August 2, 2023

There have been an estimated 27 billion people on earth over the course of human existence.  The world’s population today is approximately 8 billion, with 19 billion human beings having preceded us on our planet.  Each of those lives, no matter how modest, was a miraculous affair filled with hope, joy, pain, and perhaps disappointment — but nonetheless life.  Each was important, and the most important thing was, and is, liberty.

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Long before charters and constitutions devoted to liberty, Sophocles wrote something similar: “Numberless are the world’s wonders, but none more wonderful than man” (“Ode to Man” from Antigone).  It is human life that gives meaning to our planet: human beings are the culmination of a process that began 3.7 billion years ago.  Despite the belief of climate alarmists that the Earth is overpopulated and that we should be made to feel guilty for using the Earth’s resources, we humans have a right to live securely and comfortably, and doing so requires the use of fossil fuels and other resources.

Watching a 14-year-old gymnast, a spelling bee winner, a superb tennis champion still in his teens — as were Federer and Nadal, and now Alcarez, when they became champions — reassures us as to the future of mankind.  Despite the inevitable challenges — the economic recessions, wars, and social unrest to come — humanity has the capacity to innovate, create, and survive.  Barring an all-out nuclear war or virus so deadly that few survive it, it’s likely that human civilization will continue to grow and develop.

I don’t spend much time thinking about global catastrophes that I can’t control, but I do think of what life was like for those who came before us.  How was existence for the neolithic humans at the end of the Great Ice Age?  What was life like for the ordinary Egyptian under the pharaoh?  What did the early settlers face on the American frontier?

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My paternal grandparents were tenant farmers caught in the destruction of the Dust Bowl.  They survived, just barely, and went on to lead better lives when they migrated from western Oklahoma.  Still, they were never even mildly affluent.  When, in her sixties, my grandmother acquired electricity and running water — and a washing machine — she felt privileged, and she was.  Around 60% of the world’s population today goes without indoor plumbing, and 13% lack electricity.  The comforts of modern life depend on fossil fuels, which supply cheap and reliable power for all our needs.  Our goal should be to extend modern conveniences to more people, not to ban appliances and make electricity more expensive.  People matter, not the assertion that temperatures have risen or fallen by a few degrees over a century and a half.

It disturbs me to hear privileged coastal elites, including U.N. secretary general António Guterres, complain about the Earth’s climate having reached the “boiling point.”  Today’s temperatures are less than what my grandparents and parents experienced in the 1930s and no more than what I grew up with — without air-conditioning — in the 1950s, a decade that was called the “Little Dust Bowl,” and for good reason.

I don’t know Secretary Guterres, but I doubt if he has ever driven a tractor from dawn to dusk or had to budget every dollar, as those who came before me have done.  Perhaps he has never grown his own food, as I have, or washed his own dishes and his own clothes or cleaned his own house.  The same goes for our current “Special Presidential Envoy for Climate,” John Kerry — a veteran of private jets, second homes, and lavish Paris conference dinners.

The real crisis today, as a thoughtful piece in Britain’s Telegraph newspaper points out, is not the “boiling point” — an absurdity, since at sea level water boils at 212 degrees, while the highest temperature ever recorded on earth is 134 degrees (in Death Valley, California).  The real danger is that the political elite will use climate change as a pretext to seize total control of the economy and of our private lives, and that working people like my grandparents and myself will be forced into climate change servitude.  That means dictating where we live, what car we must drive, what we learn in school, how businesses operate, how retirement savings are invested, what can be spoken in public or private, and thousands of other aspects of everyday life.  That is the essence of totalitarianism, and it is exactly what climate alarmists wish to impose.

Our 19 billion ancestors survived the Great Ice Age, the Medieval Warm Period, the Great Plague, infant mortality, hunger, war, and poverty.  Those ancestors were resourceful and persevering, and they were determined to survive and, if possible, to make better lives for themselves and their descendants, as they did for us.  They endured decades when the climate was extremely hot — and cold — but no one proposed that humans could lower temperatures by burning less wood, or coal, or whale oil, or natural gas.  Nor did they want to lower temperatures: through most of human history, mankind has suffered from temperatures that were dangerously cold.

Our ancestors knew better.  It’s only today that people seem so afraid of life that they’re willing to submit to the whims of climate “experts” rather than rely on their own senses.  Life is a wondrous adventure, as Sophocles understood, filled with joy, pain, accomplishment, and disappointment, but it will only be enslavement once the climate extremists seize control of it.