Pirate's Cove

The Bloomberg News editorial board is wondering how to reset the climate change debate, and offers up a pithy idea for Warmists, way down in their editorial

It’s too easy for politicians to blame popular resistance to such measures on voters’ shortsightedness and ignorance of the proven science. Governments and their advisers have fallen into the habit of overstating their certainty about the consequences of inaction and needlessly narrowing the range of appropriate responses. It’s as though they’ve decided that people need to be scared into accepting whatever governments might propose, rather than guided to weigh intelligent choices. (snip)

And insurance companies typically don’t try to frighten people into buying their products. Instead, they present it as a sensible, even boring, necessity. Scare tactics about climate change have not only failed to move public opinion, but they’ve also undermined trust in government, which was too low to begin with.

Obviously, Bloomberg is enamored with Big Government, but it is interesting to note that they conclude that the scare tactics have reduced trust in government, and, in reality, the point of pushing “climate change” is to increase Progressive government, which is an ever increasing Big Government, with more control of individual lives and private entities. But the scare tactics aren’t working. Climate change continuously tends to be at the bottom, if not dead last, of citizen’s concerns in poll after poll, both here in the U.S. and in countries around the world.

Perhaps that arises due to those pushing “climate change” the hardest are massive hypocrites, using fossil fuels to drive and fly quite a bit.

It could also be due to people being able to get the real facts that rebut Warmist hyperventilation of doom. Warmists lament and whine about skeptics on a constant basis. They try and stop the debate, some papers refuse to allow anything but Warmist propaganda. Warmist websites remove comments and block skeptics who want to debate. Warmists call for prosecution and jail for skeptics.

Anyhow, back to the start of the editorial

The world’s failure to take meaningful action on climate change may one day be seen as the gravest mistake of our time. How to account for this failure?

There are many reasons for it — but principally lack of leadership. Governments won’t succeed in this endeavor until they start risking political capital on the cause and, equally important, rethink their arguments. Climate change is neither an inevitable cataclysm nor a scientific hoax, the twin poles that have defined this debate. It is a relatively straightforward but profound risk against which the world must insure itself.

Interestingly, the government of Australia risked their political capital in enacting a big cap and trade carbon tax scheme, which led to Labor, being the majority party who pushed the legislation, first being wiped out in the Queensland elections of 2012, then getting blown out in national elections of 2013. Both loses were due primarily to the “climate change” legislation.

Another worthwhile tactical shift would be to acknowledge that the remedies aren’t clear-cut. Offering voters a choice between acting “quickly and dramatically” or facing “catastrophic” harm, as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry did recently, doesn’t help. The costs of mitigation vary enormously, as does who would bear the burden. Addressing these complications requires more debate, not less.

Here’s the thing: much of what Warmists say they want (mind you, their talking points do not really match their ulterior goals) match up with what skeptics want: a cleaner environment. I might be out of line, but I dare say that most would like cleaner energy sources, and might be willing to pay a tiny bit more for it. I would. But, we skeptics aren’t referring to CO2 output, but actual pollutants. We understand that coal and gasoline are not exactly clean. We’d like to see the use of other energy sources used. If they work. We’d like to see more research, in order to come up with breakthroughs.

But what Warmists really want, as mentioned, is Progressive government, otherwise known as “nice fascism”. Climate change is simply a way to get where they’re going. Solar and wind projects are used as political payback to Democrat donors. Mass transit is a way to control the movement of citizens, as is their notion of everyone living in cities (even though cities have been shown to have a higher per capita carbon footprint than living in the suburbs and countryside). As Ed Rogers notes, any new “carbon tax” will not stop Bad Weather or change the weather.

The lead sentence of an April 14 New York Times “news article,” headlined “Political Rifts Slow U.S. Effort on Climate Laws,” deserves some study. The first sentence reads, “The United States needs to enact a major climate change law, such as a tax on carbon pollution, by the end of this decade to stave off the most catastrophic impacts of global warming, according to the authors of a report released this week by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.”  What? According to this article, if the United States doesn’t act unilaterally with a giant new tax, it will be impossible to “protect the globe from a future of serious food and water shortages, a drastic sea level rise, increased poverty and disease and other profound risks.” It is fair for voters to ask, “Do you like how your current tax dollars are spent?  Will a new tax designed to shape the climate be spent any better?”

But, the central point of carbon taxes is not to stop Bad Weather, but to put more taxpayer money in Government hands for liberal causes, along with controlling behavior of citizens and companies, along with creating more dependence on government as money is (supposedly) refunded back to the citizens.

Don’t expect the scary stories to stop. Warmists have been trotting them out for decades, even when they fail. How many tipping points have been postulated? Lots. And even though they fail to come about, they’ll keep trotting them out. The scary stories are all they have.

Read: Bloomberg News: Warmists Should Stop Trotting Out Scary Stories »