…“Donald Trump has been to climate regulation as General Sherman was to Atlanta,” said Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at the Columbia Law School, referring to the Union general who razed the city during the Civil War. “Hopefully it won’t take as long to rebuild.”
“We’ve lost very important time on climate change, which we can ill afford,” said Richard Newell, president of Resources for the Future, a nonpartisan energy and environment-focused research organization in Washington. “There is severe damage. To ignore climate for four years, you can’t put a price on that. It’s a huge issue that needs to be confronted with long-term momentum and extreme dedication, and we have lost that.”
Quoted in Coral Davenport, “What Will Trump’s Most Profound Legacy Be?
“And, frankly, libertarians like you who have supported Trump bear blame for this crap too. You have NO ground to stand on today having enabled this seditious shitty excuse for a human being….” (Steve Horwitz to Rob Bradley, Facebook, January 6, 2021)
“For me, one of the most tragic results of the Trump phenomenon has been to cause good, decent, reasonable classical liberals (libertarians, the good ones, not the zealots, you know what I mean) to yell at each other in anger and frustration.” (Peter Lewin, Facebook, January 8, 2021)
Amid the Capitol violence of Wednesday January 6, Peter Lewin, a notable Austrian-school economist and respected classical liberal, posted on Facebook about the “out of control zealots…. Mob Hysteria ready to explode….” Exchanges followed. I asked some rather civil questions including this one:
…I’m not condoning the violence, just trying to put it in perspective…..
“Is the human environment better because of increasing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the usage of carbon-based energies? The answer is a resounding yes. That is triumphant news, whether the human influence on climate is net ‘bad’ or net ‘good’ by a physical, stasis metric.”
Statistics and history matter. Particularly when a shared narrative is contradicted by the interaction of man and nature.
A recent Facebook post by Bjørn Lomborg cannot be emphasized enough in this regard. Over the last century, climate-related deaths have plummeted as societal wealth has overcome the limits to nature. I am reminded of an Alex Epstein quotation, mirroring a major theme of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels:
…Nature doesn’t give us a stable, safe climate that we make dangerous. It gives us an ever-changing, dangerous climate that we need to make safe.