This week, fracking executive Chris Wright sat before the Senate in a confirmation hearing for his nomination to lead the US Department of Energy. Wright may not have either the public profile nor personal baggage that has already weighed down several of Trump’s other Cabinet nominees. But if anything, as has become routine with Republican energy nominees, progressives’ rhetoric about Wright is even more charged than for other scandal-plagued figures.

The Sierra Club’s Ben Jealous called Wright “a direct threat to our future and the planet’s.” Lena Moffitt from the left-leaning climate advocacy group Evergreen Action described Wright as a “fossil fuel executive who denies the climate crisis.” NRDC’s Jackie Wong voiced her opposition by drawing special attention to “the devastating impacts of climate-fueled disasters.” And several Sunrise Movement protestors interrupted the confirmation hearing, declaring “the climate crisis is here.”

Observers could be forgiven for tuning out so much familiar climate catastrophism from the institutional environmental movement. After all, these organizations described Trump’s previous energy secretaries Rick Perry and Dan Brouillete in almost exactly the same terms, calling Perry “someone who promotes dirty fossil fuels rather than the advancing clean energy market all the while ignoring the climate crisis.”

But tuning out Wright’s views on climate change would be a mistake both for his supporters and his antagonists. Because unlike Perry, Brouillette, and Trump, whose public statements on climate change have tended towards the vague and, yes, at times demagogic, Wright has expressed significantly more fluency on the subjects of climate impacts and decarbonization. Indeed, contrary to the many headlines declaring him anti-science, Wright often gets much closer to the truth than do his environmentalist opponents.

Their Brand Is Crisis

In the ancient climate wars of the early aughts, the disputes centered mainly on atmospheric science itself. Ne'er-do-wells like George W. Bush and Lee Raymond were accused of “science denial” and “climate denial.” Today, it is more likely for climate activists to make the more specific accusation of “denying the climate crisis,” a charge that carries within it the presumption that the “climate crisis” is already here.

Wright, who in his confirmation hearing called climate change “real and global phenomenon,” rejects this claim. “Is it a crisis,” he asked an audience last year, “is it the world’s greatest challenge, or a big threat to the next generation? No.”

Your mileage may vary, of course, on when to objectively declare climate change a crisis. But the numbers to date are almost certainly in Wright’s favor.

Anthropogenic carbon emissions from fossil fuel combustion, the principal cause of climate change, have warmed the Earth’s average surface temperature by about 1.4 degrees C since the Industrial Revolution. This aggregate phenomenon has real discrete impacts on both nature—such as ocean acidification and ecosystem shifts—and on human societies—such as worsening coastal storm surges and rising local temperatures. These impacts are expected to intensify, on net, in the coming decades and centuries, the more we emit.

But the widespread belief that climate change is an acute or existential threat to human societies is empirically hard to defend. Over the centuries that industrial emissions have been accumulating in the biosphere, the human species has expanded by an order of magnitude. Lifespans in the poorest parts of the world are decades longer than they were 150 years ago, and decades longer still in the wealthiest parts of the world. Infant and maternal mortality have plummeted while rates of literacy and democratic inclusion have exploded. Absolute nutritional and material deprivation, once the near-universal human condition, are vanishingly rare in all but the poorest parts of the world.

Climate change is a problem, and scientists and economists agree that it produces negative effects on net. But that is a different kind of problem than a global killer asteroid or even a pandemic. And if we’re weighing the weight of a potential crisis by its aggregate harms to the human species, the conclusion is quite clear: climate change might be a grand human challenge, but it is not, at present, a crisis.

Extreme Whether

What about the “devastating impacts of climate-fueled disasters” that NRDC’s Wong referenced? What about the hurricanes, the floods, the tornadoes, the droughts, the temperature extremes, and the wildfires?

The frequency and intensity of these latter two weather phenomena have indeed increased over the decades in some regions, though the global picture is much more nuanced. But hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, and droughts show no general increase in severity or intensity, according to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). And deaths and casualties from all forms of natural disasters remain in a decades-long and absolute decline, even as human populations have increased at national and global levels. A recent analysis of global mortality and economic losses found that deaths from natural disasters declined by a factor of 6.5 from the 1980s to the 2010s. The absolute costs of natural disasters continue to rise across all geographies, which is exactly what one would expect from growing and wealthier populations—we have more wealth and infrastructure in harm’s way, and it increasingly protects human life. As a result, the global economic losses from extreme weather as a fraction of GDP have been largely stable for decades.

If any of the shibboleths that Wright has enunciated have angered climate advocates the most, it is in his avowed amplification of these positive trends.

In a long report he wrote on climate and energy and in testimony he gave before Congress last year, Wright works through some of the “bright sides” of global warming, including that “global deaths from extreme weather have plummeted for over a century with cold-related deaths far outnumbering hot weather deaths.”

This, again, is simply true. Now, some scientists have taken issue with Wright’s interpretation of the empirical literature here, noting that factors “such as better clothing, better heating, car travel and other advancements” contribute to lower cold-related mortality as well, and that climate change could result in absolutely rising temperature deaths in the future. As Hannah Ritchie from Our World in Data put it, “If we want the trend to continue, we need to increase climate resilience…If we don’t do that, the number of deaths could go back up again.”

But this sounds suspiciously like something Wright himself would say.

To say that overwhelmingly fossil-fueled economic activity is causing dangerous climate change while also enabling “better clothing, better heating, car travel, and other advancements” is simply to impute that fossil fuels’ benefits are outweighing their costs so far. To say that “we want the trend to continue” should be moral table stakes, but it does not actually make a judgement about when or whether the cost-benefit ratio might reverse.

All of the Above

It is true that whatever “bright sides” Wright identifies from global warming are often difficult to disentangle, empirically, from the negatives and from increased societal resilience. Fewer humans proportionally today are exposed to extreme cold than in the past, but much of that is not so much due to increasing temperatures as much as it is due to the increased availability of resilience-enhancing technology that, not incidentally, still depend largely on fossil fuels. Agricultural productivity is enhanced by more carbon in the atmosphere, but diminished by rising ambient temperatures…but enhanced again by modern farming technologies and practices, most of which still depend on fossil fuels.

Could one imagine radical advances in the fitness of the human species experienced over the past two centuries without fossil fuels and the resulting emissions? Frankly, no. The steam engine, and the internal combustion and diesel engines, combined to enable the modern productive human enterprise, and all rely on coal, oil, and/or natural gas. Cement, concrete, asphalt, steel, plastic, and fertilizers also require fossil fuels not just for energy but as chemical inputs. The steam, heat, locomotion, and material outputs of fossil fuels radically exceed the outputs that could be achieved by bioenergy or human and livestock muscle, providing an economic surplus that has been turned back into higher-order human pursuits, such as universal education, scientific research, a Cambrian explosion in technological capabilities, the arts, leisure, and, indeed, conservation of the natural world. To the extent that human societies are successfully climbing up the energy ladder to advanced technologies like solar photovoltaics and nuclear fission, it is because we are already perched on the steps provided by coal, oil, and natural gas.

But progress in low-carbon technologies is an extremely recent development. Even just twenty years ago, solar panels cost 20 times what they do today, wind turbines five times as much, and lithium-ion batteries 30 times as much. Other than hydroelectric power, which is geographically limited, the one low-carbon energy technology that achieved any kind of scale before the last couple decades is nuclear energy, something that most environmentalists consider anathema.

While Wright has fairly been called a renewable skeptic and “an evangelist for the oil and gas industry,” he has also spoken positively about solar, nuclear power, next-generation geothermal, and the potential of energy storage to “open the door (again) for valuable contributions growing wind and solar penetration.” He is, in other words, more or less a classic all-of-the-above energy executive, something that would not be out of place in a federal agency with offices of Nuclear Energy, Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency, and Fossil Energy and Carbon Management.

“I've worked on that most of my career, in nuclear, solar, geothermal,” he told the Senate this week. “Do I wish we could make faster progress? Absolutely."

Climate Realism

“A little bit warmer isn’t a threat,” says Wright. “If we were 5, 7, 8, 10 degrees warmer, that would be meaningful changes to the planet.” Scientists, who are appropriately debating the subject, mostly expect warming to peak just under 3 degrees later this century, with significant uncertainties in both directions.

So it’s conspicuous that, by and large, climate advocates are working furiously to shut off that debate. They have gone from warning that the worst impacts of climate change lie beyond two degrees of warming to claiming that the climate crisis is already here, despite the facts that trends in extreme weather are noisy at best, deaths from natural disasters remain in steady decline, and global health, agricultural productivity, and economic well-being continue to improve. These trends not being dispositive of any kind of crisis, the standard operating procedure in the climate impacts literature has been to assume implausible emissions scenarios in which the atmosphere warms by 5-6 degrees or more by the end of the century.

All of which is to say, the invocation of an unfalsifiable present-day “climate crisis” and near-universal reliance on implausible future warming are not only accepted but encouraged within climate science and advocacy today. Yet Wright’s views—that the IPCC is correct about trends in temperature, extreme weather, and climate impacts—are considered by many in these fields to be beyond the pale.

Wright’s optimism, of course, is not the last word on the subject of either climate risk or the energy transition. Among other things, even lower-than-expected warming outcomes could understate risks to human societies after 2100, while baseline projections promise dire outcomes for many species and ecosystems.

But neither should his sanguineness about climate change be considered any kind of “denial.” Indeed, Wright’s views appear to match the attitudes both of the public and of climate economists, who express concern but not panic about climate change.

American voters consistently rank climate change as toward or at the bottom of the list of issues they care about. They may respond positively when surveyors ask them whether they care about climate change, or even when asked explicitly about the “climate crisis.” But a majority of Americans are unwilling to pay $10 a month to deal with it. Nearly twenty years after the release of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” (which is ten years longer than Gore estimated we had to solve the climate crisis), neither climate activists nor the experience of climate change itself has demonstrably convinced hardly anyone to care much about it at all, let alone to prioritize it above all other issues.

And Americans’ apparent nonchalance on the subject is not much out of step with mainstream estimates of the economic impacts of climate change. The economist Richard Tol routinely reviews the academic estimates of climate impact costs. His most recent review found that the modal “social cost of carbon” is around $80 per ton of carbon dioxide. That figure has been rising over time, and it’s more than the $10 per month that most Americans would balk at, but is still roughly equivalent to only eighty cents added to a gallon of gasoline. An extravagance for most American voters? Evidently. An existential threat to the American or global economy? Hardly.

Now, estimates of climate damages have been increasing in recent years, and there are plenty of estimates pointing to much higher costs. Likewise, there are major ongoing debates over detection of human influence on extreme weather, and over the optimal path forward for American and global energy systems. The upshot, though, is that these issues are highly and sincerely contested, and that on balance, assessments like Wright’s are actually well within the bounds of the scientific and economic consensus, indeed, oftentimes more so than those of his detractors. After decades of climate politics that have grown increasingly polarized but have barely gained much in the way of public support, perhaps climate advocates should be most welcoming of the kind of reset augured by Chris Wright’s realism.