AANZOEK

De Australische presentator en oud-politicus John Anderson had onlangs een tweetal lange en interessante gesprekken met historicus Niall Ferguson, die beide op YouTube te bekijken zijn. Dit is wat Ferguson te zeggen had over klimaatverandering:

I live in Northern California. As we speak, there is a massive wildfire raging in Sanoma County, that will soon send – if it hasn’t already – smoke through the air to where I live with our two small boys. If climate change isn’t affecting you yet, the way it’s affecting us (…), it is going to. So let’s not pretend there isn’t an issue here! (…)  There is a science of climate change which is extremely difficult to do; and there is an economics of climate change which involves estimating probabilities and trying to attach appropriate insurance premia. I’m a believer in insurance; that’s why I have fire insurance. And in the end climate change implies insurance. We have got to assume that something bad could happen – we don’t know quite how bad, because we can really not be sure about something as complex as the Earth’s climate – but we need to have some kind of credible insurance policy against that disaster for the sake of people living in low-lying cities close to the sea (…)

Okay, that’s the problem. Now let’s have a reasoned debate about what that insurance premium should be, what  steps we should take to mitigate these risks. You go first, Greta Thunberg! And Greta Thunberg, who now leads a kind of youthful rebellion, says: ‘you politicians are destroying our future; the world is about to end; this is not just a disaster, it’s a crime!!’ The accusatory finger is pointed and the world’s media, by and large, echoes that message uncritically. Bjørn Lomborg, another Scandinavian, comes along and says: ‘You know what? Speaking as an economist, I can see ways that we can do this well, and I can see ways that we can do this badly. If we do it badly and we actually cause economic growth to stop, or even go negative, we’re not going to have the resources available for effective mitigation. There is a way in which you could actually get this wrong.’ Now, what do the other side say then? Do they say: ‘That’s interesting, can we look at your numbers’? No, no, no, that’s not what they say! They say: ‘You are a denier and you are an evil person and you should be boycotted, ostracized and shamed!’ (…)

So we have a problem here, which is that there isn’t a real debate going on; there is virtue signalling and reputation destruction and a great deal of heat and very little light. I am weary of hearing sermons about this problem. I am weary of people saying: ‘It is a terrible thing that we are not going to meet our targets; it is a terrible, terrible crime – and here are the guilty people!’  What we need to discuss – and here I think Bjørn Lomborg is absolutely right – is what the optimal combination of mitigation steps, what the right insurance premium is. (…) If Europe adopts a policy to reduce CO2 emissions by essentially taking economic growth to zero (….), if you impose such burdens on manufacturing as are being imposed on German manufacturing right now, because you got rid of nuclear (…) and you are getting rid of coal and you’re committing to an all renewable program and the result, at least in the short term, is higher costs … well, who really benefits from that? It’s not really clear to me that we significantly alter the trajectory of average global temperatures, because meanwhile in China the emissions continue! If all we do in the West is to cause our own economies to flat-line, because we’re so determined to be virtuous and nothing happens to change the trajectory in Asia, then we have achieved nothing. Maybe some people will feel morally better, maybe they’ll feel that they have done a saintly thing, but the planet is still going to burn and Northern California is not going to get any less arid and flammable. So where I get depressed is when I have to listen to speeches, whether it’s Greta Thunberg or Al Gore frankly, that are highly moralistic in nature but don’t address the question ‘what do we do about China, what do we do about India, how do we actually get CO2 emissions  worldwide to be reduced?’ It is not going to be the Paris Accord that achieves that! I wonder: how can we get back to a rational discussion of this problem? Because if we don’t, we’re not going to solve the problem of climate change; all we’re going to do is self-harm, all we’re going to do is cause the West to fall faster behind China than it is already falling … Our inability to have a rational debate about this problem, the utter refusal of one side to listen to the arguments of the other, is itself a fatal flaw in the way that Western civilization now functions. And it may be that we can’t fix this; maybe we’ve just lost the basis for reasoned debate and we’re reverting to where we were back in the 16^th and 17^th centuries, where instead of reasoned debate you just accused one another of heresy. I think we’ve kind of got to that point again. (…) In the period after the (invention of the) printing press, Europeans in particular spent 130 years fighting one another, burning one another over religious questions that couldn’t in fact be resolved. I feel as if that’s happening in the realm of Western politics today and it’s a deeply depressing prospect …

Als ik niet al bijna dertig jaar getrouwd was, en als Niall ook vrijgezel was, zou ik hem zeker een aanzoek doen! (Zie mijn eerdere blogs ‘Ontkenner’, ‘Braaf’ en ‘Angst’.) Maar wát een pech: sinds 2011 is hij ‘meneer Hirsi Ali’; het echtpaar woont en werkt in de VS, heeft dus twee zoontjes en wordt nog altijd professioneel bewaakt, wat onze ex-parlementariër en (ex?-)landgenote te danken heeft aan haar rol in de totstandkoming van Theo van Gogh’s film Submission. Maar ‘onderwerping’ is bepaald niet het eerste woord dat in mij opkomt wanneer ik de namen van dit dappere denkduo hoor!

H.A., 17/11/2019