Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to Professor Emeritus David Shearman, some problems are beyond the comprehension of elected politicians, and should not be entrusted to their authority. The only way to halt the disintegration of Western democracy is for politicians to surrender power to independent peer appointed panels of scientists.
Climate change emergency cannot be solved by disintegrating democracies
BY DAVID SHEARMAN, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR — 01/03/22 07:30 PM EST 1,097
THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILLPresident Biden’s climate agenda was launched with hopes, prayers and the expectation of leadership to all world democracies, like a glorious ship set on a maiden voyage: the SS Biden. There is now deep concern that in stormy seas it has been driven onto rocks, still intact but in need of a high tide to free it.
…
Clearly, President Biden placed great reliance on reducing domestic emissions by a range of measures in a Build Back Better initiative, which was grounded on the rocks of a democratic congressman who appears to accept climate change and yet opposes constraints on fossil fuel production. The president now has to resort to executive orders and to a range of other measures, which do not require legislation.
This brings us to the crux of the problem. Our western democracies can no longer deliver consensus and action on issues that threaten the continued existence of humanity, not least the most powerful democracy in the world.
…
In the U.S., there are 109 members of the House of Representatives and 30 senators who refuse to acknowledge the scientific evidence of human-caused climate change. These members have received more than $61 million in lifetime contributions from the oil, gas and coal industries.
…
The U.S. is not alone in democratic disintegration. Climate denial and anti-vaccination sentiment exist in many countries but have not become as debilitating as they appear to have done in the United States.
Over the past four decades, the failures of liberal democracies to address environmental issues and particularly climate change have become increasingly apparent. In 2007, these failures were detailed and today we find they remain unaddressed. Indeed, one failure has become the salient problem, the need to separate governance from corporate capitalism.
The common denominator in current democratic failure is government unwillingness to accept that many of the problems we now confront are so complex and urgent as to be beyond the comprehension and abilities of elected officials. The issue of climate emergency is compounded by two additional interrelated issues: Elected officials place their political survival before collective needs and many defer to an overwhelmingly powerful fossil fuel industry for personal gain.
To become relevant today, elected governments have to be prepared to accept advice and guidance from independent commissions of scientists and other relevant experts selected by their peers — and not by political appointment. The details of this guidance need to be available to all parties and to the public. A starting model for the U.S. and many other countries might be a strengthened U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) with appointees selected by peers and not politically appointed.
…
David Shearman (AM, Ph.D., FRACP, FRCPE) is a professor of medicine at the University of Adelaide, South Australia and co-founder of Doctors for the Environment Australia. He is co-author of “The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy” (2007) commissioned by the Pell Centre for International Relations and Public Policy.
Read more: https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/588091-climate-change-emergency-cannot-be-solved-by-disintegrating
If you want to see what an Expertocracy or Technocracy looks like, a place where a significant portion of daily decision making is genuinely dominated by appointed panels of alleged experts, take a look at Communist China.
The following academic wet dream of how wonderful life is in China for educated people was published a few years ago in an engineering industry magazine.
The Chinese Government Is Dominated by Scientists and Engineers Their political elite are largely technocrats.
By Patricia Eldridge 3 years ago
When Chinese Government comes to mind, what things do you generally think of?
Most of you would say The Great Wall, feng shui, their food, pandas, cheap products, communism, and martial arts, among others. All of these are valid observations, as China is indeed famous for such. But I’d like to add something to that list, a thing that is so rare that China has to be remembered for it: most of the political leaders in China are scientists and engineers.
To prove that fact, let us play a quick game. Name a scientist or an engineer from your country’s top government officials. Don’t cheat with Google, just think of someone that you already know.
Now I doubt that you have thought one especially if you’re in the U.S.
Nowhere in the world can you see the same admiration and respect from the public to their scientists and engineers other than in China. This is a little known fact. They admire such professionals so much to the point that they qualify these people to be worthy and capable in handling political affairs.
The Chinese people believe that scientists and engineers, who eventually become technocrats, have a highly disciplined mind fit for public office.
…
Read more: https://gineersnow.com/leadership/chinese-government-dominated-scientists-engineers
In my opinion this seductive offer of power is the real pulling power China has over Western academia. It is not just the shadowy grant money Chinese Communists provide to our elites, it is the promise of a future in which Western academics have greater say over government policy; the promise that if Western governments become more like China’s Communist Technocracy, academics will play a far greater role in civil government.
Those who are tempted by China’s seductive offer somehow overlook the fact that the offer of power is conditional on total obedience to the central authority. China did not hesitate to punish expert doctors who tried to warn the world about Covid. The local CCP leaders were upset when the doctors tried to speak out, because did not want anyone to know they had a problem.
To be fair, Professor Shearman does not mention China directly, and glancing through his writing, he is not a fan of China’s greenhouse gas emissions and reliance on coal. But in my opinion, a Chinese style Technocracy is effectively what Professor Shearman is describing, whether or not he is self aware enough to realise what he is saying.
Professor Shearman does not explain what he would want to happen, when ordinary people rebel against and refuse to follow “expert” directives, like the massive ongoing protests against vaccine mandates, or the yellow vest riots against carbon tax fuel hikes in France. I’m guessing Professor Shearman would want the views of his panels of peer appointed experts to prevail over the short sighted desires of the uneducated masses.
We’ve seen what happens in China when ordinary people object to government directives, or to ordinary people in China who demand a greater say over government policy.
Frankly I don’t want to live under such a system. We’ve all seen the bullying, pettiness and mindless cruelty of Western academic elites, like the mistreatment of Peter Ridd, and countless other cases.
Imagine if these people had a bigger say over your life? Imagine if the vicious internal politics of academia spilled out of universities and was inflicted on the whole of society? Imagine if these people were permanently put in charge of major levers of government like the EPA. Imagine if elected politicians were stripped of the power to remove them? Imagine if say the next US government was stripped of the power to remove people like Dr. Fauci from office?
Because that is what life is like in Communist China. That is effectively what Professor Shearman is calling for.
Thanks but no thanks, Professor Shearman.
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That would be a nightmare scenario, and if that quack thinks “scientists” are somehow immune to lobbying he’s seriously deluded.
We don’t have to imagine – New York has already declired racism as ‘health emergency’.
They were transparent as to why they have done this – “Framing racism as a public health issue compels organizations and governmental agencies to address the crisis in the systemic ways that other threats to public health have been addressed,” state Sen. Kevin Parker said in the release.”
That’s right, anti-racism lockdowns can be coming in the future. What about anti-racist passports for racists? Preventing racists from work or shopping. Isolating racists forcefully in camps. Army on the streets to fight racism. All the wonderful things we have seen with Covid.
The panels of experts can declare an “emergency” and… who knows. To fight an emergency, everything can be done. Wait, didn’t many governments pass laws already, that for health emergencies they can detain anyone, anytime? How convenient.
This is genius. Yes! Anti-racism passports! If you can’t show that you’ve been vaccinated against racism – say, by completing a degree in humanities at an Ivy-League university – you have to pass regular “racism” tests to show you’re not carrying any recently-acquired racism before being allowed out in public.
Invest now in re-education camps, before the stock price goes up.
NY is quickly goose-stepping its way to a ghost town. If they take measures re: racism as a health emergency, they are lighting a fire they may not be able to extinguish.
Are the folks in NY particularly ignorant or, perhaps, stupid. There is a difference. From their voting in the commies, its baffling. Definition of insanity comes to mind.
The new DA in NYC has all but declared that he is not going to prosecute anyone for minor crimes. For example, he will not prosecute anyone who shoplifts less than $250 dollars at a time.
He is also going to set the maximum jail time as 20 years for any crime that doesn’t have an already declared mandatory penalty.
He will also take race into account when determining whether to charge.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/manhattan-district-attorney-alvin-bragg-bloodbath
New York has also declared that COVID treatments will be prioritized by race, with white males being the last to get treatment.
It seems we can afford, to hang a lot of politicians from lamp posts, but there a cost
to it, if hang a bunch of scientists.
In order to “save democracy” we first need to destroy it. We’ll put it back again.
We plomise.
Build it Back Better
“ the disintegration of Western democracy”
Wishful thinking
He is co-author of “The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy” (2007) commissioned by the Pell Centre for International Relations and Public Policy.
How come the Pell Centre asked a Professor of Medicine to co-author something on climate and politics? It’s like asking a Professor of Medicine to design a bridge. And how much attention was he giving to his job as a professor of medicine when he was co-authoring it?
They needed an MD because the climate data is doctored.
Back in the 80’s or so, the Council of Bishops put out a paper on how we needed a kinder form of capitalism. There solution was also indistinguishable from socialism.
A friend of mine stated that he was waiting for the Council of Economic Advisers to come out with a paper on the theology of the Virgin Birth.
Is the Wizard of Oz still available? He seemed to have the Emerald City running along nicely. Had the backing of the Lollipop Guild, too.
If he’s not available, then I’m against the idea.
According to Professor Shearman, “some problems are beyond the comprehension of
elected politiciansexperts and should not be entrusted to their authority.” They should be left in the hands of engineers who have a much better idea about how to get things done.Of course, climate change is not a problem, so the argument that Professor Shearman is making is invalid from the beginning. Secondly, academia was the first institution to fall to the machinations of those seeking a one world order dictatorship similar to Orwell’s ‘1984’, or Rand’s ‘Atlas Shrugged’ which featured such panels of experts wielding tyranny over the population and destroying the civilization. Anyone reading Prof. Shearman’s words and thinking they have any merit at all, is simply not paying attention!
The main problem with this entire diatribe is the assumption that *government* is the proper path to use in creating solutions to problems. A secondary problem in the US is that we are actually governed by an unelected Bureaucratic Hegemony (BH), not by elected politicians. This is true today from local to federal government. You will *never* get the BH staffed with people who actually understand the problems the “experts” identify and so no government solution will ever work.
The *real* answer is to let the private sector work it out. What the government can do is incentivize the private sector to look to the long-term instead of short-term profit. But that would mean cutting down the money tree the government wants to use to fund social programs. The US financial regulations *used* to fund large, productive private sector innovation centers focused on fundamental progress like Bell Labs, PARC, etc. No more.
No nation with a large, overweening national government like we have today has ever lasted. Not the Roman Empire, not Maoist China, not the Soviet Union, etc. Those nations eventually topple by crushing the base. The US is headed down that path. The Founding Fathers understood this and it’s why they put the federal government in charge of only interstate functions with the states maintaining sovereignty within their borders. The erosion of that idea continues apace every day.
Let the private sector solve the issue, not politicians.
You think you have problems in the US?
I read somewhere that the UK has a bigger parliamentary membership between all the MP’s in the House of Commons and the unelected peers in the House of Lords than America, and the UK can fit in the footprint of Lake Superior!
I’m not sure if the comparison was literal or per capita but it’s utterly ridiculous. We also have more BH’s than we can shake a stick at, including charities which have been co-opted by government to fill lobbying duties in return for money to prop up most which would otherwise fail.
Edit: I have stopped giving to any charity. I’m quite capable of buying someone sleeping rough a sandwich or even point him/her in the right direction for a job, but I refuse to fund the six figure salaries of charity CEO’s.
I do all of giving through my local church. I know most of the leadership of the church and keep an eye on who they are using church funds to help.
Most of the time, the church just sends out a notice that there is a family in need, and then the rest of us organize a group to help them.
The private sector already does a better job of looking to the long term than any politician is capable of doing.
Any company that fails to plan for several years into the future, in several years, won’t be a company anymore. Any company that hopes to stay in business is already working not only on next year’s products, but the ones for the year after as well. That planning includes not just designing your next product, but figuring out how you are going to build it, which includes how they are going to acquire all the things needed to build it.
The only thing business needs from government is for government to set the basic rules and not constantly change those rules. Other than that, the best thing government can do is get the heck out of the way.
The private sector already does a better job of looking to the long term than any politician is capable of doing.
If you want some examples of real long-term thinking, take a look a cognac makers.
“Those who are tempted by China’s seductive offer somehow overlook the fact that the offer of power is conditional on total obedience to the central authority.”
They also ignore what happens to opinionated bourgeois academics who trained under the previous regime after the revolution is won. They are the first to get thrown in the gulag. It’s only once the next generation that has been trained in an academy that is completely subservient to the state and the dialectic that scientists and engineers can begin to ascend into leadership positions.
The SS Biden has struck an iceberg called Reality, and is rapidly taking on water. Oops, there goes Mikey over the side. Mann overboard!
‘Those who are tempted by China’s seductive offer somehow overlook the fact that the offer of power is conditional on total obedience to the central authority.’ They do? I thought they had orgasms over the thought.
Breaking News
WUWT to be renamed
“What’s Up With Eric Worrall”
Either you have a team of writers, Worrall,
or you are a “writing machine”
All good articles too.
I’d never thought about EVs
in the Virginia winter storm traffic gridlock,
before you wrote an article on the subject..
I noticed some Dumbocrats blaming
climate change for the snow, as expected.
One Dumbocrat blamed
Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin.
Didn’t realize he takes office January 15, 2022,
so he’s NOT yet the Virginia Governor !
Keep up the good writing, Worrall, but maybe
slow down a little – your’re making the rest of us
look like lazy bums.
Democratic parliaments need to represent the broad social and cultural values of the communities they serve.
In which case ‘scientists’ make up something less than 10% of most communities. I can think of one prominent scientist within the incumbent Conservative party in the UK, David Davis.
Davis also came from a deprived background so knows what it’s like to be grubbing around for food and clothes as part of a single parent family.
I learned that early on in the covid pandemic he was desperately trying to persuade parliamentarians to take vitamin D to help resist the worst effects of covid. Perhaps that fell on deaf ears, perhaps it didn’t, but no word of it leaked out to the public.
He has also written articles for the Telegraph scathing of Boris’ NetZero policy and how much damage it will do to the country so, whilst he’s unlikely to come straight out and say he’s a ‘denier’ I think the clues are that his scientific qualifications make him constructively critical of ‘climate science’.
What no one needs are ranks of lawyers and PPE graduates filling parliamentary seats. How many PPE qualified friends do any of us have in our circle of friends. I offer to suggest almost none, even fewer that there are scientists.
A qualification designed for a working lifetime in politics should be the very reason for disqualification from ever entering politics.
I know some PPE types. Smart people but inclined to scientism and hubris.
So Shearman has never had even a glance at Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World”, and all the fallacies that it pointed to? Never spent a moment with “Soylent Green” or any of the other closed society stories, which aren’t too far off China’s growth pattern?
“…is for politicians to surrender power to independent peer appointed panels of scientists.” – article
I sincerely doubt that he really understands what that means: that you have to go along with the “meme” (whatever is held as The Rule) to get any kind of support to develop something new. We’ve sent our techno-engineering stuff over to China for manufacturing. They’ve made leaps and bounds in upgrading everything, as a result, and NOT because they’re so very brilliant at inventing anything. If the US and other countries shut off that supply line, China will stagnate, period.
Whatever – it will all balance out in the end. Yeah, I do see a “crash” coming down the road. I wonder if Shearman could survive without his microwave and iPhone.
There seems to be something about the ‘woke’ mind set that they only see the things that are wrong with society, and are blind to the things that are good. This, compounded with the seriously inflated self view of their intelligence, they feel gives them the license, even responsibility, to correct the evils of the world, whether the lesser people want it or not. Further, they seem utterly unable to anticipate unintended consequences. Perhaps this arises because they think that they are so smart that their ideas for utopia are perfect, with no downside or problems possible.
Minor correction, Clyde
“There seems to be something about the ‘woke’ mind set that they only see the things that they imagine are wrong with society”
Professor Shearman assumes domain expertise will naturally lead to consensus and correct policy solutions.That is a widely held misconception. Dan Kahan has shown that expertise in fact leads to greater divergence; people are better able to defend a position motivated by their beliefs. A well-educated liberal will disagree vehemently with an equally well-educated conservative.
If Professor Shearman has ever seen policy concensus amongst experts he has probably been looking at some kind of self-selecting clique.
Slightly off topic, but I would be interested to hear from Anthony on the level of interest in WUWT over the last couple of years now covid seems to have produced a level of community scientific scepticism, and COP26/Biden’s/Boris’ crumbling Build Back Better and NetZero policies are falling apart at the seams.
From the article: “To become relevant today, elected governments have to be prepared to accept advice and guidance from independent commissions of scientists and other relevant experts selected by their peers — and not by political appointment.”
These elected governments need to come to WUWT to get their guidance. They need to expose themselves to the real world in order to deal with real world problems and the real world is laid out for them right here at WUWT.
Come one, come all.
Any government must have control over the people , but all people must be able to decide who will govern them and for how long .
Well, I suppose that academic geniuses think they can run the world better than anybody, given that self-proclaimed business geniuses like Trump thought he and they could run the world better than anybody, and we all know how that turned out. The same laments have been uttered by men about the time when women got the vote a century ago, and then promptly enacted Prohibition, which proved to be the most colossal government failure of all time in US history. And now women think they oughta run the world because men have effed it up so bad, but to date there is no evidence that women are doing a bang up job either.
The bottom line is that democratic self determination is the only way to provide the maximum well being to the maximum number of citizens.
I believe it was Winston Churchill, the great defender of democracy in an era dominated by dictators in Germany, Italy, Spain, Russia, Japan, and most of Asia and South America – who quipped:
Regardless of one’s personal expertise or perspective, you only represent yourself, not everybody and everybody’s interest, both individually and collectively. Only we acting in our own self interest, and collectively in democratic representative government, can make sure that OUR interests are considered.
The other way to put things is the way Lord Acton put it in 1887:
Our government in the United States is not just based upon democracy alone … our Constitution is predicated upon the separation of powers, such that no individual person or group ever has absolute power to run things. The best outcomes result when competing interests compete, and compromise.
To give the Devil his due, the economy and supply lines were doing a Hell of a lot better under Trump than currently!
Everything was doing a lot better under Trump.
The Trump Derangement Syndrome continues strong with this one.
Where did this delusion that Trump tried to run the world come from?
As to how Trump did, he did very, very well. Much better than anyone since Reagan. Trump’s predecessor is making even Trump haters wish they had voted for Trump.
Imagine if truly skeptical voices were harassed, bullied, marginalized, and censored?
Oh, wait?
On WUWT no imagination needed.
The atmosphere’s albedo makes the Earth cooler not warmer. Remove the atmosphere or just the GreenHouse Gases and the Earth’s albedo would become much like the Moon’s. That is NOT what the Radiative GreenHouse Effect theory says.
If this is correct RGHE is not.
According to the K-T atmospheric power flux balance (TFK_bams09.pdf (ucar.edu)) and numerous clones the GHGs must absorb “extra” LWIR energy upwelling from the surface allegedly radiating as a black body.
The kinetic energy heat transfer processes of the contiguous atmospheric molecules render such upwelling LWIR BB energy impossible as also demonstrated by experiment.
For the experimental write up see:
https://principia-scientific.org/debunking-the-greenhouse-gas-theory-with-a-boiling-water-pot/
If this is correct RGHE is not.
No RGHE, no GHG warming, no man/CO2 driven global warming or climate change.
AS WE et. al. frequently requests of commentors: address the correct/incorrect-ness of these specific points, don’t change the subject and wander off to unrelated esoteric topics, appeal to the consensus authorities or close with ad hominem insults.
So much paranoia, so little actual science.
Yet again.
When you post the same post to every single thread, you can expect that the editors will eventually get tired of your nonsense.
“These members have received more than $61 million in lifetime contributions from the oil, gas and coal industries”
These millions are but a pittance compared with the billions per year given to the so-called climate ‘scientists’. These are given more than a $billion per year by the US government alone. These $billions are given only to the technocrats who drink the CAGW kool-aid. I would trust the decisions of randomly selected properly informed citizens long before I trust those drinking from the troughs of government largess.
When I read Comrade Professor Shearman’s short note my mind was flashing CCP, CCP, CCP. He is clearly a CCP plant/sympathiser.
for politicians to surrender power to independent peer appointed panels of scientists.
Oh, sure. ‘Peer’ in the last couple decades of ‘science’ is restricted to a like-minded political hierarchy, which lives on the funding of their grants by like-minded politicians with other people’s money to dole out. This proposition is nothing but incestuous.