Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

Climate justice warriors, indulging the fantasy that the developing world will do just that, advocate a regime of “sustainable development.” As Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus satirize it, that consists of “small co-ops in the Amazon forest where peasant farmers and Indians would pick nuts and berries to sell to Ben and Jerry’s for their ‘Rainforest Crunch’ flavor.”⁶¹ They would be allowed solar panels that could light an LED or charge a cell phone, but nothing more. Needless to say, the people who actually live in those countries have a different idea. Escaping from poverty requires abundant energy. The proprietor of HumanProgress, Marian Tupy, points out that in 1962 Botswana and Burundi were equally destitute, with an annual per capita income of $70, and neither emitted much CO2. By 2010, Botswanans earned $7,650 a year, 32 times as much as the still-poor Burundians, and they emitted 89 times as much CO2.⁶²

Faced with such facts, climate justice warriors reply that rather than enriching poor nations, we should impoverish rich ones, switching back, for example, to “labor-intensive agriculture” (to which an appropriate reply is: You first). Shellenberger and Nordhaus note how far progressive politics has moved from the days in which rural electrification and economic development were among its signature projects: “In the name of democracy it now offers the global poor not what they want—cheap electricity—but more of what they don’t want, namely intermittent and expensive power.”⁶³

Economic progress is an imperative in rich and poor countries alike precisely because it will be needed to adapt to the climate change that does occur. Thanks in good part to prosperity, humanity has been getting healthier (chapters 5 and 6), better fed (chapter 7), more peaceful (chapter 11), and better protected from natural hazards and disasters (chapter 12). These advances have made humanity more resilient to natural and human-made threats: disease outbreaks don’t become pandemics, crop failures in one region are alleviated by surpluses in another, local skirmishes are defused before they erupt into war, populations are better protected against storms, floods, and droughts. Part of our response to climate change must be to ensure that these gains in resilience continue to outpace the threats that a warming planet will throw at it. Every year that developing countries get richer, they will have more resources for building seawalls and reservoirs, improving public health services, and moving people away from rising seas. For that reason they must not be kept in energy poverty—but neither does it make sense for them to raise incomes with massive coal burning that will overwhelm everyone later with weather disasters.⁶⁴

How, then, should we deal with climate change? Deal with it we must. I agree with Pope Francis and the climate justice warriors that preventing climate change is a moral issue because it has the potential to harm billions, particularly the world’s poor. But morality is different from moralizing, and is often poorly served by it. (The Pope’s encyclical backfired, decreasing concern about climate change among the conservative Catholics who were aware of it.)⁶⁵ It may be satisfying to demonize the fossil fuel corporations that sell us the energy we want, or to signal our virtue by making conspicuous sacrifices, but these indulgences won’t prevent destructive climate change.

The enlightened response to climate change is to figure out how to get the most energy with the least emission of greenhouse gases. There is, to be sure, a tragic view of modernity in which this is impossible: industrial society, powered by flaming carbon, contains the fuel of its own destruction. But the tragic view is incorrect. Ausubel notes that the modern world has been progressively decarbonizing.