Jan 18, 2025 11:23 PM
(This post was last modified: Jan 18, 2025 11:24 PM by C C.)
https://www.breakthroughjournal.org/p/wright-is-right
EXCERPTS: This week, fracking executive Chris Wright sat before the Senate in a confirmation hearing for his nomination to lead the US Department of Energy...
[...] In the ancient climate wars of the early aughts, the disputes centered mainly on atmospheric science itself. Ne'er-do-wells like George W. Bush and Lee Raymond were accused of “science denial” and “climate denial.” Today, it is more likely for climate activists to make the more specific accusation of “denying the climate crisis,” a charge that carries within it the presumption that the “climate crisis” is already here.
Wright, who in his confirmation hearing called climate change [a] “real and global phenomenon,” rejects this claim. “Is it a crisis,” he asked an audience last year, “is it the world’s greatest challenge, or a big threat to the next generation? No.”
Your mileage may vary, of course, on when to objectively declare climate change a crisis. But the numbers to date are almost certainly in Wright’s favor.
Anthropogenic carbon emissions from fossil fuel combustion, the principal cause of climate change, have warmed the Earth’s average surface temperature by about 1.4 degrees C since the Industrial Revolution. This aggregate phenomenon has real discrete impacts on both nature—such as ocean acidification and ecosystem shifts—and on human societies—such as worsening coastal storm surges and rising local temperatures. These impacts are expected to intensify, on net, in the coming decades and centuries, the more we emit.
But the widespread belief that climate change is an acute or existential threat to human societies is empirically hard to defend. Over the centuries that industrial emissions have been accumulating in the biosphere, the human species has expanded by an order of magnitude. Lifespans in the poorest parts of the world are decades longer than they were 150 years ago, and decades longer still in the wealthiest parts of the world. Infant and maternal mortality have plummeted while rates of literacy and democratic inclusion have exploded. Absolute nutritional and material deprivation, once the near-universal human condition, are vanishingly rare in all but the poorest parts of the world.
Climate change is a problem, and scientists and economists agree that it produces negative effects on net. But that is a different kind of problem than a global killer asteroid or even a pandemic. And if we’re weighing the weight of a potential crisis by its aggregate harms to the human species, the conclusion is quite clear: climate change might be a grand human challenge, but it is not, at present, a crisis.
[...] What about the “devastating impacts of climate-fueled disasters” that NRDC’s Wong referenced? What about the hurricanes, the floods, the tornadoes, the droughts, the temperature extremes, and the wildfires?
[...] In a long report he wrote on climate and energy and in testimony he gave before Congress last year, Wright works through some of the “bright sides” of global warming, including that “global deaths from extreme weather have plummeted for over a century with cold-related deaths far outnumbering hot weather deaths.”
[...] To say that overwhelmingly fossil-fueled economic activity is causing dangerous climate change while also enabling “better clothing, better heating, car travel, and other advancements” is simply to impute that fossil fuels’ benefits are outweighing their costs so far. To say that “we want the trend to continue” should be moral table stakes, but it does not actually make a judgement about when or whether the cost-benefit ratio might reverse.
[...] It is true that whatever “bright sides” Wright identifies from global warming are often difficult to disentangle, empirically, from the negatives and from increased societal resilience... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPTS: This week, fracking executive Chris Wright sat before the Senate in a confirmation hearing for his nomination to lead the US Department of Energy...
[...] In the ancient climate wars of the early aughts, the disputes centered mainly on atmospheric science itself. Ne'er-do-wells like George W. Bush and Lee Raymond were accused of “science denial” and “climate denial.” Today, it is more likely for climate activists to make the more specific accusation of “denying the climate crisis,” a charge that carries within it the presumption that the “climate crisis” is already here.
Wright, who in his confirmation hearing called climate change [a] “real and global phenomenon,” rejects this claim. “Is it a crisis,” he asked an audience last year, “is it the world’s greatest challenge, or a big threat to the next generation? No.”
Your mileage may vary, of course, on when to objectively declare climate change a crisis. But the numbers to date are almost certainly in Wright’s favor.
Anthropogenic carbon emissions from fossil fuel combustion, the principal cause of climate change, have warmed the Earth’s average surface temperature by about 1.4 degrees C since the Industrial Revolution. This aggregate phenomenon has real discrete impacts on both nature—such as ocean acidification and ecosystem shifts—and on human societies—such as worsening coastal storm surges and rising local temperatures. These impacts are expected to intensify, on net, in the coming decades and centuries, the more we emit.
But the widespread belief that climate change is an acute or existential threat to human societies is empirically hard to defend. Over the centuries that industrial emissions have been accumulating in the biosphere, the human species has expanded by an order of magnitude. Lifespans in the poorest parts of the world are decades longer than they were 150 years ago, and decades longer still in the wealthiest parts of the world. Infant and maternal mortality have plummeted while rates of literacy and democratic inclusion have exploded. Absolute nutritional and material deprivation, once the near-universal human condition, are vanishingly rare in all but the poorest parts of the world.
Climate change is a problem, and scientists and economists agree that it produces negative effects on net. But that is a different kind of problem than a global killer asteroid or even a pandemic. And if we’re weighing the weight of a potential crisis by its aggregate harms to the human species, the conclusion is quite clear: climate change might be a grand human challenge, but it is not, at present, a crisis.
[...] What about the “devastating impacts of climate-fueled disasters” that NRDC’s Wong referenced? What about the hurricanes, the floods, the tornadoes, the droughts, the temperature extremes, and the wildfires?
[...] In a long report he wrote on climate and energy and in testimony he gave before Congress last year, Wright works through some of the “bright sides” of global warming, including that “global deaths from extreme weather have plummeted for over a century with cold-related deaths far outnumbering hot weather deaths.”
[...] To say that overwhelmingly fossil-fueled economic activity is causing dangerous climate change while also enabling “better clothing, better heating, car travel, and other advancements” is simply to impute that fossil fuels’ benefits are outweighing their costs so far. To say that “we want the trend to continue” should be moral table stakes, but it does not actually make a judgement about when or whether the cost-benefit ratio might reverse.
[...] It is true that whatever “bright sides” Wright identifies from global warming are often difficult to disentangle, empirically, from the negatives and from increased societal resilience... (MORE - missing details)