Defining climate as a political cause, a planet-scale problem that could only be solved by an international regulatory scheme, assured its demise. Divinity school dropouts Al Gore and Jerry Brown weren't the answer either-Steven F. Hayward, Wall St. Journal opinion, 'Climate change has run its course'

1988-2018: 

June 4, 2018, "Climate Change Has Run Its Course," Wall St. Journal, Steven F. Hayward, opinion (Mr. Hayward is a senior resident scholar at the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley)

"Its descent into social-justice identity politics is the last gasp of a cause that has lost its vitality."...

A good indicator of why climate change as an issue is over can be found early in the text of the Paris Agreement. The “nonbinding” pact declares that climate action must include concern for “gender equality, empowerment of women, and intergenerational equity” as well as “the importance for some of the concept of ‘climate justice.’”

Another is Sarah Myhre’s address at the most recent meeting of the American Geophysical Union, in which she proclaimed that climate change cannot fully be addressed without also grappling with the misogyny and social injustice that have perpetuated the problem for decades....

This outcome was predictable. Political scientist Anthony Downs described the downward trajectory of many political movements in an article for the Public Interest, “Up and Down With Ecology: The ‘Issue-Attention Cycle,’” published in 1972, long before the climate-change campaign began....Mr. Downs discerned a five-stage cycle through which political issues pass regularly.... 

The second stage typically includes a large amount of euphoric enthusiasm—you might call it the “dopamine” stage—as activists conceive the issue in terms of global peril and salvation. This tendency explains the fanaticism  

 


have warned of climate change....

Scientists who are genuinely worried about the potential for catastrophic climate change ought to be the most outraged at how the left politicized the issue and how the international policy community narrowed the range of acceptable responses.

Treating climate change as a planet-scale problem that could be solved only by an international regulatory scheme transformed the issue into a political creed for committed believers. Causes that live by politics, die by politics."
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Among comments
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If you keep moving the goal posts your cause is dead:
 

 


"David Kreda 

When the first whacked-out heat storms +/- chronic flooding of presently high-value low-lands, etc., wipes out insurance of all sorts, that experience will  obliterate the current intellectual hangover of this generation's incarnation of "flat earth" types who feast on the Koch's fossil fuel largesse. By then, perhaps today's earnest, non-denialist technologists will have something to replace them."

"Slav Rohlev

"This tendency explains the fanaticism with which divinity-school dropouts Al Gore and Jerry Brown have warned of climate change."
 
Best line so far this week."




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