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.

Turkey's Dangerous Human Pipeline to the West

Not all pipelines carry oil and gas. For the past five years, a human pipeline has sprung up, connecting "refugees" from their hellish homelands in Afghanistan and Syria with the desirable precincts of Greece and Italy. That the vast majority of them are not entitled to asylum under laws dating back to the end of the Second World War and designed to prevent a second Holocaust, matters little -- not when they can be used as a weapon against the West.

So Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s provocation in opening Turkey’s borders to the West so that thousands of “migrants” might once again invade the territories of his fellow NATO allies really ought to be the last straw for the lands of Christendom. At war with the Seljuk Turks since they first invaded the Eastern Roman Empire in the 11th century and defeated the Byzantine emperor at the crucial Battle of Manzikert in 1071, the West suffered an existential threat from the Islamicized central Asians until well into the 17th century. At the Battle of Vienna in 1683, the Ottoman Turks (successors to the Seljuks) were finally halted in their quest to invade Europe and conquer Rome.

Fast forward to 2015, when the so-called “migrant crisis” – a Muslim invasion by another name, this one conducted by fighting-age men in trainers, carrying cell phones and pleading “refugee” status in order to take advantage of western charity and guilt – roared through eastern and southern Europe, heading for the rich countries of the European Union, particularly Germany and the United Kingdom. In a blunder of historic proportions, outgoing German chancellor Angela Merkel foolishly welcomed a million or more mostly young men from Muslim lands into the heart of central Europe – their historical goal.

This invasion force first had to traverse the bulwark countries of Greece, Serbia and, especially, Hungary, leading to a sharp division in the contemporary EU: the areas that had suffered most under Islamic rule, such as Hungary and Balkans, turned their faces against the “migrants,” while hitherto unscathed western nations like Italy, French, Germany, Britain and the Scandinavian countries continued to embrace them, at their cultural peril.

What has happened since has been eminently predictable. In the wake of widespread  disruption Hungary has erected a fence along its eastern and southern borders. Poland – whose elite Winged Hussar cavalry was instrumental to victory at the gates of Vienna – has adopted a policy of zero immigration from Muslim lands. France, meanwhile, has suffered from rioting and an outbreak of church burning, Germany and Sweden from rape, molestation, arson and murder sprees, and Britain has been subject to the “grooming” of its girls and young women by Pakistani (“Asian,” in Fleet Street parlance) rape gangs.

Re-enter the Turks under the Islamist Erdogan, who views himself as the successor to the caliphs whose rule ended with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War One. Like Vladimir Putin in Russia, who wishes to recreate the Czarist and Soviet territorial empires under Russian hegemony, Erdogan hopes to restore the ummah under Turkish rules. To that end, he has abrogated the reforms made by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who established a secular Republic of Turkey in 1923, abolished the caliphate the following year – bringing for the first time to Islam the idea of separation of church and state –  and brought Turkey into the family of civilized nations and, ultimately, in 1952, into NATO.

Turkey in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, however, only made sense in the context of the Cold War, providing the Americans with a forward operating presence close to the Soviet Union, including the big air base at Incirlik, from which it operated the U-2 spy planes. Even today the base remains useful, serving as a staging area for American operations in the Middle East.

By greenlighting the invasion of Europe by Muslim Syrians and Afghans, Erdogan has abrogated Turkey’s NATO bargain.  Which means that the West – which admitted Turkey to NATO with the understanding that it stay secular – needs to rescind its deal with Turkey.  Turkey was always a marginal member of NATO (it stayed neutral throughout almost all of World War II and fought on the wrong side during World War One), and now that it has abandoned secularism in favor of recrudescent Islamism, which historically has been incompatible with the West, its presence no longer serves any useful purpose. The country’s meddling in the Syrian crisis, its war against the U.S.-allied Kurds, and its increasingly cozy relationship with Russia make Turkey more of a security risk than an asset.

Alas, NATO is akin to the Hotel California, with this twist: you can check out, but you can never be 86ed. There is no way to expel a member – and Turkey knows it.

With many displaced persons in his territory, the Turkish dictator has been holding them as hostages, to be used as blackmail against the West as he goes his increasingly anti-Western way.  That his way is not our way matter little, neither to Erdogan or the western media, which has long preferred the sob story of “refugees” to the historical realities of Realpolitik. The “refugees” are often sentimentalized in the Western press as “just wanting a better life.” But so what? So does everybody. Economic migrants are rightly not regarded as legitimate refugees.

Still, economic migrants (which is what most of the “refugees” are) are not entitled to legitimate refugee status, a legal concept codified after World War Two during the displacement of millions of people. So-called DP camps dotted Europe as the victorious Allies confronted the thorny legal difference between “refugees” (those who could not return to their homelands) and “displaced persons” (those uprooted by the war who could return as conditions allowed).

It’s an important distinction. No one is truly a “refugee” if he or she can return to their homeland, even after a time spent in a DP camp. When the Americans finally leave Afghanistan, no Afghan will be a refugee.  When the Syrian civil war is finally sorted, no Syrian is a refugee. No one fleeing his own homeland’s cultural, economic, or civil dysfunction is, by definition, a “refugee.” The way for Syrians to improve Syria -- a Roman province as far back as 64 BC and a center of early Christianity -- is by staying home.

That the flashpoint is once again Greece should come as no surprise. Recall that Byron, one of Britain’s greatest poets, died at Missolonghi fighting for Greek independence from the people who turned the Parthenon into a mosque and an ammunition dump. As recently as 1974 Greece and Turkey came to blows over the island of Cyprus, which remains divided today. In the current crisis, the Greeks have deployed troops to their land borders, and their navy to the littorals.  The memories of Thermopylae, although distant, echo still.

Will we heed them? This is no time for political correctness. With the imminent end of America’s forever war in Afghanistan, it’s time for a complete re-assessment of our presence in the Middle East. It’s also past time for Turkey to be gone from NATO, and to be understood as the enemy it is, rather than the ally that it was.