The rhetoric of reaction to climate change
clock The hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts hopes you and yours had a good Thanksgiving break. Everyone needs some time to pay attention to family, friends, turkey-induced naps, holiday sales and whatnot. One cannot spend every single day of ones life focused on current events, lest one go mad with information overload. In case youre just starting to check the news, however, let me just quote the first few sentences from a federal government report that happened to be released the Friday after Thanksgiving: Earths climate is now changing faster than at any point in the history of modern civilization, primarily as a result of human activities. The impacts of global climate change are already being felt in the United States and are projected to intensify in the future but the severity of future impacts will depend largely on actions taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to adapt to the changes that will occur. That is from the Fourth National Climate Assessment , a congressionally mandated report that the Trump administration released on one of the slowest news days of the year. Heres some more from The Posts write-up of the report : The assessment makes clear that policy responses can mitigate the harmful effects of climate change. Will this report trigger any serious policy response from the Trump administration? Before I answer that, lets remember two important facts about President Trump. The first is that he has recently tweeted about climate change: Brutal and Extended Cold Blast could shatter ALL RECORDS - Whatever happened to Global Warming? The second thing to remember is that Trump does not know a lot about, you know, most areas of public policy. On Sunday, The Posts Josh Dawsey and Damian Paletta related the following anecdote: So no, do not expect an actual response from the Trump White House when the president believes that the climate will change back again . I would also not expect a particularly vigorous reaction from the congressional wing of the GOP either. For one thing, the midterm elections wiped out a lot of moderate Republicans, who are the GOP officials willing to acknowledge that man-made climate change is real and require some responses. As the Atlantics Robinson Meyer noted earlier this month, The 2018 midterm election dramatically shrank the small group of House Republicans who have painted themselves as moderates on climate change." For another thing, I can already anticipate the reaction, because this is not the first report to make this point this fall. These kind of warnings seem to be issued on a regular basis, almost as if there is something that warrants concern. Albert Hirschman wrote a great and depressing book titled The Rhetoric of Reaction in which he detailed three tropes of argumentation that reactionaries deploy in response to proposals for progressive action. The perversity thesis is the argument that any willful action to address the problem will have counterproductive effects. To see that in action with respect to climate change, see the conservative response to this story about proposed geoengineering . The jeopardy thesis warns that any action taken will sacrifice hard-won gains. That has been the standard GOP response to climate change, which is that any response is not worth risking U.S. living standards (doing nothing, on the other hand, seems guaranteed to threaten U.S. living standards). The more dire the warnings get, however, the more I suspect that Trumps GOP pivot to the futility thesis that the problem is so massive that it is folly to expect any public policy to put a dent in the problem. Or, as Trump would put it, have fun, everybody. It is a truism in Washington that the urgent tends to crowd out the important in policymaking. In the case of climate change, it would be great if officials could take action before matters become urgent.