Reader Responses to The Cost of Skepticism

Erik Ness could benefit from a reality check. His headline “U.S. lags behind” and his failure to vet J. Timmons Roberts’s claim that “literally every country in the world is moving ahead on reducing carbon emissions without us” ignores the fact that privately funded advancements in fracking have resulted in the United States reducing carbon emissions more than any other country. While talkers talked, doers did. He writes: “Follow the Money,” but doesn’t—perhaps sensing that the facts are overwhelmingly negative to his narrative. If I understand him, he also ties the world’s refugee crises to sea-level rise and drought, though evidence seems to implicate political factors more than weather. Elsewhere in the same issue a writer extols the concept of “challenges to pre-existing beliefs and not just affirmation of them.” It appears the determined frackers and other relentless inventors ran with that idea, nicely. Evangelizing may turn out to be a lot more costly than skepticism.

Erik Ness writes that the United States lags behind as scientists advance their climate prediction models (“The Cost of Skepticism,” The Big Issue, March/April). Like many such articles, the cost of the solution to this despair is overlooked: the costs of the Paris Accord, the world’s massive and comprehensive plan to act quickly on apocalyptic climate change. 

As a result of this agreement the world is requested to (1) lower carbon emissions to near zero as it transitions to solar, wind, and geothermal energy,  and (2) use this alternative energy to remove and store geologically enough CO2 from the atmosphere to take us back to 1987 levels. This “sink” for carbon is an untested geoengineering approach that is far from ready to operate at global scale.

More serious than cost is the added time necessary to accomplish these quixotic goals. It will take hundreds of generations to reach zero emissions.

All this is separate from “denial” or whether the global climate is changing unidirectionally or not, or even whether the models are accurate. How the world ultimately reacts to this impractical, lengthy, and expensive venture will indeed define the future.