Making Ignorance Great Again

Donald Trump just took us out of the Paris climate accord for no good reason. I don’t mean that his decision was wrong. I mean, literally, that he didn’t offer any substantive justification for that decision. Oh, he threw around a few numbers about supposed job losses, but nobody believes that he knows or cares where those numbers came from. It was just what he felt like doing.

President Trump at the White House in May. Credit

And here’s the thing: What just happened on climate isn’t an unusual case — and Trump isn’t especially unusual for a modern Republican. For today’s G.O.P. doesn’t do substance; it doesn’t assemble evidence, or do analysis to formulate or even to justify its policy positions. Facts and hard thinking aren’t wanted, and anyone who tries to bring such things into the discussion is the enemy.

Consider another huge policy area, health care. How was Trumpcare put together? Did the administration and its allies consult with experts, study previous experience with health reform, and try to devise a plan that made sense? Of course not. In fact, House leaders made a point of ramming a bill through before the Congressional Budget Office, or for that matter anyone else, could assess its likely impact.

Read Paul Krugman’s story in The New York Times - “Making Ignorance Great Again.”

Despite the politics, good news on climate

Anyone following the news on climate policy might well incline to despair. Not only is the Turnbull government continuing to promote the idea that coal is the energy source of the future as well as the past, but many of its backbenchers also think that the best alternative is nuclear power. 

Gesture politics: Donald Trump signing executive
 orders relating to climate policy in late January. 

Of course, in the grand scheme of things, what Australia does or doesn’t do counts for little. That’s not a justification for doing nothing or doing the wrong thing – with a couple of exceptions, no single country counts for much. The biggest exception to this rule is the United States, of course, followed by China and India. So the real concern is that the Trump administration is adopting a similarly retrograde position.

The good news is that it’s almost certainly too late for Trump and Turnbull to derail the progress that’s being made towards a decarbonised and sustainable global economy. They are engaged in gesture politics designed to appeal to culture warriors on the right, not a serious strategy to revive coal and nuclear power.

The case of nuclear power is the clearest. The only hope for nuclear power is the adoption of a single low-cost design that can be built in large numbers, thereby achieving economies of scale. France managed this in the 1970s, but no one (including France) has managed to repeat the trick.

Read John Quiggan’s Inside Story piece - “Despite the politics, good news on climate.”

Failed climate science logic could cost taxpayers $billions - Pitman

Andy Pittman - 'most ill-informed statement
I have ever heard from a senior executive.
 

Speaking to the Sydney Morning Herald yesterday, CSIRO chief executive Larry Marshall offered the following justification for his decision to cut 110 jobs from the agency’s climate science staff:

“We have spent probably a decade trying to answer the question “is the climate changing?” … After [December’s] Paris [climate summit] that question has been answered. The next question now is what do we do about it? The people that were so brilliant at measuring and modelling [climate change], they might not be the right people to figure out how to adapt to it.”

That is among the most ill-informed statements I have ever heard from a senior executive. It will take a little to unpack it and to show that the apparent decision to dramatically downscale CSIRO’s ocean and atmospheric research will cost taxpayers and governments billions of dollars in flawed investments unless, by sheer blind luck, the right guesses are made.

Read the story on The Conversation by the Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science at University of New South Wales in Australia, Andy Pitman - “CSIRO boss’s failed logic over climate science could waste billions in taxes.”