This speech by Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) has the political world abuzz:
If you don’t want to sit through it, there’s also a transcript. On an aesthetic level, I suppose the Senator did an OK job, although that’s not really his area of expertise. I’m sure his staff enjoyed this assignment. I was vaguely amused. I also saw mention of this on Colbert last night, and, on review, I think Colbert was a somewhat unfair to the Senator.
However, and I believe the Senator is no longer being satirical at this juncture, I was horrified at his conclusion. I suppose I shouldn’t be – his training is in law, neither climate science nor demographic analysis nor ecology nor, since he mentions he believes this is an engineering problem, an engineer. When he calls for, in very libertarian language, more people:
And problems of human imagination are not solved by more laws, but by more humans!
More people mean bigger markets for innovation.
More babies mean more forward-looking adults – the sort we need to tackle long-term, large scale problems.
American babies, in particular, are likely going to be wealthier, better educated, and more conservation-minded than children raised in still-industrializing regions.
As economist Tyler Cowen recently wrote on this very point, “by having more children, you are making your nation more populous – thus boosting its capacity to solve [climate change].”
he’s calling not for a solution, but for an exacerbation of the problem. At it’s root, climate change is not about burning fossil fuels or even mass consumption – tragically, it’s about too many people. If we had only a third, or even half the population we actually have, and they were steady state, and our technology more or less the same, would we be facing a climate change problem? Almost certainly not. In fact, the Spring 2019 issue of American Archaeology, not yet online, has an article which inadvertently makes my point for me. I plan to publish a post using material from that article when AA’s publisher, the Archaeological Conservancy, gets their act together and puts it online (if they do – some articles don’t make it online). It has to do with the severe reduction in North American population when the diseases of Europe were let loose among the Indians, and how that affected the climate.
But back to the point, his call for more people and a magical creation of a solution is rather like, after jumping out of an airplane sans parachute, calling for everyone else to jump out as well and we’ll develop a solution before we hit.
