COULD IT BE?  ARE WE ACTUALLY SEEING SOME MATURE, REASONED COMMENTS ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE?  THE SIGNS LOOK GOOD.  FROM THE GREAT GLENN H. REYNOLDS IN THE NEW YORK POST: 

Has the air gone out of the “climate crisis” balloon? 

It’s starting to look like it. Some other causes du jour are looking limp lately, too.

Oh, hysteria is still out there. In Boston this month, I passed a church whose door bore a lurid poster reading “DUE TO GLOBAL CLIMATE CRISIS, WORSHIP IN SANCTUARY 9-17-23 CANCELED.”

If it were really a global crisis, wouldn’t you want to be praying?...

...Bill Gates, however, is pumping the brakes on climate panic. 

Speaking at a New York Times event, he observed that heavy-handed policies won’t work: “If you try to do climate by brute force, you will get people who say, ‘I like climate but I don’t want to bear that cost and reduce my standard of living.’”

As Gates noted, many of these people are in middle-income countries, like China and India, that are the biggest contributors to carbon emissions today and whose emissions (unlike those of the United States) have been growing.

He also rained on the greens’ apocalyptic parade, saying “no temperate country is going to become uninhabitable.” 

And he cautioned against untested approaches like massive tree planting:  “Are we the science people or are we the idiots? Which one do we want to be?”

Well, the climate policies the political system supports are mostly the ones likely to yield the most graft, and those the corporate world supports are mostly the ones involving massive government subsidies.

But it’s interesting to see Gates softening his tone; it feels as if climate outrage has passed its sell-by date.

Oh, sure, there are still kooks in Europe gluing themselves to roadways and the occasional nut throwing oil on famous works of art, but it’s all started to seem rather forced.

When you see a shift in a social trend like this, it’s almost always happening for the same reason: The people behind it have figured out it’s doing the left more harm than good.

It’s of a piece with the sudden de-emphasis of ESG (environmental, social, governance) as a tool of corporate management. 

In both cases, the detached, well-off white people who mostly run the left dreamed up causes and slogans, which their follow-the-herd peers uncritically adopted until they ran into reality and the rest of the world noticed. 

The reality, as Gates is reminding us, is there’s not actually a climate “crisis” calling for drastic action tomorrow, and running businesses and institutions as if there is one is counterproductive and even outright destructive. 

Another reality is the great mass of people around the globe knows this and has lost patience with it.  

Likewise, investors have figured out ESG is just a way for managers to substitute fuzzy, hard-to-assess performance metrics — basically a “net wokeness” calculus — for clear and well-defined metrics like, you know, how much profit managers produce for shareholders.

It’s not really surprising that, on reflection, shareholders would rather have profit than trendy causes, and voters would rather have jobs and functioning societies than nonstop apocalyptic rhetoric.

COMMENT:  Read the rest.  Very well argued.  Maybe people, including voting people, are waking up to the fact that "the sky is falling" is the oldest political scam.  It isn't falling, and climate change is not about to destroy the planet. 

The war for sanity is starting to show some victories.  I hope that the next nut cause to fall is the alleged need for electric vehicles.  It seems that many of them are winding up on the "unsold" lots, and their cost may well be prohibitive.  And will someone please tell me how much it will take out of the family budget to charge an electric vehicle every night of the month?  Not much talk about that, is there?

September 25, 2023