Fear
“There’s no room for facts when our minds are occupied by fear.
Think about the world. War, violence, natural disasters, man-made disasters, corruption. Things are bad, and it feels like they are getting worse, right? The rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer; and the number of poor just keeps increasing; and we will soon run out of resources unless we do something drastic. At least that’s the picture that most Westerners see in the media and carry around in their heads. I call it the overdramatic worldview. It’s stressful and misleading. In fact, the vast majority of the world’s population lives somewhere in the middle of the income scale. Perhaps they are not what we think of as middle class, but they are not living in extreme poverty. Their girls go to school, their children get vaccinated, they live in two-child families, and they want to go abroad on holiday, not as refugees. Step-by-step, year-by-year, the world is improving. Not on every single measure every single year, but as a rule. Though the world faces huge challenges, we have made tremendous progress. This is the fact-based worldview.”
At the beginning of the 2020 Concordia Summit, Matthew Swift penned a letter titled Why Conversations Matter that moved me enough to write a draft letter that very day. I ultimately chose not to send that letter because I am a fan of Dale Carnegie, who advises me that it is foolish to criticize.
However, this morning I read an article published by Helen Regan at CNN titled UN warns that world risks becoming an 'uninhabitable hell' for millions unless leaders take climate action. The basis for this story comes from Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, to which Concordia awarded its 2020 Leadership Award for the Public Sector.
In the spirit of the letter that Mr. Swift penned, and after reading the irresponsible Alarmism emulating from the United Nations and Mr. Guterres, I would like to challenge Concordia (and now Mr. Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Institute).
There is a beautiful book written by Hans Rosling, a Swedish man, that I have grown to respect called Factfulness; Mr. Rosling was a key adviser to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the United Nations, and the World Economic Forum, to name a few. Factfulness was his final published work before his death in 2018 and I wish he were still here to temper those getting out over their skis.
“Fear plus urgency make for stupid, drastic decisions with unpredictable side effects. Climate Change is too important for that.”
Mr. Rosling went on to describe just how important Climate Change is to him, naming it alongside the risks of extreme poverty, world war, and a global pandemic (he essentially predicted the coronavirus pandemic in 2018) as the most important issues facing the world. This is a man who wrote,
“Crying wolf too many times puts at risk the credibility and reputation of serious climate scientists and the entire movement. With a problem as big as climate change, we cannot let that happen. Exaggerating the role of climate change in wars and conflicts, or poverty, or migration, means that the other major causes of these global problems are ignored, hampering our ability to take action against them. We cannot get into a situation where no one listens anymore. Without trust, we are lost.”
Mr. Rosling's book is riddled with examples of combining Fear and a Sense of Urgency. Each time, it resulted in horrible unintended consequences. In one example, his fear of Ebola caused him to shut down the roads in an African country, a decision he writes that he deeply regrets; that decision resulted in dozens of mothers and children dying in the rivers trying to get around the closures and to school. In more pointed examples, Mr. Rosling highlights just how Alarmism has perpetuated the very foundation of the Climate Change movement as well.
““We need to create fear!” that’s what Al Gore said to me at the start of our first conversation about how to teach climate change… but I couldn’t agree to what he had asked. I don’t like fear. Fear of war plus the panic of urgency made me [incorrectly] see a Russian pilot and blood on the floor. Fear of pandemic plus the panic of urgency made me close the road and cause the drownings of all those mothers, children, and fishermen. Fear plus urgency make for stupid, drastic decisions with unpredictable side effects. Climate change is too important for that.
Al Gore continued to press his case for fearful animated bubbles beyond the expert forecasts, over several more conversations until, finally, I closed the discussion down. ”
This Alarmism, perpetuated by Concordia's awardees, is not only irresponsible, but it is also dangerous. The reality is that it is not an existential crisis that we face, nor is it a crisis at all.
“It is important to understand all the things that climate change is not. It is not the end of the world. Humankind is not poised teetering on the edge of extinction. The planet itself is not in peril.”
The tell for people who espouse militancy for their cause is primarily found in their words; those who have adopted "Climate Crisis" have done so very deliberately (documented by the Guardian). Those same people are the ones who use the term "Existential Crisis" as well to describe the issue at hand. This is why I was so dismayed to learn that Concordia not only awarded Mr. Guterres an award but also Miss Christiana Figueres as well. Their Alarmism has been going on for ages, too.
These are figures who willfully ignore the sound advice of Mr. Rosling. These are figueres (pun intended) who use 'Climate Crisis' and 'Existential Threat' as part of their vernacular to incite fear and a sense of urgency. These figueres taint the national discourse on the subject, causing people to tune out altogether once their exaggerations are inevitably found out. In the words of Mr. Rosling, "without trust, we are lost."
“The overdramatic worldview in people’s heads creates a constant sense of crisis and stress. The urgent “now or never” feelings it creates lead to stress or apathy. “We must do something drastic. Let’s not analyze. Let’s do something.” or “It’s all hopeless. There’s nothing we can do. Time to give up.” Either way, we stop thinking, give in to our instincts, and make bad decisions. ”
All this Alarmism might cause one to be surprised to learn that Climate Change ranks as the 13th-most important issue facing the world (out of 17), according to the United Nations Sustainability Project. The most critical issue facing the world is by far poverty, a state that 2 billion of humanity still lives in. These people live without access to reliable electricity, food, or even the most basic hygiene. Entire villages still share a single toothbrush. Hunger follows closely in second place as voted by the United Nations' millions of stakeholders.
“Most concerning is the attempt to attract people to the cause by inventing the term “climate refugees.” My best understanding is that the link between climate change and migration is very, very weak. The concept of climate refugees is mostly a deliberate exaggeration, designed to turn fear of refugees into fear of climate change, and so build a much wider base of public support for lowering CO2 emissions. ”
As you have likely also observed, hyper-partisanship has permeated our national discourse. It is no coincidence that permeation increased hyperbolically since the adoption of social media platforms, either. This has been well documented in the Sundance Film Festival documentary purchased by Netflix called The Social Dilemma. If you haven't seen the film, I hope you do so swiftly (nailed that pun!). It is also the basis for a creative work I penned titled The Social Dilemma and The Office (yes, the Michael Scott one).
While we might ultimately disagree, I am committed to providing you an overwhelming mountain of evidence from the most trusted sources – the NOAA, NASA, IPCC, Stanford, Harvard, UT, Secretary Moniz, Vaclav Smil, Hans Rosling, and more – that climate change is not what people are being led to believe it is, and neither are the solutions.
I support a thesis that anthropogenic climate change is real. However, I also support how The Economist chose to characterize the crisis as well. These two positions are not mutually exclusive, as many would like to believe. Would you be willing to accept that ending global Poverty or Hunger is a more noble goal to achieve?
“Energy does not end poverty; but you can’t end poverty without energy. ”
I would like to take a moment to talk with you about why this conversation matters and why Alarmism is morally wrong, undermining the public's confidence in our scientific and governmental institutions. This is too important an issue to ignore.
“To be absolutely clear, I am deeply concerned about climate change because I am convinced it is real – as real as Ebola was in 2014. I understand the temptation to raise support by picking the worst-case projections and denying the huge uncertainties in the numbers. But those who care about climate change should stop scaring people with unlikely scenarios. Most people already know about and acknowledge the problem. Insisting on it is like kicking at an open door. It’s time to move on from talking talking talking. Let’s instead use that energy to solve the problem by taking action: action driven not by fear and urgency but by data and coolheaded analysis. ”
Today we find our Congress controlled by a single party which, at the moment, is signaling via The Green New Deal and similar policy positions that it believes they were elected to enact extremist environmental and energy policies for the American people. Hans Rosling taught us that this is a dangerous thing to do - to combine fear with a sense of urgency.
We still believe in capitalism, we believe in the American dream, we believe in individual liberties, and we believe in the Constitution. We do not want the federal government to dictate winners and losers; we do not want a homogenous energy policy that heavily incentivizes the buildout of energy-disparate wind and solar into heterogenous energy markets; we do not want to penalize energy-dense fuels like natural gas, via a carbon tax or otherwise, that provide American’s economic prosperity; and we do not want the federal government to inhumanely demonize millions of Americans who provide a way of life to those who are not energy literate enough to know better.
While it’s possible groups like 350.org have already cried wolf too many times, I’m writing you today to ask that we instead seek to re-instill confidence in our scientific and governmental institutions by removing extremism and alarmism from the national energy discourse.
Kind Regards,
Robert A. Hefner V
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