Waiting for a Dreyfuss Moment

A man climbs stairs on day two of the COP26 United Nations Climate Change Conference at Scottish Event Campus in Glasgow, Scotland, on Nov. 1, 2021. (Ian Forsyth/Getty Images)

Commentary

If you’ve never heard of a “Dreyfuss Moment” before, don’t be surprised. As far as I know, I’m coining the term.

It refers to that pivotal point in the iconic Steven Spielberg movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” when the character played by actor Richard Dreyfuss becomes convinced that the government has been lying about the air being poisonous to keep him and others from meeting the aliens at Devils Tower, Wyoming. His character rips off the gas mask he has been told to wear. Sure enough, the air is just fine. The political authorities have been lying (surprise, surprise)—there’s no danger.

As the United Nations convenes its annual climate alarmist extravaganza, COP28, in the United Arab Emirates, I find myself becoming increasingly confident that there will be a Dreyfuss Moment about the official climate change narrative.

Sooner or later, the American people will come to the vivid realization that the alarmist narrative of the “climate change cabal“ is a lie, that the “jihad against carbon dioxide“ is unscientific and was concocted as a pretext for implementing the oft-stated real agenda of transforming the economy along more socialistic lines.

Even as climate change proponents are gathering at COP28, their credibility is being steadily undermined. Little by little, as lurid predictions of disaster fail to materialize and with the death rate from natural disasters down by more than 90 percent in the past century, the climate alarmists are looking more and more like Aesop’s “boy who cried wolf.”

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Public surveys show that a majority of Americans attach a low priority to taking action to combat climate change. Most Americans oppose paying as little as $10 or $20 per month to address it. And that’s as it should be, for humanity is much better off and Earth is significantly greener after the gentle warming of the past two centuries as Earth has emerged from the harsh Little Ice Age.

Scientific evidence debunking the “human carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are causing ‘global boiling’” narrative hyped by U.N. head António Guterres continues to pile up. A recent study out of Norway found that the greenhouse effect has been in a downtrend for four decades.

As the abstract of the study states: “The effect of man-made CO2 emissions does not appear to be strong enough to cause systematic changes in the temperature fluctuations during the last 200 years.”

Multiple scientific studies have found “an observed decreasing greenhouse effect [from 1983 to 2020] despite the increase in greenhouse gases such as CO2 and CH4 [methane]” and that “natural cloud variations, which have a greenhouse effect impact larger than that resulting from a 100-fold increase in CO2 [remember: We haven’t even had a two-fold increase of CO2 yet] are driving the recent greenhouse effect decline, overriding the anthropogenic emissions impact.”

Two months ago, Climate Intelligence, an independent foundation with a deep interest in climate change, published a document signed by more than 1,600 scientists, engineers, and professionals from more than 30 countries (including more than 300 Americans) declaring that there’s no climate change crisis. The signatories are described as “independent.” That description is crucial. Translation: They aren’t receiving any of the billions of dollars that the U.S. government has bestowed on scientists who support, or at least won’t criticize, the alarmist narrative.

For several decades, anyone who has challenged the official narrative has had their integrity questioned by media figures who have asked whether they’ve ever received money from a fossil fuels company—as if people who work in such industries are assumed to be liars. The key question to ask today is whether any scientist supporting the alarmist narrative has received, either personally or through the university they work for, government money. I suspect that a survey of experts independent of government would show a sizable majority endorsing the opinion that, while Earth’s climate is changing modestly, there’s no crisis and no need to radically retool human society.

What will precipitate a “Dreyfuss Moment” when it dawns on the public that the official government position is a myth and “We, the People” have been played as suckers? Being only an economist, I can’t make a prediction with any sort of precision, but let’s look at a few possibilities.

Maybe the trigger will be the regulatory assault against air conditioners, dishwashers, internal combustion engines, light bulbs, and so forth. Maybe it'll be if politicians are ever rash enough to formally propose what a travel company recently projected: the issuance of carbon passports restricting how often we may travel so that we don’t exceed our governmentally determined quota of CO2 emissions. I can’t see Americans taking such a heavy-handed mandate lying down.

I hope I’m wrong, but my guess is that the most likely trigger for a “Dreyfuss Moment” would be a major breakdown of the electric grid—something such as the blackout that hit Texas two winters ago and resulted in more than 200 people freezing to death—but on a more lethal scale. What caused the unnecessary tragedy in Texas was an overreliance on intermittent energy sources (primarily wind) that destabilized the grid.

President Joe Biden and his progressive allies in Congress and the energy bureaucracies are charging ahead, determined to increase the use of intermittent (“renewable”) energy. They’re ignoring the sober warnings of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, whose 2023 report identifies a “changing resource mix”—specifically, the transition from nuclear and fossil fuels to “renewables”—as the greatest threat to our country’s electric grid system.

I suspect that if the U.S. electric grid breaks down because of overreliance on intermittent energy sources during a hot or cold spell and a large number of people die because they couldn’t keep cool or warm, we'll have our “Dreyfuss Moment.”

When it dawns on people that their primary protection against temperature extremes is the electric power that enables them to keep their homes at safe temperatures and that a zealously green government mob is pursuing policies that take that protection away from them, there will be a huge reaction.

Millions of Americans will turn against the climate change alarmists with fury and disgust. When they realize that the green policies adopted in the name of combating climate change pose a greater threat to their well-being than the climate itself, we'll be ready to return to a sane energy policy: allowing our electric utility companies to use whatever fuels produce reliable, affordable power for the American people.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.