Nicholas Goldberg: Americans don’t care about climate change. Here’s how to wake them up.
Nicholas Goldberg is the editor-at-large of the American Thinker and a contributing writer at The American Conservative. He is the author of a three-volume history of conservatism titled The Republican Intellectual Movement, published in 1988 by HarperCollins.
Nicholas Goldberg is a journalist and editor-at-large for The American Conservative. A former newspaper editor and writer, he writes regularly for The American Thinker. His books include The Conservative Intellectual Movement: Intellectual Leaders and the Struggle for the Soul of the Conservative Movement (HarperCollins, 1988); and The Conservative Intellectual Movement (HarperCollins, 2006). He can be reached through Twitter (@NicholasGoldberg) or by email ([email protected]).
The latest example of this problem was the article by Judith Miller that appeared in the New York Times last week. And then yesterday, came the resignation of the head of the EPA, as well as of several EPA field operations chiefs. And now, a report in the New York Times that the EPA had been ordered to conduct a “war on evidence” against scientists in its fight against climate change.
I have a question: Why? Why are we destroying our own economy to save the world’s from climate change?
Climate change and global warming are among the least important things in the world. At most we can claim that they will affect a few people around the world. Most of these people will be the tiny island nations whose fragile economies will be wrecked by global warming. Even after you take into account the effects that climate change may actually have on some other areas of the world, such as the melting of ice caps, the question is still, “Why do we need to worry about global warming?” If we are going to worry about global warming, we should worry about terrorism — not terrorism but climate change. Here, too, the problem is that climate change and terrorism have far more in common than they have differences. There are no good terrorists, just as there are no good climate change deniers.
And no, the U.S. doesn’t do the best job of protecting its citizens from terrorists. The U.S. has no real security against terrorism, whereas the U.S. has had a poor track record of protecting American citizens from climate change. There is not a single U.S.