Against Climate Piety

Climate policy needs to focus on human wellbeing and the environment, not the global temperature.

Editor’s Note: This is the third in a three-part series on how the Right should think about environmental and climate policy. Read Chris Barnard on Reclaiming Environmental Policy from the Left and Joseph Majkut on What the Science of Climate Change Really Tells Us.

What should we do about climate change? That question could alternatively be framed as one of two others: how should we limit rising global temperatures, or how should we protect the people and places a warmer world puts at risk? The first matters only as a means to the second. Yet for 30 years, mainstream climate policy has treated that means as an end in itself. Europe’s recent summer shows the cost of this confusion.

June and July 2026 were the hottest such period on record in Western Europe. Copernicus—the European Union’s climate service, not the sixteenth-century astronomer—puts the two months at 5 degrees Fahrenheit above the 1991–2020 average. While the tallies are still provisional, it seems that at least 35,000 excess deaths will be attributed to the heat. The deaths were primarily among the elderly, either alone in their homes or in care facilities. In Spain, 96% of the deaths were men and women over 65.

Of course, heat waves are not new, and they have always killed the old and the vulnerable. The New York heat wave of 1896 killed 1,500 people in ten days, more than the Great Chicago Fire, while a young police commissioner named Theodore Roosevelt handed out ice in the tenements.

But there are good reasons to expect more frequent and more extreme heat waves. Driven in significant part by rising atmospheric carbon dioxide, the average global surface temperature is now roughly 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than before industrialization. While that is not enough to raise the average temperature across most of the world to a dangerous point, it is a significant shift in the mean. And when the mean moves, the tail moves with it, so extreme temperatures that used to be rare become common.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change accordingly projected increases in hot extremes as “very likely” in 2007 and “virtually certain” in 2021. In March 2024, the European Environment Agency declared that “heat is the gravest and most urgent climate risk driver for human health” and predicted more deaths among “the elderly and people living in poorly built dwellings … or with inadequate access to cooling.” This summer, then, wasn’t a surprise.

What Money Can Buy

Europe cannot be accused of unwillingness to spend money on climate. Since 2007 the EU and its member states have committed on the order of two trillion euros to climate: €216 billion from the 2014–2020 EU budget, €658 billion from the 2021–2027 budget, plus roughly €700 billion in national subsidies to solar and wind, not to mention carbon prices, early nuclear and coal retirements, and fracking bans. Nearly all of this money went to what is called climate mitigation: the reduction of carbon emissions with the intention of slowing warming.

Emissions did fall. Between 1990 and 2024, the EU cut its total greenhouse gas emissions by more than a third, and its share of the world total fell from 15.1% to just 5.9%. But no one in Brussels ever thought the Green Deal would cool a European July, certainly not in our lifetimes. Run the EU’s original Paris pledge—a 40% cut by 2030, held for the rest of the century—through the standard climate model used in IPCC reports and the optimistic result is a 0.095 degrees Fahrenheit reduction in projected temperature rise by 2100, a quarter to a half of the year-to-year natural variability in the global average. In the shorter term the change is undetectable.

There was something that would have helped, however, and it is in 90% of American homes: air conditioning. In the United States, expected deaths from extreme heat fell about 75% over the twentieth century even as temperatures climbed. Residential air conditioning explains essentially the entire decline.

Across Europe, by contrast, air conditioning reaches only about 19% of homes. If European air conditioning coverage among the old had been raised from one household in five to nine in ten, it is likely around 60% of heat deaths, or about 21,000 of the 35,000 who died this summer, would have been prevented.

Installing all that AC would be expensive, but hardly impossible. To get a split unit installed in Europe costs around €1,000 to €1,500. The EU has 99 million people over 65 and nearly 28 million over 80. Installing a split unit in every household with a resident over 80, plus every care home, comes to roughly 14 million units and €15 to €20 billion. Covering every household with a resident over 65 would run €50 to €75 billion. That’s a lot of money, but it is only about one year of what Europe pays in subsidies to solar and wind.

Why didn’t Europe do it? Ask Europeans and most answer that the reason they haven’t bought an air conditioner is cost. Two decades of climate policy have driven electricity costs to as much as double or triple American levels, which makes running an air conditioner expensive. Other policy choices have added obstacles of their own. The EU’s F-gas regulation is phasing out the refrigerants used in the cheapest units. And running an AC unit through an August evening requires firm generating capacity, which Europe has spent the last 20 years retiring, largely in pursuit of its climate and anti-nuclear goals.

While many individuals might not have the resources to buy AC, Europe’s climate bureaucracy certainly does. An air conditioning program would have been a fraction of the cost of the overall climate program and far more effective. So why didn’t climate leadership pay?

The answer is that Europe’s governments, national and local, did not merely fail to buy air conditioners; they actively discouraged them as bad for the climate. In June 2024 ADEME, France’s environment agency, formally declared air conditioning a solution of last resort whose use should be limited as much as possible. At the peak of the heat waves in late June, the city of Ghent discouraged its citizens from using air conditioners to beat the heat, saying “the best air-conditioner is a tree” and suggesting anyone who was too hot should instead request a free tree to plant outside their house.

Seeing Like a Commission

How can we account for this? The same institutions that called heat the gravest and most urgent climate risk to human health, and that were willing to spend two trillion euros to mitigate this risk, were unwilling to spend, and in places openly hostile to spending, a fraction of that on a program that would have met the risk head-on.

Contrary to the conservative caricature, most climate bureaucrats are not radical “degrowth communists.” But they are bureaucrats. As the political scientist James C. Scott argued in Seeing Like a State, the logic of governmental control rests on perception: the unavoidable administrative propensity to favor a single legible measure over the tangled reality it stands for.

Scott’s paradigmatic example was eighteenth-century German scientific forestry, which reduced the forest to a single figure, the annual yield of commercial timber, and then rebuilt the forest to match it: old growth cleared, underbrush stripped. The first rotation was a triumph, and yields went up. The later rotations came in 20 to 30% below it, because the monoculture had stripped out the soil fungi and insect life the number could not see. Germans have a word for the worst cases: Waldsterben, forest death.

Global mean surface temperature is the most legible number ever devised: a single figure for the whole planet, reportable to the hundredth of a degree. But the number by itself doesn’t mean much. Press anyone who cares about climate change on why the number matters and within a sentence the subject has changed to heat deaths, flooded towns, dying reefs, or farmland turning to dust. Most people love people and places, animals and plants, and fear what a warmer climate might do to them. The temperature is just a proxy.

However much the rhetoric around climate change focuses on specific changes or outcomes, there’s only one number that the state apparatus can see and compare, so that number is what it manages. An air conditioner in a care home does nothing for that number, so by the only measure Brussels has, it is bad climate policy.

Call this fixation climate piety: the treating of temperature as the good itself rather than the proxy it is. Climate piety accepts harm to people and places so long as the temperature improves. Thus, a program that reduces the temperature while the people it was meant to protect die counts as a success, while one that saves them but raises temperature looks like surrender.

Europeans are easy to pick on from our 72-degree homes stateside, but they are not alone in this. The same error occurs wherever safety, conservation, or anything else we care about is subordinated to a carbon metric. Consider a case that brings us back to the forest. California worries that a warming, drying climate will worsen wildfires in the Sierra Nevada, which a century of fire suppression has left choked with small trees. Yet the same groups that call wildfire a climate emergency have sued to stop the Forest Service from thinning the Plumas National Forest—one of the few things that would meaningfully reduce fire risk—in part because thinning “would severely reduce forest carbon storage and increase carbon emissions into the atmosphere.” The German foresters at least had the excuse that their bill came due 80 years later.

Energy Is Different

Such absurdities alone, however, are not sufficient to reject the effort to manage global temperatures. Scott’s critique is devastating to high-modernist claims of bureaucratic omnicompetence, but there are many areas where the benefits of large-scale governmental action offset the inevitable distortions.

The example best loved by many climate pietists is the Montreal Protocol, the 1987 treaty that set out to eliminate the chlorofluorocarbons eating the ozone layer. It worked: Global CFC production fell 99% and the ozone hole began to recover. Montreal is a triumph of technocratic capitalism, but it worked only because CFCs were a niche chemical and DuPont, the lead producer, had already identified possible substitutes it could sell instead. As a result, the public kept their refrigeration without any enforced scarcity or imposed reduction in the standard of living.

Greenhouse gases are a different beast entirely. According to the IPCC, stopping the global warming trend would require the world to get to net-zero global greenhouse gas emissions. Reversing it would require something beyond that. And about three-quarters of global greenhouse gas emissions come from energy use: burning coal, oil, and gas to make electricity, move goods and people, heat buildings, and run industry. To reduce global mean temperature in a meaningful way, you must first observe, measure, regulate, and rebuild the energy system of the entire world. There is no off-the-shelf alternative waiting in the wings—not wind, not solar, not geothermal, not hydro, not solid-state batteries, not biofuels, not even nuclear—that can be deployed at scale and on the timeline necessary to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.

This is where EU-style climate policy meets its biggest problem: Energy is not one good among many but the thing people use to get everything else they care about.

Consider people first. The inverse relationship between energy and poverty is one of the best-demonstrated correlations in economics. Energy builds and powers the things that keep weather from killing you. A century ago, natural disasters killed hundreds of thousands of people in a typical year and millions in a bad one. Today they kill tens of thousands, and per capita death rates have declined by more than 90%. This is not because natural disasters have become rarer. It is because we became rich enough to build the things that keep us safe: buildings, roads, irrigation, air conditioning.

Our environment, the places and creatures we care about, is protected the same way. While early industrialization fouls everything it touches, the pattern eventually reverses because an energy-rich society can afford not to wreck the place. Economists call this the environmental Kuznets curve. Between 1970 and 2024, emissions of America’s six principal air pollutants fell 79% while GDP rose 338% and energy use rose by more than 40%. Lead has fallen 99% since 1990. And American rivers no longer catch fire. The relationship between man and nature after the industrial revolution has many complexities, but—with the greatest possible respect to Tolkien, Hopkins, and Wendell Berry—the persistent claim that economic and technological development leads to ecological collapse is false.

And once people have seen the safety energy buys, they will not be talked out of it. Robert Bryce calls this the iron law of electricity: “people, businesses, and countries will do whatever they have to do to get the electricity they need.” Put that law together with the record above and the standard mitigation plans fail twice over. A policy that works by making energy scarce or dear will be refused by anyone with the option of refusing, and thus cannot move the global total. Where scarcity is not refused, it raises the vulnerability of the very people and places it was meant to protect. Either failure alone would sink a program this ambitious. Mainstream climate policy has both.

Look at what the consensus program asks for instead. The IPCC’s pathways to holding warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) require “rapid and far-reaching transitions in energy, land, urban and infrastructure … and industrial systems” with “no documented historic precedent for their scale,” with virtually every scenario requiring less energy than the world would otherwise have used. And for what? By Bjørn Lomborg’s projections, every Paris pledge on earth, sustained for 75 years, yields a global average temperature just 0.31 degrees Fahrenheit cooler.

A Realist Climate Policy

If the global mitigation program offers only enforced scarcity in exchange for a fraction of a degree, what should a realist policy offer instead? For decades U.S. politics has oscillated between two positions.

The first judges the climate program ineffective and ruinous and concludes the science must be wrong, as if an absurd prescription discredited the diagnosis. There is plenty to argue about in climate science, but its core observations—that greenhouse gases increase radiative forcing and that global temperatures have risen—are very well demonstrated. The second accepts the evidence and concludes it must accept the program attached to it, with some trimming: Paris-style targets, carbon budgets, urgent forced scarcity. Conservatives who reject the first option generally prefer a less astringent version of the second, but the disagreements are about speed and regulatory mechanism, not ultimate goals, and sooner or later that version runs headlong into every peril of rebuilding the world’s energy system.

Both positions have accepted the premise of climate piety: that the temperature is the thing that matters. They differ only over whether it is moving.

The better approach is to reject the target, not the science. Thinkers on the New Right have already suggested as much in another context. A fixation on maximizing GDP turned out to be entirely compatible with hollowed-out towns, men leaving the workforce, the destruction of the family, and many other social ills. The useful response was to ask what GDP had been standing in for and whether those underlying goods were still being delivered. Global mean temperature is the GDP of climate policy, and requires the same treatment.

Subsidiarity is the old name for this cure. Authority belongs at the level competent to exercise it, because that is where the knowledge and the consequences sit together. The harms of a changing climate are always experienced intensely locally, as harms to a particular people or environment, and it is local and national leaders that are best positioned to identify and address them. A city that buys air conditioners for its care homes or a forest service that thins aggressively to reduce fire load will know within two summers whether its policy is working. A global Commission that buys a fraction of a degree in 2100 can never know anything.

This is not to say short-term fixes never create long-term problems; anyone who watches the national deficit knows that sometimes the choice is between a livable, self-imposed austerity now and a market-imposed catastrophe later. It’s possible that climate change poses such a risk. But whether it does or not, the pietists’ solutions are not only politically unachievable but self-defeating: for every good we actually care about—human wellbeing, environmental quality—the cure is worse than the disease.

Because projecting outcomes 75 years out is a fool’s errand, the most rational hedge against climate risk at the national scale is to seek to maximize energy abundance. Power is a near-universal adapter to problems in the material world. It is far more likely that an energy-rich society in 2100 will possess the industrial capacity to manage extreme weather, engineer carbon removal, or deploy energy systems we have not yet invented than that we will be able to enforce the scarcity current policies require.

It is no coincidence that neither of the two largest decarbonizations in American history was driven by climate policy. The first was the nuclear buildout that began in the 1960s, which was built on the promise of cheap baseload power. The second was natural gas displacing coal after the shale revolution. In the 2010s this transition did roughly twice as much for power-sector emissions as wind and solar combined. For both, carbon fell as a byproduct of cheaper power. American emissions now run more than a billion tons a year below their peak in the early 2000s—the largest absolute decline of any country—with no national carbon price and electricity at a third to a half the European price. And crucially, neither transition could have been predicted by a central planner decades earlier.

We should have policies for helping people live in a changing environment. And we should have policies that protect our environment from a shifting climate, just as we already protect air quality and waterways and fight habitat loss and invasive species. A climate policy that instead focuses on the single number of global mean temperature isn’t just a distraction; it is destructive of the very goods it was designed to protect. If that is what climate policy means, then we don’t need it.