RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/follow-the-science-leads-to-ruin-climate-environment-policy-3f427c05?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

More than one million people die in traffic accidents globally each year. Overnight, governments could solve this entirely man-made problem by reducing speed limits everywhere to 3 miles an hour, but we’d laugh any politician who suggested it out of office. It would be absurd to focus solely on lives saved if the cost would be economic and societal destruction. Yet politicians widely employ the same one-sided reasoning in the name of fighting climate change. It’s simply a matter, they say, of “following the science.”

That assertion lets politicians obscure—and avoid responsibility for—lopsided climate-policy trade-offs. Lawmakers contend that because climate change is real and man-made, it is only scientifically logical that the world end fossil-fuel use. Any downsides are a mathematical inevitability rather than something politicians chose to inflict on constituents.

The Biden administration has set the goal of achieving a net-zero emissions economy by no later than 2050. President Biden has pushed costly yet ineffective programs such as the Inflation Reduction Act to reduce U.S. emissions. If you ask the president’s outgoing climate envoy, John Kerry, there is no alternative. He claimed only a couple of weeks ago that “nothing that we are doing, nothing that President Biden has sought to do, has any political motivation or ideological rationale. It’s entirely a reaction to science, to the mathematics and physics that explain what is happening.”

This way of thinking conflates climate science and climate policy. Man-made climate change exists, but what societies do in response is still a matter of choice. When politicians tell us we must “follow the science” toward extreme climate policies, they are really trying to shut down the discussion of enormous, unsustainable costs. We shouldn’t let them.