Ask yourself a simple question: whenever a Catholic organization or group deliberately chooses to side with the interests of “Americanist” ideologies- materalism, individualism, nationalism, militarism– over the teachings of the Church in particular instances, is it not abundently clear where this group’s loyalty lies? Case in point: Richard John Neuhaus on the Iraq war. And now I see First Things has waded deeply into the tedious realm of global warming denialism, in the guise of an essay by Thomas Derr.
Derr’s essay is dreadful. He paints himself as an honest skeptic, not in the thrall of the oil industries, but a believer in the process of dilligent scientific inquiry. But his analysis shows total unfamiliarity with the literature, as he trots out the same tedious old stories of the medieval warming periods and mini ice ages as if nobody had heard of them before(actually, I became acquainted with these issues in Al Gore’s Earth in the Balance, all the way back in 1992). He brings nothing new to the table. Nowhere does he mention the position of the Church on global warming. Nowhere.
But what annoys me most about this essay is his complete distortion of the most important study to date on the economic costs of global warming, the UK Treasury-mandated Stern Review (see here for more details). Derr says the following:
“You’ve also been told that failing to curb our greenhouse-gas emissions will cause irreparable economic damage to the poorer nations, as the Stern Report insisted. But the report was savaged by economists. William Nordhaus of Yale is among those who fault Stern for using a near-zero social-discount rate, which would charge current generations for problems not likely to occur for two or three centuries hence. In fact, one can make the opposite case from Stern’s with greater plausibility: Economies would be wrecked by adoption of the Kyoto targets. Even a moderate stabilization of greenhouse-gas emissions would require something like a 60 to 80 percent reduction in fossil-fuel use, and standards of living would drop through the floor. Poor countries would have a nearly impossible time rising out of their poverty.”
In fact, Derr is engaging in a kind of obfuscation bordering on lying. Here is what the Stern Review actually says: By not acting, the costs of climate change will eat up 5 percent of global GDP each year, which could rise to 20 percent, taking into account a wider range of risks. In contrast, the cost of reducing greenhouse gas emissions would amount to 1 percent of global GDP a year. But what about poor countries? In fact, these are destined to suffer the most from inaction, as “hundreds of millions of people could suffer hunger, water shortages, and coastal flooding”. The most vulnerable, the poorest countries, will pay the price “earliest and most”, even though they are least responsible for global warming. And in fact, low-lying Pacific islands today are already beaing the brunt of climate change.
And the Stern report was not “savaged by economists”. I know of two serious critics, one of whom is William Nordhaus. But look at the grounds for Norhaus’s critcism: he thinks the discount rate used by Stern should have been much higher. But the Stern Review made the choice it did on ethical, not economic, grounds. In other words, they refused to discount the future simply because it is the future. Putting it another way, they held that the welfare of future generations should be treated on a par with our own. Of course, if we argue that furture generations don’t matter as much, then of course the need to action will be lowered, as we will be paying the price and not harvesting the full reward. I believe Stern’s assumption is perfectly in line with Catholic social teaching: our lives are not worth more than the lives of those who have not yet been born. Durr seems to think otherwise. It is a selfish, individualistic position. Incidentally, the reluctance of politicians to take action is exactly because they discount the future too heavily– they do not see far beyond the next electoral cycle.
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