Most people probably don’t realize what terms like “net zero” really mean in terms of their way of life. I use the words “way of life” purposely instead of “standard of living” because I don’t believe the latter term conveys the magnitude of the effect eliminating fossil fuel use would have.

Eliminating fossil fuels would return civilization to a pre-industrial existence, one which a large percentage of the current world population would not survive. Those who did survive would live at a level far below what anyone living in the fossil fuel-powered world could even imagine.

So, why are so many so eager to embrace a narrative that promises such hardship for themselves and their children? Certainly, there is some delusional belief that “renewable” energy will replace most fossil fuel energy, but it seems impossible that most people honestly believe that. Regardless, their leaders are coming right out and telling them a substantial lowering of their standard of living will be necessary – what Barack Obama often called “shared sacrifice.”

Whether Mr. Obama or his ilk will be doing any of the sharing is a subject for another day.

Before trying to explain the average American’s willingness to believe, I will tell you my own reaction to the climate change narrative from the perspective of one who remembers when it was not a major issue, even for environmentalists. It is only fair that I do my best to explain my own biases as they were when “climate change” first became a thing.

Unlike most people I know, I’ve always had a predisposition towards the free market. I had it long before it would have ever occurred to me to say the words “free market.” But even while working those first, minimum wage jobs everyone works in their teens or early twenties, I had a general impression that commerce was a good thing and business owners were making a positive contribution to society.

This despite a liberal arts education that, in retrospect, did everything it could to convince me otherwise.

This impression was bolstered by my even earlier interest in history. History, or “social studies,” as it was called in my Catholic grammar school, was my favorite subject. I did well in it. If you asked any of my grammar school classmates in 1979 what I was going to be when I grew up, most would have guessed history teacher.

An interest in history and a predisposition towards the free market aren’t mutually exclusive, the overwhelming anti-capitalist bias in modern college history departments notwithstanding. In fact, any objective look at the history of the past five hundred years would only confirm one’s belief in the free market.

All this is relevant to the way I saw the climate change narrative when it first became one of the dominant narratives in the major media. Having a knowledge of history that supported my pro-free market disposition, I found the climate change narrative extremely dubious right from the start.

Let’s review what we were asked to believe at the time. We have a certain political movement that promoted an alternative economic system to capitalism for hundreds of years. That economic system was implemented to various degrees in virtually every country in the world. And at the moment it spectacularly failed, its proponents suddenly discovered a threat to the planet that could only be solved by adopting that failed system.

Are you kidding?

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Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupidand Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?