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In The Age of Error and the West’s Undoing, Rupert Darwall examines the fundamental incompatibility between Western elites’ obsession with achieving net zero emissions to avoid allegedly catastrophic climate change, and the West’s capacity to safely navigate a world riven by geopolitical tensions, the increasing use of hard power, and the rise of China as a great power to rival the United States.
The trauma of the 2008 financial crisis led Western democracies to morph into technocracies, and climate policy became therapy for elites. Elected politicians lost legitimacy and sought to regain political authority by elevating experts to co-govern alongside them: central bankers, who failed to revive stagnant economies with ultra-low interest rates; public health experts, who gave politicians cover to impose draconian lockdowns during the COVID pandemic; and climate scientists, who pushed economically disastrous and socially divisive net zero energy policies while China and the Global South powered ahead. Dependence on experts as purveyors of government-approved truth led to widespread censorship during the pandemic, the covering up of the origins of the COVID virus, and muzzling dissent on climate change.
In The Age of Error and the West’s Undoing, Darwall takes the reader from 2006—the threshold of the age of error—to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the brutal return of geopolitics. He concludes by examining the West’s path forward: Will the age of error be followed by an age of renewed realism? Or will it beget dissolution and disintegration to earn the epitaph: “The West’s undoing was its own doing”?
“When I first met him as a history undergraduate, Rupert Darwall already showed that he had an unorthodox and enquiring mind. This book also shows his penetrating intelligence. It brings a mastery of detail to a devastating indictment of the Western establishment and its disastrous miscalculations. The political class, he shows, has thrown away the confidence of its voters, preferring to justify its actions by opportunistic claims to scientific authority. It has undermined, and is still undermining, the prosperity, security, and future of our societies. Darwall shows how, why, and what needs to change urgently.”
—ROBERT TOMBS, bestselling author and professor emeritus of French history at Cambridge University
“Rupert Darwall has written an outstanding account of how Western politicians did their damnedest to destroy the prosperity of the Western world with foolish policies on energy, climate, epidemiology, and money. This is Cato’s ‘Guilty Men’ for our age.”
—MATT RIDLEY, author of The Rational OptimistRUPERT DARWALL is a senior fellow at the National Center for Energy Analytics. He was previously a senior fellow at the RealClear Foundation, researching such issues as energy, environmental policy, and corporate governance. He also worked as an investment analyst and in corporate finance, and served as a special advisor to the UK’s chancellor of the exchequer. The author of two books—Green Tyranny and The Age of Global Warming—and numerous think-tank reports, Darwall has also written for The Wall Street Journal, The Hill, and Daily Telegraph, among others.