The bureaucracy is not the thing
It’s possible that the US leaving UNFCCC is a great idea, it’s possible it’s a terrible one. Here, we’re not expressing a view on that either way. Rather, we want to point out the fundamental mistake being made by some criticising the decision.
A colossal own goal’: Trump’s exit from global climate treaties will have little effect outside US
As expected, The Guardian is against the idea.
The US president’s decision to withdraw from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the world’s leading body of climate scientists, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, will not alter any of those scientific realities.
Nor will it do much, at least in the short term, to alter the economic reality that the push to a low-carbon world is proving an engine of growth for scores of countries. Global investment in low-carbon energy now outstrips that in fossil fuels by two to one.
Apparently the fight against climate change will continue unaltered.
While the political aspect of climate action struggles to gain top-level attention in a world beset by conflict, the economics of the low-carbon transition have taken on a life of their own.
Again, all will carry on therefore.
Investment in low-carbon forms of energy is now above $2tn a year, dwarfing the $1tn spent on fossil fuels. Renewable energy alone grew 15% last year, accounting for more than 90% of all new power generation capacity. Electric vehicles now account for about a fifth of new cars sold around the world.
Climate change is being solved. And yet apparently there’s some disastrous cost associated with this decision:
Simon Stiell, the UN’s climate chief, said US citizens and companies would bear the impact. “It is a colossal own goal which will leave the US less secure and less prosperous,” he said. “It will mean less affordable energy, food, transport and insurance for American households and businesses as renewables keep getting cheaper than fossil fuels, as climate-driven disasters hit American crops, businesses and infrastructure harder each year and as oil, coal and gas volatility drives more conflicts, regional instability and forced migration.”
It’s not really possible for both to be true. Either climate change is being dealt with and will continue to be dealt with on that global scale or, if not, then disaster will strike the US - and other places given the global nature of the problem.
If you say that everything will still carry on whether the US is in the UNFCCC or not then the US being in the UNFCCC or not is an irrelevance. If you insist that the US not being in the UNFCCC will bring about floods, droughts, wildfires and cats lying down with dogs then that is to insist that the actions against climate change will not continue as they are. This is one of those either/or times.
We take this to be an example of a greater and usual failing among a certain sort - to confuse the bureaucracy for the thing. Being a member of a committee, even the existence of a committee, is not, at all, the same thing as something being done, a problem being solved. Thinking that it is leads to the gross error of believing that the setting up of a committee solves the problem - something we insist is one of the grand banes of our current society.
Of course, this logical error can be fixed by making one assumption, that those whining are doing so over the loss of the US paying for large parts of the UNFCCC. No bureaucrat likes to see a falling budget, of course. But equally of course, the world is not run by the preferences of bureaucrats over their budgets now, is it.
Is it.
Tim Worstall