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Katy Tur, France’s Riots, and Panic Mode
NBC’s Katy Tur, responding to an article in the New Yorker about climate, looked into the camera and asked “How pointless is my life? And how pointless are the decisions that I make on a day-to-day basis when we are not focused on climate change every day, when it’s not leading every one of our newscasts?”
It’s a safe bet that not only will climate change not lead all newscasts, it will not even lead Katy Tur’s very often. And the reason is not any of those often proffered for failure to act in the ways activists prefer. It won’t be that she is a climate change denier. It won’t be that she was bought off by the fossil fuel industry. And it won’t be that she doesn’t care.
It will not lead because her program is a business, and if she begins her newscast every day with the same story, people will tire of it pretty quickly and soon she’ll be out of a job.
Still, I don’t doubt Tur’s sincerity. Both the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association have reported an increase in what is being dubbed “climate anxiety.” Fear of catastrophe is apparently widespread. Kids return from school fearful that they won’t live to adulthood. The National Resources Defense Council offers tips on “banishing the Climate Change Blues.” Al Gore may have many fine traits, but his effort to sow panic about climate with “An Inconvenient Truth” (2006) was a tremendous disservice to reasonable policy making and to the very cause he was promoting. It was not based on sound science, and when its wilder predictions proved false (“within a decade, there will be no more snows on Kilimanjaro”), some concluded that the whole issue was fraudulent.
Climate change is what social scientists call a “wicked problem.” Wicked problems are complicated, multi-faceted, and suffer from limited knowledge. They are not amenable to trial and error because there are too many different variables that could account for various outcomes.
Climate activists are a little weak on complexity. All that prevents humanity from solving the climate change problem, they say, is big business (Bernie Sanders calls it “putting short-term profits of polluters before people”) and Republicans.
Admittedly, Republicans who indulge the fantasy that global warming isn’t a problem are being, at best, irresponsible. But Democrats who suggest that we should simply enact measures like carbon taxes because it’s better to be safe than sorry ignore the fact that no policy is cost free.
Look at France in the past week. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets and many rioted, setting 240 fires and damaging the Arc de Triomphe. Why? Because to combat climate change, President Emmanuel Macron proposed to increase the already high taxes on gasoline. This doesn’t hit all Frenchmen equally. It’s particularly hard on rural people who rely more on their cars. Thus does a “precautionary” act cause social unrest and stoke urban/rural divisions. Additionally, the money spent to thwart climate change is money not spent on other social goods, like helping the poor, or finding cures for diseases. Nothing is cost free.
People who are taxed to save the planet are inclined to ask hard questions, such as: Should I forego a new roof on my house when countries like China are responsible for the lion’s share of emissions? Last year, China’s carbon emissions increased by 4.7 percent and India’s by 6.3 percent. The European Union’s emissions dropped by 0.7 percent, not nearly enough to offset Asia’s growing economies.
The idea behind carbon taxes is that higher prices will incentivize the search for alternatives, but unless governments can devise methods to ensure that the poor and near poor are not made worse off – say by providing the taxes back in the form of credits – the burden will be rejected by voters.
Speaking of being rejected by voters, another misguided fear-mongering campaign by environmentalists has come home to roost now. Remember the movie “The China Syndrome,” the Three Mile Island accident, and the hysteria about nuclear power that followed? That tantrum essentially halted the construction of new nuclear power plants in the U.S. – the one form of energy that is cheap, noncarbon emitting, and abundant. After the tsunami that crippled the Fukushima plant in Japan (causing no deaths), Germany closed down its nuclear industry altogether. Unreasoning fear blots out clear thinking. Nuclear power is safer than any other.
Solutions to this wicked problem will likely be technological. Government has a role in funding basic research (not companies like Solyndra). Hysteria is not policy.
Published in Environment
…and you lost me.
What a loser!
As a Japan resident, allow me to posit this: Nuclear power has a great deal to recommend it — just not in all geographies, one of which being Japan.
I fully agree that TMI hysteria, and the hobbling of the nuclear power generation industry Stateside in its aftermath, was totally unwarranted.
Where nuclear power in Japan is concerned, though, nationwide seismic susceptibilities combine with a drastically more limited range of options for locating both power plants and waste facilities to create a situation that should most certainly induce greater planning caution and operational vigilance. To be sure, if and as next-generation reactor designs emerge that offer Japan a decent-probability shot at bringing cost-effective new power resources online with significantly heightened safety characteristics, the Japanese public will need to come to a modus vivendi with the electricity utilities and the regulators that it has vociferously resisted since 2011.
Until then, however, fossil fuels will have to predominate — indeed, I have been thundering for years that Israel, for example, has been foolishly passing on a vital strategic-relationship-building opportunity by not pursuing on a serious and sustained basis (so far as is known) a deal framework with Japan’s government and Japanese fossil-fuels distributors to aggressively bring Israeli natural gas (as LNG) in massive bulk here to Japan.
And incidentally, the Fukushima reactor did actually emit a radioactive cloud in March 2011 that very nearly drifted down to the Tokyo metropolitan area — and the existence of which the government at the time went to tremendous lengths to conceal from the Japanese public.
So Mona, please get your facts straight, and please also avoid taking on a perspective just as straitjacketed and one-note as the Gore acolytes.
“It isn’t a problem” might be better than “it’s a problem amenable to economy gutting fantasy solutions based on the false premise that CO2 is the major driver of global warming.”
It would certainly be less of an obstacle to solutions than what underlies this:
The APAs are reporting on the success of pre-K to postgraduate indoctrination into a destructive fantasy ideology. The reality is that the ongoing reduction in US CO2 emission is a drop in the Indian and Chinese buckets. Bogus recycling rituals in the schools won’t change that.
What would change it is nuclear energy, but the same indoctrination factories (and their feeder teacher training programs) that promote “climate anxiety” promote anxiety about nuclear power.
That’s the “Bullet Train” which is supposed to mitigate global warming by reducing freeway and air traffic. By a tiny amount. On the other hand,
Instead, we have neglect of forest management (Save the Trees!) which makes the inevitable fires much more destructive and failure to build water storage capacity (or desalination plants) for agriculture.
Instead, we see:
repurposed as playgrounds for high ranking public officialsallowed to revert to nature. (#5 has not happened. Yet. Theforced relocationdenial of permits to rebuild is, however, becoming accepted as a policy tool by progressives.)Here is some interesting hindsight about the Fukushima plant:
Oops. [emphasis added.]
Hindsight again. Japan is an old nation with a considerable historical record. There are centuries old tsunami high water markers along Japan’s coast.
Flood plains are known.
Tsunami high water marks are calculable and safety margins can be established.
We know a fair amount about how to make buildings seismically resilient, including places not to build them.
TEPCO’s planning wasn’t good. The same plant on higher ground would not have been breached by the tsunami.
As a Catholic I am embarrassed that my pope blathers on about how climate change is one of the greatest threats to man.
https://www.breitbart.com/environment/2018/11/12/pope-francis-chief-threats-world-climate-change-nuclear-war/
And his Cardinal Secretary of State also added to the hysteria at the recent climate conference in Poland.
https://zenit.org/articles/cardinal-parolin-calls-for-action-at-climate-change-conference/
If these men focused more on the spiritual well-being of man and his need for salvation, and the love God has for us, perhaps there wouldn’t be such hysteria.
As a geologist, I am dumbfounded that people get hysterical that climate changes – it always has and always will. Wasn’t it back in the 70’s that the libs were warming us of a coming ice age?
Man is such a blip on the radar in this global phenomenon. To think that we can control the climate is folly. Perhaps if Katy Tur and her ilk had a sense of their cosmic insignificance they wouldn’t be so hysterical. But that is a lot to ask of one who sits in front of a camera and calls for all to look at her and hear her opinion.
The use of coal started in 1750. 25% of all of the human-caused carbon that was ever emitted was done between 1997 and 2015. During that time, every single climate change model broke. Every single one.
No one did a damn thing about the East Angelica research scandal uncovered by Wikileaks.
What are we going to do, invade China and India?
Apropos of nothing, do you think Chinese money and influence have a role in the push for China’s rivals to undertake expensive measures to mitigate CO2?
I watched the craziest interview on Real Vision of a dissident that was on the run from the regime. Just to be clear, this guy is a billionaire businessman. He basically hides in the United States. That country is controlled by sick mafia. Maybe they will make it work out, but that is the primary thing going on.
To be fair they have a Yale professor on right now. Stephen Roche. This guy at knows all about China. He’s not as negative. I haven’t watched yet though.
What I get it is, these guys have pushed their economy around like crazy to keep the Peoples Liberation Army happy and so they can steal from it. So it gets more and more fascist. Good luck with that.
last I checked we still don’t know where the corium is, and the frost wall to contain the waste water failed, and they are running out room for water towers to store the waste water.
Fukishima is still an active disaster.
All because they wanted to build it closer to the water.
Ditto…
Climate changes. It has changed since this planet & everything on it came into existence. It is ridiculous to insist that humanity can somehow STOP CLIMATE CHANGE! Maybe we can make the wind stop blowing, too? Eliminate earthquakes? The proper question isn’t “How do we stop climate change?” It’s “How do we ADAPT to climate change?”
What is irresponsible is believing a bunch of Gaia worshipers and socialists that promote a hoax with failed science. Admittedly, it is shameful that people cannot distinguish between political rhetoric and true science. As a starter, look at the politicized assumptions (RCP 8.5) of the doom and gloom reports: African fertility explodes; engineers forget things and we revert to Soviet era energy technology; farmers forget things and crop yields regress. If our technology in 2100 is the same as 1988, a little less snow will be the least of our worries.
I just thought of something. There was a Power Line podcast a few weeks ago that was really good on energy. We have three grids, East, West and Texas. The Texas grid is effectively decentralized, which is what we should be doing anyway at this point in time. (We couldn’t do it in the past.) Because of that, they literally know if a wind turbine pencils out or not. Everywhere else, the left and the criminals that run the utility companies just shove them down our throats. Not only do they not pencil out, they cause all kinds of side effects. It’s outrageous.
I really recommend those interviews.
Wonderful column, Mona. Very thoughtful. And, of course, well written.
What they should’ve done was switched to clean coal, and then maped out how they were going to decentralize the grid and switch to thorium pebble bed mini-reactors.
That would’ve helped the most people on the planet while dealing with this supposed CO2 problem. Of course this can’t happen because it involves taking the jackboot of statism off of everyone’s throats.
I guess I’m an irresponsible Republican. The AGW fanatics have lied to me one time too often. I just dismiss them. If there are sensible, non-hysterical voices of climate concern, they need to come out strong. Maybe, just maybe, I’d listen to them.
Otherwise, a good post, Mona.
That’s the way I feel. Congress or whoever isn’t policing this research at all.
Moderator Note:
name callingMore proof positive that Mona Charen is on the progressive billionaire’s payroll. Why do you continue with Mona [redacted]
This is the way I think about it. I would absolutely love to be ruled by some anti-Trump republicans. Kevin Williamson and Jonah Goldberg come to mind. This list not so much. And everyone can figure out more guys that belong on that list. They don’t get how big government has gotten dysfunctional and people either want their cut of it, or they want it fixed. They are sick of cultural Marxism and the media. So we got Trump. The people on that list just need big government to work for their lifestyle, or their ego, or their geopolitical preferences. Well good luck with that anymore.
Tom Nichols makes this great big deal about how he’s a conservative. He has literally said he’s for “strict gun control.” All of that expert stuff he blathers about has gotten in this country into a ton of trouble. People are sick of it.
The other thing like that, is there are a bunch of Republicans that sneer at Jordan Peterson. It’s a similar list, this isn’t really my bag.
The funding source on a lot of their stuff is suspect too, like you point out here.
More.
The history of CO2 is very interesting. Al Gore and the other Profits of Doom have many folks convinced that CO2 is pollution and that less is better. This is absolutely backwards. CO2 is one of the vital molecules for life on the planet. Saying CO2 is pollution the same as saying H20 is pollution! The levels of CO2 in the per-industrial age (280ppm) were barely high enough to support life. In fact, there was a lot of desertification caused by the low CO2 levels.
Millions of years ago, CO2 levels were much higher (800ppm) and the earth was lush with plants and animals. Then something bad happened. Trees, with woody fibrous tissue, developed. This woody tissue could not be broken down after trees died. This led to a global “carbon capture” and CO2 levels dropped to very low levels risking most life on earth. Then a good thing happened! A fungus evolved that could break down the woody fibers and CO2 cycle was restored. Yeah! (FYI, all those old trees are the source of coal.) Earth became lush again.
Meanwhile another bad thing was happening. Shellfish were flourishing and they were capturing CO2 from the water. They became limestone and there is nothing on earth that can break down limestone and CO2 was slowly being removed from the cycle. This happened for a long time until the industrial age, when the earth was starving for more CO2. Then something great happened. Humans started burning fossil fuels (coal) and returning CO2 to the cycle. Humans burned coal and to turn limestone into cement and balance has been restored. Now the earth is becoming more lush and we should all rejoice!
For more info, look for “Dr. Patrick Moore CO2”.
@dong very interesting. That is a version of that topic that I have never heard before. Excellent.
Mona Charen personifies what is wrong with Politics, education, rhetoric and our culture in general.
She just isn’t very intelligent. Sure, she can regurgitate a line that has already been fed to her by others but she is incapable of independent thought of her own. As long as she keeps on regurgitating, her masters will keep trotting her out there. She is like much of the elite(st) class. College professors, media types, artists, etc. have very little to offer us. They all love the sounds of their voices and are amazed when anyone else isn’t amazed at how amazing they are.
What gives Mona away is how she dismisses others without respectfully acknowledging their arguments. Anyone who still confidently believes in AGW is a religious zealot. Certainly, there are folks on the other end of the spectrum. Yet, the science is not just far from settled but at the least is trending towards the whole thing having been poorly thought out from the start. It is long past time for real journalism to return and for more intelligent voices to be heard. Even when she is on point her articles are like rat poison.
Consider this stolen. It is the best distillation of this problem that I’ve ever seen. A “destructive fantasy ideology.” Such an ideology has a two pronged offense–the “We-have-only-weeks-to-live-fantasy,” and the “I’m-offended-fantasy.” There are no other possibilities.
It’s the last scurrilous refuge of a generation that, in real and material terms, doesn’t have much to worry about and which has to invent its own bogeymen in order to feel fully alive.
I vacillate between the thought that perhaps an existential crisis of devastating consequence (but I repeat myself) might shake them out of it (not that I wish such a thing), and despair at the contemplation of their likely reaction to such a thing.
And as is usually the case, I vacillate and contemplate in the context of my parents’ generation and the privations and sacrifices they made during World War II to get us to the point we are today.
I am acutely aware of Katy Tur’s cosmic insignificance.
I’ve never heard of her.
Pundit Privilege™
Used to be that we were all going to die in a nuclear war, but we didn’t teach that in grade school.