Category: Mitigation

Page proofs . . .

are killing me.  But, the book is here, and I am cleaning it up.  I hate page proofs.  Deeply.  This is the sort of detail work I loathe – combing back through 90,000 words looking for misspellings and erroneous punctuation.  It is taking days, because you can only focus that hard for so long.  And at the same time, I am cleaning up the index.
Oh, and that is on top of the article that was due back in today – I worked with two of my Ph.D. students, Mary Thompson and Manali Baruah, to produce a paper that examines how REDD+ functions as a form of unacknowledged environmental governance (defining legitimate terms and actors within debates over how to implement terrestrial carbon sequestration projects in forest areas).  We’ll see how it does in this round of peer review.
And then there is the talk I am supposed to be giving at UNC – Chapel Hill on Friday.  I’ll be discussing how we think about livelihoods in development, how current framings might have carried us as far as they are going to, and what a new framing might look like.  Yeah, it is coming together, but not as quickly as I’d hoped.
But, without further ado, the first few hundred words of Delivering Development:

Posted on by Ed 0

Hoping we are either stupid or uninformed . . .

A while back, I put up a post about how the US failure to pass climate legislation is screwing up the entire process at the global level.  While the Chinese are enormously problematic, and the Indians are not much better, our domestic political scene’s inability to come to any sort of agreement on anything that might look like a climate bill makes us the single biggest obstacle to addressing emissions productively.  What most people do not understand is that legislation is not the only way to control emissions here in the US.  In 2007 the Supreme Court held that the Environmental Protection Agency not only could, but indeed had to treat greenhouse gas emissions as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act.  Thus, we can control emissions via the regulations put forth by an agency of the executive branch, effectively cutting Congress out of the loop (unless they want to revoke or amend the Clean Air Act, and nobody seems to have the votes for that).  Hey, that is what the Court said, and what the Court says is the law until Congress rewrites things or the Court reverses itself.
So when people start arguing that the EPA’s impending move to actually come into compliance with the law is something “dangerous”, “activist” or “unwarranted”, they are hoping that the reader/listener/viewer doesn’t know the history or legal background of the issue – and they would often be right.  Certainly, that is the tactic of Mackubin Thomas Owens at the Washington Times, who in a recent Op-ed ignored this case, calling the possibility of controlling emissions through regulations a “ploy” and a “naked power grab by the EPA.” So, let’s review, shall we?
I have no doubt that this is a tactical effort on the part of the Obama administration to force some of those blocking real climate legislation to come to the table and negotiate something they can live with.  However, I don’t think the term “ploy” applies here – this is not an effort by the executive to do some backroom deal, such as consolidating power executive power at the expense of the other branches (for studies in that, see the Nixon and Bush 43 presidencies).  The president and his people surely know that regulation is a much weaker form of emissions control than is legislation.  One need only read the Washington Times Op-ed to see why, as they argue “a constitutional perspective suggests that Congress, not unelected bureaucrats, should be setting U.S. policy.”  Even with the backing of the court, it is much easier to argue against regulations (however legally empowered) created by the bureaucracy than it is to argue against a law passed by a majority (or, in the case of the Senate, a supermajority) of both houses and signed by the president.  Let’s also remember that the rest of the world is watching us to see what we do – and likely will build off of our domestic legislation for any global agreement (to ensure we participate).  Domestic regulation, especially if it is contested, will never work as a similar foundation, and it is entirely likely that the Senate would not ratify any agreement predicated on that regulation (2/3 of the Senate must vote to ratify).  If we want a global deal that even beings to address our problems, then the EPA must be an intermediate step toward binding legislation.
Now, do agencies grab for power when they can?  Of course they do.  But in this case, the EPA laid back until the Supreme Court told them, in effect, they had the right to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.  In fact, one could argue that once the Court placed greenhouse gases under the purview of the Clean Air Act, the EPA had no choice but to move toward regulating emissions lest it fall out of compliance with federal law.  After all, the court found:

“EPA has offered no reasoned explanation for its refusal to decide whether greenhouse gases cause or contribute to climate change,” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the majority. The agency “identifies nothing suggesting that Congress meant to curtail EPA’s power to treat greenhouse gases as air pollutants”. . . The court majority said that the EPA clearly had the authority to regulate the emissions and that its “laundry list” of reasons for not doing so were not based in the law. (via Washington Post)

This is how politics, policy and the global environment intersect, folks – turns out those civics courses were a lot more important than we realized at the time, huh?

Posted on by Ed 12

Shuffling the deck chairs?

I recently had an e-mail exchange with Rick Piltz over at Climate Science Watch (I link to them regularly, and if you are not familiar with the site, you should check it out – it is an activist site that does very good work) about the whole Cucinelli circus.  At the end of that exchange, Rick mentioned that with the upcoming IPCC plenary the question of Patchauri’s leadership was once again on the table.  This got me thinking . . . and I shorthanded an answer to him that I think I can expand on here.
For those not neck-deep in the world of climate change, Rajendra Pachauri is the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).  The IPCC is the authoritative scientific body working on the issue of climate change – it is empowered to review the existing literature and evidence (it does not do its own research) and present what amounts to a summary of our best understanding of what is happening to the global climate and why it is happening.  (full disclosure: I have been appointed to the IPCC for this round as a review editor – basically, I will manage the peer-review process for one of the chapters).
The IPCC has come under fire quite a bit – in my opinion, mostly because the scientific story of climate change is getting clearer and clearer, and it is not a happy story.  However, there have also been screwups – for example, some of you may have heard how a completely unrealistic assessment of glacier melt in the Himalayas somehow got through review into the last IPCC report (this melt is important, as it tells us how much flooding to expect downstream (i.e. northern India and Bangladesh, among other areas) in the near term, and how much the river flows of the region will decrease once the glaciers have largely melted (potentially creating significant food crises in the same areas).  I wasn’t completely freaked out by this error – it is large document that is hard to manage, but the review process is very comprehensive.  It’s just not realistic to expect a review, compiled by hundreds of scientists and reviewed by hundreds more as well as representatives from the participating governments (including the US), to come together flawlessly in a reasonable timeframe.  However, when this popped up, the handling of it was botched – it was more or less the classic error: instead of identifying, acknowledging and fixing the error, at first the IPCC was seen to be stonewalling and trying to defend an undefendable statement. At one point, Pachauri issued a remarkably tone-deaf statement in which he effectively called India’s Environment Minister “arrogant” and dismissed the Indian Government’s report which seemed to contract the IPCC findings.  Even if the IPCC report had been correct in its claims, this could have been handled better.  However, the IPCC claims were wrong, and the Indian report was closer to the truth . . . which makes this a disaster.  The whole event badly damaged the legitimacy of the IPCC in some people’s eyes, and was fodder for those who would deny the role of human beings in climate change.  It was a PR disaster, really – the overall science of the report is, in my opinion (and it is an informed opinion) quite solid.  If nothing else, note that as the models of climate get more sophisticated, their results are mapping ever closer to observed reality . . . and the models are predicated on widely accepted understandings of the causes of climate change brought forth through exercises like the IPCC assessments.  Still, it was bad.
Add this to the fiasco from this summer (in which I’m afraid I was a visible participant), where the IPCC secretariat, in Pachauri’s name, issued guidance to members of the IPCC on how to interact with the press. The letter was astonishingly poorly worded to sound like those of us on the IPCC were not to speak to the press at all, when what was meant was that we were not to represent the entire IPCC report by ourselves to the press (in other words, we can speak to the press and say “in my opinion . . .” and be fine, but we cannot say “The IPCC says/believes/thinks . . .” because we do not speak for everyone on the IPCC).  The meaning of the message was completely innocuous, but the initial wording was very unclear, and set off something of a firestorm.
So, does tone-deafness qualify as a reason to throw the chairman under the bus?  Well, if you think that the chairman’s job is to be a media spokesperson, maybe it is.  But if the chair is to run the larger IPCC process, I don’t think replacing Pachauri changes anything – it’s just finding a scapegoat to make it look like the panel has been reformed or something – which I strongly object to, as I don’t think the IPCC needs reform.  The process is sound, the author selection is sound, the data is sound (yes, I know some people have issues with the data, but the vast majority of the scientific community does not – so I am going with them until such time as I see new evidence – though I remain open to new evidence, as our understanding of the climate as a complex system is incomplete, at best).  So replacing Pachauri might actually be read as an admission of guilt or problems with previous IPCC reports that I do not think exist – there is no systematic rot here.
Besides, this round of the IPCC has already started – the authors are selected, and the first plenary will meet soon.  So changing the chair now will do nothing but create administrative confusion.  And the importance of replacing Pachauri rests on the assumption that the chair has a lot of power – and the post does not, in the grand scheme of things.  In the end, the IPCC is an intergovernmental process, which means that the diplomatic process in large, key countries like the US greatly constrain and shape what the IPCC can do – probably more than the chair can.  You’ll notice an absence of calls for replacement from the diplomatic community, which tells you what they think.  More to the point, Pachauri still has his job – if any major country had an issue, he would be out.  For an illustration, take a look at what the Bush administration did to Bob Watson, the previous chair of the IPCC.  The Administration withdrew support for him (and there is documentary evidence to suggest that they did so because ExxonMobil really wanted him gone) and that was that.
So, in the end I vote to keep Pachauri in place.  I think he is sincere in his efforts to get outreach right, both in terms of his own statements and in terms of the dissemination of the IPCC reports.  He knows the process.  And the governments are, for now, backing him, so all of the demands for removal are going nowhere right now.  That said, I fear he may be one more public gaffe away from someone in the diplomatic world getting fed up and demanding a replacement . . . and that would not be good for the IPCC process during this assessment report.

Posted on by Ed 3

Well, this isn't good . . .

Coral bleaching is back, and the New York Times has noticed.  Nice of them, given the persistence of this problem over the last few decades.  In summary, you care about this because coral is generally seen as one of the canaries in the global coal mine – they are very sensitive to changes in the temperature of the oceans in which they live, and when they get too warm (often only a few degrees above normal temperatures) they lose their color as they go into survival mode – hence the term “bleaching”.  Many bleached corals die, and when they do the very rich biodiversity they support dies with them or disperses.  Yep, coral bleaching is bad.
That said, Justin Gillis and the people he interviewed for this story are perhaps pushing the coral bleaching = global warming thing in the wrong way.  Basically, the argument in the article is that climate change (warming) has pushed average sea temperatures up, and so when we get a warm year, it doesn’t take long for the already warm seas to get too warm for coral:

“It is a lot easier for oceans to heat up above the corals’ thresholds for bleaching when climate change is warming the baseline temperatures,” said C. Mark Eakin, who runs a program called Coral Reef Watch for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “If you get an event like El Niño or you just get a hot summer, it’s going to be on top of the warmest temperatures we’ve ever seen.”

Well, yes . . . but you don’t have to have evidence of a warming trend in the seas to get this outcome.  Instead, all you need is greater climate variability where there are several years with hot enough temperatures to push things over the edge, even if average temperatures have not really risen all that much.  Climate variability is an outcome of climate change – so you can still make the bleaching-to-climate change connection – but you don’t have to assert permanently warmer seas when the evidence for this is pretty uneven globally.  This, of course, is not surprising – the distribution of atmospheric warming is pretty uneven globally, thanks to the circulation of the winds and oceans, and differences in the vegetation that cover the land in different parts of the world.
So, to summarize – yes, coral bleaching is a good preliminary indicator of the impacts of ongoing climate change . . . but it does not necessarily mean that we have an established warming trend as much as evidence of disruptions in the normal variability of air and water temperatures created by the redistribution of excess heat energy in our atmosphere.  Overselling the warming trend (which is there – see here at Climate Charts and Graphs, but not in a manner that can be downscaled to reliable causality for coral bleaching) doesn’t do us any favors as we try to influence policy on climate change, and how to address it.

Posted on by Ed 0

Carbon-neutral consumption? Nah . . .

Well, the markets seem to have faith in biofuels – two companies working on this idea have filed for IPOs in the past week.  Both are interesting, though for different reasons.  Gevo is interesting not for its choice of source material (still using corn, wheat and sugarcane), but for the fact that it is turning these sources into isobutanol, which as Martin LaMonica notes

“can be used as a solvent, blended to make jet fuel or other liquid fuels, or used as a raw material for plastics or rubber.”

Diversifying the products that might come from cellulosic sources is very interesting, and hints at directions we might take toward a post-petroleum world.  The big drawback: they are still stuck using food crops as their source material for fuel.  Elsewhere on this blog I have noted that this sort of sourcing of our fuel has significant ramifications for the global food supply, taking out perhaps too much slack in a time of environmental uncertainty (let alone new economic tools in the commodities markets).
All this makes the other IPO filing, PetroAlgae, much more interesting.  They are working with algae as a source material for their fuel.  Algae doesn’t take up arable land, isn’t one of our current food crops, and can be grown in a wide range of environments.  If they can make this work, we might have something interesting there.
Let’s all remember, though, that biofuels don’t really fix the greenhouse problems our current development pathways are generating.  At best, biofuels are carbon neutral – carbon goes into the plant, is released when plant is converted to energy, rinse, repeat).  However, to get the plant to a state that works as a fuel requires energy – that energy has to come from somewhere, and therefore has a carbon footprint.  So biofuels may not be as bad as coal, but completely clean they are not.  The days of the guilt-free consumption of carbon-neutral goods derived from algae are not yet here . . .
Advanced biofuels maker Gevo files to go public via CNET
Algae fuel maker PetroAlgae files to go public via CNET

Posted on by Ed 0

Wired #Fail on clean coal

I’m a fan of Wired magazine – its a pretty amusing read, and every once in a while I see something that really makes me think or go do a bit more reading.  However, I was a little chapped when reading the feature article in their most recent issue – a review of technologies we thought we would have by now, but don’t.  On that list was clean coal (link here, scroll down to find the clean coal piece).  While I appreciated the fact that Wired was willing to run a story that called clean coal an oxymoron, they got the barriers to its implementation wrong:

The good news is that we already have the technology to use [coal] without melting the polar ice caps. It’s called carbon capture and storage — sucking up the CO2 that results from burning fossil fuels, compressing it into liquid form, and pumping it into the ground.

Here’s my problem – we haven’t actually worked out how to keep it in the ground, which is an immense technical challenge.  Liquefying CO2 isn’t all that hard – pressure or very low temperatures will get you CO2 in liquid form.  But once we inject it deep underground, it gets a lot warmer and the pressure levels are likely to drop . . . meaning it returns to a gaseous state.  It’s hard to trap gases underground (geology is tricky – lots of faults and cracks to worry about, not to mention earthquakes!) and even when we do, the CO2 might interact with water, creating carbonic acid which can dissolve (very slowly and inexorably) the stone that makes up the storage reservoir, potentially creating holes through which the CO2 might return to the atmosphere.  We don’t have great fixes for these issues right now, though there are some technologies that might be promising down the road.  So, to summarize, right now we can extract (scrub) a lot of the CO2 from the process of burning coal, liquefy that CO2 and pump it underground.  But if we can’t keep it there, we have just created a very long, expensive and indirect route for those emissions to reach the atmosphere.
This is not to say that carbon capture will never happen.  A lot of money is being poured into this idea (see a recent posting at the NYTimes).  And this is certainly not to say that I don’t want to see it happen – finding a way to produce cheap electricity with minimal environmental impact is a dream that will work in everyone’s favor, both now and into the future.  But the clean coal crowd needs to be honest, as do the wind and solar people – there are still barriers to the successful implementation of all of these technologies.

Posted on by Ed 3

The Death of the Energy Bill: Who cares? Basically, everyone.

There is much flutter around Senate Democrats’ recent decision to give up on the Energy Bill that might have brought about a cap-and-trade system here in the US.
From the NYTimes:

Senate Democrats on Tuesday abandoned all hopes of passing even a slimmed-down energy bill before they adjourn for the summer recess, saying that they did not have sufficient votes even for legislation tailored narrowly to respond to the Gulf oil spill.

Although the majority leader, Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, sought to blame Republicans for sinking the energy measure, the reality is that Democrats are also divided over how to proceed on the issue and had long ago given up hope of a comprehensive bill to address climate change.

There will be a lot of analysis of the biophysical impact of our continuing inability to act on the twinned issues of climate change and energy in the coming days, I am sure.  But, early in the morning, I want to quickly point out the cascading disaster this will cause in the environment and development policy world.  What most people don’t understand about the Copenhagen meetings, which ended in such confusion without a clear agreement, is that most of the key actors decided that it would be best to wait and see what the US managed to pass for its own internal purposes, and then try to work to that to ensure that the US joined the next major global climate agreement (remember, we never did sign Kyoto).  Copenhagen wasn’t really a failure the way many people thought – indeed, had they plowed ahead with an agreement in absence of American climate and energy legislation, they would have set the stage for Kyoto II – where the US, once again, refused to sign on to standards that it had not already agreed to.
I have found exactly one piece of good coverage of this issue, via Lisa Friedman of ClimateWire: “Overseas Frustration Grows Over U.S. Domestic Impasse on Climate Policy”.  The article nicely captures what is truly at stake here:

“Why is it that for the last 20 years the United States is unable to have a bill on climate change? What’s happening? What’s going on? It’s very complicated to understand,” said Brice Lalonde, France’s top negotiator.

“For a lot of us, we cannot wait for the United States. We have to go on. It’s like Kyoto,; we just go on” Lalonde said, referring to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol treaty that the U.S. joined but never ratified, leaving European countries to largely carry the weight of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Added Pa Ousman Jarju, lead negotiator for the small West African nation of Gambia, “We cannot rely on the U.S., because everything the U.S. is supposed to do depends on domestic policy. So we’re not going to get anything from the U.S. in terms of tangible commitment.”

He charged that the international community is “no longer hopeful” that America, the world’s biggest historic emitter of global warming pollution, will ever pass a bill to cut emissions. That, he said, leaves the global community with two options: “Either the rest of the world continues to do what they were doing before, or the whole multilateral system will collapse.”

What we were doing before was not good enough.  I am not all that sure that the net outcome of business as usual is all that different from a complete collapse of the environmental component of the multilateral system as we understand it.  The US simply has to be on board, or this is all for naught.  UN Climate Chief Christiana Figueres put it this way:

“Whether the United States meets the pledge that it put on the Copenhagen Accord via legislation or whether it meets it via regulation is an internal domestic affair of the United States and one that they need to solve,” she said. “What is clear is that at an international level the United States needs to participate in a a meaningful way, and in a way that is commensurate with its responsibility.”

Credit to her for saying this clearly, and for suggesting that content (getting some sort of formal controls on emissions in place, whether through regulation or legislation) is a lot more important than form (insisting that everyone pass legislation to somehow bolster the legitimacy of these efforts).  Now, let’s see if the Obama Administration is willing to really use the newly-empowered EPA as a blunt object in the fight to control greenhouse gas emissions – at this point, I see no other way forward for the US.  Which means no other meaningful way forward for the rest of the world.

Posted on by Ed 8

How to have a conversation?

Over the years, a number of people have hassled me for trying to find the good in reasonable, if doubtful, voices in the climate change debate.  This was my motivation in writing the op-ed about Douthat’s column (link here, link to blog post here).  Part of my motivation is that I am a person who inherently tries to build connections between disparate points of view to see what interesting and new things emerge from the conversation.  The other part is the vitriol which I and those I work with who choose to have a public profile get to endure.  I don’t mind the vitriol, actually, but it is really hard to build a conversation with someone who is screaming at you – so I try to build connections to people that preclude shouting and lead to something productive.  This is a serious challenge.
To illustrate, let me excerpt two e-mails I received this morning, not long after the publication of my op-ed.  In doing so, I have no intention of personally humiliating anyone or personally attacking anyone (though the messages were, as you will see, a bit personal).  So, I have removed the addresses and names – though the subject lines are intact. The point here is to demonstrate what sorts of things are said to people like me on a pretty routine basis.  I’m not sure if these count as Over the Cliff moments or not, but here they are:

Subject: Pseudo Intellectualism

Scanned your comments in the State.  It is amazing to me how academia has changed over the years, but then, again, there was Ehrlic in the 70s.  He has never been right about anything but is still revered by the leftist academia.  He must be brilliant.  This is not about conservatives and liberals (NYT conservative comments?????).  It is not about green gasses, despite your beliefs.  Imagine, the whole concern is about changes of a degree over a period of a hundred years when the error of any group of instruments is not accurate to a degree and the instruments have never been standardized.  I highly recommend going to Dr. Roy Spencer’s web site.  It is about water vapor and the temperature of the oceans.  How can I recommend to you, the great specialist of humanistic global warming, while I am only a peon on the subject?  I have watched this for a number of years.  There is a much higher authority than man.   While man can cause pollution and really screw up localities, the great academics (you) have not figured out this global warming thing.  You have spent countless years on suppositions, aberrant computer models, and criticizing the political movement that you feel superior to.  Yep, you are simply a pseudointellectual democrat.  Remember, Al Gore is the intellectual leader of the left.  Bow down often.  Get a massage.  The very intellectual morons on your side are against the very technology to reduce the use of hydrocarbons–nuclear energy and the use of Yucca mountain to store the waste.  Even the French and Russians and Chinese have figured this out.  Science is science.

[Name Redacted]

[Address Redacted]

Darlington, SC

To this individual’s credit, he actually signed his e-mail with a name, address and phone number.  So he is certainly no coward.  But I am completely unsure how to address this, as it is all over the map.  More or less, this message ties a political stance (liberalism, however it is conceived here) with climate change and an implicit questioning of my religious beliefs.  But this says a lot – the assumption here is that I am anti-nuclear power (not really – it may be our best medium-term option), worship Al Gore (I’ve complained about a number of things he has said), I have no religious faith, and that I live in a world of suppositions instead of a world of evidence.  The fact is that I have not discussed any of this in the op-ed, or anywhere else – the author is resting on a lot of suppositions, some of which are a bit offensive, to say the least.
But there is something else important here – the tone of the writer when addressing me as “the great specialist of humanistic global warming, while I am only a peon on the subject” and “great academics (you)” belies a deep-seated insecurity that, to some extent, I think those of us working on this issue must acknowledge and take some responsibility for creating.  Scientists and policy-makers must take seriously the complaint that we can sound elitist and arrogant in our pronunciations – especially because this is relatively easy to address.  We need to do more community engagement, make ourselves more available, in person, to talk to people about what we do and what we know.  It’s easy to shout at a caricature of someone, as this writer did at me, than it is to shout at a real person who wants to have a real conversation with you.
Then there was this.  Even as this person was agreeing with some of my points, he gets in a rather personal shot about me being motivated by a “paycheck-pension drive”.

Subject: “DOUTHAT”  —  2 ATTACHMENTS

I tried this on you several years ago.   I can see that you have not progressed.

I probably agree more with you than Douthat, but in the end I do not fully agree with either of you.   You both stay on the surface, within the range of the tips of your noses, and do not address the underlying cause and effect, including for this issue.   Remember, you cannot fix a leaky faucet unless you first turn off the water.

The thought has occurred to me that a fundamental reason for this is that y’all are virtually completely captives of what I call the “paycheck-pension drive.”

This will take much more than nice words.   It will take action.

Don’t pout  —  forward this up your flagpole and to some problem-solvers.

A key point here – I was not pouting.  I was trying to make my colleagues and myself accountable for our failures of communication, and to encourage my colleagues to redouble their efforts as they are, in fact, starting to work.
This writer sent me two attachments promoting his ideas on population reduction, which he sees as the fundamental problem here (he is right to identify population size and growth as a major challenge).  What bothers me here is the idea that his solution is the “right” one, and mine (or anyone else’s) is therefore “wrong”.  It seems to me that these are linked challenges that could be addressed and discussed in concert – we go nowhere when we get absolutist in our thinking.  I fear that those of us in the global change community come off as absolutist ourselves, contributing to this sort of problem.
In any case, the vitriol to which my intellectual community is exposed all the time is very real, and not some made-up fantasy created to demonize the right/anti-global warming crowd/whatever.  It is something we deal with that most of our academic colleagues do not, and something we have to learn to address productively if we are to make positive change in the world.

Posted on by Ed 2

Douthat Misses His Own Point

Sometimes I show up in the old media, too:
An op-ed via The State (Columbia, SC)

Douthat misses his own point on climate change

Ross Douthat’s Tuesday column “The right and the climate,” reveals just how far the global environmental change community has come in its efforts to educate the public on the real challenges posed by climate change — and how far we still have to go. After arguing that climate change is real and a problem (“Conservatives who dismiss climate change as a hoax are making a spectacle of their ignorance.”), the conservative New York Times columnist says we are probably better off doing nothing for now, and instead fostering economic growth that generates enough wealth to address the problem in the future.

Douthat has been pilloried for trotting out conservative talking points about climate change, but perhaps the problem lies with those of us whose job it is to connect the scientific evidence for climate change with its human impacts. Doing so quickly lays his argument to rest, and points to some of the real questions we must answer.

First, to argue that greater wealth will allow us to address climate change and its associated impacts fails to account for the fact that economic growth is one of the principal drivers of climate change. Even in the United States, where we are becoming more efficient in our use of fossil fuels and therefore in the amount of greenhouse gasses we emit as we grow, our absolute production continues to rise. Douthat’s so-called solution forces us into an ever-escalating race to grow wealth and the economy faster than the rate of climate change.

Several economic assessments of climate change suggest that we will lose this race. Logically, then, the real question about his proposal is how to generate economic growth and wealth without increasing greenhouse gas emissions.

Second, the idea that one day we will have enough wealth to address the impacts of climate change misunderstands a great deal of the environmental science that Douthat himself argues is too convincing to ignore. Simply put, people will not be impacted directly through warming temperatures — a few degrees Celsius is well within our tolerance as human beings. However, these temperature changes do have vast, complex effects on the ecosystems we rely on for food, our atmosphere, and amenities such as hiking, fishing and hunting. An extinct species is gone forever, and the loss of that species in an ecosystem will be felt forever in complex, unpredictable ways. No amount of money can fix that. It is willfully optimistic to assume that future wealth will allow us to address these permanent changes when we don’t even know what they will be. So here the real question is how we as a society should proceed into this era of uncertainty. What risks are we willing to take with our future?

Douthat’s column shows that we are halfway to a productive conversation about climate change, its impacts and how to address them. Now we must turn to serious, evidence-based discussions to identify productive, meaningful paths forward.

Edward R. Carr

Associate professor, USC Department of Geography

Columbia

This got a bit edited down from the original (to be expected), so I am a bit concerned that the central point here got muddy – Douthat fully acknowledges that climate change is a problem, and acknowledges the scientific basis on which we have established this.  But he is still ignoring half of the equation – that the science, and a lot of research built on it, makes clear the fact that the costs of climate change will greatly outweigh any economic benefit from ignoring it now.
We are getting closer on our conversation, but we are not quite there – and it falls to those of us who work on this issue to do more to communicate these issues clearly.

Posted on by Ed 3