By Robert Bradley Jr. — July 11, 2022
“In order to solve the climate problem, the first thing we need to do is ignore the economists.” – Andrew Dessler, May 14, 2022
“If you’re pushing fossil fuels at this point, you’re anti-human.” – Dessler, June 28, 2022
Andrew Dessler is the alarmist’s alarmist, joining Michael Mann and others who have declared war not only against fossil fuels but also against anyone who thinks otherwise. The two bring to mind the infamous Joe Romm, who carried the ugly torch back in his heyday.
Dessler is angry. His message of doom-and-gloom is not convincing many outside of the Church of Climate. And his emotions and disrespect work against his (hyped) activism. Consider his sarcastic paraphrase of the IPCC Summary for Policymakers:
Hey assholes. We’ve been telling you for decades that this was going to happen if we didn’t reduce greenhouse gas emissions. You didn’t listen and now it’s all happening. We hope you’re happy. Enjoy the heatwaves, intense rainfall, sea level rise, ocean acidification, and many other things, you fucking morons.
That’s Angry Andy, to whom every negative weather event is due to us and every positive weather event is, well, in spite of us.
Dessler will not debate physical climate science against an able opponent (why not?) as if fundamental questions of natural-versus-manmade warming were settled (they are not). He ignores plant biology (the work of Craig Idso) since that is on the benefit side of CO2 emissions and increasing atmospheric concentrations.
Dessler looks the other way at the profound problems of climate modeling where causality is sub-grid scale, for starters. He tries to cancel the esteemed Steven Koonin whose influential book Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters (2021) explains what Dessler does not want you to know.
Dessler does not understand Economics 101 either. Such concepts as opportunity cost and anticipatory entrepreneurship do not register well in his natural science mind. Energy density? Not part of his thinking. Energy affordability? That’s not an energy crisis.
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Andrew Dessler now traffics on the economics and policy sides of the climate debate, far outside of his expertise–and his job as a chair professor in geosciences. (His colleagues in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at Texas A&M University must wonder about his agenda and priorities. But with tenure ….. )
Dessler’s latest is … ban the economists! On the one hand, he wants to cancel the “climate deniers” as out of the mainstream. Yet he relies on Stanford University engineer Mark Jacobson, an outlier for sure, to argue that renewables are cheap, reliable, and scalable. (They are not.)
Economists do not give Dessler the answers he so desperately wants, so he dismisses them. Bjorn Lomborg is one critic that wants to cancel. But the list of leading climate economists who cannot find a way to justify pricing carbon dioxide (CO2) anywhere close to Net Zero runs deep. Climate economists, in fact, are important to tone down climate activism, as Bryan Gould recently explained:
Rhetoric about climate change being an “existential threat,” a “crisis,” an “emergency” and even an “extinction-level event” has come, not just from overheated activists, but also from corporate leaders, bankers, bureaucrats, politicians, United Nations officials and more than a few scientists.”
Missing from that list? Economists. If the climate-emergency crowd were right, we should have stopped using fossil fuels and demanded that major producers immediately sequester the stuff underground. Most economists, by contrast, view the climate-change cost of fossil fuel use as a relatively small side effect that should not stand in the way of continued enjoyment of the global benefits of inexpensive and reliable energy.
How do I know? Partly because in 2018 the Nobel Prize committee for economics gave the award to Yale’s William Nordhaus for work on the economics of climate change that showed, among other things, both that aggressive emission reductions were costlier than doing nothing and that the optimal course of action would be to reduce emissions to only slightly below the business-as-usual case. As Robert Murphy and I explained in a study published by the Fraser Institute last year, Nordhaus’ analysis does not support the 1.5°C policy [of CO2 mitigation] or anything close to it….
[M]ainstream climate economists … view carbon dioxide emissions as a global problem, but not a huge one and not one that should cause us to radically alter the role of fossil energy in economic growth and development…. [T]he economic implication is that the optimal response to climate change is to keep using fossil fuels almost as much as if carbon dioxide wasn’t a greenhouse gas.
The way out of this mess begins by getting back to mainstream economics, mainstream science, and the more than occasional exercise of common sense.
Conclusion
Andrew Dessler has a problem, a big one. He is emotionally wed to a cause that is both wrongheaded and futile. He is in denial about the benefits of fossil fuels and CO2 greening, not to mention the benefit side of the human influence on climate. And Andy is mad as the world correctly prioritizes here-and-now problems over future, speculative ones.
Will this activist make mid-course corrections with climate and energy realism in place of exaggeration and alarm? Or will be become more and more shrill, while demeaning and teasing his adversaries who value economic freedom, affordable and reliable energy, and a greener, more productive earth?
He’s right, but noit for his reasons. Economists are just astrologers for finances; astrologers need licenses for entertainment, and even then they are bad.
Massachusetts marsh biologists have switched from studying bad nutrients to ice.
Wittyngham, S.S., et al.2022.Biotic Recovery Following Ice-Rafting in a Salt Marsh. Estuaries and Coasts 45, 1361–1370. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12237-021-01023-z
I hate to bash all economists since I have a Finance MBA and wrote a for profit finance and economics newsletter for 43 years … but it is a fact, that as a group, American economists have never predicted a US recession. Not even once. Not that it’s ever easy to predict the future.
By the way, there is moderately strong evidence the US has been
in a mild recession this year. Very low U of M consumer confidence
is evidence. The low unemployment rate is a contradicting variable.
Any recession with such a low unemployment rate must be a mild recession.
Recessions tend to be recognized up to six months after they begin (the actual starting month is sometimes not specified by NBER before the recession has ended).
Since 8 to 9 years of every 10 years are NOT recession years, financial people who deal with the public are perma-bulls, expecting to be “right” for 8 pr 9 years of every ten. Which makes them look “smart”, in their opinion.
I can never remember –
are economists there to make weather forecasters look good, or is it the other way around?
Climate Loonies do not have an economic input circuit available to them.
This guys great. He needs to be on the talk show circuit being the new face of climate change (sorry Greta). The more the public see how unhinged he is the better.
Someone whose last name starts with a D is acting like a spoiled punk
Stupid has become the new social achievement. Between them, and there are plenty, the followers who just want to be on side with the virtuous in-crowd, regardless of outcome, and the cowards, of which there are as many in number as there are the stupid. On the international level money has bought them all off, and all they had to do was promise to participate and/or support the destruction of the world democratic, private capital economy. Something the left has been promising, and very proud of its nearing achievement.
I know a few people who cannot, at all, argue their position. Try to tell them something that does fit with their imaginings and their likely response is to get angry and walk out.
Why would a group of people who want to take away the fundamental resource of modern life (energy) want to listen to economists, who study and manage resources?
He was on Rogan. When asked specifically ruled out a debate. The science was settled and treating dissenters and their arguments as respectable and worthy of a platform only creates doubt where none exists and plays into the corruption of fossil fuel advocates.
If renewables are so cheap, greenies should be celebrating high fossil prices.
Let the market forces push fossils out of the market.
~2 trillion per year spent on renewables should be more than enough for a quick transition.
Sadly I have not seen a single business plan from anyone to shows me that renewables are cheaper.
Levelised energy comparison are not business plans.
Typical lefty wolf cry. If only we had more subsidies, just another say 100 trillion then all will be good.
Economists would be delighted by a solution to reduce atmospheric CO2 that is profitable. Not all climate activists agree.
Increasing plankton biomass in the oceans would do great work to restore fisheries (see Russ George’s work with the Haida and how Canada shut him down) and coincidentally would sequester an awful lot of CO2 while increasing economic activity. Feeding more people would be popular with the general public too.
I don’t know Andrew Dessler’s opinion on this but I strongly suspect it is negative.
They will go on and on about those who don’t have a degree in climate science should just listen to the experts.
On the other hand, none of the people being quoted by the people who say this, have degrees in climate science.
It is such fun watching these dumb climate nutters bash their heads against the brick wall of economic reality. Hopefully, the first places that are hit by the inevitable cuts they caused, will be their own institutions.