Why Climate Change Won't Be Stopped (2018)
People are missing the point of the article. It&#x27;s not about hipocrisy, or the ability of ground-up change to solve climate change, but instead about <i>the credibility</i> of people demanding sweeping government intervention to address climate change. When someone who advocates for banning abortion turns out to have paid to have his girlfriend have an abortion, it obviously doesn&#x27;t have any bearing on the moral question of abortion. Nor does it have any significant aggregate effect on the number of abortions. But it eliminates that person&#x27;s credibility, for the simple reason that it highlights the negative implications of the person&#x27;s proposed policy. It underscores that having an unplanned child can drastically change the course of a person&#x27;s life in ways they may be desperate to avoid. And it suggests that the person may not even believe their moral premise, and wants to ban abortion as a pretext for something else. By contrast, people who lead by example signal that they&#x27;re willing to live with the consequences of the policies they wish to impose on everyone--and in the process demonstrate to people that those consequences can be lived with.<p>The same thing is true for climate change. When people who demand a war-time mobilization of the economy to combat climate change still emit gigatons going on foreign vacations, that signals to people one of two things. One, the reduction in standard of living required to address climate change must be enormous, because even those who believe catastrophe is at our doorstep won&#x27;t suffer that reduction unless the government forces them to. Or two, those people don&#x27;t really believe climate change will be that bad, and their demand for government intervention is a pretext for something else.