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Freakonomics and now SuperFreakonomics authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner may still be denying claims that they are climate-change skeptics, but Dave Weigel talked to some self-proclaimed skeptics who beg to differ:
“It reminds me of what happened when Michael Crichton wrote ‘State of Fear,’” said Myron Ebell, director of energy and global warming policy at the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute, which gets some of its funding from the energy industry. “The problem for the left is that there are still some people who don’t toe the party line who have megaphones. And anyone who has a megaphone, they’re going to go after.”Of course, these endorsements do not in themselves prove that Levitt and Dubner are climate-change deniers anymore than, say, David Duke and Osama bin Laden's endorsements of Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer proved them to be anti-Semites. However, these sorts of debates do not occur in a vacuum. Sure, Levitt and Dubner may well believe that the earth is warming and that greenhouse gas emissions are responsible. But when they write a chapter bashing solar energy and carbon emissions reduction generally, and endorsing utopian geoengineering plans over more proven solutions, the result is practically indistinguishable from denial.
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[Cato fellow Patrick] Michaels, who has not read the book but is planning to pick it up, saluted Levitt and Dubner for tackling an issue that few popular economists touch. “It’s about time that people who do popular economics tell people the truth,” he said. “Fortunately, the planet is not warming.”
Indeed, I would argue that they are doing far more damage to the public discourse –- and in turn to the planet's health –- than Ebell or Michaels. Conservative think-tankers are expected to deny all manner of environmental catastrophes. Popular social science writers are not, and non-ideological ones especially have a greater impact as a result.
--Dylan Matthews
