Robert Wilson is nothing if not grumpy, and his grumpiness can lead him occasionally to a kind of foolishness that he might have avoided if he had taken a deep breath before clicking on the publish button.
Today's post is a case in point. Entitled Dear climate change deniers, please spare me your faux concern for the poor it is something of a rant at "right wing climate change deniers/skeptics/lukewarmers" (he forgot "eeevil" and "big-oil-funded"). According to Wilson, BH readers and people like that are actually cold, callous, heartless bad people who are unconcerned about our fellow human beings unless they are, like us, bloated plutocrats. What seems to have pushed him over the edge was a tweet from Junkscience's Stephen Milloy, which had a poverty-stricken Indian lady asking "Who exactly is 'the Pope' and why doesn't he want me to have electricity?". It does look rather as if Wilson's ire has been prompted more by the fact that these are difficult questions for global warming adherents to answer rather than anything else. Certainly it's a crashing logical fallacy to respond as Wilson does:
Bring up climate change, and these people will rush to defend the interests of the poor. It’s the first port of call. Bring up welfare, the state of public health provision, foreign aid, disability benefits, free school meals, inequality, the state of public housing, and this concern for the poor is absent. In fact, bring up these other issues, and these bleeding hearts will be in a mad rush to do all they can to screw the poor.
Apart from Milloy, Wilson's considerable ire is directed at Matt Ridley. But while I don't hang out at Junkscience much these days, I'm much more familiar with Ridley's output, so I was rather taken aback by Wilson's case against him (if I can dignify it with that term):
It is perfectly consistent to complain about rich land owners making money from wind farms, while you yourself being a rich landowner who makes money from coal mining on the land you inherited.
So, here is a challenge for a social scientist. I have a hypothesis and I believe it needs to be tested.
Here it is
Right wing climate change deniers/skeptics/lukewarmers show orders of magnitude more concern for the poor when they are writing about climate change than any other issue
This hypothesis can easily be tested by compiling the inconsistent and hypocritical comment pieces by Matt Ridley, the land owner referenced above, et al.
As a way of advertising that your rant has not been preceded by any great thought, this is going to take some beating. Can Wilson really not detect a qualitative different between a subsidy, extracted mainly from the poor via the tax system and handed to the wealthy, and a contractual payment, negotiated freely on both sides and not involving the poor at all? And where is Wilson's moral compass pointing if he cannot?
Moreover, I have at hand a copy of Ridley's Rational Optimist, which readers are no doubt aware is a natural history of how mankind became wealthy and healthy, and something of a primer in how poverty can be reduced. It's hard to open the book without reading discussion of the plight of the poor and tales of how poverty has been done away with, often unwittingly; or very often, how it has been exacerbated by those who have been claiming at the tops of their voices that they are the only ones who care.
It's also worth mentioning this excerpt from the front page of Matt Ridley's website:
Supporting Rational Optimism
I have donated roughly half of the advance royalty received for my book The Rational Optimist to two charities (here and here) that are helping those in need, especially in Africa, to trade, farm and innovate. If you like The Rational Optimist and are feeling generous, please take a look at their work.
I also support small local charitable causes in south-east Northumberland through the Ridley Family Charity.
So it's Ridley thinking and doing, versus Wilson venting and venting.
Case closed, I would say