Should More Scientists Offer their Service as Our Green Leaders?

Essay by Eric Worrall

PHD student Sanam Mahoozi asks whether we should all follow Mexico’s example and elect scientist leaders like former German Chancellor Angela Merkel to guide us through the climate crisis.

Can Scientist Leaders Help Countries Fight Climate Change More Effectively?

Sanam Mahoozi
Contributor
Jun 29, 2024,01:33pm EDT
Updated Jun 30, 2024, 02:21am EDT

In early June, Mexico made history by electing its first-ever female president, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, a scientist with a background in physics and advanced degrees in energy engineering.

Her victory has since sparked a discussion about whether leaders with scientific expertise can have a positive impact on pushing forward climate policies worldwide.

In the past, the combination has been a boon for environmental causes.

For example, Margaret Thatcher, the former UK Prime Minister, was a trained chemist who raised awareness about global warming in a powerful speech at the United Nations in 1989 back when a lot of people weren’t taking the issue that seriously.

Then there is Angela Merkel, the former Chancellor of Germany, who with a doctorate in quantum chemistry, played a significant role in advocating for the 2015 Paris Agreement.

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Let’s see what Rachel Kyte, professor of practice in climate policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford said about this topic in an interview with Forbes via email.

For women, “we can look at a number of leaders who have a science background, if not climate science, who have been able to lead their countries into ambition on climate action.”

“Margaret Thatcher and Angela Merkel come immediately to mind. They were able to ask questions of the scientists and understand its implications for action, unrelated to the ideological position of their parties,” whether conservative, religious or liberal.

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Let’s see what Dr. Peter Gleick, member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, co-founder and Senior Fellow of the Pacific Institute said about this topic in an interview with Forbes via email.

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Read more: https://www.forbes.com/sites/sanammahoozi/2024/06/29/can-scientist-leaders-help-countries-fight-climate-change-more-effectively/

Scientific knowledge isn’t an automatic guarantee of political competence. The disastrous mishandling of the Peter Ridd academic freedom case demonstrates that groups of scientists are just as prone to making bad decisions as anyone else.

Angela Merkel was also a political incompetent, in my opinion. She might have been a motivated advocate of green policies, but her green policies were largely responsible for Germany’s energy crisis. Merkel’s 2011 decision to shut down Germany’s nuclear reactors increased Germany’s dependence on Russia.

There was plenty of warning Russia was an unreliable energy partner. President Trump tried to warn Germany about the consequences of its reckless energy policy in 2018, when Merkel was still in charge. The German diplomats laughed in Trump’s face.

Margaret Thatcher is an interesting case. While it is true Thatcher had a big hand in promoting the climate issue in the early days, in her 2002 memoir, Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World (New York: HarperCollins), she expressed dismay at how concern about climate change had been used as an excuse to promote global tyranny, and criticised exaggerated claims of scientific certainty. It is truly sad that greens who cite Thatcher as a right wing green leader consistently fail to provide a more complete picture of her views.

… The doomsters’ favorite subject today is climate change. This has a number of attractions for them. First, the science is extremely obscure so they cannot easily be proved wrong. Second, we all have ideas about the weather: traditionally, the English on first acquaintance talk of little else.

Third, since clearly no plan to alter climate could be considered on anything but a global scale, it provides a marvelous excuse for worldwide, supra-national socialism. All this suggests a degree of calculation. Yet perhaps that is to miss half the point. Rather, as it was said of Hamlet that there was method in his madness, so one feels that in the case of some of the gloomier alarmists there is a large amount of madness in their method.

Indeed, the lack of any sense of proportion is what characterizes many pronouncements on the matter by otherwise sensible people. Thus President Clinton on a visit to China, which poses a serious strategic challenge to the US, confided to his host, President Jiang Zemin, that his greatest concern was the prospect that “your people may get rich like our people, and instead of riding bicycles, they will drive automobiles, and the increase in greenhouse gases will make the planet more dangerous for all.”

It would, though, be difficult to beat for apocalyptic hyperbole former Vice President Gore. Mr Gore believes: ‘The cleavage in the modern world between mind and body, man and nature, has created a new kind of addiction: I believe that our civilisation is, in effect, addicted to the consumption of the earth itself.’

And he warns: “Unless we find a way to dramatically change our civilisation and our way of thinking about the relationship between humankind and the earth, our children will inherit a wasteland.”

But why pick on the Americans? Britain’s then Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, has observed: “There is no greater national duty than the defense of our shoreline. But the most immediate threat to it today is the encroaching sea.” Britain has found, it seems, a worthy successor to King Canute.

The fact that seasoned politicians can say such ridiculous things – and get away with it – illustrates the degree to which the new dogma about climate change has swept through the left-of-centre governing classes….

Read more: https://www.amazon.com/Statecraft-Strategies-Changing-Margaret-Thatcher/dp/0060199733 (pp. 449–50)

The Forbes author also quotes our old friend Peter Gleick as an authority, which is pure comedy. Gleick was forced to resign as chair of the AGU scientific ethics committee, after he was outed for using a social engineering computer hacker trick, impersonating the identity of a real Heartland Institute officer, to obtain unauthorised access to internal documents. To add to the mess, Gleick included a fake document with the leaked stolen documents, which he claimed was forwarded to him by an “anonymous source”.

In the original leak, Gleick did not clearly differentiate the fake “anonymous source” document from the real documents he stole from Heartland.

Unbelievably, Gleick is still a member of the US National Academy of Sciences – which in my opinion begs the question of what level of immorality or depravity is required to get someone ejected from that organisation.

I don’t know what kind of Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo will make. But having a background as a scientist offers no reassurance that she will be a competent leader. The signs in my opinion are ominous – in 2019, while serving as leader of Mexico City, Claudia introduced a raft of radical green policies. If Claudia turns out to be another green policy obsessive like Angela Merkel, Mexico could be about to experience some German style energy price pain.