m aligned with a great many but I know he’s just being daddy. It’s easy for him to say… I think engineering focuses one’s thinking in such a way that you are really too science-minded to think about meaningful change.

Earlier in the week I had a little hiccup… with such an influx of visitors and corresponding drain on the internet, I wasn’t getting my emails. Especially in the late afternoons when kids who should be swimming or in school are mad-gaming. The internet provider suggested I opt-out of using Wi-Fi and hard-wire my computer to the router— and which is so like a service provider to just make up some excuse as to why you can’t have what you clearly understood you were paying for. Plus it defeats the whole purpose of coming here to work. Luckily the yacht clubs are selling international hotspots so I can now work from wherever is most conducive to my productivity.

I had received a query from a global environmental movement that had “nearly” one hundred academics enrolled in fighting global warming. My first thought was how near to one hundred are you? Near enough to just recruit a couple more to make it an even hundred? Which would have been my suggestion to them once we started working together. Further details explained that they “hoped” to rally worldwide support. Again…can you really not assert (with confidence) something so vague as “worldwide support”? They were going to need every bit of help they could get.

I was however impressed with their aim to using “nonviolent civil disobedience” to achieve their goals. But on second thought, the word “aim” scared me. And after some research it seemed aim was indeed the right word, as they’d blockaded five bridges in London as a protest. Technically this qualified as non-violent but it had the makings of a wholly man-made disaster.

Just now I was missing my rather bad-tempered client who’d made a killing in the cosmetic device industry, and whose presentation for the Audubon Society I’d painstakingly crafted just prior to being sacked.

Nonviolence was definitely the way to go, but try telling that to Greenpeace who’d made a name by insinuating themselves between a Russian whaler and a whale just in time to witness and film the gruesome death of said whale and sell the footage to the news media. In years to come Greenpeace would continue to sell their goodness until they became a $336 million a year multinational behemoth. Some questioned the integrity of these donations when China’s abysmal environmental record dropped off of Greenpeace’s radar.

As an avid environmentalist I have to care that we don’t look or act crazy, and in this way we can achieve greater results not to mention greater trust from the public. In the end what saved the whales from extinction was greed. With ever increasing demand for whale oil, man looked for alternatives and soon after creating petroleum, production from one petroleum well outpaced what a whaling expedition could garner in four years. This is of course all stuff I learned as a kid, but now as an adult I continue fighting both the evil destroyers of our planet and the movements that delegitimise those of us who are doing truly good work.

I was feeling rather down that this briefly promising client had evaporated as quickly as they’d arrived so I rang my father in London to see if he had any ideas. He nudged me again toward the grub worm food factory he had suggested last week but even he knew I wasn’t having it. And then he dropped the bomb saying,

“Some of your friends had a good go of it on Thursday.”

“My friends?” I asked, not knowing what he was referring to.

“Spraying fake oil on the Bank of England to win friends and influence enemies,” he said.

Ah, environment nutters, he meant. “Friends” was his loving jibe.

“Fake oil?” I asked.

“Pond scum if you must know. Pond scum and guar gum is what they used. Pity none of the news media seized on that…I thought Pond Scum Protestors had a nice ring to it.”

What could I say? These were my people in a fashion, and they were dragging us all down.

“Listen…” he continued, I’ve got to run but let me send you the link, they sure need help.” He was nearly chortling before saying goodbye.

It was both embarrassing and tragic. After pond-scumming the bank, they’d gone on to demand the Bank of England “make banks integrate climate risks."

Firstly I don’t think they meant to say "integrate risks" and second, asking banks to regulate themselves, is, I am sure, also not what they meant but something banks would be all too-willing to agree to do.

Oh, and they were dressed like jesters. Actual jesters. If the visual was not bad enough, the historical association was that of fools, who existed to entertain the Crown.

Ding-ding. Instagram calling.

Utopian Ambitions, Hideous Costs

One of the features of the modern world is that as the ambitions of governments expand, their performance deteriorates, and to cope with the hostile reactions that generates, they grow increasingly tyrannical.

Initially, they divert resources from the everyday tasks of government—building roads, stopping crime, defending the country—to pursuing grand projects such as “building Europe” or “saving the world.” Over time their rhetoric catches up with their performance and they claim credit in elections for what they promise to achieve while ignoring or covering up or distracting from their failure to perform government’s essential duties, let alone their lofty ambitions, at all well.

The final stage of this rake’s progress is that they try to suppress information and even debate about the costs and failures of their most cherished policies and condemn their critics for “social” crimes like “ignoring” science or “spreading hate.” Here are a few examples, from several countries, to make the general point:

Take, first, crime. Crime figures always need some interpretation; for instance, this year U.K. statistics have been distorted by the coronavirus pandemic. In Britain there have been fewer home burglaries since the residents have been living at home most of the time. Until this year, however, there have been sharp rises in crimes of violence, including rape, and moderate rises in thefts and burglaries.

The real enemy is the citizenry.

These patterns do not seem to be reflected in increased police concern: residents increasingly complain that the police respond slowly or not at all to notifications of theft and burglary on the grounds that they are “swamped.” On the other hand the police have expanded their interventions in cases of bias expressed on the internet even when they are not crimes (in which cases they have still recorded them as bias “incidents"), and they run campaigns inviting complaints about “hate.”

In addition, legal reforms proposed—in Scotland by the Scottish government, in England by the official Law Commission—will, if enacted into law, criminalize expressions of racial and other prejudice spoken at home around the kitchen table. Earlier generations of Britons would have seen this an unacceptable intrusion of tyranny into the home in pursuit of the mirage of a multi-cultural society without tensions.

In the United States, state and city authorities in those jurisdictions with left-wing Democrat majorities have instructed their police forces not to intervene to protect people and property against attacks by left-wing mobs of social justice warriors. In Britain the police have shown a similar bias in taking the knee during “Black Lives Matter” protests and dancing in the streets with Extinction Rebellion protesters while cracking down on demonstrations against government-imposed coronavirus lockdowns.

All these things show a trashing of the impartiality of law and hint that the police and legal authorities now see their role as regulating the behavior of respectable citizens and their opinions rather than apprehending and punishing criminals.

It’s as if the real threats to freedom and democracy come from ordinary citizens using free speech and the vote to promote their opinions and interests rather than people who believe their ideas are so right and necessary that they can impose them on the rest of us—and that institutions controlled by the latter are maneuvering to find ways of skirting the law to do so.

A related idea in the sphere of economics is the Great Reset advanced by the World Economic Forum, aka Davos Man, which proposes to exploit the Coronavirus Pandemic to usher in a new age of . . . well, of what exactly? Its proposals (or some of them) were outlined in a video that predicts our lives will be better in almost every way except that we’ll “own nothing” but also hints heavily that we won’t be choosing this future democratically but will have to adapt to what the World Economic Forum thinks is necessary.

I remember that it asked whether or not the Davos people in the WEF would own anything like the rest of us. And if the reply came that of course they wouldn’t own anything, as I suspected, I would then ask if they would enjoy the traditional perquisites of ownership such as being able to use the property as they wished.

That kind of thing makes a difference to the abolition of private property. Communist apparatchiks and their apparatchiks did not own their dachas, etc., in the early days of social justice, which is why you discover from books such as Milovan Djilas’s New Class that they ensured their children would inherit their jobs in order to get the privileges that went with them.

And about those privileges: as a result of the Great Reset we’re told we won’t be eating much meat, or traveling very far, or keeping “billions” of migrants out of our nations or cities—the prohibition on traveling apparently doesn’t apply to them—and that we’ll nonetheless be as happy as clams in a plastic-free sea.

Everything clear now?

So much for the future that Davos offers you. Let’s now look at how that kind of utopianism works in practice. Earlier this week the London Times had a bold headlined story announcing that Ministers in the Tory government, notably Chancellor Rishi Sunak, were considering making people pay for using the roads. It was strong stuff:

Rishi Sunak is considering plans to charge motorists for using Britain’s roads amid concerns over a £40 billion tax shortfall created by the switch to electric cars.

A Treasury paper on a new national road pricing scheme has been presented to the chancellor. The government will announce this week that a ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars, which forms part of the prime minister’s ten-point plan on climate change, will be brought forward to 2030.

Downing Street wants to seize the initiative after days of damaging briefings between allies of Boris Johnson’s former adviser Dominic Cummings and his fiancée, Carrie Symonds.

Let me first indulge in a little interpretation of how an ambitious editorial writer on The Sun—a job for which Ms. Symonds once applied—might write up this story in a column. How about:

PM’s sweetie tells Boris: Pay! Pay! Pay! “Make Motorists Pay for New Electric Cars, Pay Higher Electricity Prices, And Pay to Drive.”

Unfair? To Ms. Symonds, undoubtedly unfair. She is a devout environmentalist, apparently an eloquent advocate, and the future Mrs. Johnson. Of course, she has some influence on Boris. But she couldn’t prevail against the Treasury, the Cabinet, all the opposition parties, the BBC, the rest of the media, and the pipes and drums of “Not an Energy Company—BP.”

Then again, she wouldn’t have to do so. They’re on her side. All of those powerful bodies have committed themselves strongly to the policy of making the British economy a net-zero carbon emissions economy by 2050 and thus also to the major step towards it (to be announced, as the Times predicted, this week) of making it illegal to purchase a car driven by the internal combustion engine after 2030.

Well, I’ll leave it there except to point out that this is merely the latest example of what happens when governments declare utopian ambitions and only consider the costs of them as they start coming in. And they have only just started coming in--see my earlier column on the costs of electrifying the whole of Britain to make it hospitable to electric cars.

Electrifying? It will make your hair stand on end.

With the Climate, Some Things Are Uncertain, Some Not

I attend a local Anglican church in a middle-class suburb of Sydney. As is common these days, most congregants are of an age. Churches were allowed to open in New South Wales some weeks ago, albeit with social-distancing rules and sans singing. Hymn singing along with playing wind instruments is well known, apparently, among epidemiologists advising governments, to speed transmission of the dreaded virus. And no, before you ask, no evidence has been adduced.

Who needs evidence to back scary talk? Make it scary enough and people are too busy worrying to think for themselves. In any event, in the mind of the church, St Paul (Romans 13:1-5) dispels any thought of rebelling against civil authorities. Yes, but how about Dietrich Bonhoeffer or Nelson Mandela? Weren’t they right to rebel, you might query? Never mind, that’s a story for another day.

Currently only half the congregants have returned. Evidently, the other half remain too scared to return. This is not surprising. Most will have been brought up on public broadcasting and remain umbilically attached. Funded wholly by tax payers, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, as media watcher Gerard Henderson (The Sydney Institute) often observes, is a conservative-free zone. Its staff-elected director aside, the government appoints the board, but the board has never, ever, shown itself to be anything other than the very model of a toothless tiger. A green/left staff collective runs the ABC. Alarmism is its forte, stirring grievances among supposed oppressed minorities its specialty.

For years climate alarmism has taken centre stage at the ABC. A hot day for the weatherman or woman is code for climate change. On the other hand, a cold day is just a cold day. Unusually, spring snow fell in parts of south-eastern Australia in late September. Nothing to see there. Incidentally, I’ve just clicked onto the ABC website. The first story I see is titled: “Human evolution and climate change.” Safer for one’s state of mind not to venture beyond the title.

According to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, the highest temperature yet recorded in Australia was 50.7 C at Oodnadatta Airport on 2 January 1960. Incidentally, the third highest was in January 1939. The people at my church wouldn’t know that and would have no interest in finding out, I suspect. Thus, I often have to put up with prayers on Sunday to save the environment from mankind. And, in this tremulous Age of Covid, prayers for those afflicted by the virus, which they have been taught by the ABC to regard with the same trepidation as the imminent apocalyptic collapse of ecosystems.

What about children dying of cancer, I whisper under my breath. But death, has become focussed on ‘the invisible enemy’ or, as I saw in my morning paper in a letter from a group of learned physicians living in premier Daniel Andrews’ fiefdom of Victoria, ‘the silent enemy.’ The virus is both invisible and silent. Who knew? What an extremely clever virus is this?

What I particularly notice about those about me at church is a lack of questioning on the issues of the day. My doubts about climate change or the virulence of the virus or, for example, about the factoid we have in Australia (and in the schools) that part-Aboriginal children were ‘stolen’ from their families, are met with absolute incredulity. I believe they think I’m simply eccentric and to be treated kindly (they are Anglicans after all) but condescendingly.

But, let me issue a challenge. Who is self-reflectively questioning in these days of sharply divided opinions? I spent some time some years ago, when I still could stand mixing with those on the left, with a chap who was at the time vice president of Australian Skeptics. I challenged him as to why he wasn’t the least bit skeptical about the received view on climate change. He was gracious enough to issue a mea culpa but remained obdurate; totally without doubt when it came to his certainty that mankind (personkind in Canadian English) is overheating the world.

In case you think I am picking on the Left -- which I admit to often doing -- I meet with a group of conservative friends each Friday morning over coffee. They are equally certain that CO2 is not heating the atmosphere to any material extent. One short-circuits the argument by denying that the recorded increase in CO2 has much, if anything, to do with burning fossil fuels in the first place. I believe I heard Richard Lindzen, or maybe it was another well-known skeptical climate scientist, express a similar view on a YouTube video, so I assume it isn’t outlandish. You notice I say assume because, really, I have no idea.

This brings me to a point. How can we be certain that we are right, particularly on matters outside of our expertise? Obviously, I am not referring to religion where faith is the defining arbiter. Take climate change.

Do I personally know, absolutely, and without possibility of error, that man-made CO2 is not destroying the planet? After all, David Attenborough and Prince Charles think it is; not to mention Greta Thunberg and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; and lots of other people, some of whom might actually have expertise in climate science. I believe I can say with certainty that the alarmist position is unproven. Thereafter, my opinion tends to be on the balance of probabilities rather than beyond doubt.

However, all is not lost in equivocation. Sometimes it's cloudy and the sun always goes down in the evening. The wind doesn’t always blow. Renewable power based on these two sources is therefore intermittent and unreliable. Of this, there is no doubt. Batteries cannot fill the gap. Of that there is also no doubt. If there were, I am sure Michael Moore (Planet of the Humans) would have said so. What this means is that wind and sun power need back-up; mostly, in practise, from coal, gas, or nuclear.

And, the more the wind and sun feed power to the grid, the more back-up is needed. And that, to speak colloquially, is the bleeding obvious. It is one thing to have the wind become still when providing about 7 percent of power, as it did on average in Australia in 2019. Quite another, if in the future, in green dreamland, it is providing 37 percent and more.

It is no accident that South Australia, the state relying most on wind and Tesla batteries, suffered blackouts in 2018. Blackouts have been avoided since by sourcing power, as needed, from Victoria which still has coal power. South Australia has none. The option of sourcing interstate power will progressively diminish as coal-fired power stations (providing 56 percent of the electricity supply nationwide) are demolished. Nine have closed in the past ten years. Of the twenty-four remaining, only six are less than twenty years old. One of the oldest, Liddell in the Hunter region, coal country in NSW, is scheduled for closure in early 2023. This, in a land which is the second largest exporter of thermal coal. Someone, somewhere, must be burning it?

Down Under

It says a lot about the mess we’re in that prime minister Scott Morrison (15 September) threatens to build a government-owned gas-fired power station, unless one or other of the electricity-generation companies replace Liddell with enough dispatchable power to keep the lights on. Gas in coal country you say? Well, that’s as good as it gets. And, of course, instructively, gas better backs up intermittent wind than does coal. Wind calls the tune.

My friend Rafe Champion, among other pursuits, is an avid wind watcher; while cautioning that “wind watching can be time-consuming and habit-forming.” He takes on the onerous task of informing any half-receptive politician he can find, that it isn’t the average amount of wind power delivered to the grid over any period of time that counts, but the minimum amount. Obvious, when you think about it, as the demand for power must be met continuously. Not so obvious to the political class.

It would be nice if those diametrically opposed on global warming could at least agree, if there is a problem, that wind and sun won’t solve it. Then we could put aside differences and work on effective (least-regret) solutions, which would likely include HELE-coal power, gas and nuclear. Alas, differences can’t be put aside. I need to go back to religion.

Faith, as I said, is the final arbiter when it comes to religion. In the final analysis, it is not subject to non-transcendental arguments. It is evident that renewable energy has become totemic of the new ersatz religion of climate change -- aka saving the planet from human pollution. Its dogma lives loudly within climate alarmists, the Extinction Rebellion crowd and the like; and, of course, within the ABC. Questioning the dogma is heretical. My fellow parishioners who listen to and/or watch the ABC need to understand that while high priests are indeed at its helm, their line can’t be traced to the Apostles.

Extinction Rebellion and Tony Abbott: the Climate Changes

As the lockdowns begin to fray around the world, so the pre-lockdown controversies emerge blinking into the light, seemingly unchanged by their experience of hibernation. We’ve just had two resurrections of the climate change debate in London in the last week. And though the arguments heard in them are much the same as before, there are signs of a slight chill in the public’s response, hitherto quite favorable, to them.

The first was the blockade on Friday night/Saturday morning of the printing works that produce most of the Brits’ morning newspapers by Extinction Rebellion protesters. One hundred XR demonstrators, chaining themselves to vehicles, blocked roads to three printing sites from which the great majority of newspapers are transported to homes and newsagents across Britain. Printing then began at other sites, but most people in provincial Britain missed the papers that on a Saturday give them a vast panorama of information and entertainment on news, politics, the economy, real estate, sport, travel, movies, music, theatre, etc., etc.

Much noise was made by XR to the effect that the print works and two papers they print, the Times and the Sun, are owned by Rupert Murdoch who is a hated figure on the Left. But Murdoch’s rivals, the Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph, and the Financial Times are also printed at his works. And the FT is editorially friendly to the XR’s claim that climate change now constitutes an emergency.

Talk about an existential threat.

Until this happened, the public had seemed partly sympathetic, partly resigned, to the inevitability of such demonstrations. Very few people had been inconvenienced by earlier blockades, and the costs in delayed journeys or diverted routes to those who had was modest. Being deprived of a long Saturday read over coffee at the breakfast table, however, though hardly a tragedy, was nonetheless very irritating. And irritation is a favorite British emotion.

Then the XR spokesmen made matters worse for themselves by their justifications of the blockade which generally boiled down to claiming that the papers misled their readers on the urgency of dealing with climate change. Here is the choicest argument from activist Gully Bujak (27):

"The climate emergency is an existential threat to humanity. Instead of publishing this on the front page every day as it deserves, much of our media ignores the issue and some actively sow seeds of climate denial.”

It’s pretty clear that Mr. Bujak wouldn’t make a very good editor, running the same story on every front page every day, but he wouldn’t be a very good reporter either. Almost all the U.K. mainstream media, far from actively sowing seeds of climate denial, are united in their belief that climate change is a major challenge facing humanity and that we should be prepared to cut living standards in order to lower carbon emissions. That’s true not only of the leftish Financial Times but also of the hated (but widely read) Murdoch press. In fact copies of the tabloid Sun diverted or blocked by XR demonstrators were that day carrying an article by Britain’s most celebrated BBC environmentalist, David Attenborough, on how to combat climate change (because readers of the Sun think of little else.)

Occasional op-eds taking a climate-skeptic viewpoint appear in their pages because newspapers not edited by Gully Bujak have a professional bias in favor of debate and controversy. But the mainstream media are generally careful not to stray too far from officialdom’s climate-change orthodoxy.

XR protesters, however, stray very far from that orthodoxy in the opposite direction, demanding net-zero carbon emissions within five years and more or less eliminating both holiday air travel and meat from peoples’ diets, these changes to be supervised by unelected and unaccountable “citizens’ assemblies.”

Given the puritan authoritarianism of these aims, XR’s assertion of its right to halt the distribution of newspapers because they disagreed with the opinions they expressed on climate change rang a very loud warning bell. Commentators across the spectrum condemned the blockades as attacks on press freedom. Members of the public started to ask why the police had appeared to cooperate with the protesters so that the blockades could be enforced with minimum inconvenience to third parties. Aren’t newspaper readers and printing companies, not just third parties, entitled to go about their business without deliberate let or hindrance too? (Maybe, yes: 72 protesters were eventually arrested.)

Even government ministers, who have been somewhat timid of late, spoke out firmly in defense of “a free press, society and democracy” (Home Secretary Priti Patel) and against this particular attack on the free press (“completely unacceptable,” Prime Minister Boris Johnson.)

In short there was a rare bi-partisan consensus that Extinction Rebellion had laid an egg and that in future it should no longer be allowed to run around bullying people in order to impose a minority opinion that if implemented would have grim consequences in lower living standards for the rest of us. Except, as the Daily Mail’s combative centrist columnist, D.P. Hodges, pointed out mildly, until this weekend almost all the people now fulminating had given the impression of admiring the idealism of XR protesters even if they mildly deprecated their occasional excesses. Was that now changing?

I’ve seen too many false dawns of that kind to believe so without crossing my fingers and hoping to die. But a second event makes me ever-so-slightly more hopeful. In the middle of last week it was leaked in London that the Johnson government would be asking the former Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, to join the Board of Trade as a senior advisor in its forthcoming drive to sign post-Brexit free trade deals with a wide range of countries, including the U.S., Canada, Japan, and, er, Australia.

Abbott: an almost infinitely complex mechanism.

There’s no doubt that was a shrewd and sensible move. Britain badly needs to accelerate its trade diplomacy not only for the sake of future deals but in order to show to Brussels that London has enough good options so as not to need to appease the European Union in the current talks—now at make-or-break time. Abbott has the experience of trade negotiations and a knowledge of the players that would improve the chances of success. As Mark Higgie—a former Aussie ambassador to the EU—pointed out in the Australian Spectator www.spectator.com.au, Abbott as prime minister negotiated free trade deals with China, South Korea, and Japan which between them covered 50 percent of Australia’s trade.

Not everyone in Britain wants its extra-European trade diplomacy to prosper, however, because they hope to limit the country’s global reach and to keep Britain even outside the EU inside the EU’s sphere of influence. That makes them especially wary of the concept of CANZUK which promises to develop a closer trade, security, and migration relationship between four of the five countries in the “Five Eyes” intelligence cooperation agreement. There’s modest but growing support for this concept—which already exists in its subordinate but important parts like security cooperation—and Abbott is sympathetic to it. From some points of view, he’s an obstacle to a closer UK-EU relationship down the road.

That’s not a point of view, however, that can be openly argued with any chance of success. So Abbott was denounced as unsuitable to the Board of Trade role because he was a misogynist, opposed in the past to gay marriage, pro-life, and above all a “climate change denier.”

None of these charges is relevant to the post for which he was being considered. Most of them describe (or caricature) legitimate opinions held by very large groups of voters, most of whom lean to the Tories. And one at least—Abbott’s supposed “misogyny”—is simply false. But the charge of being a “climate change denier,” which was probably the most damaging of the charges, is worth at least unpacking since we have some evidence in relation to it.

The first thing to be said is that “climate change denier” is not a scientific term but a political one intended to silence or blacklist anyone so described. If it is to have any clear meaning, that must be someone who denies that the climate is changing or—to be a little more flexible—that it’s rising so rapidly as to pose a serious threat to humankind that can only be countered by emergency measures of mitigation not far short of those advocated by Extinction Rebellion. Fear of being called a “denier” explains the contradiction, noticed by Hodges above, that many politicians and public figures now denouncing Extinction Rebellion have been very mild in their criticisms of it until now. They don’t want to be accused of backing XR’s aims but refusing their means and thus being a “denier” in practice.

Get thee behind me, Satan.

But this apparent contradiction is a false one and the fear it generates groundless. As the science writer and author (most recently) of “How Innovation Works," Matt Ridley, pointed out a few years ago in Quadrant magazine:

These scientists and their guardians of the flame repeatedly insist that there are only two ways of thinking about climate change—that it’s real, man-made and dangerous (the right way), or that it’s not happening (the wrong way). But this is a false dichotomy. There is a third possibility: that it’s real, partly man-made and not dangerous. This is the “lukewarmer” school, and I am happy to put myself in this category. Lukewarmers do not think dangerous climate change is impossible; but they think it is unlikely.

And the evidence is overwhelming that Tony Abbott belongs to this lukewarmer school because he delivered a lecture to the Global Warming Policy Foundation in 2017 on this very topic:

Physics suggests, all other things being equal, that an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide would indeed warm the planet. Even so, the atmosphere is an almost infinitely complex mechanism that’s far from fully understood.

Palaeontology indicates that over millions of years there have been warmer periods and cooler periods that don’t correlate with carbon dioxide concentrations. The Jurassic warm period and the ice ages occurred without any human contribution at all. The medieval warm period, when crops were grown in Greenland, and the mini-ice age, when the Thames froze over, occurred well before industrial activities added to atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Prudence and respect for the planet would suggest taking care not lightly to increase carbon dioxide emissions; but the evidence suggests that other factors such as sun spot cycles and oscillations in the Earth’s orbit are at least as important for climate change as this trace gas – which, far from being pollution, is actually essential for life to exist.

Certainly, no big change has accompanied the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration over the past century from roughly 300 to roughly 400 parts per million or from 0.03 to 0.04 per cent.

Well, maybe someone in Downing Street was paying attention, because after a few days of ministers looking like frightened Bambis in the glare of klieg lights amid the thunder of media questioning, Boris Johnson appeared in public to state the obvious: that while he didn’t agree with everything that was said by the government’s many advisors on many topics, Tony Abbott was nonetheless a whiz on trade and that he was happy to have him on board. And as often happens when it’s clear that a prime minister really isn’t going to surrender to a media mob, the storm dispelled—and a much more convenient storm blew up over Extinction Rebellion’s candid attack on press freedom.

My optimism remains provisional, but one thing is clear and another thing is possible. Political and public opinion is growing more hostile to the claims of XR and other alarmists that their belief in climate catastrophe gives them a right to override democracy and free speech; and as more and more scientists, economists, and politicians who aren’t intellectually intimidated by fear and/or alarmism adopt a "lukewarmer" stance, the prospect increases of a more rational policy that treats climate change as a serious problem requiring a prudent mix of mitigation and adaptation in response rather than as an imminent catastrophe calling for sackcloth and ashes.

It won’t happen overnight, and there’ll never be a consensus on it. How could there be? As Matt Ridley wrote in that Quadrant article: You can’t have a scientific consensus about the future.

'Climate Change' Hysterics Seeing the Lights

One by one, prominent members of the Doomsday Cult of Climate Annihilation are beginning to defect to the side of reason and rationality. First came filmmaker Michael Moore and his heretical movie, Planet of the Humans, which castigated the "environmental movement" for selling out to corporate America. Next up was Michael Shellenberger, whose new book, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, is currently setting the kat among the klimate konformist pigeons by daring to argue that -- hold on to your Greta baseball caps! -- in fact, we're not all going to die and that there is a sane alternative to Thunbergianism. Among his findings:

Humans are not causing a "sixth mass extinction."
Climate change is not making natural disasters worse.
The build-up of wood fuel and more houses near forests, not climate change, explain why there are more, and more dangerous, fires in Australia and California.
Carbon emissions are declining in most rich nations and have been declining in Britain, Germany, and France since the mid-1970s.

I know that the above facts will sound like “climate denialism” to many people. But that just shows the power of climate alarmism. In reality, the above facts come from the best-available scientific studies, including those conducted by or accepted by the IPCC, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and other leading scientific bodies.

Shellenberger made these points in a piece he wrote the other day for Forbes... which of course yanked it from its website within hours, thus proving Moore's point about corporate hijacking of climate alarmism. So he reposted it on the Australian-based website, Quillette; have a look for yourself:

On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years. Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem.

In the final three chapters of Apocalypse Never I expose the financial, political, and ideological motivations. Environmental groups have accepted hundreds of millions of dollars from fossil fuel interests. Groups motivated by anti-humanist beliefs forced the World Bank to stop trying to end poverty and instead make poverty “sustainable.” And status anxiety, depression, and hostility to modern civilization are behind much of the alarmism.

Shellenberger calls out the impractical Ludditism of the "Green Movement" Neanderthals, and offers policy recommendation that will turn the Greenies purple with rage, including a defense of clean nuclear energy:

Factories and modern farming are the keys to human liberation and environmental progress.
The most important thing for saving the environment is producing more food, particularly meat, on less land.
The most important thing for reducing air pollution and carbon emissions is moving from wood to coal to petroleum to natural gas to uranium.
Vegetarianism reduces one’s emissions by less than 4 percent.

Once you realize just how badly misinformed we have been, often by people with plainly unsavory or unhealthy motivations, it is hard not to feel duped.

Clean energy or Green energy? Your choice.

Well, as Barnum said, there's a sucker born every minute, including some very famous ones, among them chimp conservationist Jane Goodall, 86, who's moved on from general monkeyshines to weighty issue of climate, diet, the coronavirus and -- of course -- Why Everything Now Must Change:

With a background in primatology, Jane Goodall became well known in the 1960s through films about her work studying chimpanzees in Tanzania. She famously gave the animals human names. Her discovery that chimps in Tanzania and elsewhere were threatened by habitat destruction due to human activity informed her view about the interdependency of the natural world. She founded the Jane Goodall Institute in 1977, and it's now a leading voice for nature conservation.

Dr Goodall’s analysis of COVID-19 stays true to her beliefs. Speaking at an online event held by the group Compassion in World Farming, Goodall said our global food production system is in need of urgent reform. “Our disrespect for wild animals and our disrespect for farmed animals has created this situation where disease can spill over to infect human beings. We have come to a turning point in our relationship with the natural world.”

Talk about hostility to modern civilization: here we are: after more than half a century of the relentless battering of Western civilization by the likes of the Frankfurt School and their bastard children in academe, there are suckers aplenty in the West, who will go to their graves convinced that everything modern man has done to improve his life is wrong and bad, and that a prelapsarian state of nature is the way forward. Such is the suicide cult of Leftism as articulated by Rousseau and then passed down by Marx and Marcuse.

And yet, some common sense is beginning to reassert itself. In addition to Shellenberger, the Danish author and climate-hysteria skeptic, Bjorn Lomborg, the "skeptical environmentalist," has a new book out as well, False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet. As Richard Trzupek, an environmental consultant and analyst at the Heartland Institute, notes in his review:

Lomborg addresses his core mission statement early on: “[W]e’re scaring kids and adults witless, which is not just factually wrong but morally reprehensible. If we don’t say stop, the current, false climate alarm, despite its good intentions, is likely to leave the world much worse off than it could be.”

Everyone knows the meme: “Catastrophic global warming is real and it’s manmade.” It’s a simple statement of the perceived problem, one that would surely earn an “A” in Marketing 101. Whatever else it is, that simple statement is not science. The issue of climate change cannot be explained by any one statement, but must be addressed by answering a series of questions. This is what Lomborg bravely attempts to do in “False Alarm.”

And now along comes a lady with the felecitious sobriquet of Zion Lights, a spokewoman for Britain's lunatic Extinction Rebellion movement. When last seen, she was being memorably eviscerated by the BBC's Andrew Neil in October:

Today, however, she's singing a different tune.

Extinction Rebellion's spokeswoman has quit the protest group to become a nuclear power campaigner. Zion Lights, 36, has left the climate change cause, which brought London to a standstill last year, to join pro-nuke outfit Environmental Progress. The former XR communications head said she had felt ‘duped’ after being surrounded by anti-nuclear campaigners until she read more into the radioactive fuel.

Mother-of-two Zion said: ‘The facts didn't really change, but once I understood them I did change my mind.’ The switch took non-campaigners by surprise given her new role seems entirely at odds with her old position. Zion, who was born in the West Midlands and given her unusual name as a baby, said: ‘I have a long history of campaigning on environmental issues, most recently as a spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion UK.

‘Surrounded by anti-nuclear activists, I had allowed fear of radiation, nuclear waste and weapons of mass destruction to creep into my subconscious. I realised I had been duped into anti-science sentiment all this time. Now, I have quit the organisation to take up a position as a campaigner for nuclear power.’

It's easy to laugh, but pay attention to the statement above: I had allowed fear... to creep into my subconscious. Fear is a hallmark of all zealous crackpotism, along with an urgent insistence that the world change right now in order to accommodate what is manifestly a form of mental illness akin to aliens sending you messages through the fillings in your teeth.

The environmentalist Left needs more people like Moore, Shellenberger, and Lights, struggling out the darkness of their former irrational anxieties and obsessions and joining the community of the sensible, and fewer deluded children like poor exploited Greta, shamelessly manipulated by the "movement" for malicious ends.

After all, who doesn't want the best for Mother Earth? There are many paths to conservation and civilization. We need not let fear prevent us from seeing the solution, and the light.

'Extinction Rebellion': Rebels with a Cause

The poet and scholar of Soviet history, the late Robert Conquest, is the author of several commonly quoted -- and misquoted -- rules of politics, the second of which amusingly holds that "the behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies." (Many sources list this as Conquest's Third Law, but the one they list as second -- "Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing" -- was actually coined by our own John O'Sullivan.) Anyone who has ever been to the DMV or had occasion to deal with, say, the Bureau of Land Management, will take his point, though it is perhaps slightly contradicted by the fact that the bad behavior of bureaucracies never seems to rein them in. Rather the opposite in fact.

In any event, it isn't only bureaucratic organizations that often seem to be run by cabals of their enemies. Hardly a week goes by these days without some group or other engaging in an officially sanctioned activity that seems to run so counter to its own interests that it really makes you wonder. A recent example of this comes from an outift that has made its name antagonizing the very people you'd think they'd be trying to persuade: Extinction Rebellion.

You might remember them from their various antics over the past few years, including gluing themselves to a DLR train in London so that everyone on the platform would be late for work, and digging up the famous lawn of Trinity College, Cambridge, for reasons which were difficult to follow. I myself happened to be giving my young niece and nephews a tour of Lower Manhattan on the day that they sprayed fake blood all around Wall Street, likely turning those horrified children into life-long anti-environmentalists.

Extinction Rebellion purportedly engage in these shenanigans -- what we used to call crimes -- in order to draw attention to the supposed "climate emergency" we're allegedly experiencing. In fact, they mainly succeed in pissing people off, so much so that even environmentalist onlookers were disturbed by the Trinity Lawn incident, and the train-gluing eventually led to frustrated commuters dragging the protesters from the tops of the trains.

As for their latest bright idea, The Mail on Sunday reports that XR are planning on aggravating the present COVID-19 related economic calamity by "staging rent strikes, halting tax payments and taking out bank loans they don't intend to repay":

Internal documents obtained by The Mail on Sunday set out plans for a ‘Money Rebellion’ involving acts of financial sabotage to ‘directly challenge the fundamental principles that govern our national and global economies’. Despite dire warnings that the coronavirus pandemic has plunged Britain into its worst recession for 300 years, the dossier details how the group – also known as XR – wants to launch a rent strike later this month....

XR hopes at least 5,000 supporters will refuse to pay their rent, adding: ‘Council tenants and private tenants alike can participate in the strike… on such a scale that it forces a society-wide conversation about our misguided economy.’ According to the documents, it will be followed by a tax strike involving 10,000 people who will sign a conditional commitment to withhold £100 of income tax. Such a move will, it adds, ‘present a dilemma to HMRC about whether to pursue 10,000 claims for £100’.

Other possible protests include a utilities strike, where activists refuse to pay their bills unless suppliers promise to switch to 100 per cent renewable energy, and plans for supporters to withhold VAT, student debt or mortgage payments.

In the United States, some 33 million people have filed for unemployment due to this pandemic and the attendant lockdowns. In Great Britain, almost a quarter of workers have been furloughed. It is likely that many more people are going to suffer from the economic effects of this crisis than know anyone who has contracted the virus. But this is good news, say Extinction Rebellion. This is the moment to bring civilization to its knees. While their previous acts of vandalism and disruption mostly fall into the category of nuisance, this proposal has more than a whiff of treason about it.

Now, I'm skeptical that they will actually succeed in bringing civilization down. Indeed, it would be surprising if they convinced enough people to engage in this scheme to have a discernible impact. More than likely they will succeed only in injuring their own credit scores (that is, if they don't get their wealthy parents to pay off their loans before there are any real consequences), while once again enraging regular Britons, who are putting up with a lot right now without having to watch spoiled children trying to tank the economy.

Hence my invocation of Conquest's law. After all, what have they to gain from all of this negative sentiment? Shouldn't they be trying to make a case for the rightness of their cause rather than disrupting the lives of regular hardworking people, all while lecturing them about their carbon footprints?

And yet, it seems significant that, most of the time, XR's disruptors get away with it. At Cambridge -- to the annoyance of locals -- the police simply stood by and looked on. At the London Underground, it was the commuters, not the cops, who dragged them off the train. Its hard to imagine that they would have acted with such passivity without a directive from above, and while I'd like to think that were they to seriously attempt to sabotage an already shaky economy during a national emergency they would be dealt with swiftly and severely, I have my doubts.

In any case, it does seem like persuasion is the furthest thing from their minds. Rather than seeking and perhaps gaining broad support, leading to the election of politicians who agree to advance their aims, XR's tactics are aimed at giving headaches to the people in power, who fold rather than dealing with them, or else giving a pretense to the people in power who already agree with them to act according to their own inclinations.

Which is to say, perhaps they have a better sense of their interests than I do. Power, not popularity, is what matters to them. Maybe the goal of Extinction Rebellion is to become the cabal that controls the bureaucracy.

Who's to say that they haven't already succeeded?

The Harsh Sounds of Silence

Q. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to see it, did it happen?

A. That is a more complicated question than Bishop Berkeley, who first formulated it in the 18^th Century, could ever have realized. Let me try to give you a full answer.

In the first place, if the person not in the forest is an environmentalist who supports strong action to halt climate change, then the tree did not fall but instead volunteered to play its full part in creating renewable energy. If the person not in the forest is Michael Moore who disputes the value of renewable energy industries, then the tree fell with a loud crash in order to alert people that it had made a contribution to climate policy. And if the person is a climate skeptic or denier, whether he’s in the forest or not, the tree did not fall because whoever heard of a tree falling without making any sound whatsoever.

And it gets clearer every day that the instinctive and sometimes preferred strategy of the climatist movement is to silence both critics and dissidents when they question the prevailing theory, rooted in IPCC reports and embraced by most Western governments, that climate change is an emergency threat to the world: either we reduce the predicted rise in world temperature from 2.0 to 1.5 degrees by 2050 or the world will burn. Some Greens suggest that the world will burn at an even earlier date than the official IPCC-approved forecasts suggest. They include Greta Thunberg, Prince Charles, Extinction Rebellion, and Michael Moore, the last of whom has now fallen foul of climate censors to the surprise of all who have no idea how revolutions proceed.

A film made by Moore and Jeff Gibbs, Planet of the Humans, was shown to three million viewers on the internet last week, criticizing the theory and practice of renewable energy as a solution to climate change. It’s reviewed on this site by Tom Finnerty, Michael Walsh, and me, and though we differ on some points and regard the movie as mistaken in its main proposals, we all agree that it’s an important film that makes damaging criticisms of the renewables industry and that has divided the larger Green movement.

At the very least the Gibbs-Moore movie is a substantive contribution to informed debate on climate change. Ideally, it should lead to criticisms from opponents, a response from the film-maker to the critics, and a rejoinder from them to him, perhaps ad infinitum but more usually for about five exchanges on a hot topic. And that’s what we see where Tom Finnerty locks horns with Moore on The Pipeline.

But within days other climatist factions had called for the film to be withdrawn from public viewing and for Moore and Gibbs to be silenced. Here are The Guardian’s account of this, the letter from Moore’s critics denouncing the film, and Michael Walsh’s reflections on the politics of the controversy. The controversy is a window into the mind of the coercive utopian: he protects us from making bad choices.

Quite as sinister but more subtle is the approach of more “moderate” and “liberal” censors. They protect us from ourselves by simply not mentioning unwelcome stories or commentaries at all. Though Moore and Gibbs are accomplished film-makers, the film’s subject is a large topical one, and its approach has the “man-bites-dog” character of the classic news story, there has been almost no mention of the movie in forums that would usually give generous coverage to a story with those qualities —apart, that is, from reports that environmentalists want it banned.

Vladimir Bukovsky pointed out some years ago that intelligent readers in Soviet times were able to glean quite a lot of genuine news from Pravda and Izvestia by waiting for them to attack some Western claim or achievement which they had never reported in the first place. “Aha,” they would then say. Silence deprives readers of even that recourse. As the noted wit "Iowahawk" has famously observed:

Journalism is about covering important stories. With a pillow, until they stop moving.

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) May 9, 2013

In The Pipeline’s own original reviews, we pointed out that almost all of the film’s most wounding attacks on renewable energy projects echoed the arguments that climate sceptics and “deniers” (aka lukewarmers, in reality) had made over the years. And as Bukovsky would have predicted, these flaws in renewable energies came as a shattering surprise not only to climatists but to conventional bien pensant liberal opinion as well. That’s an indicator of just how effective the bias of silence has proved in keeping vital facts about climate change and climate policy off the front pages, out of public debate, and inside the corridors of power whether in the Washington Beltway or the Westminster village.

And that’s still going on.

This week, the Global Warming Policy Foundation in London published a paper titled The Climate Noose: Business, Net Zero, and the IPCC”s Anti-Capitalism by Rupert Darwall. Mr. Darwall is an economist, a former special advisor to the UK Treasury and Chancellor Norman Lamont, and the author of two books and many other works on climate change and energy policy. It’s a substantial work, and I shall be returning to analyse its reports and proposals more fully next week. For the moment, however, consider these questions it raises:

How much will it cost? The IPCC tries to sweep cost under the carpet, saying cost data on 1.5°C are scarce. The few numbers it provides imply the policy costs of net zero by 2050 are up to 61 times estimated climate benefits.

What is the likely impact on the world’s poor? The IPCC concedes that draconian emissions reductions mean higher food and energy prices, the latter delaying the transition to clean cooking. Is there any chance of reaching net zero in 2050? Irrespective of what Europe and the US do, there’s not a chance. In less than a decade and a half, the increase in developing nations’ carbon dioxide emissions outstripped the combined total of US and EU emissions.

Above all: Why should companies target net zero when the world’s governments are going to miss it by a country mile? Unilateral net zero will make companies, their shareholders, employees, customers and local communities poorer.

Darwall does not place the total blame on the IPCC. Western governments have repeatedly endorsed the same goal of a reduction in the world temperature increase to 1.5 degrees by 2050 when any realistic analysis suggests that it’s impossible to achieve. They have repeatedly refused to impose any real cost-benefit analysis on their net-zero commitment—indeed, they treat reasonable demands for such estimates as immoral. They acknowledge that their commitment will have a serious negative impact on living standards, including those of poorer communities everywhere, through rises in food and energy prices without offering any serious idea of how to alleviate it.

Moreover, they place increasing political and financial pressure on private corporations to adopt policies that would make their investors poorer and their ability to help their economies to grow weaker. They don’t seem to grasp that the effect of this commitment on global economic relations would be to shift economic power from the West to Asia, in particular to China, at the very moment when we have become aware that Beijing is at best an untrustworthy power, and at worst an outright enemy. And they seem oblivious to the likelihood that the outcome of their approach would be an impoverished world under the aegis of a global economic regulator.

One might suppose that such a warning to the West’s governments would get at least some attention from a media supposedly committed to holding government to account. So far, however, Darwall’s monograph has not been mentioned in the main UK or US media. We would surely expect it to attract the attention of the Financial Times since its business readership has a direct interest in knowing what governments intend for them in its Green agenda.

Again, not a peep. Silence reigns today.

And tomorrow?

Will those who persist in seeing trees falling in the forest for no good reason, like both Moore and Darwall, find their next investigation being confronted by a sign that says: Trespassers will be prosecuted?

The Limits of Science

John O'Sullivan's excellent weekend column examined the work of Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of the British medical journal The Lancet, and his tendency to expand the scope of his publication in order to pronounce on topics which are decidedly beyond its remit as a journal of medicine:

[Horton] argues that doctors as doctors have a professional obligation to become political activists and to engage in civil disobedience when they think that a political issue has bad medical consequences for their patients—or indeed for any doctor’s patients. His editorials have made The Lancet notorious for the range of topics, including directly political topics—inequality, for instance, or Iraq war casualties -- which they pronounce to be medical issues for which they have their favorite prescriptions ready. And on no topic has he been more fervent, more frequent, or more “authoritarian” than on climate change.

Horton's editorials in The Lancet have adopted the “worst case” scenarios of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to argue that the “climate emergency” is “one of the greatest threats to the health of humanity today” and poses “an acute danger to human and natural systems” (my italics.) He has called on other professional journals to become “activist” (i.e., to take sides in controversial issues) as The Lancet has done -- for instance, it publishes an annual report on health and climate change that diagnoses a pandemic of climate emergencies which, however, can be cured every time by the same anti-capitalist remedy.

And he has used the journal to call on health workers to join in Extinction Rebellion’s civil disobedience protest against government inaction on the emergency last October which led to scattered acts of disruption—occupying banks, cancelling flights, and blocking bridges, roads, and traffic that included (ironically) an ambulance—by usually small groups of protesters in major Western cities.

What's disturbing to me is that we are so used to people with lots of impressive-looking letters after their names (Horton's alphabet soup, according to his Wikipedia page, is "FRCP FMedSci") speaking authoritatively on every subject under the sun that we hardly roll our eyes at the above any more. What, a few decades ago, we would have considered inappropriate -- that is, the editor of a medical journal making claims about foreign and domestic policy on the grounds that they have some imagined health component -- is now unfortunately commonplace.

Why is that? Well, first of all it is because we listen to them. When Stephan Hawking or (heaven help us) Neil DeGrasse Tyson wander away from physics and start talking about history, philosophy, art, or, really, anything else, we (well, many of us) sit and listen instead of bolting for the exit. But why do we let them? It is, ultimately, because we have, by and large, accepted science as a method for determining the meaning of all things -- something like a religion -- which is decidedly not how true science understands itself.

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry of the Ethics and Public Policy Center wrote an important article awhile back examining our societal misunderstanding of science:

Everybody [says]... [s]cience says this, science says that. You must vote for me because science. You must buy this because science. You must hate the folks over there because science. Look, science is really important. And yet, who among us can easily provide a clear definition of the word "science" that matches the way people employ the term in everyday life?

So let me explain what science actually is. Science is the process through which we derive reliable predictive rules through controlled experimentation. That's the science that gives us airplanes and flu vaccines and the Internet. But what almost everyone means when he or she says "science" is something different.

He explains that the great insight of the Scientific Revolution was that the claims of science are necessarily limited by our ability to experiment and test our conclusions.

What distinguishes modern science from other forms of knowledge such as philosophy is that it explicitly forsakes abstract reasoning about the ultimate causes of things and instead tests empirical theories through controlled investigation. Science is not the pursuit of capital-T Truth. It's a form of engineering — of trial by error. Scientific knowledge is not "true" knowledge, since it is knowledge about only specific empirical propositions — which is always, at least in theory, subject to further disproof by further experiment.

This is radically different from the more popular meaning of 'science', which is often meant to convey a mental image of superior beings "wearing lab coats and/or doing fancy math that nobody else understands." Gobry argues that, for most people:

The reason capital-S Science gives us airplanes and flu vaccines is not because it is an incremental engineering process but because scientists are really smart people. [Italics are mine].

This is why various academic disciplines, the so-called soft sciences -- psychology, sociology, anthropology, etc. -- feel that they need to clothe themselves in the veneer of science. The practitioners of these disciplines want everyone to know that they are very smart people too, even if they did get a 'D' in Organic Chemistry! So if they do important sounding studies (even ones whose results are irreplicable), illustrate their points with lots of graphs, and wear lab coats, people will taken them seriously. (This tendency even infects the humanities, by the way. I've always liked a comment of the mid-20th century poet and politician Charles Wilbert Snow who, explaining his decision not to seek a doctorate, said that the Ph.D. was "a German invention designed to turn an art into a science.")

Gobry goes on to point out that:

This is how you get people asserting that "science" commands this or that public policy decision, even though with very few exceptions, almost none of the policy options we as a polity have, have been tested through experiment (or can be). People think that a study that uses statistical wizardry to show correlations between two things is "scientific" because it uses high school math and was done by someone in a university building, except that, correctly speaking, it is not. While it is a fact that increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere leads, all else equal, to higher atmospheric temperatures, the idea that we can predict the impact of global warming — and anti-global warming policies! — 100 years from now is sheer lunacy. But because it is done using math by people with tenure, we are told it is "science" even though by definition it is impossible to run an experiment on the year 2114.

In many ways, the scientific revolution began as a call for epistemic humility: It is difficult to truly know things about the inner workings of the universe. What methods can we use to accurately demonstrate the few things which we have definitely uncovered? The almost unimaginable success of this project and the tremendous innovation which came after it is likely why we came to hold scientists in such high regard and, ironically, why we have drifted from its basic insight.

Consequently, we are left with men of science like Horton pushing public policy proposals because science is just, well, smart people being smart, and why wouldn't we listen to smart people? Appeals to a supposed "scientific consensus" on something like climate change (and scientists preferred responses to it) is just taking this a step further: Lots of really smart people think this. You want people to think you're smart, right? It is important we realize that these appeals take us beyond the strictures of science into something else entirely.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Medicalizing Climate Policy

On a recent Question Time, the BBC’s flagship debate program on current affairs, Richard Horton, the editor-in-chief of the medical journal, The Lancet, passionately denounced the UK government for taking too complacent a view of the coronavirus pandemic. Not long before, Dr. Horton had taken the same view -- which he should probably have mentioned -- but epidemics are among his specialties, and he corrected himself when China admitted the seriousness of the threat. And as an expert with medical credentials up to his medulla oblongata, he seemed to speak with greater authority than the politicians on the panel.

But how far does that authority go? Horton intends to expand it very considerably. He argues that doctors as doctors have a professional obligation to become political activists and to engage in civil disobedience when they think that a political issue has bad medical consequences for their patients—or indeed for any doctor’s patients. His editorials have made The Lancet notorious for the range of topics, including directly political topics—inequality, for instance, or Iraq war casualties -- which they pronounce to be medical issues for which they have their favorite prescriptions ready. And on no topic has he been more fervent, more frequent, or more “authoritarian” than on climate change.

Horton's editorials in The Lancet have adopted the “worst case” scenarios of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to argue that the “climate emergency” is “one of the greatest threats to the health of humanity today” and poses “an acute danger to human and natural systems” (my italics.) He has called on other professional journals to become “activist” (i.e., to take sides in controversial issues) as The Lancet has done -- for instance, it publishes an annual report on health and climate change that diagnoses a pandemic of climate emergencies which, however, can be cured every time by the same anti-capitalist remedy.

And he has used the journal to call on health workers to join in Extinction Rebellion’s civil disobedience protest against government inaction on the emergency last October which led to scattered acts of disruption—occupying banks, cancelling flights, and blocking bridges, roads, and traffic that included (ironically) an ambulance—by usually small groups of protesters in major Western cities.

Though these protests continue, they seem to be having less impact the longer they last, as with previous radical protest movements. Extinction Rebellion’s larger impact—despite Horton’s high hopes for it as a “transformational” international rebellion -- has been on the whole counterproductive. Though the police and the courts have been indulgent towards the protesters, the general public has been irritated, even angry, at being blocked and delayed. Successful protests in the past, such as the Suffragettes, triumphed because majorities or large minorities in the population thought they had justice on their side. But what XR wants doesn’t begin to meet that test, at least as laid out by Horton:

There are three demands—first, tell the truth; second, act now; third, go beyond politics to create a citizens’ assembly. A citizens’ assembly will reclaim control from a paralysed political process.

Each of these demands is more than problematic. The first glides over the difficulty that there isn’t general agreement on what is the truth—and, significantly, that is the case with almost all political questions. Climate scientists differ, and the moderate global warmers among them, including the IPCC scientists, differ strongly from Extinction Rebellion in their analyses, predictions, and remedies.

Secondly, “act now” is an abstract demand whose abstraction is a deceit. Governments could legitimately reply that they are already acting on climate, but Horton regards their actions as “inaction.” His definition of action in this context is a radical program of decarbonization and deindustrialization. All the signs are that neither governments nor electorates want to go too far in that direction. Hence, Extinction Rebellion (XR) is quite coy about its proposed reforms, but sometimes they leak out. Horton and XR have to find a way around the obstacles of political opposition and public opinion..

Hey presto! That’s demand three: creating a citizens’ assembly to “reclaim control of a paralysed political process.” But the political process he’s talking about is parliamentary democracy, and it isn’t “paralysed” at all as its current handling of the Covid-19 crisis demonstrates (even if you disagree with what it's doing.) Nonetheless, XR is demanding that new bodies be established to take control of major political decisions away from Parliament and the elected government and given to . . . well, other than that they’d be citizens, it's not clear who? Nor how? It’s all very vague and misty, but apparently the process wouldn’t be through elections since, as Horton has already pointed out, they only lead to paralysis and inaction.

All this is slightly concerning. Though the wag who asked —“why not call them Soviets and be done with it?”—probably went too far, it’s nonetheless rings a faint alarm bell when Horton writes, as he did in October, that doctors shouldn't be punished for taking part in Extinction Rebellion protests? Well and good if that means they shouldn’t be punished for voicing their opinions or putting them on placards. That’s free speech even if they use it to say “Climate change is too important to be left to democracy.”

When those words become actions, and those actions break the criminal law, however, we can’t exempt health workers—much though we admire them for the sacrifices they are currently making to keep us safe—from the rules that apply to all citizens in or out of assemblies. And since even a favorable view of Dr. Horton’s politics suggests that he favors some sort of guided democracy with a special role in politics for doctors, scientists, and other experts—especially when that view comes with the imprimatur or The Lancet—we need to remember some old and unfashionable truths.

To start with, we must briefly demystify expertise. Experts are not infallible; they can be wrong. We know that for a certainty because they sometimes differ. That’s why when a doctor gives you a diagnosis of a terminal disease or prescribes a painful cure, he’s not offended if you ask for a second opinion. Similarly, when Horton criticized Tory Ministers on Question Time over their handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, he was really differing with the medical scientists whose advice they were following.

There are many questions too, especially in politics, in which no-one can be an expert because judgments on them require too many different kinds of knowledge for one kind of expert to give an authoritative view. Whether to declare war—the single most important decision a political leader can be asked to make—is one such question.

Climate change is another. Though there is said to be a “consensus” on it, there are a significant number of dissenters in what is a very various profession. Even if there were unanimity among them all, they would still have to deal with criticisms and opposing viewpoints from economists, engineers, philosophers, and as Horton proclaims, from doctors and medical scientists too. So when experts enter the political arena on such issues as climate change, they are only partly giving a professional opinion with some authority; it would be more accurate to say that they're contributing their particular insights to a debate among equal citizens, including other experts who draw on different sources of authority. Even (or especially) in their own profession, their authority is limited. For instance, since it is obvious that many doctors and scientists do not in fact agree with Horton’s view of climate change and give plausible reasons for their disagreement, they can be under no obligation to campaign, let alone break the law, to advance those views .

That’s important for reasons going beyond politics. Horton has made some serious blunders in a largely successful editorial career: over his defense of a doctor which critics contend has led to a fall in child vaccinations, his large exaggeration of casualties in the Iraq war, his publishing an open letter to the people of Gaza that falsely accused Israel of a massacre, and not least his passionate, engaged campaigning over climate change. To be fair, campaigning editors take risks to uncover the truth; they don’t always pan out; and Horton is a campaigning editor but not an infallible one. Have a look at some of the criticisms of The Lancet’s 2019 report on health and climate change that raises alarmist anxieties over the most recondite threats to health from fossil fuels when the single most relevant chart in it shows that mortality rates are falling fast worldwide.

How Horton deals with such problems when they arise therefore matters. It's a mixed record. He did retract the Open Letter to the people of Gaza on a trip to Israel--and he did so generously. But when two Australian climate scientists submitted a letter disputing an article on the precautionary principle, he overruled sub-editors who had been negotiating its publication and rejected it. When his pet political ideas are at stake, he has to be forcibly evicted from his fixed positions. Sure, editors must have the final say, but in a professional journal the spike is not best way to advance a scientific argument, and silencing your critics is not a good exercise of professional judgment.

They are, however, the familiar political tactics of Woke ideologues—and thus a sign of the spreading blight of the politicization of professional associations and their particular ethics. We can hardly accuse Dr. Horton of such abuse, however, since he has anticipated us by proclaiming it. He does so in his editorial calling on health workers to support Extinction Rebellion, lamenting as follows:

And yet science itself is strangely reticent. The Royal Society is the UK's leading scientific academy. It is dedicated to promoting excellence in science. But its activities to scale up political action to address the climate crisis are anaemic. The Royal Society has projects on low carbon energy and greenhouse gas removal. Its policy initiatives include work on energy, environment, and climate. But the Royal Society's actions are empty of passion, devoid of campaigning, and seemingly disengaged from politics.

In Britain the Royal Society is Science and The Lancet, though independent, is its Prophet. The Royal Society is a professional body dedicated to seeking the truth of nature through observation, experiment, and argument. Horton has found the one great truth and wants to proclaim it to the world and if possible, to make it compulsory. They’re a bad fit.

The moral is clear, and the solution should be satisfactory to all. Horton wants to be a great campaigning editor in the hard-hitting style of a Hugh Cudlipp or a Harry Evans. Give him the editorship of a major left-wing newspaper. The Guardian springs to mind. It could certainly use some of Horton's energy, confidence and expertise. He would enjoy campaigning without the dispassionate reticence of science.

Make an honest man of him. And make The Lancet an honest professional journal of medical science. They'll both be happier.