Climate change is really hard

Climate change is really hard

I sadly do not have the answers here

Matthew Yglesias

1 hr ago

Member J.S. emailed me last week to ask “curious if you have a ‘what to do about climate change’ post in the works. I know Vox has covered that quite a bit but don't recall you writing about it much when you were there. Would be interested to see your ‘what we can actually do about this given political realities take.’”

The short answer is that I don’t have such a post in the works because I don’t know exactly what we should do about climate change. What I think the political realities show is that some of the primary season arguments about here’s a $2 trillion plan versus a $7 trillion plan versus a $1,782 quazillion plan were sort of pointless — the limiting factor on climate action is now and has never been a lack of aspirational pledges. My main take, in line with the overall theme of this blog, is that the climate change problem is an extremely hard board to bore for some reasons that are pretty fundamentally baked into the structure of the issue.

Emily Atkin wrote a post at Heated taking issue with some stuff I’ve said. She writes that “we have to do every single thing humanly possible.” I agree with the spirit of what she’s saying. But in the interest of being pedantic, let’s note that I don’t think we should dispatch the Air Force to start bombing coal plants in China and India even though the emissions benefits would potentially be very large. Obviously nobody in the climate movement thinks we should do that — that would be nuts.

So, yes, that’s pedantic. But it underscores to me the overarching truth: Making progress on climate is really hard. It’s actually harder than the “do everything possible” rhetoric implies, because we really do have to do all this stuff, but on the other hand, we are balancing a bunch of other considerations. And since we can’t bomb our way to reduced emissions, we also need to cope with a lot of tricky coordination problems.

I don’t have any super-original ideas about the path forward. But to the extent that I have a different take on this from anyone else, it’s that instead of looking at an IPCC target and then seeing how far short of it we are and falling into despair, it’s worth starting with how genuinely difficult the problem is and appreciating that meaningful progress has been and continues to be made.

The climate problem is genuinely difficult

I think it’s useful to return to first principles here — the structure of the climate problem makes it genuinely hard to solve.

That structure is twofold:

Even under optimistic assumptions, abandoning the energy infrastructure you already have in favor of some new infrastructure involves present-day costs for the purpose of achieving future gains.

Because climate pollution operates on a global scale, each country will receive less than 100 percent of the future gains that it makes sacrifices for.

That’s hard!

Like many Americans, I am overweight and I periodically try to become less so. But it is challenging. Not because I’m a science denier or because I’m corrupt and on the take from Big Late Night Snacking but because the health benefits of not snacking accrue in the long run, while the pleasure benefits of snacking accrue in the short term. Now imagine if the benefits were not just in the future, but spread across every overweight person the country. But then imagine if some other pundit’s overeating could undo my efforts by making me gain weight. So the only way for a bunch of us scattered around the globe to all diet together.

Nobody would ever get in shape.

I don’t think my diagnosis is at all unusual, but it does lead me to a big difference in tone from a lot of the climate commentary you hear. A lot of it seems to assume that there is some obvious, technically tractable and politically viable solution that politicians are just perversely refusing to implement. But that isn’t true and it’s impressive that we make any progress at all.

Nobody really prioritizes climate change

Famously, lots of people who are fired up about climate change also eat beef or use gas stoves or fly around on planes to go on vacation.

And famously, the reply to that is this is a collective problem that you’re not going to solve by shaming people about their individual consumption choices.

But if you go to a nice blue jurisdiction where everyone collectively cares about the collective problem of climate change, you still see lots of issues. Here in DC we’re not raising residential parking fees. We’re not changing historic preservation laws so I can install energy efficient windows. We’re not banning the installation of new gas-fired furnaces.

Now there are various reasons people give to oppose all these things, just like there are reasons people eat beef (tasty) and fly on planes (convenient). But a state or city that really prioritized climate would clearly want to require new construction to meet exacting energy efficiency standards but otherwise remove all barriers to density while reallocating road space away from cars to more energy-efficient modes of transportation.

What you see is that there simply isn’t much appetite for prioritizing climate at the city or state level, any more than there is at the individual lifestyle level. That’s in part for the same reason. If you could honestly tell the preservationists that letting me have my efficient windows would solve climate change they would probably listen to reason. But of course it won’t solve climate change. In the scheme of things, the enforcement of the Logan Circle Historic District rules doesn’t really matter — at least not any more than my next plane flight matters.

But this stuff just aggregates upwards. Norway does a lot of great environmental policy, but it’s all built on an economic foundation of oil and gas extraction. The Norwegians are good progressive folks and maybe they’d agree to “leave it in the ground” if everyone else agreed to do it too, but otherwise you’re asking them to forego economic benefit for trivial climate impact.

It’s hard.

The technical problems are also hard

The good news about the state/local policies I named above is that they would work. Apartment buildings and bus lanes are proven technologies that reduce emissions. But of course they don’t reduce emissions to zero.

When you start talking about getting emissions really really really low, you end up having to talk about Hard Technical Problems. You’re talking about electric heat in cities where the winters are too cold for heat pumps. You’re talking about batteries big enough to store excess solar power in the summer and dispense it in the winter. You’re talking about electrifying international cargo shipping. You’re talking about dramatic changes to agriculture or peoples' eating habits.

These are, again, not new points. But I think they are worth dwelling on. For example, at least part of the answer to the question “why don’t we just make everyone manufacture concrete without causing tons of CO2 emissions?” is that nobody knows how to do that.

In the realm of less-hard technical problems, we know that solar panels and windmills work and we know how to make more of them. But as you install more and more renewable power, you need to find the land for it. You need to build the transmission lines. You need in a specific way to overcome the myriad obstacles to building new stuff at large scale.

And you need policies that solve these problems in specific ways.

Timelines aren’t policies

I was frustrated during the 2020 Democratic primary by a tendency among journalists to evaluate plans based on how “ambitious” they were, generally defined by what timelines they selected for decarbonizing this or that sector of the economy.

Ambition is great. Man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible.

But a timeline is not a policy. Bernie’s plan, for example, called for decarbonizing the transportation sector by 2030. Try to think about how you would actually do that. You’d have to make the sale of new internal combustion engine cars illegal basically right away. But not only is that wild politically, the capacity doesn’t even exist to make that many electric cars. It would be less exciting (but necessary) to try to spell out exactly what it is you are going to do to spur electric vehicle adoption. How does it work?

A lot of people got frustrated with pricing-centric ideas like a carbon tax or cap and trade. But one appealing thing about those ideas is that they are comprehensive and they denote a lever that reduces emissions rather than an aspiration to reduce them. When you decide the price stuff doesn’t work politically, then you’re in a world where you need a very detailed topic-by-topic plan, explaining exactly which subsidy carrots and regulatory sticks you are using to move emissions.

I’m not a price dogmatist, but the basic Hayekian point that the price lets you aggregate a lot of information is sound. Without it you have a very complicated policy task to solve and you do have to solve it — declaratory aspirations aren’t enough. That’s not to say they are bad, but if you are going to get angry about the lack of ambition in certain plans you owe it to yourself to be equally angry about the lack of detail in certain more ambitious plans.

The problem is very international

The global nature of the global warming problem is of course well-known. But I do think that it tends to fall out of view in some intra-progressive conversations about climate change.

Just eyeball this chart and you’ll see that US-specific measures are not the ballgame here.

Now, yes, the moral and ethical case for America to lead on emissions reduction is strong. We should not let the global dimensions of the problem paralyze us.

Still the fact remains that this is a global problem.

And much of the world is still at a level of economic development where its aspiration is to consume a lot more energy. There are substantial numbers of people, especially in sub-Saharan Africa and India, living with no electricity.

Even a very ambitious rollout of zero-carbon electricity in African is mostly going to improve lives by giving people electricity (it’s very useful) rather than reducing emissions, emissions that will likely rise as a result of economic development. Similarly, giving every Indian an electric car would lead to a huge increase in aggregate energy use because very few Indian people have cars.

These are not causes for inaction. Giving everyone in Africa access to a reliable supply of cheap, non-polluting electricity would be a huge win for human welfare. But it wouldn’t reduce greenhouse gas emissions and also wouldn’t change the larger point that African leaders are going to want their countries to industrialize, with all the implications for higher emissions from industry, agriculture, and concrete that follows from that.

Stepping back: As we know, asking American politicians to make present-day sacrifices to benefit a global public mostly in the future is very challenging.

If you take that exact same ask and bring it to countries that are poorer (so the marginal value of more energy consumption is higher), faster-growing (so present sacrifice for future gain is less appealing), but smaller than the United States (so local sacrifice for global gain is a worse deal) and the ask gets that much harder.

There’s some good news

I encounter a lot of people who say and do things about climate policy that don’t make sense to me, and it often turns out that they believe that, absent a radical change in policy direction, we are hurtling toward a level of climate change that foretells human extinction or the collapse of civilization. That context helps make their words and actions a lot more comprehensible.

But it’s not true.

The technical details of this are outside my wheelhouse but I’d urge everyone to read David Wallace-Wells on how the worst-case scenarios have become less likely and Kelsey Piper on why climate change is not a genuinely “existential” threat. Media industry gossip is closer to my wheelhouse, and something I’ve heard from several climate-focused journalists over the years is they don’t like to spend time correcting apocalyptic climate rhetoric because they believe strongly that global governments should act with more urgency so they think punching left like that is a bad idea. I see where they’re coming from there, and 100 percent agree that the focus should be exhorting more emissions-reduction policy, not infighting.

That said, I do worry about three problems with uncorrected apocalypticism:

In some cases I think it’s creating undue psychological distress among individual citizens, rather than raising pressure on political or economic elites.

Anchoring around the idea of “IPCC goals or apocalypse” (which to be clear is not what the IPCC is saying) can lead you to seriously underrate the value of marginal reforms, which exacerbates the failure to prioritize.

A lot of politicians — Joe Biden, for example — will casually toss off the idea of “existential” threat and then go on to propose Biden-esque meliorist solutions that are at odds with the rhetoric and makes them look a little ridiculous.

I’m not 100 percent sure what people, in general, should say or do about this.

But for the record, where we are with current policies is not great, but it’s well short of the level of warming described in the IPCC’s RCP 8.5 scenario from which the “worst case scenario” narratives are drawn.

This is very important because as Martin Wetizman has emphasized, in an expected value sense, a large share of the cost of climate change comes from the possibility of utter catastrophe (Toby Ord’s recent book on existential risk in general is excellent).

I bring this up not so much to say “calm down everyone,” but as to note that the risk of backsliding is underrated. The Trump Administration was not “doing nothing” on climate; they were seeking to shift the United States from the current policies’ path toward something closer to the “no climate policies” path. The Bolsonaro government in Brazil is doing something similar. If literally the only thing Biden achieves is to keep us on the current policies path, everyone is free to find that disappointing (I would be disappointed) but it’s still a meaningful contribution to avoiding total catastrophe.

Of course we should press for more than that. But “I want to avoid electoral backlash” is not just the motto of a coward, it’s an important piece of political stewardship. If coming out for a fracking ban cost Biden the presidency, that would have been a very bad climate outcome.

What is to be done?

That’s a lot of words and the answer is still: I don’t know.

I will say that relative to the media I consume, I think my analysis would tend to put less weight on the idea of fossil fuel companies as a Big Bad and more on general status quo bias combined with collective action problems. Why doesn’t your state pass a law eliminating mandatory parking minimums? Why doesn’t DC eliminate street parking on 14th Street and create protected bus lanes? It’s not Big Oil, it’s that people like their damn parking. And achieving a final ideological triumph over neoliberalism won’t change that either. And to be honest about it, while people like me who are eyeball-deep in land use and transportation issues find it natural to see these things as central to the climate problem, if you ask a west coast nature enthusiast who loves weekend hikes, she’ll tell you that the real solution is to get everyone electric cars.

Which is to say again that the problem is difficult and there is a genuine difficulty persuading people to genuinely prioritize climate — which is different from emphasizing the climate benefits of acting on their own pet issues or just kind of slapping climate branding on a comprehensive vision of social reform.

But my basic view is that when we see specific controversies come up, it’s constructive to keep in mind the real difficulty of making headway on the problem, the importance of the headway that has already been made, the need to keep the international dimensions in view, to push ourselves and our networks and allies to be better prioritizers, and to always remember that technological innovations are critically precise because they help cut through some of these Gordian knots.