COP28: Another Climate Fail Paid For By Taxpayers

At least we can wonder why Al Gore has understood so little about the putative cause to which he’s devoted so much time.

His comments on the now-concluded COP28 summit continued his theme of vilifying big oil and predicting doom to sell climate action, despite mountainous proof of its failure. [emphasis, links added]

By now, 40 years of climate change in the daily diet of news consumers has only saturated the audience. Most of the public endorse the climate warnings they have been imbibing steadily yet don’t volunteer to bear significant costs.

Those who are easily worked up have become activists. Those inclined to skepticism remain skeptical.

The few who inquire deeply know the case against CO2 is plausible but unprovable, and that difficult trade-offs amid uncertainty mock the simple-minded chants of various extremists.

The political response is also fully saturated, and quite prepared to spend trillions just not in a way that will actually influence climate.

Even the Biden administration, off the record, understands that subsidizing green energy will have little effect on emissions.

When the Obama Democrats embraced this approach in 2010, in those more honest days they funded a National Academy of Sciences study of their handiwork.

Its finding: Handouts are a “poor tool for reducing greenhouse gases and achieving climate-change objectives.”

The point would be crystallized for thinking people in a 2021 paper by Princeton economists modeling both a carbon tax and green subsidies over centuries, showing that subsidies would be expected to have a “minuscule” effect on emissions.

But the real mystery is the following: The public says it’s concerned about climate change. An easily solved policy conundrum would seem to be a carbon tax.

We have plenty of taxes. Enacting a new one could be a win-win if coupled with cuts in payroll or income taxes.

If adopted by the U.S. alone, yes, it would merely shift emissions around. But if other governments were inspired by the example, emissions would be placed on a permanently lower path.

The day isn’t close but it’s closer than you think. Congressional Republicans hanker for a border-based consumption tax; Democrats are pushing a carbon-based variant of such a tax.

Their motives may be protectionist and bureaucratic, but tilt your head and you can see both parties gradually discovering how a carbon tax might help them reach a variety of policy and constituency-pleasing goals.

Unfortunately, a culture of genuine dimness has engulfed many newsrooms on the subject of climate, which impedes progress.

This was brought home to me in an unexpected way.

Jeffrey Gerth, a former New York Times investigative reporter, emailed on a recent Saturday to explain why the skeptical writing of several of us on these editorial pages went unmentioned a year ago in his Columbia Journalism Review series on the media’s Russia collusion botch: The review’s then editor, Kyle Pope, insisted references to our work be removed.

“One further note that may help you understand,” Mr. Gerth added. “Kyle left CJR recently to head up a journalistic venture involving climate reporting.”

Mr. Pope, in an email, rejects the implication but his climate writings are a round robin of “denier,” “crisis” and “extreme weather.”

The venture he helped organize, Covering Climate Now, gives every evidence of being an exercise in journalistic sinecurism, its narrative already laid out, mastery of a difficult subject not required.

Under the low bar now prevailing, we might celebrate a recent Atlantic article. After trotting out approving paragraphs on electric vehicles, heat pumps, and carbon pledges, it surprisingly credits readers with “suspecting” that none of this is “making a dent.”

In fact, the failure has been continuous and uninterrupted for 40 years, a recognition muffled to maintain political receptivity for the climate pork that has become the main output of the climate lobby.

Indeed, beyond the calamitous addiction to the attention of Greta Thunberg, activists have nothing to show except overstimulating the deployment of wind and solar technology (which already exists, has cost advantages and disadvantages, and can find viable markets without subsidies) beyond what can be efficiently absorbed.

My history on the climate topic started, 22 years ago, not with a focus on the science or policy proposals, which seemed bound to be fruitless. Instead, the obvious focus even then was the colonization of the climate cause by special interests, notably oil giant BP.

Which brings us back to another point that’s been obvious for 20 years. If worst-case warming materializes for any reason (CO2 or not), 100% of our effective response will be [to artificially increase] particulates in the atmosphere to reduce the amount of sunlight falling on Earth.

Ungodly sums were spent on the COP28 climate summit as on its predecessors. Yet this subject, which may actually matter, barely came up.

h/t Steve B.

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