The Real Fix for Global Warming
New, better technology is needed
I n spite of (or perhaps because of) a lax international agreement emerging from the UN’s recent COP21 climate conference in Paris, Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Institution worries that more must be done to overcome public apathy about global warming — in the United States in particular:
In addition to Republican opposition, public indifference serves as another hurdle for officials interested in doing something on climate change.
While the survey data Kamarck cites to bolster her case are somewhat interesting, they are incomplete. And the interpretations offered by Kamarck are flawed.
For instance, Kamarck starts by making much of supposed “denial” of global warming’s “reality.” But attention also needs to be paid to the important work by Daniel Kahan’s Cultural Cognition Project at Yale. Among other things, it has shown that the more scientifically informed people are, the more skeptical they are of claims of climate crisis. Overall, Kahan’s extensive research has led him to conclude that what people believe depends more on who they are than what they know.
So what people say they believe about the cause, extent, or seriousness of “anthropogenic global warming” (which is not equivalent to “climate change”) is not particularly relevant to the climate policy questions Kamarck addresses. As Roger Pielke, Jr. (University of Colorado) has observed, the influence of climate skeptics or “deniers” is greatly exaggerated. From his study of extensive survey research — not just in the US but many other countries — he finds there is more than a sufficient level of public concern about potential climate problems to support some policy action.
Efforts to sell the public on policies that will create short-term economic discomfort cannot succeed if that discomfort is perceived to be too great. — Roger Pielke, Jr.
The real problem is that the sorts of austere regulatory schemes climate activists have long demanded violate Pielke’s “Iron Law”:
When policies on emissions reductions collide with policies focused on economic growth, economic growth will win out every time. Climate policies should flow with the current of public opinion rather than against it, and efforts to sell the public on policies that will create short-term economic discomfort cannot succeed if that discomfort is perceived to be too great. Calls for asceticism and sacrifice are a nonstarter.
Indeed, abundant survey research not cited by Kamarck shows that even when a substantial majority of the public says they want something to be done about global warming, the price they personally are willing to pay is far less than what climate activists insist is required. (See Jesse Jenkins’ illuminating three-part report on the politics of pricing carbon.)
Kamarck fears that the public can only be roused to act by immediately tangible environmental hazards, like the floating sludge that caught fire on Cleveland’s waterfront in 1969.
It’s true that it is human nature to discount the future and to value proximate hazards more highly than distant ones. But contrary to Kamarck’s invocation of burning rivers, this does not mean that constructive action is impossible until disaster is at the gate. For instance, the destructive effect of refrigerant chemicals — chlorofluorocarbons — on the ozone layer of the earth’s upper atmosphere did not, at the time it was discovered, impose any palpable hazard on most of the human population. Yet it still was possible to forge a reasonably effective international agreement to replace CFCs with other chemicals that served the same purpose.
The key to that solution was that technology existed which could substitute the undesirable CFCs at very modest economic and social cost. It helped that CFCs and the industry that used them accounted for only a tiny segment of the overall global economy. Fossil fuels, in contrast, are a vast, immensely valuable industry that is absolutely crucial to the functioning of modern societies. So the technical and economic challenges of replacing or transforming that industry are far more complex.
The promising aspect of the Paris climate conference is its implicit acceptance that global emissions regulation will not work, seeking instead merely voluntary national pledges to do “something.”
More important, thanks to concurrent initiatives by Bill Gates and others, the conversation has belatedly started to shift toward creating the breakthrough technology innovations that can finally make “clean” energy cheap enough, without subsidies, for the poor to afford.*
The central flaw in climate policy to date has been that the costs of the actions demanded by activists far exceed any plausible benefits to most people — because the technology needed to make the solutions easily affordable for the most part does not yet exist.
In another Brookings commentary discussing the politics of COP21, Bruce Jones and Adele Morris conclude:
Paris shouldn’t be a milestone, but rather a launching pad for a new phase of productive, practical conversations about the economic policies that can most cost effectively shift the global energy mix.
Jones and Morris are right that the UN’s sterile annual climate conferences have now exhausted their potential to have even a minimal impact on climate conditions. Yet their discussion completely ignores the essential role of technology.
It is innovation, not economic policies, that “can most cost effectively shift the global energy mix.” That is the only kind of initiative that is both necessary and sufficient to effectively solve the greenhouse gas problem.
The hard truth is that alternative energy technologies for the most part do not exist that can replace fossil fuels without imposing unacceptable economic hardship, especially on emerging economies. On the other hand, once truly cost-effective non-carbon energy alternatives are developed, they will obviate the need for special subsidies and mandates much less the cultural revolution Pope Francis, Naomi Klein, and others of the more zealous climate activists demand.
The energy equivalent of Viagra will not need government arm-twisting to be widely adopted.
Relatively clean natural gas, made abundant and cheap by advanced drilling technologies, already has gone a long way to displace coal in generating electricity. That has been the major factor that has enabled the United States to substantially reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. Normal market mechanisms will suffice to sell reliable, far cleaner energy options that cost no more than coal…once those have been created.
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*For more on how to accelerate the development of breakthrough energy technology, see Energy Innovation: Fixing the Technical Fix.
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© 2015, Lewis J. Perelman
