The Eschatology of Climate Change: Climate Politics & Mythology

The climate change myth casts seemingly plausible scientific, economic, and political observations cast in their most radical, extreme forms. The sleight-of-hand is brilliant.

The American Spirit Essays #20

(continued from The End of Times)

Climate Politics

Climate science establishes that models with minimal predictive ability, funded to predict a looming cataclysm, and exhibiting severe sensitivity to input specifications, can predict a cataclysmic outcome when given appropriate inputs.  That’s hardly enough to power a full eschatological movement.  Wokeism thus glides effortlessly from climate science to climate politics—and from there into climate mythology.  Those politics harken back to a debate that has raged at least since Thomas Malthus introduced the notion of resource depletion around the turn of the nineteenth century. 

As an important precursor to the entire utopian worldview that would soon follow, Malthus was deeply concerned that the accelerating use of resources in the early industrial age was straining the earth.  He predicted that the world would soon run out of resources.  His prescription was that his contemporaries curb their seemingly insatiable appetites, cease experimenting and advancing, and instead conserve the world’s resources base. 

Concerns about resource depletion have never left the environmental discussion, even as consumption has skyrocketed with no signs of imminent depletion.  In every generation, some new hysteric arises to announce that—this time—the world really is running out of resources, suffering irreparable damage, and dooming future generations to a miserable existence.  In the late twentieth century that mantle fell to famed biologist Paul Ehrlich, whose concern was so great that he predicted, in 1980, the demise of England by the year 2000.  (Spoiler: England made it into the twenty-first century).  In response, economist Julian Simon bet him that the long-term trend of free market commodity prices was downward—a result incompatible with increasing shortages.  The two agreed on a fixed basket of commodities and a fixed ten-year term.  In 1990, Simon won easily; every commodity in the basket had declined in price.

Old habits die hard.  The timeless beauty of resource depletion for those who believe in it is that it always justifies draconian reforms.  Surely, no one could believe that their personal short-term comfort was more important than the future of life on earth!  For those seeking to transform their societies, the fear of such a cataclysm provides a plausible justification for insisting upon massive, widespread behavioral change.  More importantly, it justifies the draconian centralization of authority necessary to impose such behavior change on an unwilling population.  Climate politics thus follows a venerable and predictable pattern that is completely untethered to climate science; it is, quite simply, political.

The Great Reset

The blurring of the scientific and the political abounds throughout the Woke literature.  Klaus Schwab, head of the Woke temple in Davos known as the World Economic Forum (WEF) ,provides a masterful example of the genre.  His Great Reset/Great Narrative series prescribing the global future of a post-Covid world rests upon two strong-form assumptions: One, we are heading towards a potentially apocalyptic climate crisis.  Two, the governmental actions taken to combat Covid exemplify laudatory collective action in the service of the common good.  In Schwab’s Woke framing, these two assertions are self-evident truths that only fringe “deniers” would even bother to challenge.