Sep 182008
A well-informed sceptic recently asked me if I understood why politicians are so keen on global warming. He said that he found this hard to explain. So although Harmless Sky’s blog rules say that party politics are out of bounds, and its impossible to discuss this subject without breaking those rules just a little, I’m going to set down a few reasons why, if I were a politician, I would believe in anthropogenic climate change too.
- Talking about climate change is the nearest a politician will ever come to risk free politics. If you don’t believe me, just name one politician whose career has been damaged by joining the crusade against global warming. Proclaiming your intention to cut greenhouse gases by 99.9% before the end of next millennium is so much safer than suggesting a date for troop withdrawals from Iraq, or promising to sort out problems in the National Health Service.
- For the last decade, the government and the opposition in the UK have been competing to create the most ‘concerned’ image, and climate change is by far the safest thing to be ‘concerned’ about. If you are ‘concerned’ about street crime or social deprivation, the electorate will expect you to come up with some sensible policies and then they will notice if nothing happens. This does not apply to climate change.
- All politicians love to occupy the moral high ground. It provides endless scope for moral blackmail along the lines of, ‘If you ask me awkward questions about my plans of make driving an SUV an offence punishable by public crucifixion in Parliament Square, then you are obviously a climate denier who wants to destroy the planet, and deserve to suffer the same fate. All I’m trying to do is save the planet for God’s sake, while you are trying to destroy it.’
- As a politician, you probably have more than enough enemies at Westminster without making new ones in Brussels. The EU was remarkably quick to recognise the political benefits of climate alarmism – just think of all those new regulations and new agencies to enforce them – so you don’t want to look like a troublemaker. And what about the EU funding for that new, chicken effluent powered, carbon neutral, smokeless incinerator in your constituency that will create over a hundred-and-fifty new jobs?
- Politicians who have achieved ministerial office quickly learn that the campaign against climate change requires new departments, more staff, bigger budgets and new quangos for their friends to run. In other words it is very good for business, if you are in the business of maximising your power and influence.
- Politicians who hold forth about the economy often run into trouble because they don’t know very much about economics, and economists love putting politicians right. This can’t happen with climate change because the only people who can challenge your more exaggerated claims authoritatively are climate scientists, and why would they do that when their funding depends on global warming?
- With almost everyone else in politics riding on the global warming bandwagon, there is little chance that your opponents will challenge what you say, however ill informed and hysterical it may be. People who live in glasshouses do not throw stones. Once an idea like climate change reaches a certain critical mass, it makes it almost impossible for other politicians to accuse you of being alarmist, because they are so busy being alarmist themselves that it would undermine their own position. You can talk sheer nonsense and no one will say a word. How else could DEFRA get away with spending public money on schemes to stop flatulent farm animals emitting greenhouse gases?
- Climate change provides spin-doctors with almost limitless opportunities to launch eye catching scare stories that effortlessly elbow bad news stories that you want to kill out of the headlines.
- There are obvious fiscal benefits; lots of scope for new taxes and some of them not too obvious either. And you can reassure people that these taxes have nothing to do with ‘black holes’ in the public finances too, its really all about changing climate-wrecking human behaviour.
- When it comes to climate change, politicians can always be sure that the press is on their side. Notebooks will be poised to take down another sensational apocalyptic prophecy, safe in the knowledge that scare stories sell newspapers. This is one time when the vermin won’t ask you difficult questions, which is probably just as well.
- For politicians of cabinet rank, there are endless opportunities to strut your stuff on the world stage at yet another headline grabbing climate conference, in the safe knowledge that, as none of these carefully staged events ever produce viable policies for reducing global CO2 emissions, there will be plenty more to come. As you fly back home, just get the spin-doctors to put something out about the way that you are leading the world in the battle against climate change. With a few mentions of new strategies and road maps, the public will never notice that it’s all been a glorious waste of time, and opinion polls show that they are not particularly concerned about climate change anyway.
- If all else fails, and a critic suspects that you don’t know anything about climate change, just talk about the precautionary principle. Their eyes will glaze over as they stumble off to find someone else to talk to.
Yes! Global warming has created a whole new world of risk free politics where the only way that you can really come to grief is by being sceptical. And what benefit is there for any politician in that?
Update 30th October 2008: Andrew Orlowski has a very astute report in The Register on the extraordinarily smooth progress of the Climate Bill through the House of Commons here. A great example of risk free politics in action.
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Seems to sum it all up very nicely. The whole political angle reminds me of Yes Minister.
In the spirit of CA, I’ve managed to create a petition at the number 10 site:
We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Require
government funded research into climate change to meet minimum
standards of honesty.
In order to ensure that public policy is guided by the best
possible scientific knowledge, it should be required of
research bodies such as the Hadley Centre that their published
research meet at least the same standards of disclosure and
transparency as financial and mining prospectuses, such that
failure to meet such standards should disqualify research from
consideration in setting public policy.
URL: http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/agw-research/
Mark
A great idea! I’ve signed and I’ll do my best to spread the word. Does Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit know about this? I think that it would interest him and support from that vastly popular blog would probably be significant as many of the readers are from the UK.
I’ve added it to the comments on the “How’d they do that” post, so hopefully, it’ll get noticed.
Cheers!
Just a quick comment……………
All employees need to convince their employers that they are needed.
Politicians are employed by us.
To convince us that they are needed they need to convince us they make our lives better.
The easiest way to do this is to perceive a threat to our lives and then to save us from it. The newspapers sell both the good and the bad news for them.
Creating wars was the old fashioned method of causing a scare from which we needed saving but a public educated by two world wars has forced them to replace this with terrorism or just the threat of it.
Food shortages come a close second and are as difficult to engineer nowadays so have been replaced by “scares” such as Foot and Mouth, Bird flu and Blue tongue.
Climate change will now replace both these old political methods of self preservation and will ensure that the oldest profession in the world bar one will continue well beyond when the ice caps have melted!
I’m afraid the only way of changing the system is to threaten their wages by not turning out next polling day!
Philip,
I seem to remember that, five hundred years ago, Machiavelli said something like:
The wise prince will always have an enemy who threatens the security of the state so that the people will feel the need of his protection and be grateful to him. [This must have been before the comma became popular and anyway, when I looked for the passage the other day I couldn’t find it.]
The Prince has never been out of print, and I suspect that there is at least one newly appointed cabinet minister – with a very ambitious brother – who keeps a copy under his pillow.
Much the same thought as H L Mencken’s:
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
How did he know about Jacqui Smith..?
I just signed the petition – it’s a good start. I’ll also be writing to my MP – good to know I’m not the only one astounded by the sheer lack of scrutiny the Climate Change Bill received in the Commons. Also by the lack of publicity, generally. There’s very little in the media – Brown and Cameron managed to publicly weigh in on the Brand/Ross/Sachs business but seem to have been strangely quiet on the subject of this dire and far-reaching piece of legislation.
Alex
I would be very interested to know what your MP’s reaction is. Might he be prepared to put down a written question to the appropriate minister in the House of Commons?
Hi Tony, I’ll let you know. My MP is Ann Keen, (Brentford & Isleworth); given that she hosted a climate change conference last year in Brentford (where An Inconvenient Truth was shown) and has gone on record to say “Climate change is the single most important issue we face as a global community. It is a reality and it is essential we work together to protect our planet” I’m not sure what (if any) impact my letter will have. But we’ll see.
Alex
If you haven’t written yet, and you will probably have thought of this anyway …….
Could you take the line that this lack of transparency feeds scepticism and the warmist case would be greatly strengthened if the data is archived and available for inspection?
Sorry if I am interfering. In notice that she doesn’t have much of a majority.
No, that’s fine; I’m still drafting it & will include something to that effect. Basically I will be saying that there needs to be due diligence both re the science and the economics. If there are policy decisions to be made on our behalf, there needs to be some attempt to enquire into the climate science that underpins these, and some scrutiny into the practices of (for example) James Hansen and Michael Mann, who purvey said science. And yes, I agree that the lack of transparency does feed scepticism, not least because it leaves a strong impression that there’s something to hide.