Steven Pinker, Progress and "Climate Alarmism"

Steven Pinker recently tweeted against what he calls "climate alarmism" and in favor of two books by opponents of effective climate action who have been thoroughly debunked by climate scientists. This sort of science denial seems odd coming from someone who claims to be a supporter of enlightenment and reason, but it is actually consistent with what he has said in the past and with what he is saying now about history being the story of progress. 

In his book The Blank Slate, he parrots conventional conservative arguments against environmentalism, focusing on environmental issues that were current in the 1970s, when he was a graduate student and formed his political opinions, and ignoring those that are most important today. He attacks environmentalists for what he calls their “Malthusian” predictions that there are limits on resources, criticizing the Club of Rome Report named The Limits of Growth, which focused national attention on the issue when it was published in 1972. To refute this report, he mentions the famous wager between Paul Ehrlich, an early environmentalist, and Julian Simon, a fellow at the free market Cato Institute, about whether the price of natural resources would rise in real terms between 1980 and 1990; they bet about the price of five strategic metals, and Ehrlich lost all five bets, because (Pinker says) “Malthusian prophesies ignore the effect of technological change in increasing the resources that support a comfortable life.” (Blank Slate, p.237)  Pinker mentions in passing that The Limits of Growth said that uncontrolled growth would ultimately cause both resource shortages and more pollution than the earth could absorb - but he goes on to ignore pollution and only discuss resources.

Yet elementary economics tells us that the free market gives businesses an incentive to increase the supply of a resource when shortages drive its price up, but that the market has no mechanism that gives businesses an incentive to reduce pollution. Environmentalists are clearly right to say that government must control pollution. In 1990, the United States set up a cap-and-trade program to reduce the emissions that caused acid rain, and it worked: acid rain is no longer killing our forests and lakes, as it was in the 1980s. By the time Pinker wrote The Blank Slate, environmentalists considered global warming to be the greatest environmental threat and were calling for cap-and-trade to control it also. In fact, California passed a law using cap-and-trade to control greenhouse gas emissions just four years after this book was published.

When it comes to global warming and other problems caused by pollution, Pinker is clearly wrong to attack environmentalists and claim that new technology in itself will solve the problems. Yes, we do need to develop new clean energy technologies to control global warming, but the market does not provide the incentive needed to shift to clean energy quickly enough. It will remain cheaper for quite a while to keep existing dirty power plants than to replace them with clean energy, so we need the government to provide incentives to shift to clean energy in time to avoid the worst effects of global warming. The entire world realizes this, with the exception of the Trump administration, which is why the world adopted the Paris agreement in 2016 and governments worldwide pledged to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

More recently, Pinker has finally joined the entire world and realized that it is necessary to control global warming, but he obviously is still reluctant to admit how big a problem it is and to support putting a price on carbon, the most effective way to deal with it. Instead, he supports writers who say that nothing is needed but more technological breakthroughs, consistent with his belief that the world is inevitably getting better, as he argues in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature. 

He is right to argue in this book that people have become more humane over the long course of history, but he doesn't seem to understand the cause - and he doesn't understand the difference between that long course of history and our situation today. 

Over the course of history, technology improved, so people became more prosperous and could afford to be more humane. They didn't have to be like the Vikings or the Mongol Horde, who had no way to improve their own situation apart from invading, pillaging, and killing others. Military technology also improved, but before the twentieth century, it did not improve enough to cause mass destruction. Technology that improved production had destructive side-effects, but before the twentieth century, they were just local - polluted air or water that just killed people nearby. In both cases, the costs of improved technology were clearly outweighed by the benefit of increased production. 

Today, we have gone further. We have reached the point where we have weapons of mass destruction such as hydrogen bombs, poison gas, and bioweeapons that can wipe out entire populations. Everyone agrees they should be controlled, and we have done a good job of controlling gas and germ warfare, but we are not doing a very good job of controlling nuclear weapons, as rogue states like North Korea and Iran develop nuclear bombs. If we project current trends, we have to expect that there will ultimately - perhaps in a few centuries - be widespread proliferation of nuclear weapons that will probably be used in wars between small nations, with radiation spreading around the world. And if we project historic trends, we can also expect new military technologies to eventually be developed that are even more destructive than any we have today. 

Likewise, we have reached the point where the side effects of technologies that increases production have side effects that can effect the whole planet rather than just being local, for example by destroying the ozone layer or causing global warming. We have done a good job of protecting the ozone layer, but we are not doing as good a job of controlling global warming. It seems inevitable that we will have more than 1.5 degrees of warming, though we still have some chance of limiting warming to 2 degrees, avoiding its worst effects and avoiding feedback loops that would make warming much worse, such as melting of the worlds permafrost, which would release more carbon than is already in the atmosphere - and release it in the form of methane, which causes much more warming than carbon dioxide. 

Pinker's optimistic faith that progress is inevitable makes him reluctant to deal with global warming - and so makes it less likely that we will avoid its worst effects. 

We have reached a point where there is a very obvious answer to the question of whether or not the world will continue to become better - and the answer is that it depends on what decisions we humans make. Our technology has become so powerful that it can cause immense good or immense destruction. If we limit destructive technologies, we can eliminate the poverty that has stultified most people since the beginning of history and have a world with unprecedented prosperity and peace. If we fail to limit destructive technology, we can have nuclear war or environmental breakdown that causes billions of deaths and leaves a miserable world for those who remain alive. This is the permanent situation of the human race in the future: whether or not we do deal with global warming and nuclear weapons successfully, we will continue to develop new technologies that are even more powerful than those we have today and that can bring even greater benefits or even greater destruction. 

The irony is that people like Steven Pinker, who hesitate to control destructive technologies because they think history is the story of progress, make it more likely that future generations will look back on history as the story of misery and destruction.