States and localities across the country are continuing the fight against man-made climate change in the aftermath of President Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris Agreement on climate change. If the federal government won’t take action on climate change, state and local governments will. That’s a good thing, even for those who think that man-made climate change is nonsense.
The Totalitarian Impulse
Those who advocate action against climate change are totalitarians crusading under the guise of compassion. Because the fight against climate change has been couched as a fight for the survival of humanity, no expense can be spared, no sacrifice can be too great to turn the tide of climate change.
Cities and states that continue to take action against climate change will do so through taxation, legislation, and regulation that will harm small businesses, cost taxpayers more money, and lead to major job losses. Many of the areas at the forefront of the fight against climate change are already losing population, as their high taxes and restrictions on individuals and businesses make them less and less pleasant places to live. People still have the ability to vote with their feet, and they do so by moving to states with a lighter regulatory burden.
The Demise of the Climate Change Movement
This ability to move away from burdensome regulation will ultimately be the undoing of the climate change movement, which is why the opponents of climate change are trying to use multilateral agreements to take that option away from the citizenry. The Paris Agreement is no different than tactics we have seen used time and time again in various other policy areas. Taxation is one such area, where European nations acting through the European Union or developed nations acting through the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) attempt to collude to enact higher taxes in developed nations, punishing countries that try to keep tax rates low.
If freedom is the ability of people to escape draconian regulations then the climate change movement is one of the most anti-freedom movements there is. It seeks to impose burdens on people that they don’t wish to have placed on them, reducing their standard of living in order to achieve some arbitrary temperature goal. The climate change movement seeks to keep the climate at some constant temperature level, regardless of whether that is even feasible.
The climate change movement bases its public policy recommendations not on sound science or economics but on arbitrary decrees. Schemes like cap and trade or carbon taxes have no basis in sound economics or public policy, they are merely the dictates of governments that want to “do something” about climate change without concerning themselves with the effects of their actions.
Causes of Climate Change Still Not Well Known
The climate change movement thinks not only that mankind has affected the world’s climate through its actions, but that if mankind’s behavior can be manipulated by governments then climate change will cease. This is utter nonsense. There is still so little that is known about climate and how climate changes that the impact of human beings on climate still cannot be ascertained. The climate change movement is a modern-day King Canute, ordering the waves to be still, but Mother Nature will not comply.
The world exists and will continue to exist regardless of the existence of human beings. Were the entire human race to be wiped off the face of the planet, the world would go on. The climate would continue to change, with cooling and melting periods occurring periodically. Most people will come to that realization eventually and understand that government actions to combat climate change are meaningless. The more states and localities that undertake those pointless actions, the quicker that realization will come about.