The Convenient Truth

No easy answers to climate change questions

Jonathan Rauch | March 23, 2007

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Roger Pielke Jr., a University of Colorado professor of environmental studies, points out that many communities around the world are already maladapted to their climates. (Just ask New Orleans.) In the 1990s, he notes, extreme weather events caused more than 300,000 deaths; malaria currently kills between 1 million and 2.6 million people a year. Climate change will affect those problems, but on the margins. Pielke cites a study finding that the global population at risk of malaria would double by 2080 without global warming; climate change increases malaria risk by a further 7 percent.

Climate change, then, is a reason to do more of what makes sense anyway: reduce coastal vulnerability and strengthen homes to minimize hurricane damage, improve public health and develop drugs to fight malaria, and so on. There is nothing radical about any of this. No rethinking of capitalism is required.

Given how neatly adaptation dovetails with the sustainability agenda, and given its immense potential to relieve whatever human suffering that global warming causes, one might think environmentalists would tout it to the skies. Some do, but many seem to believe that reducing harm distracts from the real job, which is to reduce emissions. In a blog post last year (at gristmill.org), an environmentalist named David Roberts made the point with startling candor. "In an ideal, abstract policy debate, sure, I'd say we should boost our attention to adaptation," he wrote. "But in the current political situation, I don't want to provide any ammunition for the moral cretins who are squirming frantically to avoid policies that might impact their corporate donors."

This is like denigrating HIV treatment and blocking condom distribution in order to discourage promiscuity. And it is every bit as callous and irresponsible. Where climate change is concerned, the truth -- and this truth really is inconvenient, or at least sad -- is that too many activists and politicians mistake panic for virtue.

© Copyright 2007 National Journal

Jonathan Rauch is a senior writer and columnist for National Journal and a frequent contributor to Reason. The article was originally published by National Journal.