Stop the hand-wringing, humankind will adapt and prosper

But articles, tweets and interviews that deliberately lob personal tears into the public domain sound the alarm bells of sanctimony. Telling the world about your saltwater reaction to this or that is perhaps the epitome of virtue-signalling.

“I cried two times when my daughter was born,” was the opening line in a New York Times piece this week. Those sanctimony warning bells rang loud. It was by Iraq veteran, English professor and climate alarmist Roy Scranton, promoting a new book of essays on war and climate change titled We’re Doomed. Now What? And yes, he claims to have shed tears for the planet.

“First for joy, when after 27 hours of labour the little feral being we’d made came yowling into the world, and the second for sorrow, holding the earth’s newest human and looking out the window with her at the rows of cars in the hospital parking lot, the strip mall across the street, the box stores and drive-throughs and drainage ditches and asphalt and waste fields that had once been oak groves. A world of extinction and catastrophe, a world in which harmony with nature had long been foreclosed. My partner and I had, in our selfishness, doomed our daughter to life on a dystopian planet, and I could see no way to shield her from the future.”

Where to start with such inanity? Perhaps with the good news. Max Roser’s work for Oxford University’s Our World in Data project shows that two centuries ago, 90 per cent of the global population lived in extreme poverty and now, even though the population has grown from less than one billion people to about 7.5 billion, those proportions have completely reversed so that only 10 per cent of the world’s population lives in extreme poverty.

Similarly, despite the explosion in global population, literacy has flourished. In 1800 more than 80 per cent of people were illiterate, now more than 80 per cent can read and write.

On both these indicators it is extraordinary to consider how much of the progress has happened in recent times. As recently as 1950, 72 per cent of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty and 64 per cent of us were illiterate. Postwar industrialisation, development, trade and globalisation have improved living standards dramatically for the overwhelming majority of people.

Two centuries ago, 43 per cent of all babies died before reaching the age of five. This mortality was spread widely — more than one in every three babies did not make it through the first five years in any country. Now, worldwide, more than 95 per cent of children survive their first five years.

Perhaps when Scranton considered his baby’s future on the planet, he should have limited himself to tears of joy.

But his schtick is pessimism: “Barring a miracle, the next 20 years are going to see increasingly chaotic systemic transformation in global climate patterns, unpredictable biological adaptation and a wild spectrum of human political and economic responses, including scapegoating and war. After that, things will get worse.”

Goodness me, I hope someone stops him reading to his daughter. She needs to hear less of this and more of Possum Magic.

Doomsday scenarios are hardly new. They are as old as human communities. In recent decades we’ve had the Club of Rome warning in the 1970s about how we would run out of food, resources and energy as we overpopulated and polluted the planet. We have seen rampant fears of nuclear Armageddon at the height of the Cold War and millennial doom and gloom in the 90s. But, increasingly, cataclysmic climate alarmism has taken hold and it is deeply rooted, with teachers and activists striking fear into the hearts even of our children.

Never mind that the climate has stubbornly refused to warm in line with any of the modelling published during the past three decades. Indeed, compared with the models, the global climate has been stable.

Never mind that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has gradually revised downwards many of its predictions. Never mind that its early iterations talked about human factors accounting for about half of any climate change and even now it characterises anthropogenic factors only as “extremely likely to have been the dominant cause” of detected warming — that is, to an unknown extent, the climate is changing anyway. Never mind that climate change will boost living conditions and agricultural productivity in many parts of the world.

And never mind that if the world ever decided it had to switch to emissions-free energy in just a few decades, it could do so with existing nuclear technology. No, never mind any of this, just throw the switch to panic and pessimism.

Scranton even talks about suicide as the ultimate climate action. “Once you’re dead, you won’t use any more electricity, you won’t eat any more meat, you won’t burn any more gasoline, and you certainly won’t have any more children. If you really want to save the planet, you should die.” Cheery.

With this sort of madness infiltrating apparently intelligent communities around the world, it helps to explain how this country can be inflicting such harm on itself over energy policy. To placate these types of sentiments, unchallenged in the polite circles of the political/media class, we have adopted radical interventions designed not to supply energy efficiently and reliably but to appease the gods of Kyoto and Paris.

So after spending billions of dollars over a decade imposing policies specifically designed to undermine the viability of fossil-fuel generation and force it out of the market, we now have the government’s national energy guarantee proposal, an Australian Competition & Consumer Commission report, an Australian Energy Market Operator report and conservative political pressure all pushing, in different ways, for more expenditure and action to support, extend and encourage fossil-fuel generation so we can get back to reliable and sufficient energy supplies. It is the very definition of a shambles.

When the political class behaves so irrationally in the management of something as fundamental as energy, it is little wonder that voters will turn to a disrupter such as Donald Trump who was prepared to abandon Paris.

At the same time, by the way, technological progress on shale gas exploitation has made the US more energy-independent and reduced its emissions.

Ingenuity will beat ideology any old day.

The population explosion and industrialisation of the planet, of course, creates pressures we must deal with. But the story so far is one of triumph, not doom. We have found new ways to produce more food, exploit resources, reduce pollution, fight diseases, preserve wildlife, conserve water and protect lives. The population continues to climb and, as wealth and education rise with it, population growth slows. That will bring its own demographic challenges. Eventually world population may stabilise and shrink, as it has done in some countries.

If we keep our heads we are likely to deal with these challenges the same way we got to where we are; primarily through innovation, markets, democracy and optimism.

And we will do it, as ever, to make good on the tears of joy we shed for our children.