‘Net stupid zero’ vs economic madness: How the climate change debate is losing touch with reality
Right-wing and hard-left politicians offer little hope that humanity will emerge unscathed from its latest Fermi Paradox ‘great filter’
Flying saucers are usually the preserve of conspiracy theorists, flat-earthers and the like. However, on a summer’s day in 1950, that was the topic of conversation as four physicists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the US ate their lunch.
For a while they pondered whether it was possible to travel faster than the speed of light, but then moved on to talk about something else until one, the Nobel-prize winning physicist Enrico Fermi, unexpectedly returned to the subject by asking: “Where is everybody?”
By everybody, he meant intelligent life from other planets. Given the vastness of the universe and the billions of years since it began, surely there should be many civilisations more advanced than ours, yet there had not been a single sign that they existed. Seventy-five years later, if they are out there, they are still maintaining strict radio silence.
Smart enough to use tools
One of the many potential explanations of the now famous ‘Fermi paradox’ is a daunting one. In order for a lifeform to become advanced enough to develop interstellar travel, it must first pass through a series of ‘great filters’ and these have so far proved sufficiently difficult that, whatever advanced species exist in the universe, they have not yet been able to contact us.
Potential filters include difficulties that get in the way of the development of multi-cellular organisms; the emergence of sexual reproduction, which boosts genetic diversity; and the evolution of a species smart enough to use tools.
Pass through each of these and, like humans, a species might become intelligent enough to understand nuclear physics and build bombs capable of destroying their entire planet without having the sense to avoid doing so – a potential filter that we have not yet safely navigated.
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Climate change warning from 1896
Climate change may be another filter. If science had not developed fast enough, we may have not have discovered that we were dramatically changing the planet until it was far too late. So we can congratulate ourselves on being smart enough to realise there is a problem as long ago as 1896, when another Nobel prize-winning scientist, Svante Arrhenius, became the first person to predict that increasing the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would cause the temperature to rise.
This was all very theoretical and, therefore, largely unnoticed, until the 1980s when scientists detected a large enough temperature rise to sound a warning to the world. The response in the four decades since then has been lacklustre, at best.
Instead of reducing carbon emissions, the world has been increasing them, with a new record set virtually every year. This is despite the lack of any credible alternative theory that disputes the findings of the established science: that the Earth’s temperature is rising, carbon emissions produced by humans are the cause, and allowing this process to continue will result in increasingly extreme weather and, potentially, a catastrophic collapse of the stable climate that has allowed humans to flourish over the past 10,000 years.
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Not our problem?
The debate over whether climate change is actually real has, pretty much, ended. In 2016, even the late former Conservative Chancellor Nigel Lawson, who was then the UK’s leading climate sceptic, told a House of Lords committee: “I don’t question for a moment that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and that other things being equal this will lead to a warming of the atmosphere.”
However, he argued that it would be “crazy” for the UK to cut its emissions because they were only a small part of the global total and doing so would put the UK at an economic disadvantage to the rest of the world. In the decade since, this has become the most commonly deployed argument of those opposed to action on climate change around the world: it is real and it is happening, but we shouldn’t do anything about it, someone else should.
It is a pitifully weak and falls apart completely with the addition of a simple fact: while the UK produces just under one per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, its population is also just under one per cent of the world’s, so we are about average emitters and exactly the sort of people who do need to take action.
High price for climate scepticism
Yet one slogan of the coming force in politics, Reform UK, is ‘net stupid zero’, a message the Conservatives appear to be embracing. There is no argument, it’s basically just teenage bluster – ‘climate change is so stupid’.
Given extreme weather is becoming increasingly hard to ignore and China and other countries are stealing a march on the technologies of the future, it seems obvious that the politicians selling this ideological moonshine will pay a high political price for it themselves at some point.
However, if the beneficiaries turn out to be hard-left Greens who believe capitalism is part of the problem and that, in order to fight climate change, the economy must be rebuilt from the ground up, the resulting chaos could destroy any chance of an orderly transition from fossil fuels to renewables, let alone a just one.
The current model of capitalism may not be the pinnacle of human achievement in economics, there may be better ways of doing things. But it’s the only system that has resulted in sustained prosperity, the only one that has been shown to work.
It would be utter madness to eschew the power of the free market and plunge ourselves into a vast economic experiment. Despite its flaws, capitalism offers the only realistic way out of our predicament.
Perhaps, a long time ago on a faraway planet, this has essentially all happened before but the advanced species involved could not find its way through their latest Fermi Paradox ‘great filter’. Humans are definitely smart enough to go at least one better, but whether we are wise enough is a very different matter.
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