On The Bob Zadek Show, climate change is treated as a subject where scientific questions, political rhetoric and economic policy are entangled, and where the host and his guests repeatedly question whether the issue can be resolved through centralized government action. The topic appears in episodes featuring Ronald Bailey, Richard Epstein, Sterling Burnett and a discussion of carbon taxes, with guests disagreeing about the magnitude of the problem while sharing a suspicion of top-down remedies.
Framing the debate
Bob Zadek opens the topic by noting that “climate change” is a strange phrase because the climate changes every day, and that in current usage it means a long-term change in climate trends caused by human activity. He asks whether the effect of human activity and hydrocarbon use is good news or bad news Ronald Bailey on the End of Doom (2015).
In a later episode Zadek frames the subject as a worldwide political debate on matters of science, comparing it to the Scopes trial, and asks why the world is openly debating science rather than leaving it to scientists Richard Epstein on Climate Change (2017). In a third episode he says ordinary Americans are being asked to decide a hyper-technical scientific issue, and that the subject was once called global warming but was renamed climate change because the globe was not warming How to Spot Tabloid Climate Science (2018).
Ronald Bailey: a reporter changes his mind
Ronald Bailey tells Zadek he has covered climate change as a reporter for over 30 years, attended the Earth Summit where the UN treaty on climate change was negotiated in 1992, and been to 10 UN climate change meetings. He says he was initially very skeptical of man-made climate change as a problem, but about 10 years before the interview decided that man-made climate change could become a significant problem for humanity over the course of the century, and publicly changed his mind Ronald Bailey on the End of Doom (2015).
Bailey argues the question is whether the problem requires a top-down centralized solution, and says low-carbon and no-carbon energy technologies are coming along that will probably be fairly rapidly adopted over the next few decades and will probably solve the problem. He says the world will be warmer because of burning fossil fuels and putting more carbon dioxide in the air, but it will not be a catastrophe. Asked whether warming is per se bad, good, or simply different, Bailey answers that it is not per se bad, but that the speed of change relative to the ability of the biosphere and humanity to adapt is the problem, and that the most concerning thing is not the heat but sea level rise as glaciers melt, which would be a big problem for people living along the coasts. He agrees with Zadek’s characterization that the effect will be a net minus Ronald Bailey on the End of Doom (2015).
Richard Epstein: the “lukewarm-er”
Richard Epstein, introduced as a professor who teaches law at NYU Law School with a trained scientific background and schooling in economics, tells Zadek that climate change has always been with us and is highly variable, and that the system never spins out of control because if it did the entire system would have collapsed and there would be no organic life on earth. He describes it as a self-stabilizing system, illustrating with two spheres, one inside the other Richard Epstein on Climate Change (2017).
Epstein says human beings can have an impact on the environment that no other species can, though nothing we do will be like the meteor that crashed into the earth about 65 million years ago in the Yucatan, and most things we do are not as dramatic as Mount Saint Helens. He notes that carbon dioxide is not the only greenhouse gas and that the single most important greenhouse gas is perhaps water vapor, which is difficult for anybody to do anything about; carbon dioxide distributes itself uniformly throughout the earth, which makes this a global problem if one is thinking about the Paris Accords, whereas water vapor tends to concentrate in some areas. He says that given the welter of other forces and the high up-and-down quality of temperature movement, one cannot think of carbon dioxide as the dominant player, and that in the eyes of many people that makes one a denier—a word he calls peculiarly ugly, designed to evoke images of the Holocaust denier—while on his view it makes him a mild skeptic or a “lukewarm-er,” stressing a weak positive connection between carbon dioxide and temperature Richard Epstein on Climate Change (2017).
Sterling Burnett: politicization and models
Sterling Burnett, identified as being with the Heartland Institute, tells Zadek that debates over scientific issues in public policy are not new, citing debates about sociobiology and evolution going back over a hundred years and public debates in the ’60s about pesticides, in particular DDT. He says Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring led to banning the production and use of DDT, which had been effective at wiping out malaria in the United States, where there used to be 50,000 cases a year in the ’50s, and that people in developing countries were then told they could not have the cure because of concerns that it thinned birds’ eggshells How to Spot Tabloid Climate Science (2018).
Burnett argues that the leadership of environmental groups began treating environmental issues as the most important value, trumping every other value, and started talking in admiring terms about China’s population policies; once one starts talking about changing the economy and the way people live, one has left the realm of science and entered politics. He says that when they were unsuccessful in certain respects they looked for the next issue, and that climate change was bigger and more comprehensive than others. He says conferences on global warming sometimes had to be cancelled because there was too much snow, and that temperatures stopped rising for 18 consecutive years despite carbon dioxide emissions going up, so the framing shifted from global warming to climate change. He identifies the big question as whether humans are causing the present climate change, whether that can be said with any kind of certainty, and whether it means catastrophe is in the offing requiring dramatic action How to Spot Tabloid Climate Science (2018).
Carbon taxes and cost-benefit accounting
In a discussion of carbon taxes and global trade, a speaker identified as Mark Joffe says that pricing emissions through carbon taxes and cap-and-trade could let the market take climate damage into account, assuming one could figure out for each metric ton of CO2 emitted how much damage it will ultimately cause, but that there is a lot of religion and not as much science as one might like in the climate change debate, making the appropriate level of taxation very challenging Not Enough Bricks (2019).
Zadek responds that the difficulty of the accounting tells him not to do it, and that government is forcing people to behave in a certain way based upon speculation and superstition; he says he does not want to be forced to do things on that basis, and that if the government can prove the case, fine Not Enough Bricks (2019).
Across episodes
The topic recurs across four episodes, and the excerpts show a shift in emphasis rather than a resolution. Bailey in 2015 accepts man-made warming as probably a significant problem but argues technology will solve it without centralized control; Epstein in 2017 disputes that carbon dioxide is the dominant driver and describes himself as a lukewarm-er; Burnett in 2018 argues the issue was politicized and that warming claims were renamed to become unfalsifiable; and the 2019 discussion turns to whether carbon taxes can be priced correctly, with Zadek concluding that uncertainty is a reason not to act coercively. Each guest advances a distinct position, and no single argument is carried forward by the same speaker across episodes.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state what specific temperature figures, emissions data or model projections any guest relied on, nor do they identify the terms of the Paris Accord beyond calling it a wealth transfer mechanism in one episode summary. No excerpt states what any court held on climate regulation, which statutes govern emissions, or what specific technologies Bailey had in mind beyond low-carbon and no-carbon energy. The excerpts also do not resolve whether the guests agree on any factual premise, and several sections break off mid-discussion.