Ben Shapiro has a frustrating mix of hypocritical, ill-informed, and poorly reasoned opinions about the challenges posed by anthropogenic climate change. Fortunately, he is not absurd enough to deny that climate change is real and is being caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases, so he is perhaps not beyond the point of redeeming himself in regard to this issue. What remains to be seen is whether he is humble enough to accept that his arguments are fallacious and destructive. There is the potential that the fossil fuel industry has explicitly made a shill of him, but perhaps he will choose to alter his harmful course nonetheless.

Let’s start with his Aquaman-memed comments, as well as his ridiculous reaction to being questioned about the meme on Lex Fridman’s podcast. Shapiro shrugged off the prospect of ten-foot sea level rise by rhetorically asking if people wouldn’t just sell their coastal homes and move. The meme appropriately asks if those people are going to sell their homes to Aquaman. 

This was a gaffe by Shapiro. He got caught slipping. The meme is right. No one is buying your submerged home. 

His response on Fridman’s podcast was to call out the meme for using a straw-man argument. But the meme is just a reaction to his argument. He clarifies that of course people will have to abandon those homes eventually, and that the real estate will be rendered valueless. 

Ben, that’s exactly what the meme is getting at. When you put it that way, it doesn’t exactly retain the rhetorical impact of downplaying climate change that was clearly intended by the original comment. 

Coastal plains around the world will no longer be inhabitable under these conditions. It will create humanitarian crises even if the land loss is gradual, and will be bad for the economy due to its effects on the real estate market, as well as any other industries and institutions using that space. 

Shapiro needs to admit when he’s wrong. He should salvage some respectability. He got pwned, but he didn’t have to double down. He can’t be the conservative concerned for the economic viability of industries, while at the same time dismissing such massive economic consequences. And he can’t ignore the fact that some people will become refugees. Nor can he ignore the grim fate of many refugees in today’s world.

In the same interview, Shapiro takes a whirl at another type of manipulation. He appears to defer to climate scientists, saying they know better than he does about these types of things. They do. But he is merely leeching credibility, while offering his own aberrant, whimsical viewpoints.

For example, Shapiro mentions William Nordhaus’s nobel prize-winning work to support his resignation that at least 1.5℃ of climate change is inevitable. It’s true that Nordhaus is not optimistic about our capacity to meet this goal. He states that, “policies taken to date fall far short of what is necessary to slow climate change sufficiently to meet international goals.” Shapiro immediately uses whatever he gleaned from Nordhaus to support his own interpretation that “human beings are crap at mitigation and excellent at adaptation,”–and that we should thus forgo our mitigation efforts. Because everyone knows, if you’ve been deficient at something in the past, you should just quit–no matter how important it is. That’s the spirit, Ben. 

But this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The degree to which we are unsuccessful at mitigation is proportional to the degree to which people adopt thinking akin to Shapiro’s. We are bound to be unsuccessful at mitigation only if we don’t attempt to mitigate. And Shapiro’s claim should not be taken as undeniable truth, far from it. Humans mitigate effectively all the time. For example, we wash our hands to mitigate the spread of germs. It’s true that humans adapted to motor vehicle accidents by developing safer technology, but we also instituted traffic laws to mitigate their occurrence. Warnings about the dangers of smoking cigarettes have led to reduced smoking rates. Rather than simply waiting around for adaptations such as the cure for cancer, people decided to alter their behavior. We banned the use of lead pipes and leaded gasoline because the notion of trying to adapt to toxic lead levels is just plain stupid. We developed the (admittedly chilling) strategy of mutually assured destruction because adapting to nuclear warhead detonations is unthinkable. The list goes on. Shapiro’s plan to just wait and hope to get bailed out by speculative technologies seems less like wisdom, and more like the perspective of a person who doesn’t care about future generations. He continues:

“you will see people building sea walls, you will see people adapting new technologies to suck carbon out of the air, you will see geoengineering–this is the sort of stuff that we should be focused on.”

Nordhaus, on the other hand, writes that “Plan A is ‘abatement,’ or reducing emissions of CO2 and other GHGs primarily by reducing combustion of carbon fuels.” That which Shapiro wrote off is Nordhaus’s top priority. It’s what the latter regards as “the only realistic option to deal with climate change.” Nordhaus continues:

“Plan B, carbon removal is in principle a highly attractive option. It is running combustion in reverse. While it is conceptually useful, we have no technologies that can remove 200 or 400 or 1,000 billion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere at a reasonable cost. This might happen, but it has not happened yet, and it seems unwise to bank on it.”

Given that the first item Nordhaus lists as a “major finding of integrated assessment models is that policies to slow emissions should be introduced as soon as possible”, it’s not surprising that he doesn’t have much enthusiasm for wishful technologies. Keep in mind, Nordhaus is not an ascetic, but rather an economist attempting to direct humanity towards the most economically responsible path. Finally, here is what Nordhaus thinks of Plan C, geoengineering–another of the options Shapiro prefers to focus on:

“…geoengineering is dangerous. It is untested, will not offset climate change equally in all regions, will not deal with ocean carbonization, and will have major complications for international cooperation. To me, geoengineering resembles what doctors call ‘salvage therapy’ – a potentially dangerous treatment to be used when all else fails. Doctors prescribe salvage therapy for people who are very ill and when less dangerous treatments are not available. No responsible doctor would prescribe salvage therapy for a patient who has just been diagnosed with the early stage of a treatable illness. Similarly, no responsible country should undertake geoengineering as the first line of defense against global warming.”

In the concluding section of the paper, Nordhaus lists four steps that we must take now to combat climate change effectively. As part of the first step, Nordhaus has this to say:

“Those who understand the issue must speak up and debate contrarians who spread false and tendentious reasoning. People should be alert to the claims of contrarians who find some negative results or list reasons to wait for decades to take the appropriate steps.”

It feels like he could have been thinking specifically about Shapiro when he wrote this. And all-ego-Shapiro would probably be tickled pink if that were the case.

Back in the Fridman podcast, Shapiro dazzled the viewers with another doozy of a line. He tells his unphased host, “the carbon is in the air.” 

Interesting. Perhaps an article is no big thing. Perhaps it would be pedantic to discuss parts of speech when the issue at hand is an existential threat–a Colossus, according to Nordhaus. 

But something irks me. “The carbon is in the air.” “Carbon is in the air.” Which sentence to choose. Well, most people go with the definite article, the determiner, when they intend to specify. The use of “the” begs the question, “which carbon is in the air?” Well, only the carbon that is in the air is in the air. The carbon that is not in the air is not in the air. Surely Shaprio, a serious intellectual, would not waste breath to communicate something so fatuous. No, indeed, he means to tell us that – prestidigitation – jedi mind trickery – all the carbon that we need concern ourselves with is already in the air. Resistance is futile. Don’t abate. Besmog the world. Mwahaha. 

Yes, climate change is here, but we can still choose the degree to which we worsen it. We can even choose the degree to which we improve it, eventually, if we really try. The more carbon we leave in the ground, or in the ocean, or on the surface of the planet, the less suffering the planet will endure, at least for this epoch. If we work together, we can do the good things. Which good things? The good things that we can do. 

Speaking of which, what does Shapiro have to say about working together? Well, he criticizes the Green New Deal, arguing it assumes geopolitical dynamics don’t exist. He’s likely referencing the concern of freeriding, or that countries will be economically incentivized to skimp on their own abatement spending. It’s a valid concern, and reason for adherence to international standards such as the Paris Climate Accord, which Ben argues wouldn’t be effective enough to significantly alter climate change (yet he also argues we should do even less to mitigate climate change). To be unwilling to engage with such agreements due to fears of being involved in an unprofitable transaction would be a blatant form of immoral nationalism, especially for a wealthy country that has been responsible for a tremendous amount of GHG emissions. It’s sad that we in the US would not seek to lead the world in such a noble endeavor, for all that our country has seen itself as the bastion of order and leader of the free world. After all, could we claim to be anything but a destructive force if our actions are deleterious to natural order? If we help ruin this gift of a planet, our greatest asset, the only life-sustaining world we know, is our nation acting as the nation we want it to be? 

The only fiscal conservatives who are not conservationists are, truly, narcissistic and short-sighted. They are revelers in frivolous wealth on a planet they won’t advocate for, and whose people they don’t care about. Their time is now, and they are going to live it up, morals be damned. Are they happy? Perhaps they convince themselves they are. But I doubt such wicked purposes could be healthy, especially for a religious man such as Shapiro.

Nordhaus, the economist Shapiro–hopefully now ruefully–invoked, says we need to do a lot of abatement just to achieve the economically efficient approach to dealing with climate change, nevermind if we are to attempt the most ambitious approaches. And Shapiro scorns all forms of abatement except nuclear–which he accepts because he gets to put people in their place if nuclear science scares them. Indeed, Shapiro claimed in a video during the summer of 2023 that he could do “zero things” about how hot it was outside. He urged his viewers to turn on their ACs and be thankful that they live in a first world country with a reliable electric grid, begging the obvious question–what if you don’t? While none of us may be able to alter the temperature as simply as we can change our socks, humans are causing the globe to get hotter. So we can, actually, do something about it. Shapiro, for instance, could look into efficient ways to heat his home, power his home, and commute. He could also report the facts correctly. He could advocate for a just cause. Ostensibly, that’s his job. But I understand if more serious matters were occupying Shapiro’s mind. This was around the time the Barbie movie was released, a colossal event to which Shapiro dedicated a 43-minute negative review–his magnum opus–despite the fact that he could do “zero things” about its release. I won’t burden you with the link.

Shapiro also falsely claims that fossil fuels are the most efficient form of energy. This statement flies in the face of reports from the World Economic Forum and the UN, which state that renewables are in fact cheaper, and therefore more efficient per unit of energy produced. Claims of cost efficiency regarding fossil fuels tend to rely on the fact that these industries have externalized costs of their operations, namely the abatement and damages costs that humanity is now saddled with. This leads us to Shapiro’s most dastardly approach to combating humanity’s attempt to create and maintain a healthy environment, an approach which is a true straw-man argument. In the “zero things” video and others, Shapiro likes to point out that mitigation of climate change involves the inhumane results of the cessation of use of carbon fuels. He remarks that committing to cutting down our carbon footprint would be easy for those of us living in prosperous societies (though he never actually advocates for it) but it would be horrible for poor people in developing nations who rely on carbon-based energy for their basic needs. In other words, we can’t begin to abate GHG emissions because of poor people, and shame on the entitled environmentalists for suggesting it. But none of that makes any sense. On the contrary, Oxfam reports that “the richest 1% of the world’s population produced as much carbon pollution in 2019 as the five billion people who made up the poorest two-thirds of humanity.” It turns out that there are a lot of emissions associated with yachting, flying around in private jets, demolishing and constructing elaborate mansions, driving exotic cars, and consuming heaps of other frivolous goods and services. No environmental group is saying that the first step we need to take in combating climate change is to target the poorest people and take away the fuels they use for their basic needs. Hence, the straw-man argument. There are, however, those who claim that the people who have benefited most from carbon-based energy, and thus contributed most profoundly to climate change, should proportionately contribute to paying the costs of abatement and damages. Furthermore, there are initiatives such as the Clean Cooking Fuels for Refugees project. Perhaps, if Shapiro’s concern for poor people is genuine, he could use his platform to call attention to these efforts. He could also donate some of the money he has accrued (yes, I intentionally avoided the word “earned”) from viewership of his misinformation videos.