Wired’s Matt Ridley: Don’t Panic, We Can Dig Ourselves Out of this Hole.

Wired, it should be obvious if you’ve ever opened the magazine or been to the website, is a magazine for technologists. That is, for people who turn to technology to solve humanity’s problems. Or, as is the case with Wall Street Journal columnist and Wired‘s September cover story author Matt Ridley, people who believe in the omnipotence, and apparently, the omniscience, of technology.

Ridley calls himself a “rational optimist,” (it’s the title of his most recent book) which is actually an accurate description of the basic editorial position of Wired and the Wall Street Journal. As a rule, these publications are bullish on science and technology (which they would shorthand as “progress”), and dismissive or hostile toward warnings that every bacchanal brings a hangover. This idea springs directly from the sort of rational optimism Ridley speaks of. If we just stop freaking out, Ridley claims, the ur-technologist, or simply technology itself, will solve our problems. Freaking out seems to mean demanding that the government do something, though he never makes it clear what negative impacts he thinks this fretting or fear actually has. The idea of being a “rational optimist” isn’t really remarkable at all. After all, this worldview under-girds the entire apparatus of global capitalist society.

What is remarkable is that rather than use current examples of problems where political intervention in the market, spurred by all this apocalyptic thinking, is hindering solution-making (here’s one possibility), Ridley decides to use historical examples. The examples he picks all curiously undermine his point. That’s because they all demonstrate just how effective alarmist predictions can be at creating important policy changes.

The problem with “Apocalypse Not”, intellectually, is that Ridley does not identify a problem, or establish any stakes, before taking a position. Why is it bad for people to make outsize predictions of doom, as long as they are rooted in scientific analysis and open to skeptical review? We’re still wondering by the end of the piece. Instead, he sets up a straw man techno-skeptic doomsayer, and misleadingly compares him to this guy. He writes:

Religious zealots hardly have a monopoly on apocalyptic thinking. Consider some of the environmental cataclysms that so many experts promised were inevitable.

He’s basically equating Jimmy Carter, Rachel Carson and Al Gore with religious folk-prophets like Harold Camping, who predicted that supernatural rapture would end the world in 2011. In other words, they’re irrational! Oh, and pessimistic.

Except they are not. There is a crucial difference between drawing alarming conclusions based on careful (or even reckless) review of the best scientific research available at the time, and claiming to know God’s will (even if that claim is based on study of scripture). That difference is what we call reason. Reason, remember, is what allows us to have respectful disagreements, propose equally sensible alternative approaches, make compromises, and reach consensus. It also allows us to determine when someone is right or wrong. Thus, it is important not to conflate alarming conclusions based on scientific research with the apocalyptic pronouncements of prophets.

The only real similarity between the two groups is the tone of their message. Tone is crucial. Even more than content, tone is what motivates us to listen and respond to a message. Rush Limbaugh has the largest radio audience in America. Consequently, we are bombarded these days with a whole host of “URGENT!” messages. Ridley is obviously getting tired of them. (And in the case of Rush, so am I.) Or he’s being cynical. Because he rather obviously glosses over the fact that urgent messages regarding the scale of environmental problems have led to the technological solutions that he uses to support his argument that we needn’t be so bombastic.

For example, after mentioning some of the most alarming proclamations regarding air pollution in the late 1970s, Ridley essentially claims that, without all that yelling and screaming, the problem would have just cleared up on its own:

Instead, driven partly by regulation and partly by innovation, both of which dramatically cut the pollution coming from car exhaust and smokestacks, ambient air quality improved dramatically in many cities in the developed world over the following few decades. Levels of carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, lead, ozone, and volatile organic compounds fell and continue to fall.

Wait a minute. He tried to slip “partly by regulation” past us there, didn’t he? It takes a lot of gall to claim, while citing articles, books, and speeches, even Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, that were nothing if not arguments for better regulation and policy, that these alarmists were just plain wrong. (Except Paul Ehrlich, he was just plain wrong.) Even Rush Limbaugh would give those folks some credit for the Clean Air Act and the founding of the EPA (December 2, 1970).

Ridley tries the same tactic when he talks about AIDS (my italics):

Yet the peak of the epidemic had already passed in the late 1990s, and today AIDS is in slow retreat throughout the world. New infections were 20 percent lower in 2010 than in 1997, and the lives of more than 2.5 million people have been saved since 1995 by antiretroviral treatment. “Just a few years ago, talking about ending the AIDS epidemic in the near term seemed impossible, but science, political support, and community responses are starting to deliver clear and tangible results,” UNAIDS executive director Michel Sidibé wrote last year.

He actually quotes the UNAIDS director admitting that alarming predictions of global catastrophe were the only sensible opinions until just a few years ago. But, thanks to scientific research, government and community action (Virtually all scientific research into the HIV/AIDS was and remains wholly or partly government funded, remember) we may actually defeat AIDS within our lifetime.

Meanwhile, AIDS has served as a particularly compelling and well-studied example of how public alarm, amplified by the media and stoked by experts with doomsday predictions, can affect, both negatively and positively, the political and social response to a crisis. Most critics of the media coverage of the epidemic give at least some credit to doomsday warnings as an important cause of the social and political action that Ridley is trying to claim would have happened anyway.

Ridley can’t know what would have happened had no one expressed fears that AIDS might kill hundreds of millions of people, or that urban air pollution might become so bad as to threaten millions of human lives daily (which, oh by the way, it does), or that DDT and other new and untested chemicals introduced into the environment would have unpredictable and deadly effects. He must be criticizing alarmists for some actual negative impact of their impassioned shouting.

Yet, if there are social, psychological, or political problems with “exaggerations” of potential crises, Ridley generally assumes that we intuitively grasp them already. In the concluding paragraph he finally hints at the problem he thinks “not worrying” would fix, writing: “policy can make the climate crisis worse…” and “We will combat our ecological threats in the future by innovating to meet them as they arise, not through the mass fear stoked by worst-case scenarios.” So alarmist predictions can lead to bad policy. And they might also be making us all afraid.

But as Ridley’s own examples show, doomsday predictions also lead to effective policy (i.e. the Clean Air Act, the EPA, vehicle emissions standards, NIH funding for AIDS research, banning DDT). Should concerns over vague and virtually impossible to measure “mass fear” outweigh legitimate, if loud and exaggerated, arguments for urgent action on potentially calamitous problems in the future. Ridley thinks so. He’d rather we just sit back and wait for “technology” to fix it. I’m not prepared to wait. Nothing he’s shown me would have happened without a lot of loud yelling from environmentalists, some of it by nature alarmist. If we’re making Matt Ridley afraid, that’s only more reason to keep talking.