After watching university after university cave to the politically correct demands of students here in the U.S., I was heartened to see a little sanity prevail across the pond. As reported in the WSJ earlier this week, activist students occupied the quad of the university’s bursar at St Johns College (the largest endowed college at Oxford), demanding the college divest from fossil fuel investments. As reported in the Journal, the bursar responded:

“I am not able to arrange any divestment at short notice,” he wrote. “But I can arrange for the gas central heating in college to be switched off with immediate effect. Please let me know if you support this proposal.”

Not surprisingly, the students responded with indignation, calling his counter offer provocative, given the need for heat in the winter. But the bursar didn’t let up, responding

“You are right that I am being provocative but I am provoking some clear thinking, I hope. It is all too easy to request others to do things that carry no personal cost to yourself. The question is whether you and others are prepared to make personal sacrifices to achieve the goals of environmental improvement (which I support as a goal).”

The reason I found much to be encouraged by this back and forth goes beyond the unfortunately scarce backbone of university administrators. This is encouraging because of the salience of the response–it is easy to be outraged by the fact that we don’t live in a perfect world. But common sense, as well as sound economics, insists that we live in a world of trade-offs–there is no Utopian solution to be had with many aspects of life. Young and old climate crusaders act as though, if we were suddenly to have the moral rectitude to eliminate fossil fuels, we could secure our future from the upcoming climate catastrophe. They seemingly totally neglect the tremendous benefit fossil fuels have brought and continue to bring to our world. We might disagree on the magnitude of the costs, but we should be able to reasonably agree on the benefits–or at least that there are benefits. Even if we buy the whole climate alarmist line, eliminating fossil fuels in the near future would result in millions of lives lost–we are dependent today and for quite a while on fossil fuels. And renewables are not a viable solution in the foreseeable future.

There is a trade-off that does make sense, and its a shame that Mr. Trump did not propose this in his SOTU speech. If you really believe that climate catastrophe looms, and you do not want to commit millions to death, then nuclear energy is your answer. Why not a nationwide conversion to carbon-free nuclear energy, which does not depend on sunlight or wind?

PS: Re AGW, I find little reason to change my views as outlined here in a previous post.