The term ‘Climate crisis’ is uttered at will these
days, and the danger is that young people brought up in this normalised Overton
Window period won’t even question it. Let’s try to explore what we are dealing
with here. The concept of a "crisis" is not straightforward, and
different people interpret it in different ways depending on their perspective,
values, and epistemic standards. Some friends of mine think there is a climate
crisis, and they would take it to mean that we are reaching a catastrophic
threshold; a tipping point where irreversible and extreme damage is inevitable,
such as runaway global warming, mass species extinction, or the collapse of
major ecosystems. Some other friends of mine think climate change is already
causing widespread harm and demand immediate large-scale action to prevent
worsening consequences. Others I know concede that there are urgent climate
problems that need solving, but would only call it a moderate crisis. Perhaps
you could call these interpretations of a crisis red hot, hot and warm (pun
intended).
Knowing the nature of the British public, I might even go so far as to say that the majority of people in the UK think there is a climate crisis. But for a nation, this is problematic politically and economically because these conditions are complex, multi-faceted, and difficult to conceptualise in a single framework like ‘crisis’. Most of the population as individuals do not fully understand all the interconnected elements of climate science, economics, and geopolitics that would justifiably define what a crisis is, yet there is widespread consensus that there is a crisis.
The trouble is, when you look at the majority of reported crises in socio-political history, we tend to only be able to recognise them as crises retrospectively, once their consequences became clear. As Hegel famously said, “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk”. The difficulty, then, of claiming we are in a climate crisis before it has happened, where our margin of error increases with every year of future projection, means that if the conditions for a crisis can be claimed to be consensual but not individually understood, it’s harder to epistemologically justify the claim that the crisis is real, especially if you understand that there are a lot of bad and corrupt agents in society in whose interests it is to peddle the narrative that there is a climate crisis. It is highly likely that almost all the individual agents pushing the climate crisis agenda hardest could not explain to you with reason, evidence and logic why there is a crisis. And yet they exist in society as influencers who can push it to the point where most people will believe there is one.
What would ordinarily be matters of empirical fact, economic reasoning, scientific evaluation, and right and wrong are now so routinely politicised and monetised - where most have a tribal stance to defend, or a political or financial incentive - that it’s now prohibitively difficult to track reliable appropriate expertise and rigid interpretive frameworks for large and complex matters like this.
If we think of the value of knowledge as the total benefit it provides to human understanding and decision-making, then wrongly declaring a crisis of this magnitude is one of the costliest errors that can be wrought on society – and is already proving to be one of the most financially costly errors we’ve ever made as a species.
In terms of wholesale epistemic prudence and utility – that is, what we know, and what we know we know - the only responsible conclusion to reach at this point is, in my estimation, roughly as follows. Fossil fuels have been the principal driver of our climb out of poverty, into a decent standard of living in the past 150 years. We are undergoing more technological advances than any individual can keep up with, and solving problems at a rate that far exceeds the climate issues about which the fundies are hysterical. The ideological error the eco-hysterics make is similar to the Malthusian one - it is stuck in arithmetical ratios and not geometrical ratios. Energy is not a zero-sum game. Prematurely limiting the use of fossil fuels while demonising the very energy sources that have transformed the human population is not only short-sighted and ungrateful, it's a toxic message to send to our young.
The eco-vandals are not 'prophets'; they are the entitled, uninformed narcissists of society who have no sense of perspective, very little gratitude for humanity's past struggles and current achievements – and they are too uninformed to understand that progression is mostly combinatorial, as various technologies and ideas build on one another to create exponential benefits.
I have written a book on this subject, where I have spent a long time carefully researching everything from both sides - whereupon I concluded that there is not a climate crisis, and there is every reason to believe that collective human ingenuity and increased personal responsibility are tools that make solving climate problems well within our grasp. If only more people had reached more carefully thought out conclusions, and been much more circumspect in their reactionary decision-making and short-sighted profligate spending, the current climate debacle wouldn’t look quite so grim, and be quite so costly to members of the public.
1) People are very gullible
2) There are a lot of bad agents
in society willing to exploit widespread gullibility
