Breakthrough Generation

Climate campaigner and Grist contributor Ken Ward has written an opinion piece that asks an important question: Why do U.S. environmentalists remain irrationally committed to a losing strategy?

Mr. Ward passionately calls on the mainstream environmental movement to cease accommodating industry on the issue of climate change by their support of the Waxman-Markey bill working its way through Congress. To Ward, Waxman-Markey is a “travesty” and environmentalists have framed their decision as choosing between “supporting a joke climate bill, or giving up”, both of which are “forms of despair”.

While mainstream environmentalists have accommodated industry by supporting Waxman-Markey, Ward argues that we must move in a different direction:

“intrepid folks working outside the boundaries of our major organizations have honed all the core elements necessary for an alternative U.S. climate campaign that is pragmatic and idealistic, without being naïve.”

Ward argues, correctly, that the Waxman-Markey bill is woefully inadequate and shouldn’t be supported in its current form. The Breakthrough Institute has written a collection of analyses that show, among other things, that the complete utilization of carbon offsets in the bill could allow emissions in U.S. capped sectors to rise at a business as usual rate through 2030, and how the RES provision will do nothing to increase renewable energy deployment beyond business as usual projections. The latter analysis has since been confirmed by subsequent analyses by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the Union of Concerned Scientists.

But it was surprising to see that Ward’s alternative to the environmental community’s accommodation is neither pragmatic nor idealistic, and is wholly naïve.

Ward writes,

“Environmentalists must stand on precautionary climate science—major corporations are the enemy… Environmentalists should speak the truth, which means we must draw a line distinguishing functional climate action from window dressing…U.S. environmentalists, must stand with climate scientists like Jim Hansen”

But environmentalists have been “standing on climate science” and attempting to “speak the truth” ever since James Hansen first brought global warming to the attention of policymakers back in 1988. In the last 20 years, nothing the environmental community has done has been successful in fundamentally shifting the U.S. course of climate action, as Mr. Ward suggests in necessary. But Mr. Ward’s solution is that if we “take to the streets” and scream even louder than we have been that people will finally start to listen. As I wrote in my post yesterday here at the Breakthrough Generation, polling evidence suggests that a majority of Americans have the facts and know the truth about climate change, but they don’t make it a priority.

To be fair to Mr. Ward, he has not fully articulated his alternative policy prescription to the W-M legislation, which he has said he will do in a future post. However, he does say that it will be the “outline of a functional solution that will, draw on the only successful model of international action, the Montreal Protocol.” This should create skepticism that Ward’s functional solution will succeed in achieving a new climate campaign that is pragmatic and transformational.

There is no doubt that the Montreal Protocol was successful in phasing out the substances (CFCs) that depleted the ozone layer. But fossil fuels are a different beast altogether. Unlike coal and oil, CFCs were never central to the basic functioning of the economy and had relatively inexpensive substitutes. Many environmentalists believe that successful pollution regulation schemes like the Montreal Protocol or the acid rain cap and trade program in the U.S. will mean that a similar program for carbon emissions will work just as easily. But the Breakthrough Institute’s Jesse Jenkins shows why this comparison misunderstands the challenge that we face.

To be sure, we do need a fundamental shift in U.S. climate action, one that will garner widespread public support and begin to make real progress on the climate and energy challenge.

The reason environmentalists find themselves in this bind today is because they refused to let go of their “same basic assumption”, to quote Mr. Ward, about the climate issue. As Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus argue in Breakthrough, environmentalists operate within a “politics of limits” by addressing climate change as if it was a pollution problem. The stubborn persistence of this “pollution paradigm” has undermined a real solution on climate change, and prevented the mainstream environmental movement from building a broad and diverse coalition to mobilize around the issue.

An alternative framework would have recognized that a cap and trade program for carbon emissions would not create a carbon price high enough to drive either emissions reductions or clean technology development at the scale that is necessary to meet the challenge. Cap and trade was doomed to fail from the start: If the carbon price must rise too high to achieve carbon reductions, it will elicit a political backlash, if the carbon price is contained, it will be too low to have a significant impact on carbon emissions. This is what the Breakthrough Institute labels “Global Warming’s Gordian Knot”. We are seeing this play out exactly as predicted in Congress right now. Waxman-Markey contains multiple cost containment measures that may allow emissions to continue to rise for years while investing a paltry sum of money in the clean energy technologies necessary to transform our energy economy.

Greens missed the chance for real climate action by failing to organize around a politically viable and transparent strategy to invest billions in clean energy research, development, and deployment that would have done much more for carbon reductions than the current bill. Greens could have pushed for a transparent cap and trade proposal with a 100% auction that created a modest, politically sustainable price for carbon. This policy could have created a dedicated revenue stream (on the order of $30-$80 billion per year) for clean energy development that would put us on the path to decarbonizing our economy. Instead, political horse-trading in Washington ensured that 85% of the allowances are given away, and polluting industries received five times the amount of money as clean energy.

Mr. Ward is right that the choice between supporting a weak bill and giving up is a false one. Even if the bill does pass, environmentalists that care about making progress on climate change could work to remove it next year and replace it with a transformative policy like the one outlined above. If the Obama administration deems a new fiscal stimulus necessary to fight a deteriorating economy, environmentalists could work to make sure it goes towards creating a new energy infrastructure in this country that will spur clean energy innovation while leading to dramatic reductions in carbon emissions.

But to be successful, environmentalists must let go of their pollution paradigm and their politics of limits. Mr. Ward asks another important question:

“why are we allowing the very same architects of our failed strategy of the last two decades to determine our future?”

But his solution is ultimately misguided. A losing strategy is a losing strategy no matter how loud you yell.