I’ll take climate change seriously the second you do…
France had a brutal summer. Something like two thousand excess deaths from the heat — genuinely awful, no jokes there. And the deputy mayor of Paris got up in front of the cameras, surveyed the tragedy in her own city, and identified the culprit.
America.
That’s right. French people died in France, in the French heat, and the responsible party was apparently American climate policy. Our emissions reached across the Atlantic and did the deed. I want to be fair to her — maybe it’s easier to blame a country eight time zones away than to explain why the City of Light couldn’t keep its own residents cool. But as a piece of reasoning, it’s remarkable.
My standing response to this — call it euro-whining — is pretty simple: I’ll take it seriously the exact second you take it seriously.
And I want to be careful here, because I’m not actually arguing the science one way or the other. Set my personal opinion aside completely. I’m just going to play the logic out to the end, the way nobody in polite company ever seems willing to.
If you genuinely believe this is a civilizational emergency — the clock-is-ticking, all-hands-on-deck kind — then let’s look honestly at what “solving” it would require. It would not require kneecapping the American economy to shave off a sliver of a percentage of global emissions. That’s the part that gets sold as “The Plan”, and it’s essentially a rounding error dressed up as salvation. What it would actually require is going to war with China. That’s the real math. China is the emissions story. And then you’d have to figure out India, which — and this isn’t a shot, it’s just true — can’t reliably count its own population, let alone its carbon output.
The biggest outputs, the ones that actually move the global number, come from exactly the countries that aren’t regulated and won’t be. They make lovely noises at the summits. We’re going to roll it back, we’re committed, here’s our pledge. And then they don’t. They never do. Meanwhile every serious climate campaigner in the West points the finger squarely at the one country already doing the most, and demands we do more.
So here’s the test I’ll offer. The day someone from the World Economic Forum walks up to a podium and says, with a straight face, “This is so urgent that we must go to war with China to stop them emitting” — that’s the day I’ll believe they think it’s an emergency. Because that’s what treating it as a true emergency would look like. Until someone is willing to say that out loud, I’m sorry, I simply can’t take the panic at face value. You don’t get to call something an existential threat and then cap your proposed solution at “make Americans feel bad and buy a smaller car.”
And I’m not even saying we should go to war with anybody. For the record, I’m against it — that path is worse for everyone, obviously. That’s the point. The people sounding the loudest alarm have quietly ruled out the only measure that would matter, which tells you exactly how urgent they actually consider it.
We’re supposed to lead the way, so we buy the solar panels and the wind turbines — which are largely manufactured in China, using coal, the burning of which produces the emissions we were trying to eliminate. So China burns the coal to build the green tech that we import to prove we’re going green. Round and round it goes, the snake eating its own tail, everyone very pleased with themselves.
So to the deputy mayor of Paris, and to everyone drafting off the same energy: I hear you. Truly. And the moment your side is prepared to name the actual price of the actual solution, I’ll be right there taking notes.
Until then — sell the Prius, buy some shorts. You’ll be fine.
Get more of Jobob’s perspective on today’s most important stories on Turning Point Tonight, which airs Monday through Friday evenings on Real America’s Voice.
