Although the stepping off point for his latest Wall Street Journal column is the conclusion of the UN Climate Conference that just concluded in Glasgow, I think Walter Russell Mead is onto something you may find significant whether you believe in anthropogenic climate change or not:
If there is one thing the world should take away from the Glasgow COP26 summit, it’s that the most dangerous greenhouse-gas emissions come from the front ends of politicians, not the back ends of cows. Pandering is much more dangerous to human civilization than methane, strategic incompetence a graver threat than CO2; and dysfunctional establishment groupthink will likely kill more polar bears than all the hydrofluorocarbons in the world.
The 19th-century writer Thomas Carlyle wrote of an Age of Shams in prerevolutionary France, when the chattering classes and political leaders had so fundamentally lost contact with the underlying realities of the day that they could no longer understand the political challenges facing the French social order, much less respond to them. The elaborate rituals of court life in Versailles persisted, the ministers and bureaucrats went through the motions of governance, and intellectuals sparkled in the salons—while the French monarchy sailed, like the Titanic, toward its rendezvous with destiny.
COP26 was the kind of hollow ritual that characterized Carlyle’s Age of Shams. As one politician after another committed their countries to carefully crafted unenforceable pledges, none had the bad manners to observe that no country anywhere fully honored the climate pledges made with such fanfare in Paris six years ago. Even the pledges are insufficient to meet the stated goals of the U.N. climate process, and nobody is keeping the pledges.
Clearly, he sees it that way, too:
Climate change joins a growing list of vital problems that neither national governments nor international institutions seem competent to solve. The Covid pandemic left international institutions and national governments looking helpless. On the U.S. and European Union borders, mass migration produces a tragic mix of humanitarian crisis and populist rage. Almost 15 years after Vladimir Putin set about to dismantle the post-1990 order in Europe, neither the North Atlantic Treaty Organization nor the EU has found a way to counter him.
China has converted its illegal islands in the South China Sea into military bases without an adequate response. Iran roams unchecked across the Middle East. Developments in cyber and biowarfare threaten to make arms control obsolete. Jihadi violence rages in more places today than 20 years ago; democracy is receding globally, as much of Latin America sinks into deep crisis; ethnic and religious conflicts in countries like Ethiopia, Syria and Nigeria point to a dimming future for much of the world.
As I’ve said before I’m a ways and means kind of guy. Identifying the problem correctly is well and good but if there are no means that will effect the ends you seek you haven’t accomplished very much.
How do we end our “Age of Shams”? Some would blame it on the voters but I disagree, at least based on my experience here in Chicago. When you are faced with a candidate list of five candidates, all of whom are saying approximately the same things, whatever you’re basing your choice on it isn’t outcomes. Maybe its biography or race or ethnicity or whatever but it isn’t outcomes. As an old boss of mine used to say (hearkening back to an ad campaign that began generations ago) “They may promise you anything but what are you going to get? Arpège!” And note that the issue is a common one, not unique to the United States but afflicting France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Japan as well. Returning to Chicago as another data point I would point out that a) 30 years ago the voter turnout rate in my precinct was over 80%; now a 40% turn out to vote it’s a heavy turnout; and b) people are leaving Chicago. That sounds to me more like the voters are despairing rather than embracing their choices.
Maybe our Age of Shams will end the way the original one did. I hope not. My family has not tended to prosper in periods of chaos.
