“Whip me, whip me!” said the masochist to the sadist. “No, no!” said the sadist to the masochist. That’s one of my favorite wordy jokes. Another is the unattributed one-liner, “The beatings will continue until morale improves.”
Both jokes speak to the self-destructive dynamic at play in today’s conversation about climate change. To a certain climate-alarmist set, what seems intuitively bad to an ordinary person seems intuitively good, like whippings to a masochist. And what is obviously counterproductive seems like the way forward, like the beatings to the speaker of the one-liner, who is probably not the most emotionally intelligent drill instructor. Deindustrializing the world economy, spending sums that could be put towards other generational challenges, ending animal agriculture, living without internal combustion: Sounds … good?
Let me stop here and state, since one must: The atmospheric parts per million count of earth’s atmosphere before the Industrial Revolution was about 280. It’s more than 400 now. This is because of human emissions, and the greenhouse effect is real. There’s a reason the average surface temperature of our neighbor, Venus, is 864 degrees Fahrenheit; Venus’s atmosphere traps more solar energy. Changing the composition of the atmosphere is changing the temperature of our planet.
But despite the wishes of climate cultists, understanding this science does not necessarily suggest any particular policy prescription is a good idea. And so, our conversation about climate change is beset with outright ridiculous parlance. Nothing sums this up so much as how “ambition” is used in press coverage about “plans” to tackle the problem. It’s a ploy to paper over the fact that the question does not have a good answer. Here’s MIT’s Yonah Freemark on a $16 trillion proposal that has exactly 0% chance of passing:
“Sanders’ Green New Deal platform is the most ambitious I’ve seen from Dem presidential candidates; includes mass electrification of transport, elimination of carbon emissions from the energy sector by 2030, encouragement of public energy producers, and more.”
A curious word choice, that. Would a $17 trillion plan be even more ambitious and therefore better? And you see this everywhere. Here’s Chatham House on the need to “Increase Climate Ambition by Making Policy More Inclusive”: “Working within this essentially constrained rules-based order in climate policy, and given countries’ reluctance to date to translate targets into structural reforms, what can be done to uphold [Nationally Determined Contributions] and raise future climate ambition?”
A scintillating question, I’m sure, for some masochist. For me, the percent chance of success, the cost, the economic impact, and other such numbers are as important to know as the atmospheric PPM of carbon dioxide. But the people who think “the science” “says” what we should do elide these issues. Their “activism” is all just a matter of raising consciousness about the issue.
The noun “ambition” is just another word denoting “goal,” but it carries a revealing connotation: It’s a goal that’s unlikely to be achieved. So when you see wonks and journalists covering Sanders call his plans “ambitious,” they’re really complimenting him for how unlikely to come to fruition it is. But with the slippery language in vogue now, concepts that are synonymous with “pie-in-the-sky” and “unlikely to pass” and “ill-advised” and so on can be cast as a good thing.
Keep a sharp look out for this language. The beatings will continue until morale improves.
