Climate Crisis-Mongers’ New Orwellian Mantra: Poverty Is ‘Abundance’

Hot on the heels of Alissa Quart’s assault on American Individualism comes Rebecca Solnit’s assault on the consequence of that individualism, prosperity.

What if climate change meant not doom — but abundance? By Rebecca Solnit

The article is long on high-minded cliches but devoid of concrete substance. But Solnit’s guilt-drenched, nihilistic message comes through loud and clear.

Solnit wants us to believe that material and spiritual enrichment are opposites—that it is either-or. 

But the creation of material abundance requires spiritual virtues like rationality, learning, inventiveness, entrepreneurship, perseverance, cooperation, and hard work. Material and spiritual abundance compliment and build on each other. Today, thanks to freedom and abundant, economical, reliable energy, mainly fossil fuels, we live amazingly prosperous lives, with an amazingly bright future of greater prosperity. 

So why the doom and despair? Because of the manufactured climate “crisis.” The climate crisis-mongers have infected too many people with a wholly unwarranted doom and gloom. This is especially true of the young, who are victims of mental abuse at a time they should be looking ahead with eager anticipation. Today is the best time in human history in which to be a teenager, the inheritors of unprecedented opportunities for building flourishing lives. The despair and anxiety so many of them feel is real. But it is the climate crisis-mongers who inflicted it. This is not just educational malpractice. It is child abuse.

Solnit’s premise is not new. The environmentalists’ anti-human goal is the same. She just reframes prosperity as poverty, and poverty as “abundance.” This is just a new version of Christianity’s Dark Age glorification of poverty. She speaks of “building stronger societies and being better citizens, on caring for the people,” and then glorifies disasters as paths to joy and “moral beauty.” 

This, the glorification of disaster, is where Solnit’s true colors come through. The Great Enrichment of the past 250 years, the era of Capitalism, freedom, and fossil fuels, has made us safer than ever from climate dangers, and much better able to mitigate the damage of such disasters—with promises of more safety to come. Solnit proposes to abandon the material prosperity that makes this climate mastery possible, and once again make humanity at the full mercy of nature’s fury. That is what Solnit means by her new form of “abundance”—rather than an abundance of money and stuff, an abundance of misery. This is what she terms “spiritual abundance.”

We should be grateful to fossil fuels for the wonderful lives we have today, celebrating the abundance of fossil fuels needed to power further progress in the decades ahead, and advocating to preserve the freedom necessary for the innovation that will eventually lead to better energy sources that can not only grow our economies but make us ever more resilient to future climate dangers. 

Having been lecturing us for years about how our industrial flourishing is destroying the planet, we are now being told that the unprecedentedly enriched lives we enjoy is bad for us. Reject Solnit’s bleak call for a future of scarcity and phony spiritual “enrichment.” It’s just repackaged climate hysteria. Instead, embrace human flourishing. Reason’s Ronald Bailey presents a better vision, as does Alex Epstein.

Related Ruling:

The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-first Century by Ronald Bailey

Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas--Not Less by Alex Epstein

The Anti-human Tyrade of an Ungrateful 16-Year-old

We Owe Our Children a More Technologically Advanced Society, Not 'Preserved' Nature

The Collectivist Left Media Launches Major ‘Climate Crisis’ Propaganda Campaign

CLIMATE VULNERABILITY AND THE INDISPENSABLE VALUE OF INDUSTRIAL CAPITALISM—Kieth H. Lockitch

QUORA: ‘Why is there such strong pushback on climate change at the same time as we are seeing overwhelming proof of weather extremes in the USA?’

 QUORA: ‘Why is there such strong pushback on climate change at the same time as we are seeing overwhelming proof of weather extremes in the USA?’

I posted this answer:

“Pushback on climate change” is unusably vague. So I’ll assume that what is meant is “pushback on government policies to “fight” climate change.” 

The reason is simple. Climate change danger has been vastly exaggerated to advance an anti-human agenda that values raw nature over human life, and that consequently aims to eliminate vital reliable energy; nuclear, hydro, and especially fossil fuels. There is no “climate crisis” (the term itself is conceptually senseless). The truth is, there would be an unprecedented human catastrophe if reliable energy were eliminated in favor of unreliable, super-expensive “renewables” like solar and wind. 

As to weather extremes, there was never a time, in the USA or worldwide, in which there was not “overwhelming proof of weather extremes.” They’ve always existed, and contrary to the perpetually failed predictions of the climate alarmists, there is as of yet little evidence that they are becoming meaningfully more extreme (although the possibility of some weather events becoming more intense in the future are plausible expectation). We’re living in a relatively tame period, in terms of swings in climate and extreme weather. If you want to see weather extremes, read Brian Fagan’s book The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850. What we are experiencing today is not only routine, it is mild compared to the rapid shifts in ocean currents, climate, and extreme weather that people endured during that period. What we have today is more akin to the comparably tranquil conditions of the Medieval Warm Period. *

What is undeniably true today is that climate livability and safety has surged. 

For example, climate related deaths from weather extremes (and natural disasters more generally) have plunged 98% to 99% over the past 100 years. Reason science correspondent Ronald Bailey documents that the risk of dying from extreme weather since the 1920s has dropped by 99.75 percent. (Hurricane Ida, Climate Change, and Falling Trends in Global Deaths From Natural Disasters). If you want a really dramatic specific example of the tremendous positive trend in human climate safety and livability, consider two Indian ocean hurricanes of recent weather history, 1970’s  Bhola cyclone and 2019’s Cyclone Bulbul. The two storms struck the same area of India/Bangladesh, and were of comparable strength (tropical cyclones in this part of the world are called simply “cyclones” rather than hurricanes). Bhola killed about 500,000 people, Bulbul 24! As Aljazeera reported,

Bangladesh’s low-lying coast, home to 30 million people, and India’s east are regularly battered by cyclones that have killed hundreds of thousands of people in recent decades.

While the storms’ frequency and intensity have increased – partly due to climate change – the death tolls have come down because of faster evacuations and the building of thousands of coastal shelters.

That’s real progress in protection from extreme weather in just 5 decades, and the progress happened in the time period in which we are constantly told we are facing a “climate crisis.” And it was made possible by the adoption in that part of the world of fossil fuels, including coal, which more broadly powers the industrialization that actually makes us safer from climate dangers.

The statement “we are seeing overwhelming proof of weather extremes in the USA?” is childish. It’s akin to religionists asserting “overwhelming proof of God” in everything, without ever having to offer proof of anything. There is “such strong pushback on climate change” not because people don’t recognize that climate change is a natural feature of Earth’s weather or that human activity may be influencing climate, but because “climate change” is used to whip up unwarranted hysteria geared toward policies that would cripple industry and consumers of energy and cause, if fully implemented, unimaginable human harm. Climate change hystericists vastly exaggerate the danger while ignoring or minimizing the enormous benefits that accompany human influence on the climate.

Before we consider any political climate agenda, we should start with the age-old wisdom, “First, do no harm.” Don’t let the “climate crisis” hysteria of political and crony business interests, Environmentalist anti-industrial revolutionists, and the concerted media propaganda campaign that backs it to constrict your thinking. There’s more to this story. Broaden your mind. By all means, listen to the alarmists. I do. But be objective. Get informed about the motives behind the climate panic mongering, the vital importance of energy to our everyday lives, the actual facts about extreme weather trends today, the actual history of weather and climate, what the evidence shows about the relationship between weather-related disasters and climate, the positive state of human flourishing and the planet today that the climate fear mongering camouflages, and the continued industrial/technological progress and the enabling Capitalist freedom needed to foster both growing worldwide prosperity and the tools to deal with whatever extreme weather awaits us in the future.   

* [The 2019 edition includes an added Afterword by the author that the original 2000 edition did not have. Unfortunately, the conclusion of that Afterword gives an inexplicable nod to today’s climate catastrophism movement, complete with the usual straw man tactics. I say inexplicable because the last two pages of the Afterword contradicts the entire book. Nonetheless, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850, 2019 edition, provides invaluable context for evaluating today’s raging climate change contraversy and debate.]

Related Reading:

The Collectivist Left Media Launches Major ‘Climate Crisis’ Propaganda Campaign

The Anti-human Tyrade of an Ungrateful 16-Year-old

We Owe Our Children a More Technologically Advanced Society, Not 'Preserved' Nature

It’s Time to Listen to the ‘Climate Denialists’

We Are Doomed Without, Not Because of, Fossil Fuel Use

CLIMATE VULNERABILITY AND THE INDISPENSABLE VALUE OF INDUSTRIAL CAPITALISM—Kieth H. Lockitch 

Capitalist Industrialization, Not Handouts, is “Poor” Countries' Best Protection Against Natural Disasters

Stop ‘Denying’ the View From Outside the Climate Catastrophist Government Establishment

Some Passing Observations on Climate, Economic Progress, and Fossil Fuels

From Scientists see stronger evidence of slowing Atlantic Ocean circulation, an ‘Achilles’ heel’ of the climate in the Washington Post. All emphases are mine:

A growing body of evidence suggests that a massive change is underway in the sensitive circulation system of the Atlantic Ocean, a group of scientists said Thursday. The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), a system of currents that includes the Florida Current and the Gulf Stream, is now “in its weakest state in over a millennium,” these experts say.

The enormous flow has been directly measured only since 2004, too short a period to definitively establish a trend, which makes these indirect measures critical for understanding its behavior.

The late climate scientist Wallace S. Broecker wrote in 1997 that the AMOC is the “Achilles’ heel” of the climate system, citing evidence that it has switched on and off repeatedly over the course of Earth’s history, with the power to flip warming periods to intense cold in the Northern Hemisphere.

Scientists do not expect anything so severe in our future, especially because greenhouse gases will continue to cause offsetting warming. 

The current study’s conclusions are, by necessity, only as good as the proxies are. And the complexity of different currents in the Atlantic, as well as different definitions of the AMOC, can call into question what the proxies are actually measuring, said Marilena Oltmanns, an oceanographer at the National Oceanography Center in Britain.

This seems to indicate that, far from causing a “climate crisis” due to global warming, the use of fossil fuels may be saving us from a new ice age, at least in the Northern Hemisphere.

And from Accuweather: Gulf Stream is weakest it's been in more than 1,000 years, study says --

The weakening of the Gulf Stream, formally known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), can be mostly pinned to one catalyst, the researchers said: human-caused climate change.

But, If the Gulf Stream was weaker 1000 years ago, then on what basis is it claimed that human-caused climate change is the "one catalyst" leading to the current weakening of the Gulf stream? 1000 years ago, no one burned fossil fuels. And even if the current weakening can be “pinned” on “human-caused climate change,” so what? Man has been through this before, and survived just fine. How much better off are we today than 1000 years ago? How much better will man be 1000 years after the current bout of weakening of the Gulf Stream?

Climate change discussion is full of people playing fast and loose with their rhetoric. I have noticed many more examples of contradictions in the “climate crisis” model.

Related Reading:

Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All by Michael Shellenberger

False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet by Bjorn Lomborg

Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom by Patrick Moore

Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters by Steven E. Koonin

The Rightful Place of Science: Disasters & Climate Change by Roger Pielke Jr.

New U.N. Study Shows Climate Catastrophists Getting More Open About their Totalitarian Designs

Stossel’s Optimism vs. The Biden-Led Pessimism

The Youtube video The GOOD News of 2020 by John Stossel was forwarded to me and 13 others by email by a friend. StosseI gives a summary of some of the wonderful man made technological and industrial advances we live under, but that we don’t fully appreciate. My friend’s preamble is

Friend and classmate John Stossel makes an optimistic pitch that 2020 wasn’t as bad as it has been made out to be and provides solid reasons why. Seeing this might provide a spring board for a greater sense of optimism about the current state of affairs and what we have to look forward to: [sic]

I replied to all recipients with this:

Kathy and I loved this piece. Thanks. It’s a breath of fresh air, especially given the irrational pessimism being generated in Washington.  

Unfortunately, President Biden and his supporters in the media and academia are painting an irrationally pessimistic picture, for political/ideological reasons. They are intent on creating an illusion of widespread crises. In fact, the very theme of President Biden’s inauguration speech was “The cascading crises of our era”--his words, not mine, and a false sentiment that will define his Administration.

We both love Stossel. People desperately need to learn the truth of the state of America and the world, before the progress gets reversed in the name of “fixing” an imagined “cascade of crises.” [Jonah] Norberg is great, and I have his new book on my buy list. The world is in the best shape its ever been in, at least from the standard of human flourishing and well-being. But he’s far from alone. Aside from Norberg, other scholars offer plenty of fact-based documentation for the amazingly good state of the world, including Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know: And Many Others You Will Find Interesting by Ronald Bailey and Marian L. Tupy, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker, and The Great Enrichment by Deirdre McCloskey. None try to soft pedal problems that humankind still faces, nor should any of us. But all offer context and balance to counter the disaster-mongers. Or you can simply open your eyes and mind and look around.

I did not get any response.

Related Reading:

The planet has never been a safer place for humans to live—Alex Epstein for MarketWatch

The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the 21st Century—Ronald Bailey

The Myth of Technological Unemployment: If the nightmare of technological unemployment were true, it would already have happened, repeatedly and massively, by Deirdre Nansen McCloskey.

Related Viewing:

Individualism vs Collectivism - Dr. Yaron Brook

The Anti-human Tyrade of an Ungrateful 16-Year-old

The recent United Nations gathering focused, among other things, on climate. And look who it put up as the face of the climate crusade, a 16-year-old “climate activist.” In World leaders promise to do more at the U.N. climate summit after Greta Thunberg’s appeal, Seth Borenstein reported for the Associated Press:

Leader after leader told the United Nations on Monday that they will do more to prevent a warming world from reaching even more dangerous levels. But as they made their pledges at the Climate Action Summit after an emotional appeal from 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg, they and others conceded it was not enough.

“This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here,” said Greta, who began a lone protest outside the Swedish parliament more than a year ago that culminated in Friday’s global climate strikes. “I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you have come to us young people for hope. How dare you. You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.”

“People are suffering, people are dying,” Greta said as she sat on the dais with panelists who included a young clean-energy entrepreneur from India and a Brazilian lawyer representing youth climate activists. “Entire ecosystem are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you?” 

“For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear,” Greta added. “How dare you continue to look away and come here and say you’re doing enough when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight?” [sic]

In the last 30 years, life expectancies have risen, world poverty has plummeted, and by 2018 the middle class has soared to encompass more than half the world’s population. People’s lives are getting better around the globe. This is no fairy tale. That is called economic growth. Money is the miracle lubricant that enables that growth. Money makes possible the division of labor by facilitating the ability of people to get better together through the shared prosperity of trade, thus enhancing the liberty of the individual to use his reason to advance his own life.

That economic growth means people are suffering less. Fewer and fewer people are dying prematurely from climate-related danger as steady economic growth dramatically improves climate and environmental safety. Still, many of the world’s people are still living in deprivation, lacking even electricity. There’s much more to do. “Eternal economic growth” is a vital necessity; vital, that is, if improving human well-being is your goal. 

Yet, Greta Thunberg wants to roll back the clock to a time when the climate really was a crisis for humans--a chronic crisis, a constant battle for bare survival against famine and disease and pestilence and weather. For what? She wants to save the ecosystems from “collapsing”—which means, to save the planet from human alteration. Life without technology and industry, the energy and freedom that powers it, and the economic growth that results, is wholesale suffering and shorter lives. She damns money and economic growth outright, thus regressing mankind back to the hellhole of life in raw nature, in the process stealing the dreams and destroying the futures of the very young people she arrogantly claims to speak for. 

And what kind of life do today’s young people have to look forward to? 300 years ago, at the dawn of the Enlightenment, the odds were that a youngster like Thunberg wouldn’t have lived to 16 years old. And if she did, she could count on a brutish life of extreme poverty and drudgery

in a hostile natural environment--the same stagnant life of her parents, grandparents, and generations past. Instead, a young person today faces a long, prosperous, much safer life full of opportunity. What brought that magnificent progress? Freedom, money, and economic growth. That’s the future that her elders bequeathed to today’s young people. And for that gift, all she has to say to her elders is, “how dare you?” What an ungrateful little snot.

But that’s not the worst of it. What of her claim that “the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight?” Nonsense. We’ve had decades full of hundreds of $billions in subsidies and regulations to encourage “clean energy” imposed by governments. It hasn’t worked. People want their reliable fossil fuels because economic growth needs reliable, cheap, plentiful energy, and economic growth is the only means of improving human life. But political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. To date, not enough political power has been brought to bear. The limited political solutions of subsidies and regulations have not made the impossible possible. Some controls have been tried, and have failed. So Thunberg demands what every utopian who thinks she has a right to force her values on everyone else. Though she doesn’t come right out and say it, she demands the total politics of socialist totalitarianism, plainly laid out by Leftists politicians. She’s addressing a government body. She demands that they force aside economic well-being. That means freedom must go.

How dare her! Hers is the voice of a monstrous evil. Thunberg’s message goes beyond the fairy tale of some prosperous “clean energy” future. It goes beyond windmills and solar panels. She proclaims the true heart and soul of Environmentalism, the moral supremacy of nature over human life. Give her credit for honesty. She doesn’t cloak her agenda in promises of jobs and economic growth, the way climate fear mongers do in pushing to outlaw fossil fuels and nuclear in the name of renewable energy. She flat out attacks freedom, money, and economic growth. “Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth, ” Thunberg bellows. We need “politics” (force) to impose “solutions” (“rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society,” as the UN puts it) that only totalitarian powers can bring about, as every utopian thug who ever sought to shape society to his liking has shown. 

I don’t know how much of the 16 year old Thunberg’s vision is indoctrinated ignorance and how much is her actual conviction. I do know one thing. Her utopian vision would be disastrous for human life on Earth. Such utopian disasters are never innocent. Whatever the case with Thunberg, that is the vision that the United Nations, the institution whose members claim to represent all the people of the planet, gave its platform to. How dare they!

Related Reading:

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress—Steven Pinker

New U.N. Study Shows Climate Catastrophists Getting More Open About their Totalitarian Designs

Paris Climate Agreement Adopted: New Central Plan for the World’s Economy and Climate—Ronald Bailey for Reason.com

The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels—Alex Epstein

The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the 21st Century—Ronald Bailey

The sustainability myth—Alex Epstein

Trump Provides the Right Kind of Leadership in Withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord

The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution—Ayn Rand and Peter Schwartz

The Formula for a Richer World? Equality, Liberty, Justice—Deirdre N. McCloskey

Extreme poverty has been reduced by 1 billion people in the last 25 years

Maternal Mortality Rates Are Plummeting in the World’s Poorest Regions

We Owe Our Children a More Technologically Advanced Society, Not 'Preserved' Nature

Fossil Fuels and Climate Change: Remember Life Before Them

Our Alleged 'Climate Crisis' is No Longer, Thanks to Fossil Fuels

Save Humans from the Earth Savers

A recent Trump Administration report raised Leftist eyebrows by including a prediction of a 7-degree fahrenheit rise in global temperature above pre-industrial (1880) levels by the year 2100. The New Jersey Star-Ledger jumped on it. In Trump says the planet's screwed, so let's burn as much fossil fuel as we can, the Star-Ledger editorialized:

First the good news: Science may no longer be the greatest casualty in Donald Trump's war on truth, as his official position on climate change has made a tangible shift from "Chinese hoax" and "nonsense."

The bad news is that while his administration now acknowledges the reality of climate change, his policy is essentially this: The planet's screwed, so let's feel free to burn as much fossil fuel as we can.

That is the message contained within an environmental impact statement drafted by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which was written to justify Trump's recent decision to freeze fuel efficiency standards on cars and light trucks.

The Washington Post found it buried on Page 191 of a 500-page report: At the current pace, the planet will warm by 4 degrees Celsius (7 Fahrenheit) by 2100, which scientists assert will be catastrophic, so the report concludes that there is no point in trying to prevent it.

"The emissions reductions necessary to keep global emissions within this carbon budget could not be achieved solely with drastic reductions in emissions from the U.S. car and light truck vehicle fleet," said the NHTSA, adding that the only significant change can come by a "move away from the use of fossil fuels," which is "not currently technologically feasible or economically practicable."

My emphasis. The rest of the column degenerates into an apocalyptic tirade urging us to “invest in life jackets and hazmat suits” for our grandkids, coupled with the usual cry of It’s Climate Change! In response to every unpleasant weather event.

I left these comments:

The best environmental protection humans have ever invented is industrial progress. That requires plentiful reliable, economical, clean energy; i.e. fossil fuels combined with advanced anti-pollution technologies, which we now have. The real threat to future generations is the drive by the climate catastrophists to cripple industrialization and prosperity by attacking the fossil fuel industry--the very energy needed to increase prosperity for future generations.

Trump’s energy and climate policy is exactly right: First, Do No Harm! Especially to Americans. Fossil fueled industrial progress has made us safer than ever from the danger-filled climate. Climate-related deaths have declined 98% over the past century. At the same time, our standard of living has skyrocketed. To this day, fossil fuels continue to drive Third World lives up from poverty. Reliable energy is CRITICAL to continued progress. Any policy to drive up energy prices and availability by FORCIBLY reducing fossil fuels in favor of technologically and economically unreliable “renewables” would cause a human catastrophe dwarfing the alleged harms (if any) we MAY see from climate change. Thank god the Earth savers didn’t get their way 100 years ago.

“Scientists assert” is really “Government scientists speculate.” The warming may come true, or more likely be another failed apocalyptic prediction. But the positives to human life of fossil fuels--and the other “dirty” reliables, nuclear and hydro--far outweigh the climate risks. We only get one side of the story from the Earth savers. Go outside the government (political) establishment to the “skeptics” for a balance view; Alex Epstein, Ronald Bailey, [Paul] Mulshine’s [Star-Ledger] columns, etc. You’ll find a wealth of knowledge to counter the anti-humanist climate catastrophism.

Related Reading:

‘Climate Denier’: The Leitmotif of the Climate Propagandist

Droughts No Match for Fossil-Fueled Industrial Agriculture

Are Floods More Frequent, as Climate Alarmists Claim?  by Patrick J. Michaels and Paul Knappenberger

Trends in Extreme Weather Events since 1900 – An Enduring Conundrum for Wise Policy Advice—Journal of Geography & Natural Disasters

It is widely promulgated and believed that human-caused global warming comes with increases in both the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events. A survey of official weather sites and the scientific literature provides strong evidence that the first half of the 20th century had more extreme weather than the second half, when anthropogenic global warming is claimed to have been mainly responsible for observed climate change. The disconnect between real-world historical data on the 100 years’ time scale and the current predictions provides a real conundrum when any engineer tries to make a professional assessment of the real future value of any infrastructure project which aims to mitigate or adapt to climate change.

The Truth About Sea Levels—Alex Epstein

Assume 6 Feet of Sea Level Rise: Predict Catastrophe—Useful science or worst case scaremongering? by Ronald Bailey

LINKS of Interest:

Q: What nation on Earth has reduced its carbon emissions more than any other?