by Roger Pielke
But whether you believe the spin or the science, opinion polls have not changed as science advisor Holdren predicted. In fact, as I document in The Climate Fix, public opinion on climate has been remarkably stable over decades, even as the absolute cost of disasters has increased.
Apocalyptic visions are a bit like addictive drugs. Upon repeated usage, the dosage needs to be upped to achieve the same effect. In this way, efforts to politicize connections between greenhouse gases and extreme events have a tendency to go well beyond what science can support. With fervent advocates ready to attack anyone who steps out of line, as they did when I wrote for FiveThirtyEight, there can be significant obstacles for independent experts to weigh in when claims are made well beyond that which science can support.
The goal of political debate of course should not be to get everyone to think alike, but rather, to secure collective action in common interests. Often lost in the passions of the climate debate is that the world is not making progress towards reducing the emission of greenhouse gases.
More to the point, if reducing GHG emissions is going to be an important part of our strategy for confronting climate change, then one can only acknowledge that, after more than 25 years of efforts to craft national and international climate policies, this strategy has been an abject failure.
While battles over the news cycle rage on, ultimately, a more effective approach to climate policy will inevitably focus on listening to the public, rather than trying to trick them by exaggerating or distorting the work of authoritative experts.
This volume concludes with a broader look at climate policy, well beyond the issue of disasters and climate change, with a positive focus on those steps more likely to bear fruit in the challenge of stabilizing concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and adapting to a changing climate.[100] Thus, this concluding chapter goes well beyond the issue of disasters and climate change, to engage a bit more deeply with the “so what?” question.
The Only Equation You Need to Know
To understand efforts to stabilize the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere requires a basic understanding of where carbon dioxide comes from and the policy tools which can be used to reduce emissions. A very simple but powerful framework for such an understanding was proposed in the 1980s by a Japanese scientist, Yoichi Kaya, as a tool for creating scenarios of future emissions that would be used as inputs to climate models. If you want to model the future climate, you would of course need to know something about future rates of emissions, which are primarily the result of the burning of fossil fuels—coal, natural gas, and petroleum.
Kaya explained that future carbon dioxide emissions would be the product of four factors: population, economic activity, how we obtain our energy, and how we use that energy. From a policy perspective, these four factors can be used to describe in totality the means available to reduce future carbon dioxide emissions. In short, our levers available to reduce emissions are population, income, and energy consumption or production. Those are the tools in the tool box.
We can simplify these four factors even further—population and income together are simply GDP, or aggregate economic activity, and the production and consumption of energy is a reflection of the energy technology that we use (measured as carbon dioxide released per unit of GDP).
So the Kaya Identity—as it has come to be called—simply says that:
Emissions = GDP * Technology
With this simple identity before us, right away we should see a fundamental challenge to reducing emissions, because a rising GDP, all else equal, means more emissions.
If there is one ideological commitment that unites nations and people around the world in the early 21st century, it is that GDP growth is non-negotiable. Currently policy makers on six different continents are focused on efforts to grow GDP, and with it jobs and wealth.
The Iron Law
If you spend any time in the midst of the climate debate, it won’t be long before you will be assailed by those who would like to argue that economic growth is unnecessary or even undesirable. I hear these arguments mostly from economically comfortable academics in posh university towns across the richer parts of the world. Without dismissing the pedagogical importance of such debates, it is quite easy to observe that no political candidate (much less a government) has ever secured political office on a platform of de-growth. One has to truly live in an insulated bubble to think that any such policies will be used as a response to climate change.
I have called such dynamics the “iron law of climate policy.” The law says that while evidence shows that people around the world are willing to pay some price to attain environmental objectives (and that willingness differs in different places, of course), such willingness is limited. When you consider that stabilizing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at a low level (like the oft-quoted 450 parts per million) requires cuts in emissions of 50% (or much more) in coming decades, it should be clear that reducing GDP is never going to be an effective tool of climate policy.
So the Kaya Identity tells us that the focus of policy to stabilize carbon dioxide in the atmosphere necessarily must be on technology, not on reducing GDP, and here the math is surprisingly simple. To achieve a stabilization of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (at any level) requires that more than 90% of the energy that we consume comes from carbon-free sources, like nuclear, wind, or solar, or even coal or gas with carbon capture and storage. This 90% threshold is independent of how much energy the world consumes, which in round numbers is in the future going to be a lot more than today, especially when you consider that two billion people or more lack even basic access to energy. The time that it takes to reach that 90% threshold will determine the level at which carbon dioxide is stabilized. The sooner we do so, the lower the level.
The figure below uses data from the energy company BP and shows that in 2012, the world obtained about 13% of its energy consumption from carbon-free sources. That 13% proportion has not increased in about two decades. It had doubled from 1965 to 1990, primarily due to the dramatic expansion of nuclear power. If stabilization of carbon dioxide is to be achieved, that 13% proportion must increase to above 90%, regardless how much energy we eventually consume. That is the hard math underlying the climate debate, a math that is obscured by the public wars over who gets to be a legitimate voice in the climate debate.
Figure 6.1: Carbon-Free Energy in the Global Mix (1965-2012)
Source: BP.
Is going from 13% to 90% a big deal? What is the size of the technological challenge in more intuitive terms?
It is a big deal. In a nice round number, if the goal is to achieve stabilization by 2050, then the world would need to deploy the equivalent of a nuclear power plant-worth of carbon-free energy every day between now and 2050, while retiring an equivalent amount of fossil generation. If you prefer to use wind or solar as a measuring stick the numbers are just as mind boggling—about 1,000 wind turbines per day, or 250 solar thermal plants.[101].
That one-nuke-plant-per-day assumes very low levels of growth in energy access around the world. More rapid expansion of modern energy consumption worldwide implies a need for greater rate of deployment of carbon-free energy.
What Specialists Argue About
Many specialists in the climate debate understand both the iron law and the magnitude of the technological challenge. Thus, the informed debate over climate policy revolves around competing strategies to motivate technological innovation in the production and consumption of energy. For many years the dominant view was that a price on carbon—whether through a tax or a traded permit system—would be necessary and perhaps even sufficient to create economic incentives to stimulate innovation.
Whatever economic theory may say about the merits of carbon pricing, the model has repeatedly failed the most basic of real-world political tests.[102] That this failure is inevitable derives not from economics but politics. The logic of carbon pricing is that higher-priced energy would
create an incentive to use it more sparingly and to invest in innovation necessary to generate cheaper alternatives. The incentive would be strengthened over time in a manner consistent with some timetable for hitting an emissions reduction target. The seductive logic of carbon pricing has gained it many adherents, especially among academics and scientists, and among many rich-world environmentalists.
From a political perspective, in the real world what economists call “incentives” would be more properly called “economic pain” and a “strengthening of incentives” would be called “turning the screws.” Any policy which depends for its success on creating economic stress on consumers (who are also voters in many places) to motivate change, is a policy doomed to fail. Voters will respond of course, typically by voting out of office any politician or party who is perceived to be working against their economic interests. At the same press conference that announced President Obama’s new commitment to climate change, his spokesman explained: “We have never proposed or supported a gas tax.”[103] Of course they haven’t: it would be political suicide.
Supporters of carbon pricing have no good answer for the politics. Claims that a carbon price won’t even be noticed in the economy belie the fundamental logic of the approach, which is to create a powerful incentive for change. Calls for a price high enough to actually motivate profound change are so unrealistic as to be laughable. In Australia, the introduction of a carbon tax was accompanied by tax reform that subsidized the tax—that is, the government is redistributing to consumers more money than collected by the tax. Still the policy remained unpopular, with more than 60% opposed to the tax, despite similar numbers supporting action on climate. The unpopular tax arguably played a role in the fall of Julia Gillard, now a former prime minister, the subsequent electoral loss by Labor, and ultimate repeal of the tax.
If debate over the economics and politics of carbon pricing took place only at the theoretical level, the discussion might never end. But evidence from the real world provides a broad basis for evaluating the prospects for carbon pricing and its effects on both emissions and innovation. That evidence shows that in the few places where a carbon price has been implemented, there is no evidence of changes in the technology of energy production and consumption that are even remotely close to the magnitude required to stabilize emissions.
Europe has provided the richest body of experience for evaluating carbon pricing, and the evidence shows that not only has the strategy done very little compared with what would be necessary, but that major economies within Europe have in recent years become more, not less, carbon intensive. Germany in particular has experienced a “dash for coal.” The German government, having expressed a desire to shut down nuclear power and fossil fuel power, is quickly coming to the realization that such ambitions are not presently possible. In fact, Germany is building new coal power plants. The flawed design of the European carbon trading system has prompted many calls for wholesale reform.
Why the Climate Wars are so Angry
Public debate on carbon pricing has typically segregated itself according to different perspectives on the costs and benefits of action. Some argue that the century-long costs of inaction are greater than the costs of action, others take the opposite stance. The fact is that many aspects of this debate simply cannot be resolved through evidence, as we don’t have any actual data about the future, just assumptions. This means that combatants often replace reasoned policy debates with appeals to authority, ad hominem attacks, and other tactics that have the effect of making the climate debate particularly nasty and destructive.
With respect to costs, advocates for carbon pricing typically argue that the costs of action are low, or even somewhat implausibly, cost-free. The typical tactic is to use an economic model to project net costs over the better part of a century. Such models, laden with phantasmagoric assumptions such as the pace of future technological innovation, offer little solace to the politician who runs for election every few years. Opponents argue that higher priced energy will kill jobs and force industries to relocate. With only a few exceptions, such as hydro-power-rich British Columbia, governments around the world have decisively sided with the opponents of carbon pricing, and any carbon price put into place, such as in my home town of Boulder, is too low to have any meaningful effect on energy use. Even Australia’s politicians who advocate carbon pricing have accepted that the tax would not have achieved the nation’s modest emissions-reduction goals. Those goals, if they are to be achieved on paper, will have to be met through the purchase of “offsets,” another curious invention designed to mute the pain caused by carbon pricing.[104]
On the benefits side of the equation, most of the debate has focused on the desirable consequences of reducing emissions. Yet such benefits will only play out in the future, decades or even a century or more from now, and the only tools available for specifying such benefits are complex computer models. Needless to say, the uncertainties surrounding the scope and magnitude of future benefits are incredibly uncertain, and the results of efforts to model them are strongly dependent on assumptions that scientists must make about both society and climate in the coming decades. Such uncertainty means that there are many plausible futures.
As in the case of the run-up to the Iraq war, which I discussed earlier, fear can be a powerful political tool. Efforts to stoke alarm have no apparent limit, with weather extremes and other bad things (such as species extinctions, spreading diseases, food crises, even civil unrest) often being linked to greenhouse gas emissions, no matter how tenuous the science.
Opponents to action do the same thing with snowstorms, cold summers, and extended periods with no hurricanes. Such tactics bear out a warning offered by the late Steve Schneider: “uncertainties so infuse the issue of climate change that it is impossible to rule out either mild or catastrophic outcomes, let alone provide confident probabilities for all the claims and counterclaims made about environmental problems.”[105] Science and nature provide enough varied experience to turn the future into a Rorschach test whose interpretation can reflect anyone’s contemporary political viewpoint.
In such a situation, debate typically devolves into various efforts to winnow away uncertainties through methods such as identifying a consensus opinion through survey, poll, or even fiat. Yet science is stubborn in its affinity for the empirical, and uncertainties persist. If science won’t yield unambiguous answers, the natural next step is to win a debate through political means. Opponents in such debates resort to proxies of expertise to try to assert some phantom mandate. The end result has been neither to win the debate nor to secure a political mandate, but to politicize the science itself.
But What About the Deniers?[106]
Conventional wisdom in the climate debate is that climate skeptics, who have more recently been promoted to climate “deniers” (thus equating them with those who deny the existence of Nazi genocide), are all-powerful forces bankrolled by rich corporations and who have wielded their awesome power to block efforts to deal with the threat of human-caused climate change. How do we know that climate skeptics have such power? As Martin Wolf of the Financial Times explains, it is the “world’s inaction” on climate policy which shows the power of the skeptics.[107]
From this perspective then, a key challenge of securing action on climate change is to defeat the skeptics. In the words of Lord Stern, the author of a well-known 2006 report on the economics of climate change, we must “drive back” the “forces of darkness”[108] so that the forces of good might prevail. Victory will be achieved by winning the battle for public opinion on the state of climate science.
However, a closer look at the logic underlying assertions about the power of the skeptics suggests that it is not only flawed but counterproductive. Flawed because countries where skeptics have little or no political presence, like Germany or Japan, are not doing any better at reducing emissions than countries, like the U.S., where the skeptics have been portrayed by advocates of aggressive climate action a
s the main reason for lack of progress. Yet the belief in the power of the skeptics leads to an ineffectual policy strategy by those who desire action; indeed, there is reason to believe that it actually works against effective action.
Advocates for action on climate change often adopt what scholars of science communication have called the “deficit model” of science. This view of the role of science in policymaking suggests that the public lacks knowledge that, if known properly (thus closing the deficit), would lead them to favor certain policy actions. The basic logic at work here is that if you only understood the “facts” as I understand them, then you would come to share my policy preferences.
The deficit model helps to explain why people argue so passionately about “facts” in public debates over policies with scientific components. If you believe that acceptance of certain scientific views is a precondition for or even a causal factor in determining what policy views people hold, then arguments over facts will serve as political debate by proxy. Defeat the skeptics, the logic holds, and the politics will follow.
The deficit model also helps to explain the presence of “noble cause corruption” in science, as it reinforces the idea that policy outcomes can be achieved by modulating belief.
Dan Kahan of Yale University has conducted several studies of public views on climate change and finds that the causal mechanisms of the “deficit model” actually work in reverse: data show that people typically “form risk perceptions that are congenial to their values.”[109] Our political views shape how we interpret facts. Kahan’s research shows that there is little if any difference in the level of scientific understanding between citizens who are very concerned about climate change and those who believe the problem is exaggerated. What differs between those groups is their political views.