Joel Kotkin:
“…“Saving the planet” should be an unbeatable political slogan. Yet consistently the imagined “green wave” mindlessly embraced by most of the media continues to fall short, as evidenced by recent elections in Canada and Australia, as well as across much of Europe.
These results reflect climate scientist Roger Pielke’s 2010 notion of “the iron law of climate policy.” Pielke noted that support for reducing greenhouse emissions is limited by the amount of sacrifice demanded. “People will pay some amount for climate goals,” he noted, “but only so much.” At $80 a year per household, he suggested, polls found most people would support climate measures but raise it to $770 annually and support drops below ten percent. . .
Greens can only succeed only if they abandon their dystopian scenario for humanity. This trend was epitomized by the 1970s predictions of Paul Ehrlich about an impending “population bomb,” that would lead to mass starvation on a planetary scale. Needless to say this didn’t occur. Over the last thirty years some have predicted the North Pole ice would all but disappear but this apocalypse has not remotely occurred.
Sadly, such gross errors have not led a moment’s hesitation about making ever more far out assertions. It seems that every decade the planet has five or ten years left if draconian measures are not taken. Just this year a writer for the New Yorker predicted the familiar scenario of a “famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us,” adding suggestions that to meet this challenge may require displacing our democracy with an enlightened rule from above…”