Most benefits accrued in the future begin with an immediate short-term cost. To have a successful business, you have to take a risk and invest capital; to have a pretty garden, you have to cultivate it or pay someone else to do it; to get fit, you have to exercise, and so on. Even when you learn something, you have to pass through a period of ignorance or error in order to gain knowledge. Great progress usually begins with birthing pains.
The same can be said of our industrial period, from about 1850 to the present day, and a few decades henceforward – we’ve done a remarkable job increasing the living standards and material prosperity of humanity, and the effects on the climate have been one of the inevitable costs of that. We could have done better, of course, but on balance, we’ve done amazingly well to engender this great enrichment, and we’ll continue to do even better. Throughout this journey, we’ve made the transitions in terms of energy consumption, as we’ve learned how to be even more efficient, and we’ll keep learning, and keep getting more efficient still. We have technological prowess that our great-grandparents wouldn’t have thought possible – and our own grandchildren will make even greater advances than we can possibly imagine today.
When future humans look back in history on our society, I’m fairly certain they will view this generation’s preoccupation with climate change for what it really is (was). They will be incredulous about our worry; they will be shocked by the short-sightedness and lack of perspective; they will be horrified at how much money we spent on it, when it could have been so much more wisely spent; they will see it for what it was – a temporary, monomaniacal, mass-propaganda, peddled by self-interest groups who could gain billions from the indoctrination, and swallowed hook, line and sinker by the public (and, as a consequence, politicians and the media alike). They will be mortified that so many people got so easily sucked in, and that they couldn’t subject climate change to the proper cost-benefit analysis it required, in order to see it with a more appropriate sense of perspective.
But, more so, they will look back with pride and a sense of accomplishment at how adroit we were at passing through the cult of Gaia, and how scientifically and technologically astute we were at giving the religion of climate alarmism its redundancy notice, as we advanced ever further into the next phase of our progression-explosion, at an even greater rate than any of the previous advancements. Future humans will look back at our climate problems with a far more enlightened evaluation, just as we look back at problems our ancestors faced, and pay regard to the fact that they are problems we have left in the past and have learned how to overcome.
Despite the mass-hysteria, many of us today are appalled at the damage done by climate alarmism. In the future, we’ll reach a point where almost everybody is.
