In March of 2024 the Breakthrough Institute’s Ted Nordhaus published an article entitled “Did Exxon Make It Rain Today?” The gist of the article is his claim that most media coverage of climate change catastrophizes the issue, and that climate scientists are complicit in those exaggerations. Nordhaus accurately observes that “[y]es, there are many types of disasters, like hurricanes and floods, that are causing greater economic costs in many places than they used to. But this is almost entirely because the places that are most exposed to weather disasters have far more people and far more wealth in harm’s way than they used to.”
But Nordhaus also adds, very misleadingly, that “the list of the worst climate-related disasters in U.S. history, those that claimed a thousand or more American lives, is dominated by events that occurred before 1940,” and that “the heavy concentration of catastrophic disasters prior to the period when climate change began to significantly warm the planet …”
Readers of that disingenous phrasing might come away with the misimpression that intensity of certain kinds of severe weather has not increased was the climate has warmed. Just as the dollar value of storm damage seems to overstate the relative intensity of natural disasters in modern, wealthier societies, so does the number of deaths understate their intensity. The Galveston hurricane wouldn’t have killed 8,000 people today, but that doesn’t make it a weaker hurricane.
Nordhaus’ article followed by a several months a piece by BI’s Patrick Brown claiming that science journals reward climate catastrophism, and that he had demonstrated as much by publishing in the journal Nature a misleading study that exaggerated the role of climate in wildfires. The journal’s editors offered evidence rebutting Brown’s claim, but by then Brown’s claims had spread (like wildfire?) across conservative online media.
BI scholars and analysts have called themselves “ecomodernists” because they believe that most proponents of the energy transition undervalue the importance of technology and economic growth in promoting human flourishing. In Climate of Contempt I briefly touch on the place of BI in energy transition politics in the United States, and opponents’ sometimes derisive dismissal of BI as a bunch of “nuclear bros” because they championed nuclear energy earlier and more enthusiastically than other environmental organizations.
The nuclear industry suffered some cost-related setbacks over the last year. Its first new commercial generators in decades cost more than twice the advertised price. And the most promising project based upon a next generation small modular reactor design was abandoned in late 2023. But lately nuclear energy seems to be enjoying another moment. Sudden, sharp increases in projected electricity demand have policymakers looking favorably at new nuclear plants once again. A chunk of demand growth comes from the needs of A.I., and some A.I. companies have plans to use dedicated nuclear generators to power their operations because nuclear power lacks both weather dependency and carbon emissions. All of which seems to be giving a boost to next generation nuclear companies.
In so far as ecomodernists challenge climate activists’ under-attention to tradeoffs between decarbonization and other important values, I am sympathetic to their message. But to me it seems that over time BI’s message has become more shrill and hyperbolic, perhaps because it isn’t resonating in an online world that rewards simple, emotional messages.
I don’t recall ever meeting Nordhaus or Brown, or former BI principal Michael Shellenberger, who parted ways with Nordhaus years ago to form a more bluntly anti-renewables organization called Environmental Progress. But from afar each man appears (to me) to have moved from a kind of moderate, pro-capitalist environmentalism toward ever-sharper disagreement with and criticism of the climate coalition, though each has moved at a different pace.
Shellenberger, in particular, has moved quickly beyond a focus on energy transition issues toward a kind of generalized anti-progressivism, and so has become a favorite of anti-energy transition voices like Alex Epstein and Republicans generally. Other BI experts have long criticized the association between climate change and severe weather, but less carefully and circumspectly over time. I find this odd, since that relationship is founded on such simple science.
Clearly global warming doesn’t cause individual hurricanes, droughts, wildfires and floods. But just as clearly, a warmer earth makes many of those events more intense, all else equal. Warmer oceans expand, increasing the coastal damage done by storm surges. Warmer oceans also strengthen hurricanes. And warmer air holds more moisture,[1] leading to higher volume rainfall events and flooding. Hotter temperatures increase drought and wildfire risk in low-rainfall locations. (NASA explains the relationship between climate change and severe weather here.) None of this is rocket science.
BI is an important voice in debates over energy transition tradeoffs, and the casual dismissals of its arguments online don’t help anyone learn; nor do they promote the kind of discussion that must happen to get to net zero. But as the Internet pushes public debate to the ideological poles, eco-modernists (like everyone else) should try to avoid those psycho-social forces. They don’t need to choose between “eco” and “modernism.” – David Spence
[1] Technically, water molecules in warmer air do not condense as easily. It is in that sense that warmer air “holds” more moisture.
