In this episode of The Brownstone Show, Jeffrey Tucker interviews London-based author Rupert Darwall about his forthcoming Encounter Books title The Age of Error and the West’s Undoing — the third volume after The Age of Global Warming and Green Tyranny. Tucker recalls ice-age drills that became warming sermons, then “climate change”; a friendship that ended over a modest doubt; and how COVID made the expert-cartel thesis believable. Climatologists, he says, occupied the same throne epidemiologists held in 2020.
Darwall starts with Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky: elites decide what counts as risk. Environmentalism borrowed civil-rights moral absolutism after Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring; power co-opted the movement and capitulated. The book’s clash is geopolitical. A planetary-catastrophe vision requires the whole world to act. China, India, Indonesia, Vietnam, and much of Africa will carbonize first. Subscribe to the green vision and you neither cool the planet nor keep the reflexes to treat a rival as a rival — you get a climate G-2 instead.
He dates the “age of error” after the 2006 St. Petersburg G8 energy-security principles, a document Western archives memory-holed. Japan has been the most climate-skeptical G7 nation since Kyoto. Politics led the science. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists ran dozens of climate pieces before COVID and few on lab-leak risk — including a 2012 paper putting a major leak-driven pandemic at roughly once every 12.8 years, most likely SARS. After the outbreak, Charles, Boris Johnson, and the Pope reached for nature and climate; the pandemic agreement names climate, not labs.
They turn to Fauci and Morens’s 2020 Cell paper on spillover and reconstructing society; EU net zero as a legal lock; Britain’s record residential electricity prices and first real fight over the 2008 Climate Change Act; and the cost of welding science to government — censorship, lost trust, and virologists protecting gain-of-function work rather than the public. Fauci left with a pardon. Tedros expects the U.S. back in the WHO.
Key Topics Covered:
Ice-age scares, climate as tribal religion, and expert cartels after COVID
Douglas, Wildavsky, Silent Spring, and how elites define risk
Why the Global South will not join Western decarbonization
China, a climate G-2, and lost geopolitical antibodies
Japan’s distance from the G7 consensus and the 2006 G8 document
Politics leading IPCC science; lab-leak papers the “concerned” never wrote
Zoonosis, climate, and the Fauci–Morens reconstruction of society
Why EU net zero is nearly impossible to repeal
UK power prices, the Climate Change Act, and a first real debate
Censorship, lost trust, and science as doctrine
Gain-of-function culture vs. post-1945 physics
Fauci’s pardon, no China reckoning, and the WHO waiting out Trump
Rupert Darwall is a Cambridge-trained economist and historian and author of the climate-and-power trilogy from Encounter Books.
Jeffrey Tucker ties the green expert regime to the COVID expert regime — same structure, different catastrophe.
Essential viewing for anyone who watched “follow the science” in 2020 and now sees the same governing codependence aimed at energy, industry, and dissent.
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Rupert Darwall: Author of The Age of Global Warming, Green Tyranny, and The Age of Error and the West’s Undoing (Encounter Books)
X/Twitter: @RupertDarwall
Drop a comment: If elites get to choose which risks are “real,” what does that do to science — and to a country’s ability to recognize an actual enemy?
