For decades, the Wall Street Journal’s opinion page has poo-pooed the need for climate action. For every middling, pro-market piece about how a little tweak to capitalism (via a price on carbon) can solve climate change, the paper has then published at least a dozen essays about how climate change is not even a big problem or opposing real solutions.
As one of the biggest papers on the planet, and one that caters explicitly to a “powerful,” “affluent and influential audience,” the Journal (unfortunately) has an outsized role in shaping what leaders consider “serious” climate policy. (For example, the paper ran an op-ed last year by French President Emmanuel Macron and Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness that argued the private sector should be mobilized to develop solutions.)
Imagine our surprise, then, when editorial page writer Barton Swaim published a column on Friday embracing Greta Thunberg’s scolding of world leaders who, in effect, have adopted the Journal’s preferred position of free market, private-sector policies!
Swaim actually, sort of, agrees with Greta, in so much as she calls out world leaders for failing to take action proportionate to the climate challenge. Swaim claims that the elites can avoid making personal sacrifices by arguing that such sacrifices are pointless because “real progress requires that developed and developing nations all agree to huge decreases in carbon emissions.”
But Swaim then somehow comes to the conclusion that meaningful global cooperation “will never happen,” despite the fact that exactly that happened in 2015 when every nation in the world signed up for the Paris agreement. No nation, Swaim writes, “can be expected to cripple its economy on the dubious promise that other nations cripple theirs.” Instead, climate action has been “reduced to making piecemeal demands for more regulatory powers.”
So Swaim ignores the Paris Agreement, which the Journal has repeatedly and consistently attacked since its inception in 2015, while also misrepresenting the impact of climate action (as opposed to inaction) as an economic drag instead of an engine.
Swaim is all for Greta’s scolding of “the swarms of diplomatic elite” who haven’t made draconian policies a priority because, according to him, they “don’t think we’re headed for doomsday.” If they did, Swaim claims, they would “engage in terrible and revolutionary deeds for the salvation of humanity: intimidation, brutality, sabotage.”
This is where the Journal’s farce is made plain. Having successfully spent decades working on behalf of the fossil fuel industry to argue that we need a small, market-based, piecemeal approach to climate policy, the paper’s opinion section is now turning around and saying that such an approach isn’t in any way a reasonable response to the size and scale of the problem.
At the same time, it’s claiming that if “their convictions were genuine,” leaders would go straight to “brutality” and “sabotage,” which is really just a slightly toned-down version of the (seemingly) satirical arguments from the far-right that we need to invade or bomb other countries to address climate change that we’ve talked about before.
So what we’re getting from this is that if you want the Journal’s editorial page to accept the reality of climate action, it’s time to break out the monkey wrenches and molotov cocktails.
Unless, of course, you think Swaim and the rest of the editorial team there are not actually offering advice in good faith, and are instead just testing out the latest excuse to allow the fossil fuel industry to continue profiting off of the death and destruction of people and the planet.
If you were to have listened to their (rare) suggestion for a free-market based climate policy, you’re exactly the sort of person Swaim thinks Greta was right for chastizing; someone who was stupid enough to fall for the “advice” of the very publication in which he writes.
Says a lot about the Journal that the opinion editors would accidentally admit that taking their climate writing seriously is a fool’s errand, and even more that Swaim apparently didn’t even realize that’s what he’s arguing.