Commentator

Lab Leak, Pandemic Amnesty?, Media Amnesty?, Climate Amnesty?

‘A COMPLEX AND GRAVE SITUATION’ - LAB LEAK CONFIRMED?

There’s a bombshell piece in Vanity Fair - co-reported with ProPublica and based off a Senate committee investigation - that comes close to clinching the case for the lab leak theory. 

Instead of the Rorschach test of epidemiologists looking at the SARS-CoV-2 sequence and seeing what they want to see, instead of creating maps of the Wuhan market and identifying clusters of cases (a bit like a robbery suspect being first spotted fleeing in a crowded city center and assuming the suspect originated from there), there’s an actual confession hiding in plain sight - the bureaucratese dispatches of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which apparently nobody had thought to really look at before until Toy Reid, a RAND analyst hired by the Senate HELP committee, combed through them.

Photo of Wuhan Virology Institute technicians

These dispatches establish that: 

1.there was some sort of lab safety breach in November, 2019 - significantly before any admission by Chinese authorities of coronavirus cases in Wuhan;

2.the breach was severe enough to reach the General Secretary level of the CCP and to result in an emergency visit by a high-level Beijing official;

3.the visit was contemporaneous with an active scrubbing of online records;

4.the November breach was consistent with a pattern of safety lapses in the lab - which were documented in the dispatches and in near-panicked messages to foreign counterparts asking urgently for technical advice;

5.the initial patent for a Chinese vaccine, including a correct sequencing of SARS-CoV-2, was filed in February, 2020, way too fast to fit the official timeline but just doable if the breach actually occurred in November, 2019. 

To the surprise of nobody at all, there has been pushback against the Vanity Fair/ProPublica piece, directed above all at the credentials of Toy Reid and picking at some of his translations - apparently he got the tense wrong of one of the dispatches - but failing to invalidate at any of the points above.

Toy Reid - maybe Mandarin expert

As far as I’m concerned, the Vanity Fair/ProPublica piece is completely compelling - not dispositive, not more than circumstantial evidence, but deeply compelling, and establishing a much credible chain of transmission than anything that the zoonotic adherents have come up with. As the HELP committee report - a demure document leaving out most of Reid’s text analysis - acidly concludes, the pandemic was “more likely than not, the result of a research-related accident.”

The main point here is that the zoonotic theory - holder of the mainstream consensus since 2020 and apparently confirmed by a pair of studies in 2022 - turns out, actually, to be very flimsy. If the zoonotic theory were to be borne out, one might reasonably expect a discovery of a parallel pandemic in animal populations, but nothing so far has turned up - and the zoonotic adherents have come up with ever-more elaborate mythologies of how the virus must have originated in a truly exotic bestiary of rare animals and then materialized in the Wuhan market, all without the discovery of any chain of transmission or any outbreak amongst animals. And, meanwhile, like in the sort of riddle where you come up with increasingly ingenious and far-fetched solutions before the riddle-keeper finally takes pity on you and gives you the staring-in-your-face answer, the Wuhan Institute of Virology is right there with its gain-of-function testing on coronaviruses and some sort of safety breach and cover-up occurred in November, 2019, which is just when the first cases began to surface in the surrounding area (although not, of course, reported at the time).

The sweet and harmless pangolin - leading suspect of the pandemic and to which we owe a collective apology

The New York Times, with a classic nothing-to-see-here-folks piece on the HELP committee’s investigation, claims that the committee failed to produce a ‘smoking gun.’ “There is no smoking gun one way or the other and we are unlikely to ever get it,” says a virologist quoted by The Times. Well, fair enough, but there are dispatches by Chinese bureaucrats complimenting each other on how skillfully and irrevocably they disposed of the smoking gun - or, in this case, how cunningly they repurposed the smoking gun for coronavirus research, becoming the first ones off the mark with a vaccine patent. 

The real issue here, I suspect, is that everybody is afraid that if they indulge in the lab leak theory then they go down the rabbit hole into conspiracy. If the coronavirus did in fact leak from the Wuhan lab, then the next question is whether the leak was deliberate. And, actually, for those willing to read the Vanity Fair/ProPublica piece as opposed to challenging Toy Reid’s Mandarin skills, the dispatches are reassuring on this score - the security breach in November, 2019, seems not to have been an evil Communist plot, just a very human screw-up and cover-up, technicians admitting to being overwhelmed by a tight industrial schedule (“the feel you get from all these documents is: it’s just produce, produce, produce, like an actor preparing to take the stage before they’re ready,” says Reid) and then switching into CYA mode when the official comes from Beijing to berate them. “Every time….operational errors have given way to dangers,” the WIV sorrowfully writes, “the members of the Zhengdian Lab [BSL4] Party Branch have always run to the frontline, and they have taken real action to mobilize and motivate other research personnel.” As the picture comes into focus as what seems very likely to have happened, it’s also possible to get more of a sense of the culprits: not a diabolical plot but also not a natural disaster - as the John Goodman character in Treme puts it, “a man-made catastrophe of epic fucking proportions.” Blame goes to the Chinese government and its repressive mechanisms - covering up the November leak as opposed to sharing it with the world (a very similar pattern, by the way, as the Soviets in the aftermath of Chernobyl) - and, maybe above all, to the biotech industry and its obsessive focus on gain-of-function research.

John Goodman fulminating (Treme)

From any normal, humane perspective, the gain-of-function research really is inexplicable - why play with fire in this way? why, as the WIV dispatches poignantly put it, “open Pandora’s Box?” There’s an episode in The Americans that covers this mindset nicely, and, as far as I can tell, speaks to the dynamics at play in the Wuhan leak. The season focuses on a ring of Soviet spies attempting to steal ‘Level 4’ biological weapons from Ft. Detrick. The spies themselves know it’s a terrible idea and try to beg off the assignment from their handler, but the handler shruggingly tells them “If they’ve got it we want it” - and in short order, of course, the biological agents end up on an airport shuttle bus, in a DC city park, in the bloodstream of the spies. The problem there is Cold War politics and a doctrine of mutually assured destruction carried out to absurd conclusions.

Frank Langella (The Americans) - dismissive of biosafety concerns

The surprisingly plaintive tone struck by the WIV dispatches, by the WIV level 4 director sending e-mails to American counterparts with subject lines like ‘ask for help,’ sound an awful lot like the reluctant Soviet spies in The Americans. China has very much decided that its priority is to be the world’s reigning imperial power. That ambition - completely obvious for anybody paying attention, although the West has to a startling extent managed to convince itself that that’s not the case - is coming more distinctly into focus. It includes an endeavor like the CIPS attempt to construct a rival financial system to the West-dominated SWIFT banking, like a massive effort to infiltrate Western countries through a new style of citizen espionage (as the heads of the FBI and Mi6 warned in July), and it includes an attempt, as biodefense expert Tara O’Toole puts it, “to own the bio-revolution,” to embark on a MAD-style approach to biological and chemical weapons. 

China’s imperial ambitions accelerate the timeline of this effort, which seems to have put dangerous pressure on the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The initial lesson here is obvious enough - that biological agents are incredibly toxic and not to be toyed with in the way that the Chinese (like the Americans and Soviets at the height of Cold War) have been toying with them. (The Intercept, by the way, has a useful piece documenting surprise, surprise the alarmingly high frequency of lab accidents from supposedly secure facilities.) The next lesson should also be obvious - that the Chinese really aren’t our partners and that to a great extent they have been playing us over the last decades (with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, initially a French-Chinese partnership, a conspicuous instance of a trade deal gone wrong). As Thomas Friedman plaintively writes, “[2022 marked] an end to four decades of steady integration of China’s economy with the West.” Friedman asks the question of what the defining event was of 2022 - another riddle to which there’s a pretty obvious solution (Um. I think it’s Russia’s invasion of Ukraine) - but he is right that this is a moment when Chinese ambitions and the true shape of Chinese-U.S. relations come into view. And the most obvious implication there is to signal the obsolescence of Thomas Friedman - the world isn’t flat and never was; trade does not necessarily lead to some sort of magical harmonization of political agendas; and the Cold War didn’t quite come to its end at the moment when the West triumphantly declared victory. (Putin’s ‘On The Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians’ includes a worth-reading discussion of an alternative-view of the end of the Cold War, that it really was more of a strategic regrouping, a change of systems of governance but with the imperial visions undiminished). In the spirit of Chinese imperialism, it’s possible to think about our time as a shift from a Spring and Autumn Period, in which a single entity ostensibly holds monopolistic power but with all sorts of divisions coming to the forefront, to a Warring States period, characterized by realpolitik and a fairly brutal zero sum approach to imperial hegemony. The last lesson is what a leak like Wuhan’s demonstrates about the inherent weakness of authoritarian regimes. The trick about authoritarianism is that it always looks efficient, but the pyramidal construction, the need to always, at all costs, tell the authorities what they want to hear, leads sooner or later to a certain mismatch between authoritarian megalomania and sheer reality. The anniversary of Mussolini’s March to Rome is a good moment to remember this structural weakness of Fascism - that the trains may have run on time, that the blackshirts may have looked terrific marching around Rome, but that Italy’s war machine turned out to be far weaker than Mussolini believed it to be. A very similar misfortune seems to have befallen Putin - he simply wasn’t commanding the armed forces that his generals told him that he was. And the Wuhan leak reveals a crack in China’s facade. “It’s a recipe for disaster,” HELP committee advisor Gerald Parker said of the managing structure of WIV. “You further couple that with an authoritarian regime where you could be penalized for reporting safety issues. You are in a doom loop of pressure to produce, and if something goes wrong you may not be incentivized to report.” What authoritarian regimes tend to be excellent at, however, is the propaganda game, putting on a brave front, covering up disasters so completely that it almost becomes possible to believe that the disaster didn’t exist. There seems to have been a version of that with the pandemic - an industrial accident; a cover story with the Wuhan market; and all of us buying, essentially, into a piece of CCP propaganda and not learning the lessons that we should. 

PANDEMIC AMNESTY?

Emily Oster has a good-natured piece in The Atlantic arguing for ‘pandemic amnesty’. “We need to forgive each other for what we did and said when we were in the dark about Covid,” she writes - discussing specifically the home remedies that people devised in early 2020 to counteract the spread of the virus. 

And, while it’s a lovely sentiment, and there is a place for ‘agreeing to disagree,’ it’s simply too soon, in this case, to forgive. The issue is that we weren’t really ‘in the dark.’ Not only was vital information about science of Covid suppressed but so was the ability even to discuss it. And forgiveness - a tricky act - comes ex post facto and after the offending actions have been properly acknowledged and named. Which has not happened here.

Emily Oster - easily forgiving

In fact, I think it’s time for a j’accuse on the villains of the pandemic. 

1.China. For all the reasons cited above. Assuming that the virus originated in the Wuhan Institute for Virology - which, at this stage, seems to be a pretty safe assumption - the blame for the initial spread of Covid can be pinned on an overzealous pursuit of biotech weaponry, inadequate safety protocols, and an authoritarian politics that prioritized results over safety - and that went into cover-up mode as soon as anything went wrong (by the way, the fact of the cover-up doesn’t change whether one subscribes to the ‘mainstream,’ zoonotic explanation or the lab leak theory; the lab leak simply pushes the start of the cover-up to an earlier date). And, maybe most importantly of all, China made use of the pandemic for almost unprecedented degrees of social control across a vast population - locking down entire cities for months on end, making use of invasive and dehumanizing screening techniques. Incidentally, the lockdowns in pursuit of ‘zero-Covid’ are viable contenders for Friedman’s ‘story of the year’ and continually to be wildly underreported on in the West. 

2.Biotech. The pandemic has been a textbook illustration of what Foucault called the dangers of ‘biopower.’ The insane gain-of-function research can be understood in terms of geopolitics but also in terms of simple greed within the biomedical industry. The contracts were so lucrative - the logic of inexorable technological development so internalized - that nobody seemed to be capable of stepping off the runaway train. And the same dynamic holds for the vaccine development and roll-out - the sense that a worldwide pandemic could not disrupt business-as-usual for the pharmaceutical industry; that the population as a whole was seen to be a set of shiny new customers for cutting-edge vaccines while the war chest of off-label medicines was completely ignored, in spite of copious evidence from front-life doctors that the medicines were at the very least better than nothing. The endless debate (in the forums where debate was allowed) about the efficacy of the individual medicines - ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, etc - obscures the deeper issue, that the medical industry had become so thoroughly top-down, such an adjunct to the pharmaceutical industry, that the empirical findings of front-line doctors were thoroughly ignored, and that the industry successfully pretended for a year-and-a-half, at least until the patenting of Paxlovid, that there simply was no treatment for Covid when, actually, there were many. 

3.The public health institutions. One of the direct consequences of the pandemic has been a loss of confidence in the CDC, NIH, WHO, etc. This isn’t conspiracy talk. The institutions themselves have admitted that they botched it - “We are responsible for some pretty dramatic, pretty public mistakes,” as Rochelle Walensky the CDC director admitted. The issue here seems to be two-fold. On the one hand, the health institutions are not so independent as popular imagination or a movie like Contagion would have us believe - they are subject to political pressure and, above all, to the biotech industry. And, on the other hand, the public health institutions simply aren’t set up to drive public policy in the way that everybody was looking for them to do during the pandemic. There’s a reason why epidemiologists don’t govern; they are able to offer reasonable-enough advice on reducing the spread of a pathogen, but that advice - wearing masks because, why not, they offer some marginal protection; shutting down businesses because of Covid risk; imposing quarantines; switching to a largely remote economy - all makes a degree of sense as epidemiological best-practice but have seismic implications for the economy and the population that’s supposed to fall to elected officials who, for critical periods of the pandemic, simply weren’t able to make tough, intelligent decisions. The result - a series of crude measures that turned out to be deleterious to public health as a whole; the economy snarled for two years; a whole generation set catastrophically behind in their education; ever-escalating inequality (the tech companies were in position to prosper from remote work, while everybody else lost crucial productivity); and a society that’s losing all sense of real-world interaction and becoming ever more atomized and divided. 

4.The media and the rise of the ‘disinformation industry.’ This is the one that hurts most for me - the utter inability of mainstream media to think for themselves, to move outside of official narratives, or to protect the outlines of free speech and free exchange. The key points here have been repeated often enough and I’m not really in the mood to get into them. Suffice it to say that the sort of ‘pandemic amnesty’ that Oster discusses is limited to such bold actions of reconciliation as the Pfizer and Moderna recipients ‘forgiving’ those who were initially more inclined to Johnson & Johnson. As far as I can tell, Oster and The Atlantic aren’t close to the point of forgiving the unvaccinated - who are still viewed as spreading ‘misinformation.’ And forgiveness in the other direction is more of a challenge. It’s very hard for the unvaccinated and vaccine-hesitant to forgive the incursion on bodily autonomy, on freedom of choice, the active segregation of the unvaccinated from businesses, schools, etc, throughout 2021. 

5.Trump. There is a certain forgiveness for liberals’ actions in 2020 given Trump’s abnegation of all responsibility to govern during the pandemic. Trump’s response to Covid was - this bears repeating - evil. As Vanity Fair reported (and this, more than any other outrage during Trump’s administration, genuinely shocked me), Trump simply declined to take responsibility for any public health measures during the Covid outbreak, assuming that the shutdowns would be unpopular and Democratic governors would end up paying the political price, while Trump could take credit for the eventual opening-up. The knee-jerk liberal need to contradict Trump in everything (I was part of this at the time) resulted in an unwillingness to acknowledge that a stopped clock could every so often be right - as Trump was in pointing the blame towards the Wuhan Institute of Virology and in promoting medical treatments like hydroxychloroquine. Trump was surprisingly accurate in some of his Covid responses, but that gives him no credit - he was an elected leader, not a blogger, and, ironically enough, his accurate prognostications did more harm than good by making liberals allergic to anything (e.g. medications for Covid as opposed to just waiting around for the vaccine) that Trump advocated for. 

6.The teachers’ unions. There was a critical moment when teachers could have stood as tall as ‘emergency responders,’ gone to school, accepted the same risks that all kinds of other professionals were accepting at around the same time, and been graced with duly-earned applause at the end of every day when they returned home. Instead, the teachers’ unions took no risks at all - an understandable position but with the result that the country lost at least a full year of schooling and which is proving to be an irreparable loss. One way that I’ve come to understand the pandemic is as a sort of social experiment in the necessity of various social institutions - i.e. is school really necessary? Is work really necessary? Is in-person interaction really necessary. And the answer to all of those is unequivocally yes. Zoom and the iPhone gave us the illusion that we could dispense with society-as-we-knew-it. And - as we’ve learned too late - remote life is really not a substitute for actual life. 

7.The liberals. The other painful lesson of the pandemic is the conformity of the liberals - particularly a highly-educated managerial class. These are my people and it’s been bracing for me to confront their unwillingness to dig past pharmaceutical narratives of vaccine efficacy, to treat science as a process of skeptical inquiry rather than as manufactured consensus, and to protect the free speech that they always claim to value so much. 

So, in theory, I’m with Oster. I can’t tell you how tired I am of thinking about virology, vaccine efficacy, etc. I would love to move on, forgive and forget. But participation in meaningful civic discourse requires a certain tough-mindedness. The pandemic showed us some really terrible things about our society - above all, about how gullible and conformist we can be. There’s no moving on - at least at the level of civic discourse - until we absorb those lessons. 

ERIK WEMPLE’S MEA CULPA

This has been a very interesting week in the mainstream media’s reboot on its core values. The Atlantic calls for pandemic amnesty. The Washington Post issues a startling mea culpa focused on the 2020 Tom Cotton op-ed, what Erik Wemple of The Post rightly calls “one of the most consequential journalism fights in decades.” 

Wemple describes the controversy exactly in the same terms that Bari Weiss used in her open letter to A.G. Sulzberger leaving her position at The Times; that the ‘intellectual dark web’ has been using to describe the controversy ever since it happened. What’s startling about Wemple isn’t anything that he says, it’s that The Washington Post is willing to run it, that the mainstream media is willing to take belated responsibility for its failure of nerve in the critical period of early 2020, the time of the Covid outbreak and the George Floyd riots, which was also the moment when the legacy media essentially surrendered its independence. 

“It’s long past time to ask why more people who claim to uphold journalism and free expression — including, um, the Erik Wemple Blog — didn’t speak out then in Bennet’s defense. It’s because we were afraid to,” writes Wemple. “Our criticism of the Twitter outburst comes 875 days too late. Although the hollowness of the internal uproar against Bennet was immediately apparent, we responded with an evenhanded critique , not the unapologetic defense of journalism that the situation required. Our posture was one of cowardice and midcareer risk management. With that, we pile one more regret onto a controversy littered with them.”

Actually, Wemple himself doesn’t have all that much to feel bad about. The contemporaneous article he links to, ‘A Crisis of Conviction at the New York Times,’  is coruscating on Sulzberger’s reaction to the Cotton op-ed. But this is Kremlinology, not media studies. Wemple’s line “Our criticism of the Twitter outburst” can stand in for The Washington Post and the mainstream media as a whole.

Erik Wemple - maxima culpa

It’s nice to think - and there’s reason to think - that the mainstream media knows it screwed up. There’s a a truth-and-reconciliation position that runs along the following lines. The period around 2020 was uniquely awful. Trump genuinely did pose an existential threat to the democracy - the media felt that it had an obligation to surrender certain core values for the sake of forming an effective opposition. That work was achieved and Trump lost. In the meantime, there was some collateral damage - the rise of the ‘disinformation industry,’ highly biased reporting on vaccines, cancel culture, the ‘mostly peaceful protests,’ etc. A climate of conformity and fear prevailed at the legacy media outlets - and fanned, additionally, by an unhealthy relationship between progressive Twitter mobs and ostensibly dispassionate journalists. But that’s all over now. There have been some key personnel changes at various media outlets (New York Times coverage has changed drastically since Joe Kahn replaced Dean Baquet as executive editor) and newsroom culture has changed such that the legacy media now concedes that cancel culture exists, is willing to run pieces like Wemple’s, and willing to countenance previously ‘fringe’ ideas like the lab leak theory. 

So is there room for a media amnesty? Well, I definitely like that better than the hug-and-make-up between the Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson recipients, as proposed by Oster. 

Probably the way to think about this is that it has been a watershed period for media. Journalism really still hasn’t recovered from the 2008 crash and the collapse of the old print industry. In a sense it was really only The New York Times and the wire services that emerged intact and stronger than ever, with a near monopoly on both professional reporting and on institutional legitimacy. This occurred at the same time, though, that news, as we have always known it, virtually ceased to exist - so many stories were broken on Twitter, by ‘citizen journalists’; and professional reporters largely lost their privileged access to breaking news.

So a very new media landscape: news breaking everywhere, all the time, but a handful of media outlets, The New York Times above all, as ‘the paper of record,’ making pronouncements that come to serve as ‘intelligent consensus.’ In that odd, dysfunctional landscape, The New York Times and the remaining legacy media had all the power, all the authority, but felt themselves to be in a fragile position towards the Twitter hordes, and the tone the professional media struck seemed always to be the adults turning the lights on-and-off, the adults speaking in their clearest, most reasonable tone so that they could be heard clearly over the screaming children. 

And somewhere in there, the legacy media lost its way. There was the attempt to stifle the competition - to call for ‘fact checking’ on, essentially, opinion pieces; to flag as ‘disinformation’ anything that ran counter to a prevailing consensus; to, in other words, try to shut up the people. That ethos extended into the tech companies themselves, who increasingly policed their own platforms.

When Thomas Friedman asks “how future historians will look back on 2022,” the answer, at some more macro level than any one event, may be that it was the year of the centrist counter-revolution, when old norms started to reinstitute themselves. That’s the way to understand the year’s silliest visual pun - Elon Musk’s arrival in the Twitter offices. Let what sink in? Well, the fact that the era of the disinformation police, of Twitter censorship, of progressive exigency, has ended.

The year’s silliest visual pun

I have no particular affection for Elon Musk, who seems to be turning into a comic book villain by the minute, and no interest really in his proposed reforms to Twitter (the subscription model he wants to move to sounds like a tough sell), but he is right about this - we have reached a dysfunctional media environment and the way out is through greater freedom not less.

What I’m hoping will happen has less to do with Twitter and more with the Substack model. Journalism needs competition to thrive. The sort of monopoly of legitimacy enjoyed by The New York Times and a handful of other legacy institutions for the past decade results inevitably in bias. The proliferation of excellent news sources on a medium like Substack - Persuasion, Common Sense, The Bulwark, etc - means, above all, a return to something like the old state of media before the 2008 contraction, a variety of rival publications, ‘alt weeklies,’ etc. If that’s what the media amnesty ultimately looks like - the legacy publications struggling with the undue pressure of their own monopoly of ‘legitimacy,’ an alternative press emerging to pick up slack, to help form a richer, more intellectually diverse journalistic landscape - then that’s a social vision I can get behind. 

THE END OF CLIMATE EXTREMISM?

And one more bit of mainstream media revisionism - a drastic change in tone from The New York Times in its view of global warming. 

David Wallace-Wells, the voice of The Times on climate change, announces that, incredibly enough, we’re winning the war that everybody assumed was already lost, that the time for climate extremism has passed and now’s the time for a “moderate flank” on climate action.

“Thanks to astonishing declines in the price of renewables, a truly global political mobilization, a clearer picture of the energy future and serious policy focus from world leaders, we have cut expected warming almost in half in just five years,” writes Wallace-Wells. 

So time for a ‘pat on the back,’ continues Wallace-Wells, but also, of course, continuing investment in renewables and ever-greater vigilance. 

Wonderful. Great news. But, it’s not clear we can really give ourselves, or the renewables industry, too much credit for the shift in the projections. “[Zeke] Hausfather estimates that about half of our perceived progress has come from revising these trajectories downward, with the other half coming from technology, markets and public policy,” writes Wallace-Wells. 

In other words, it’s not so much that the solar panels and the wind turbines made all the difference; more that we miscounted initially, and that the more extreme climate scenarios, repeated as gospel, were never actually plausible. 

Wallace-Wells has a bit of scolding in store for those who were overly apocalyptic about climate change. “Perhaps you’ve had nightmares about each of these [extreme climate projections] and seen premonitions of them in your newsfeed,” he writes very reasonably - but that is more than a little disingenuous from a guy who three years ago wrote a best-selling book called The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming.

David Wallace-Wells, author of - not very long ago - The Uninhabitable Earth

So, some revisionism on Wallace-Wells’ part, but this issue, of all the mainstream backtracking, seems most ripe for forgiveness and reconciliation. As Roger Pielke, maybe the most vocal of the ‘climate moderates,’ magnanimously writes, “The claim is that because of the accurate extreme scenarios, policy makers noticed and placed us on a better path. That is wrong, as these scenarios were never right. But still, it is progress.”

My suspicions about the mainstream position on climate change were raised when I was working on a global warming documentary. We were absolutely sure of ourselves, and sure that we were working on the most important possible issue, but the data we were drawing upon seemed a little skimpy - Michael Mann’s hockey stick (with the ‘decline hidden’) and, above all, the line that 98% of climatologists agreed on man-made global warming. The more I worked on specific stories, the more that anomalous results seemed to surface - hurricanes, for instance, weren’t behaving as they were supposed to under reigning climate change models. 

If there was, on closer inspection, some uncertainty about the underlying climate models, there was none about the course to follow - a massive investment in renewables, a scrapping of fossil fuels like yesterday, and a willingness to prioritize climate change over anything else in the economy. At the time I was working on my climate change documentary, there was a certain despair about bringing such an ‘unsexy’ issue to a larger population; and, in the time since then, as Wallace-Wells rightly notes, the messaging on climate change has been outstanding. Renewables have taken off, coal is in opprobrium, and responsible climate action is embedded in the culture. 

And, as everybody writing on the issue notes, all of these things must be good. By calling concertedly for action on climate change, we have made a rapid and dramatic shift towards cleaner energy. I really doubt, along with Hausfather, that that shift towards renewables could have made so dramatic a different in global temperatures over so short a period of time (it was always a tenet of faith in my climate change phase that, even if we turned off all our power sources, the momentum from Anthropogenic emissions would continue to heat the planet). But, as messaging, global warming did something that the old-line environmental movement never quite managed to achieve - compelling people (and businesses) to think seriously about their energy consumption and to work assiduously to reduce their environmental footprint. 

I’m not exactly crazy about some of the tactics that the environmental left has used to make its point - the extreme models, the apocalyptic narratives (Wallace-Wells quotes Mumbai-born climate wonk Tim Sahay as saying, very amusingly, “The West has always had a problem with millenarianism - the fall, Christianity, all of that”), and now the potatoes thrown at poor Claude Monet, but it’s hard to argue with wind, with solar, with the turn from coal (unless you’re a coal miner), with a general awareness of consumption. So in the spirit of the mainstream media’s late 2022 revisionism and mea-culpa-ing, let’s forgive and forget on this one. We have a somewhat cleaner world. And the more extreme climate projections seem unlikely to come to pass. These two facts are a bit independent of one another, but whatever. Call it good news.