Can the Government Control the Weather?

I believe that the temperature is getting hotter. It is not hard to figure out, and this year was quite hot and had many months the hottest on record. About a decade ago, the Koch brothers of Koch Industries, perhaps the largest polluters in the country, realized that climate change and subsequent government regulations were a threat to their business. They began pouring their profits into politicians that would deny that climate change was even occurring. When you hear a politician ranting against the existence of climate change, it is not what they really believe. It means that they are being compensated for publicly stating an opinion different than what they hold. Two great examples are Mitch McConnell and Mitt Romney.

This is unfortunate because it hurts the Republican party and the country. There is essentially world wide consensus that the climate is changing and that it is man made. It just makes everyone look stupid. It also precludes the more important debate, “Can the government control the weather?”

There’s a lot of people that think so, but I do not. The idea is that if the government can regulate and police people and businesses, that temperatures will go down. There is no evidence that this is even close to being true. Many countries have implemented some regulations and there has been no impact on global warming. Either the necessary regulations need to be so totalitarian that no one would implement them, or the entire premise should be invalidated that the government can regulate and police its way to changing the weather.

Don’t believe me? We have another great example staring right in front of us. Think about the war on drugs. It seems like a good idea. Drugs are harmful to the productivity of society. We can make the consumption and sale of these drugs illegal and the government will police it. Richard Nixon did this in the early 70’s, over 40 years ago. Today, we have more people in jail than all the nations on earth combined. Illegal drug use is common place, and the price of these drugs are amazingly affordable. Plus, the drug lords in Colombia and Mexico run rampant and outside of the law, wreaking havoc on these societies. We are stuck in this harmful infinite loop, where we don’t have the conviction to stop the war. So we just keep on going harming our very own citizens and the countries around us.

This is exactly what will happen with global warming if we begin to introduce regulation. It will fail and temperatures will continue to rise. So what do we do? We will have more regulation, still with no success. And then we will have another expensive and harmful federal policy that we will be unable to admit failure.

The war on drugs should be a lesson to all of us. There are limits to what the government can accomplish no matter how good the intentions.