How to Spot Tabloid Climate Science
H. Sterling Burnett of the Heartland Institute on the Corruption of Science and the Changing Tide in Environmental Policy
Northern California is burning, and climate alarmists — including California Governor Jerry Brown — are blaming carbons emissions. It’s unclear when or how Governor Brown became a climate expert, but he claims the Carr fire is evidence of the climate changing in real time.
The Independent, a British tabloid, also cites generic experts who say the fires will only get worse over time because of climate change:
Never mind that most forest fires are started on poorly managed land owned by the federal government, or that science has not established a cause-and-effect relationship between fires and carbon dioxide emissions, these experts will tell you with certainty that man-made global warming is the problem. For years, the U.S. Forest Service has wanted to increase logging to reduce fuel loads of overgrown forests — filled with dead and diseased trees — but they have been blocked by environmentalists. The Endangered Species Act has often been the reason for allowing forests to turn into tinderboxes. However, endangered species are less compelling villains than big oil companies, so don’t expect Governor Brown to blame the spotted owl anytime soon.
Just who are these climate experts the media is always citing, and should we trust them? Some may recall Dwight D. Eisenhower’s prophetic outgoing address to Congress in which he warned of a coming military-industrial complex, but few realize that modern climate science is driven by the same revolving door Eisenhower feared. As government monopolizes science, it gets to call the shots. Today, the environmental movement has co-opted and corrupted science in an unholy alliance with the regulatory state. Only a handful of nonprofits and scientists have had the courage to stand against it.
The Heartland Institute, based in Illinois, is one such group. They have been educating the public and producing freely available literature that shows how “the climate consensus” can be debunked using mainstream data and studies. H. Sterling Burnett, a Heartland senior fellow on environmental policy and the managing editor of Environment & Climate News, gives a lesson on spotting environmental fake news on the show of ideas, not attitude.
That increase in extreme weather events you’re always hearing about? It’s mostly fabricated for attention-grabbing headlines. As the Heartland Institute notes:
“[A]ccording to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s U.S. state-wide extreme weather records database, probably the best of its kind in the world, there has been no increase in extreme weather.
What’s more, climate models over-estimated the warming trend in 97.4% of their predictions between 1998 and 2014. Rest assured, their models must be getting better — it’s hard to imagine them getting much worse.
Follow the Money
For all of their efforts to clear the air and promote rational environmental science and energy regulations, the Heartland Institute has been subject to false accusation and smear tactics from left-leaning and environmental blogs. The common complaints that they are in the pockets of big oil, however, don’t stand up to scrutiny. Exxon’s short-lived donations to the Institute never exceeded 5% of the budget. Rather, Exxon has been much more active in its giving to environmental causes that are trying to stamp out its competitors in the coal industry, which is often the cheapest and most efficient form of energy available to the developing world.
The real bias in climate science is spurred by government funding of alarmist research . It’s gone unnoticed because we’ve grown accustomed to cronyism as the status quo. Carl Jung wrote, “It’s hard to see the lion that has eaten you.” Yet the tendency of government to fund studies confirming the looming ecological apocalypse is well-established, and is summed up eloquently by MIT Professor Emeritus of Meteorology, Richard Lindzen:
This corruption of environmental science has many beneficiaries — from the bureaucracies that boost their budget when a frightened public votes for increased taxes and regulations, to renewable energy insiders that only find a viable market for their products in a subsidized environment. The end result is a bootleggers-and-baptist coalition between sincere-but-misinformed activists, corporate interests in the monopolistic energy industry, and the politicians that make the great theft possible.
The Latest Hoax: “Public Nuisance” Lawsuits Against Oil Companies
Professor Richard Epstein, a Hoover Institution scholar and frequent guest on the show, did a podcast in January on a series of lawsuits in New York City, San Francisco and Oakland, trying to extract damages from five major oil companies.
As usual, the Professor dispelled the faulty legal arguments behind the plaintiffs in both written and oral form:
He concludes that private lawsuits cannot deliver remedies for ill-defined damages, especially when only a fraction of those hypothetical damages could be said to be caused by the named defendants (in this case, Exxon, Chevron, etc.). Putting aside the fact that these oil companies are only responsible for a small percentage of total energy production, and that the oil companies themselves are not emitting (this responsibility falls on us — the consumers), Epstein notes that fossil fuels are the only option for keeping transportation, manufacturing, and commerce alive. As Milton Friedman once said, “Energy is the life blood of a market economy.”
Fortunately, a federal court recently dismissed New York City’s climate lawsuit.
Other Green Shoots
Elsewhere, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit unanimously upheld the government’s current policy of leasing land to coal companies without having to a review of the impact of coal on climate. While the Obama administration put a moratorium on coal extraction, the Trump administration has been pushing an agenda of “energy dominance.” The EPA already applies an environmental impact analysis — the ruling simply prevented a new layer of red tape. Taking away coal forces power companies to switch to less reliable, more expensive alternatives, including wind and solar configurations that are often built at great expense to the environment — destroying habitats and requiring ample energy to build and maintain.
You won’t read about any of this in the papers. Mainstream media bias positions government and environmentalists as the saviors from evil corporations and energy companies. It’s a simple story that sells magazines and keeps people on the edge of their seats. There’s just one problem. It’s not true.
While the Trump administration has rolled back a number of the worst regulations, the corruption of science persists. For every Richard Epstein, Richard Lindzen, H. Sterling Burnett, and Matt Ridley, there are scores of scientists on university payrolls that remain locked into the group-think that reinforces the problem.
In 2015, The Heartland Institute began distributing 300,000 free copies of a booklet titled, “Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming.” As expected, it evoked much ire, but the message is getting out there. The majority of the public doesn’t blame capitalism for climate change, nor do they rank it as a major concern compared to other problems.
Once one steps outside of the government–media–academic echo chamber, the talk of international accords and the need for global governance start to sound ridiculous. Don’t get fooled — listen now:
Read the Transcript
Climate Change: An Indisputable Truism?
Bob Zadek: Today, we ordinary Americans are going to try to decide a hyper-technical, terribly complex scientific issue. We are going to learn the pros and cons of pure science and decide who is right. Doesn’t that seem impossible? Of course it is, and yet the subject of climate change — formerly known as global warming — is disputed. Yet, who can dispute that climate changes? It changes from one day to another, from one month to another, and from one decade to another. So what is all this debate about? We don’t debate geometry, we don’t debate trigonometry, we don’t debate the laws of physics yet, here we are, stuck in a bitter public political debate.
What could be more absurd than debating science, and yet how the vote comes out will profoundly economic life in America and indeed, economic life on earth. To help us sort out this insanely complex issue I am happy to welcome Sterling Burnett. Sterling will help us understand the complex issues so that when we vote or read articles or watch the media on this subject, we can at least make a more informed observation about what is going on. Sterling is with the Heartland Institute and he has studied environmentalism and climate change for a long time. Sterling, welcome to the show this morning.
Sterling Burnett: Thanks for having me on, Bob.
Bob Zadek: I just presented an issue that is so hard for me to get my arms around because I am not a trained scientist. I practice law and I read whenever I can, but I bring no environmental credentials to the table. I just read and struggle to understand.
In my brief research, I find that this is maybe the first and most intense time that much of society, indeed the entire planet, is conflating a political, economic, and scientific issue — all three of which are complex. And yet we are making voting decisions based upon what we ordinary citizens believe to be the case. How did we get here so that we are required through the exercise of our voting privileges to decide which scientist is right? How did we get to this important debate in the public sphere instead of having it reside where it belongs, namely, in the world of science?
Sterling Burnett: You packed a lot in there. I would disagree that this is the first time we have had these kinds of debates over scientific issues. We’ve had debates about sociobiology and evolution over the past 100 years. In the sixties we had public debates about the use of pesticides, in particular DDT. Rachel Carson came out with a book called Silent Spring about the production and use of DDT which was effective at wiping it out. Malaria used to be endemic to the United States. We got around 50,000 cases a year in the fifties and we don’t anymore, because we wiped it out with DDT. But after we solved our malaria problem here, we told people in developing countries that they couldn’t have our cure because we thought that DDT was ending up in the eggs of some birds and killing them.
So, we have had scientific debates in public policy for a long time. In the late sixties and early seventies environment became a very large public policy issue for the first time. The leadership of environmental groups started taking issues as the most important value people could have. Environment and resource issues trumped every other value. They started admiring and talking about China’s population policies regarding population control. They said that we need population control because because our resources are thinning out. We need to change the way we do all sorts of things dealing with the economy. And once you start talking about changing the economy and changing the way people live, you have left the realm of science and you are in the realm of politics.
When they were unsuccessful in certain respects in changing the economy, they are always looking for the next issue to change the way people live. And what could be bigger, and more comprehensive than climate change. Climate is constantly changing. It is everywhere. As you say, at one time they were talking about global warming. Warming is what supposedly drives the climate change.
They would have to cancel conferences because there was too much snow. The temperature stopped rising for 18 consecutive years despite the fact that carbon dioxide emissions, were going up. and how could you call it global warming when the globe wasn’t warming anymore? So they shifted gears like they did from pesticides in the late sixties to endocrine disruptors and and some other things in the early eighties. It shifted gears from global warming to climate change.
They tried to put us into a corner because you can’t dispute that climate changes. And that’s true. You can’t. The question is whether humans are causing the present climate change. And we can have a debate about that. More importantly, can we say with any kind of certainty that we are doing it. This is the most important question. If we are, does it mean catastrophe is in the offing and that we need to do something dramatic to prevent future climate changes? Can we control the weather? And that’s where we are.
Bad Science: Twisting the Data to Fit the Theory
Bob Zadek: Now Sterling, it is assumed that there are a lot of humans on earth. We behave in a certain way and there are many of us. So, the assumption is that we affect the climate. If there never was a human on earth, the climate would be different. There are a bunch of questions wrapped up in that. Assuming. as I think we must, that humans affect climate change — note that I didn’t say negatively affect climate change — the discussion seems to stop at that. There will be a change and very little economic and geophysical analysis on whether that change is for the better or for the worse because it stops at change.
The calculation on whether it will be for the better or for the worst is staggeringly complex, almost impossible. Therefore, if you are opting to change the economic life on the planet, it is easier to stop and say there will be a change and end the conversation there without discussing whether the change is positive or negative. That part of the conversation gets lost.
If the discussion among scientists is whether the planet is one degree warmer in a thousand years or two degrees warmer, that is too abstract and does not capture the attention of people living on earth. However, if you interject the word “catastrophe,” or other words like it, that gets people attention. They imagine that the next day life will be horrible and therefore we should do something about it.
Once we concede, at least for the purpose of this show, that there will be a change that humans affect the climate, is there any agreement whatever amongst scientists on the issue of whether the impact is positive or negative?
Sterling Burnett: I think you’re trying to make me a seer and I am not. I’m going to agree with you that we have an impact, but I’m not sure how much of a climate change we actually cause. Remember, climate is different from weather. Weather is a day to day phenomenon, but climate is a region’s weather averaged over time, over large periods of time. And so climate doesn’t change day to day. Weather does. The climate does change over decades, and certainly over centuries and over the millennia.
The important question is not whether climate changes. The question is whether we are driving the present change in the climate and whether that is dangerous. The question is whether we can and should do something do something about it. Those are two separate questions.
So before you get to the second question, we should address the first question, and that is whether humans are driving climate change. That is where the scientific debate is. Once people get to the subject of climate change, they assume that just because humans are causing it they believe it is bad. They believe that nature knows best. Once you start from the premise that humans changing nature is bad, and you make the assertion that humans are changing nature, you get your answer. If the answer is obvious, then we have to do something about it because humans are changing it and that is bad in their mind. That’s their assumption. I always come back to this question when I debate climate scientists or when I discuss this with people. Ask yourself how the scientific method is supposed to work.
You propose a hypothesis to explain certain phenomena you want to understand. You go out and grab your data and then you test your data against your hypothesis, and the more likely your data conforms to what your hypothesis is, the more likely your it is to be to be true. However, the more the data confounds what you predicted, the less likely it is to be true. Climate change doesn’t work that way. No matter what the data says, they assert it is more proof of climate change. It’s all based on these climate models and they’ve got 30 or more models, using the same physics, but they predict completely different phenomenon. That’s not how science is supposed to work.
If you have two climate models and one says the Great Lakes will be lower 100 years from now due to climate change, and the other climate model says the Great Lakes will be higher. Well, guess what? One of those is going to be right, but that is guesswork. That’s flipping a coin. If one says the desert southwest is supposed to be more arid a hundred years from now and the other says the desert southwest is going to have more rain, that is flipping a coin. That’s not science. Physics should point one way or the other, not both ways at the same time for the same time period. So if you get less rain, they say it is climate change. If you get more rain, they say it is climate change. That’s faith. That’s religion. It’s not testable hypothesis to the extent that they make predictions that can be tested. This is where the rubber hits the road.
Their predictions are routinely wrong even on the most basic predictions, such as temperature. According to climate models and the physics of how the climate should respond if carbon dioxide is added to the atmosphere, the temperature for the globe should be warmer than it is right now, and it should be warming faster than it is right now. That’s the most basic prediction. If they don’t get the most based prediction right, why should we trust their other predictions? They have these climate models but they don’t reflect the past accurately.
So, they have fiddled with them until they match what the past temperature record is. The climate now more closely coincide with the climate model, and they say that the model now reflects reality, so we should trust them for the future. But the problem is the climate models predicted more warming in the past. They predicted it should be more warm now than it is.
They are wrong about the present, but we are told we should trust them for the future. If they can’t get the temperature right, how can we trust them on anything else? For example, they predicted that Antarctica should be losing ice. It should be melting. It’s not. It gained tens of thousands of tons of ice per year. Records are being set with sea ice and ice on the seas. Climate models can’t explain that because none of them predict that. According to climate models — they were mixed as to whether we should be having more hurricanes — we should be having more powerful hurricanes. And yet before last year when we had a couple of powerful hurricanes, we had the longest sustained period in U.S. history of no class three or above hurricanes making landfall in the US. The models didn’t predict that, they predicted just the opposite.
So they’re wrong on hurricanes. They’re wrong on the speed with which sea levels should be rising. They are wrong on droughts and floods. Right now we are not experiencing anything near the historic droughts. For instance, in California we have histories of 50 year and 100 year droughts, not seven year droughts. We are not outside of the normal. Climate models do not predict that. So when time after time, prediction after prediction, their projections are wrong, you have to ask yourself, and if you’re a scientist you should start questioning the theory. Climate scientists don’t question the theory. They question the data. They try and make the data conform to the theory. That’s not how science is supposed to work.
The Importance of Questioning The Cult of Climate Change
Bob Zadek: As you were explaining this to me, something flashed in my brain that seems to be totally irrelevant, but let me make it relevant. Capital punishment. Now what am I talking about? For the state to execute somebody is profound. When we have criminal trials, we require the jury to universally agree on guilt because we the state don’t want to make a serious mistake because we got it wrong, so we require 12–0 to convict. Now we have the scientific debate over climate change, which as I said earlier, has a profound effect upon life on earth. It affects the whole development of the third world, from their health and longevity, and the health of their children, to their education, and in short, to their entire prosperity. It profoundly effects hundreds of millions of people in the Third World.
Therefore, following the guidance of the criminal justice systems, we had better have a serious debate before we make profound global decisions on the economy of cutting back this and doing that and spending money here. We darn sure better be right. When we have a serious debate where many people with the same credentials disagree on the topic, and we simply do not know for sure, how can we possibly gamble the well-being of hundreds of millions of people on the hubris or one side? Therefore even if — and I doubt it — man is affecting the climate in some way, we cannot make profound decisions upon the life of everybody on earth based upon a mere hope that they are right. That is where we are today.
Those people who opt for the profound economic changes that virtually undo and limit the free market and jeopardizes the wellbeing of hundreds of millions of people alive today and in the future — we simply cannot do that when there’s any danger that we could be wrong. So Sterling, is it fair to say that at very least, serious scientists can disagree on this?
Sterling Burnett: Yes. There’s no question about it. I can give you the names of dozens of scientists who are skeptical of claims not that humans impact the climate, and not that the climate is changing, but that humans are driving a dangerous climate change.
Bob Zadek: And what scares me is that an issue which should be decided in the scientific community is decided by the ballot box, and by who gets to be appointed a federal or state judge. We have so politicized science. Now, Sterling, nothing makes me happier on my show than for me to be shown wrong because every time one of my guests shows me that I was mistaken, I learn something. So we are friends for life already because you showed that I was wrong in observing that they haven’t been political or scientific debates in the past.
So, you’re quite right that when science makes a mistake or when the political system adopts a wrong scientific view, as it clearly did with DDT, in trying to save little eaglets who we thought were living in very fragile eggs, we killed lots and lots of people in the third world through malaria. So when we make a mistake, a lot of people are harmed, and therefore we should be quite careful in not making mistakes.
Sterling is with the Heartland Institute. We are discussing the intractable problem of Environment Climate Change, formerly known as “global warming.” Who is right, who is wrong? More importantly, since we can’t decide on this show who is right and who’s wrong, what should the policy be in our country given this split in scientific thinking and what should we do politically and economically in light of this conversation?
Eisenhower’s Warning & the Damaging Effects of Environmentalist Hubris
Bob Zadek: Sterling, what should be done given the uncertainty and maybe the impossibility of reaching an answer as to what the planet is going to be like in 500 or a thousand years? What policy should we intelligent voters be voting for? What is the sensible policy for our country, and indeed, for the world to adopt in light of this conversation?
Sterling Burnett: Well, before I answer that question, I do have an answer for it, let me point out to your listeners one thing. This is a libertarian show. You are honest and open about that. There is no question that you believe in limited government and you think that individual liberty and human freedom is a paramount virtue. When the real corruption of science and its impact on politics began, and it was highlighted as long ago as President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell address — it’s very famous for his discussion of the military-industrial complex. Everybody thinks his speech was far-sighted about the industrial complex. However, everyone just ignores the second half of the speech, where he talks about how the government has started funding science and has come to dominate the entire direction of science.
He warned of a technological and scientific elite taking over and directing public policy. And that is precisely what has happened. I invite your readers to go back and read his speech in full and see how far-sighted he was, because it’s playing out today in the climate field. Scientists, which were a small field that got relatively little funding before the late eighties and early nineties, have received more money in the past decades than it received in its entire history cumulatively. And to think that that does not affect the kind of research that people undertake and the findings they produce is ludicrous, because that is not human nature. You wouldn’t deny that in any other field but Science. Now in answer to your question, if you are concerned that humans are causing dangerous climate change, you have to look at what the predicted impacts are going to be.
And so you say, for instance, there will be new cases of malaria. They expect that there will be new cases of malaria and other tropical diseases because mosquitoes will now be able to carry these diseases and will able to thrive and survive in regions that they didn’t previously know. That would not be the United States or Russia. They are talking about malaria going higher up mountain tops, and they predict 10,000 to 20,000 additional cases a year. You’re worried about 10,000 — 20,000 additional cases of malaria 100 years from now, when 2 million people are affected by malaria today, not 100 years from now. Hundreds of thousands die every year from malaria now. So rather than affecting a small portion of 10,000 future cases by regulating fossil fuel use, and by basically making people poorer by taking away the use of fossil fuels for electricity and transportation, why not attack malaria directly and solve the problem now and in the future? We could prevent the 10,000 additional cases because we could wipe out malaria now! We know how to do that. We did it in the United States in the fifties, through the use of DDT.
Have it be used widespread in those countries along with other prophylactics. Address the 2 million people that are affected today and you will prevent the 10,000 additional cases of the future because it will be gone! Let us be clear about sea-levels. Seas have risen 400 feet over the past 10,000 years. However, they’re rising at a slower average rate now than they have then. They have risen on average over the last 10,000 years. But they are rising and they will likely continue to rise until the next ice age comes because history shows us that that is what happens between ice ages. Ice melts and sea levels rise. Climate change may be adding an additional inch or two to expected sea levels rise.
Rather than addressing the extra inch, start your planning today for the full 12 inches that were going to rise anyway.
Quit subsidizing homebuilding in wetlands and coastal waterways.
Quit subsidizing flood insurance and hurricane insurance, which just encourages people to move to the coast because they don’t pay the full cost when their homes are damaged. If my home gets damaged by tornado, no one pays my homeowner’s insurance, but if someone on the coast gets hit by a hurricane, I’m paying their insurance because we subsidize it. They don’t pay the full cost and they rebuild in the same area where hurricanes are going to come whether the climate changes or not. If you go to a floodplain along the river because it’s a beautiful place, when it floods I shouldn’t be picking up the bill. We’re doing that because we change policies to encourage people to live in places where we probably shouldn’t be living.
Bob Zadek: When you made your comment about future generations dying of malaria, and the fact that we are kind of ignoring the present generation with malaria, what occurred to me was that in effect all of the monumental changes in economic life in the name of climate change and of saving the earth, if you will — to be almost absurd about the whole thing — is a wealth transfer from the present to the future. That’s what we are doing. We are compromising our economic and social and political well-being today so that people we will never meet and who we assume will be here in a thousand years, might live better. First of all, the prediction is impossible because in a thousand years they will probably have tools we can’t even imagine today. But putting that aside, what is the moral justification for us to transfer wealth today to people who will be on our planet in a thousand years? That is incomprehensible to me and I can’t imagine any moral theory to defend that.
Sterling Burnett: Let’s be even more blunt. We have 100 million people or more who don’t have adequate nutrition every day. You have millions of people who starve and die every day of material want and who live in abject penury. They are dying today. They will die tomorrow. They will die the next day. You’re asking us to continue sacrificing them and their wellbeing, and you’re asking them to sacrifice themselves on the off-chance that a few additional thousand people, 100 years from now might live a little bit better. You are saying that people should die today so that much wealthier societies in the future can lead lives even better. That’s immoral. My training is in moral philosophy. I have a PhD. and my specialization was in environmental ethics. The sacrificing of large numbers of living human beings today for a smaller group of wealthier human beings in the future is not not “progressive,” it is regressive.
People like to talk about being progressive in politics. That’s regressive because you’re sacrificing the poor. It won’t be the wealthy that will suffer if we make these sacrifices. It’s the poorest among us who will suffer the most if we stop the use of fossil fuels today to prevent a modest climate change 100 years from now. And the funny thing is that the best thing you can do to ensure that anyone living 100 years from now is better off than present generations, is to ensure greater economic freedom and greater wealth creation. Because wealthier societies are better able to adapt to natural disasters and climate changes regardless of the source or cause of the climate change and natural disaster and regardless of the direction.
Ask yourself how within a few years of each other New Orleans had terrible flood after after a hurricane — and part of that was human caused because of the way we built our dikes dams and stopped to natural flows of rivers — but we had a couple of thousand people died. It was terrible. Within a year or two around the same time, there was a huge tidal wave that hit Indonesia. You weren’t talking 2,000 people that died there. You were talking 250,000 people that died there in the islands down there. Now, what was the difference? It was not the climate. The climate wasn’t the difference. The difference was infrastructure.
Wealthier societies are protected against climate change better when natural disasters occur. They have better warning systems and they have better responses. They have better infrastructure that doesn’t wash out the sea the walls still sand. That was the difference. It wasn’t the difference of climate between Indonesia and New Orleans. It was a difference of wealth. Wealthier societies are better able to respond to climate changes regardless of the cause or direction, and to say that we should sacrifice wealth today means people in the future will be less wealthy than they otherwise will be and thus less able to adapt or respond to climate change regardless of the cause and direction.
Climate Change: A Trojan Horse of Big Government
Bob Zadek: The changes that those who worry about climate change propose is inevitably more governmental control, less freedom of choice, and less economic freedom. It isn’t a coincidence that universally those people who worry the most about climate change are those people who care the least about personal freedom and who favor a top-down, tightly controlled society. That is not a coincidence. What I have observed so often with my guests on this show is that the other side cheapens freedom so much so that when there is an policy that requires a surrender of freedom they accept it, because they think freedom is not all that important. My view would be freedom is the most important and any policy that requires even a minor surrender of personal freedom must be severely questioned.
I should have the freedom to live my life as I choose so long as I don’t harm anyone else, and I’m not prepared to give that up even a little bit in the theoretical hope that somebody who doesn’t yet exist on earth might be might be better off. I resent so much the easy way that those who think differently can surrender freedom for the common good. It’s not a coincidence that that is how the fault lines are divided on this issue of climate change.
Sterling Burnett: I think it is even worse than you are describing, because for a lot of these people, it’s freedom for me, but not for thee. They’re not just willing to sacrifice freedom. They’re really sacrificing your freedom. They still want to go on living the way that they want to live. Al Gore is not wearing a hair shirt. Leonardo DiCaprio, since he became a climate spokesperson, did not cease to take private planes across the country multiple times for different events, for fun to party and to take his friends to an island. They don’t want you to live the way they live. They want their freedom, but they don’t want you and me to have the equal freedom because when we do it, evidently it causes climate change. But when they do it somehow by a miracle of miracles it doesn’t affect the climate.
Bob Zadek: Sterling, the listeners of our show and podcast become voters a couple times a year. They have to decide things. In the closing moments of our show, what advice can you offer to people who are determined to use their privilege and intellect as voters, how should they see the issue in terms that they can find useful so that they can vote and behave in their self-interest?
Sterling Burnett: Well, thankfully voters seem much smarter than a public spokesman on this issue because poll after poll shows that climate change ranks dead last, or doesn’t even rank on the issue of concerns for voters when they go to the polls. There’s a very small minority of people who think climate change is the most important issue. And that is the issue they vote on when they go to the polls. Most people realize that education is going to affect my life more. Crime, the economy, affordable healthcare, war, potholes, are more important to most voters.
Most people vote based on the local issues that they can actually have an impact on. Do you feel safe in your home? Are your schools good and safe? Are your roads good at the national level? Is our economy doing well or badly? Which policies are likely to make our economy continue to do well or prevent it from doing badly? Those are the policies that people should focus on. I’ll never tell anyone how to vote. That’s their business. But when I go to the polls, I think about the issues that’s most important to me. You are openly a libertarian. I am a radical libertarian as well.
For me, the first issue I ask is where the candidate stands on the Constitution. I don’t mean whether he has sworn an oath, but when he has acted in his life, has he defended the constitution or has he eroded the constitution by growing government beyond the bounds enumerated in the constitution? That is the most important issue to me. If it turns out that he is going against the Constitution and is constantly growing government beyond the bounds described in the constitution, he doesn’t get my vote regardless of where he stands on the other issues.
For other people the Constitution may not be the big issue. It may be about whether I have a job and about pay. Perhaps they will be paid more by the policies endorsed by the candidate. Or maybe my energy costs will rise or decline because of the policies. If they restrict fossil fuels to fight climate, our energy bills both at the filling station and your electricity and gas bill at home will increase because restricting fossil fuels, whether through taxes or cap and trade programs, we’ll raise the cost of energy because the alternatives are more expensive and less efficient than fossil fuels. That’s just a fact. There’s no debate about that. So if that’s important to you, think about that to when you think about climate change.
Bob Zadek: That is great advice Sterling. I presume that in the closing seconds you see at least in the short run that government, at least in the area of alleged climate change, are moving in a way that you think makes some sense.
Sterling Burnett: The present administration is largely rolling back policies by the previous administration that were pushing harmful responses to climate change and were restricting fossil fuel use. The present administration is rolling these back. It is much more skeptical that humans are causing dangerous climate change and more importantly, that that is the most important issue facing our country. So at the Federal Level that is happening, but at the state level it may be another story.
I believe your state legislature in California, with Jerry Brown, is moving forward with climate legislation restrictions on fossil fuels, carbon taxes, restrictions on automobiles, and so on. There are other states that are also responding that way. So at the state level regressive climate action is actually moving forward. And for most people politics is local. That is something you consider when you go to the polls is look at the national level. At the national level we have a handle on this, but in many states that is not true. Ask yourself, is your local politician pushing policies that is going to raise my energy costs and do nothing to change the weather in the vain hope that action in Massachusetts and California will change the weather despite the fact that actions in India and China are going to keep pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere?
Bob Zadek: I like it that way because people, voters, and citizens will vote with their feet. Shortly, states will learn that the states which prosper and which have positive immigration — a population in-flow — are those states that adopt a sensible policy and not a nonsensical policy. You can always tell when I speak with my libertarian friends on the phone, because you will hear me during the conversation say a bit defensively, something like, I know, I know, but the weather is nice. So yes, California makes plenty of mistakes, but Sterling, the weather is darn good. Thanks so much for giving us an hour of your time and for your wisdom.
