Like most guys, according to a recent survey, I think about the Roman Empire at least once a week. I don’t know why all the others do so, but my interest dates from taking Latin in high school. I was terrible at it, but once I no longer had to memorize declensions and conjugations I was nostalgic for the language and the civilization that created it, and have a shelf full of books on the subject. One of my favorites was Julian, a novel by Gore Vidal, about the Roman emperor who attempted unsuccessfully to reverse the adoption of Christianity as Rome’s exclusive state religion.
That led me to an earlier book by Vidal, Messiah, about the formation of a new religion in the US, started by an ex-undertaker who speaks of the peace of death and considers suicide a sacrament. The book’s narrator is an exec who got involved very early and, although not a true believer himself, enjoyed the marketing challenge of turning the founder’s ideas into a successful religion. As the religion becomes a lucrative business and spreads rapidly throughout the country, there is a palace coup, the narrator is on the losing end and is marked for execution.
It is an excellent story, still in print, and I recommend it. But one thing that always bothered me about the book was the religion itself.
It couldn’t have been easy for Vidal to think up a fictional religion that replaces every other established religion in the western world, but the idea that Americans or any other Westerners, who tend to be optimistic, would find any appeal to one that encouraged death and suicide, seemed farfetched to me. How could that be even remotely attractive to anyone who wasn’t already extremely depressed?
I may have been wrong. There seems to be developing what I would call a suicide cult, or at least philosophy, in relation to climate change, as revealed in the long article “The Green Man’s Burden” in The Economist’s 2023 Holiday Double Issue. Its subtitle is “The Moral Philosophy of Climate Change.”
Most people let their governments decide what laws and regulations to impose to reduce CO2 emissions. If the government gives out tax credits to get people to buy EVs instead of internal combustion engine (ICE) cars, and an EV makes sense for your car needs, then you would buy one, collect the tax break, pat yourself on the back for being socially conscious, and go on your merry way.
Philosophers are now saying that is not good enough. One of them calculates that the average American’s emissions over a lifetime cause between one or two deaths. Another philosopher calculates that “the typical Westerner shortens a human life by six months.” They argue that various philosophies that differ in other respects all entail a duty to not harm others, and even the smallest amount of CO2 you create, e.g., by exhaling, will cause harm.
According to The Economist, these philosophers are finding a growing audience. A retiree not only switched from two ICE cars to one EV, but had his two old cars crushed so nobody else could use them. Many climate activists now argue against having children since they too will kill people with their emissions. The article says that last year a Belgian man in his 30s with two children killed himself “after a long discussion with a chatbot about how best to curb global warming.” (Do chatbots ever get together and compare notes on humans they dealt with that day? I wonder…)
There is nothing wrong with making severe cuts in your own lifestyle, if that makes you feel better. But that isn’t good enough for the new breed of zealots who have been flocking to “Just Stop Oil” and “Extinction Rebellion,” two outfits who want to dictate your choices by damaging cars they don’t like, blocking people (including ambulances on the way to hospitals) from using certain roads, and otherwise abusing civilized life.
I get that every religion tries to inspire their adherents to comply with its goals as much as possible, while accepting that mortals are never pure enough to do so completely. But the implication of a viewpoint that merely being alive kills others, is a call for suicide.
Or murder. The NYT the other day had an extensive interview with Swedish climate activist Andreas Malm, who wrote a book How to Blow Up a Pipeline, and who advocates violence, ostensibly against property but with nonchalance if people get killed too. His justification is that you kill other people by being alive and breathing, so it isn’t being unfair if his followers do the same in a different way. He says:
“In Libya in September, in the city of Derna, you had thousands of people killed in floods in one night. Scientists could conclude that global warming made these floods 50 times as likely as if there hadn’t been such warming. We need to start seeing these people as victims of the violence of the climate crisis.”
The claim that this flood was caused by global warming, therefore justifying violence in response, was made by a computer simulation by climate activists, to which I give no credibility. You can reach any conclusion you want in a simulation with a component that says “Every X% change in Factor A will cause a Y% change in Factor B,” and produce your desired result whether any such relationship truly exists.
Even if it could be proven that the Libyan flood would not have happened had there been no global warming, the particular humans that Malm would cause to die from an attack on, say, a oil pipeline, e.g., random hikers passing by, clearly do not deserve the punishment. If those who were killed were not random, say oil company execs, then that would be intentional murder, not a property crime.
Malm is far from alone in his ignorance of economics and history. Had there never been any coal, oil, or natural gas on the planet, humans would never have gotten the boost to productivity that learning to harness them provided. All of us except a small elite would still be living short, brutal lives of bare subsistence as was mostly the case until after the Middle Ages. None of the things we take for granted today in terms of communication, transportation, healthcare, or comfort would exist.
In fact, it is only the wealth that the world has, partially due to the magnification of our efforts by fossil fuels, that gives us the ability to protect against climate change. It was barely more than 10,000 years ago that places where you may be right now would have been under 100 feet or more of ice. Back then, humans had no technology beyond their legs to get them out of the way.
Our wealth today can help protect us against climate change. An example I used in my book: The Netherlands and Bangladesh are similar in that they are largely at sea level or below, and next to oceans subject to severe storms. In the former, close to nobody ever dies from flooding, in the latter thousands are killed every year. That is the difference between affording to protect yourself or not.
What killed those people in that flood in Libya was not climate change, but their inability or disinclination to do what could have been done to make sure any floods were not fatal. Libya should be a wealthy country, but decades of rule by warlords and other kleptocrats has kept most of the country poor. It was bad government, not the climate, that killed them.
Moreover, if in fact climate change could have devastating consequences decades from now and is indeed caused by excessive CO2, as the current scientific consensus asserts, the best antidote would be technological advances that allow us to generate energy without CO2 emissions and find ways to remove CO2 efficiently from the air.
Enormous amounts will need to be invested in R&D to achieve these things, and we can’t do that by making fossil fuels expensive. People save only what is left of their income after they have taken care of their needs and wants. If the cost of living rises, that will drastically reduce the already small amount of savings available for investing.
Want to lead a moral life in the face of climate change? Support whatever will keep fossil fuel prices reasonable and fight against the bad government policies that favor current consumption and waste over savings and investment.
The religious aspects of climate narratives seem to stand in the way of innovation. After almost half a century, we have seen almost no new ways to harness energy, and only recently are we taking nuclear, itself including hundreds of potential ways, more seriously.
Compare that to a world where, as we feared, we faced depletion of fossil fuels. Millions of our best brains would be put to work, with little time to waste on pet renewables or micromanagement or expecting people to monitor their footprints individually. We would have been there by now, and probably had something much better.
Carbon taxes will not work on their own on the supply side, only to incentivize energy efficiency. Europe has had gas prices three times those of the US for seven decades (more as percentage of income), with no alternative seeming to replace it.
What we need is basic public research into hundreds of options to find out what works. Globally coordinated, the cost would be a fraction of what consumers and tax payers already spend (add opportunity costs to that). But with predictions of imminent doom all over, which politician would say we have no idea but lets try and in a few decades, we will have something better that will make fossil fuels obsolete?
So for some reason, fearing climate collapse does not work as an incentive. The comparatively milder problem of losing most of our energy would work wonders. Yet the cult seems to think that the solution lies in scaring more people shitless and dismissing even reasonable voices as climate denying shills of the greedy oil industry (who will make huge windfall profits for any discounting horizon, so if anything their incentive is to support a dynamic that constrains supply and competition without near term replacement and at most stagnating demand).