President Trump’s decision to void U.S. participation in the Paris Climate accord has already been flagged many times over as a political stunt to play to his “base” that was unnecessary from a policy point of view and hurtful from a diplomatic point of view. His ditching a carefully drafted, vetted, interagency-approved speech in Brussels in favor of a witless tirade—without telling his stunned-upon-delivery National Security Advisor, Secretary of State, and Secretary of Defense—stemmed from the same motive.
In this television-infused presidency, read “audience” instead of “base” and you get the psychomaniacal dynamic that drives this President: He cares about his own popularity, which feeds the insatiable demands of his insecurity, more than he does about nation he leads. In his mind, his former obsession with ratings for The Apprentice elides seamlessly into his obsession with the size of his inaugural crowd and his disdain for all the pollsters who now tell him what he does not wish to hear about his unpopularity in the Oval Office.
No one knows where Trump’s out-of-control ego chariot will careen next, or with what longstanding cultivated U.S. interest it will collide with and likely total. That is a dangerous state of affairs for the affairs of state to be in, certainly. But we must take care not to exaggerate the particulars.
Yanking the United States out of a global climate accord is not a Trumpean innovation. In 2001 George W. Bush pulled the United States out of the unratifiable 1997 Kyoto Accords, and the reaction from the global warming chorus was similarly hysterical. But even if ratified, Kyoto would not have worked any better than Paris is likely to.
Yes, there is a scientific basis for rising global ambient temperatures, and yes, there is a scientific basis for saying that some or much or even most of this warming has anthropogenic sources. But much of the political froth that bubbles up around the science is far more akin to religion: In its common extreme forms, it resembles the latest end-of-the-world cult, and like all cults it is impervious to genuine scientific doubt and debate, and tends to maximalist interpretations of both danger and guilt. Most such true believers could not pass a 10th-grade earth science midterm if their exquisite designer lives depended on it.
The gist of the TAI take on how to deal with climate challenges has been skeptical of the efficacy of the global conference approach that epitomized Kyoto and Paris. There are three generic problems with this approach.
First, by aspiring to maximum participation, it sacrifices rigor and enforceability to legitimacy. In all exercises aimed at global governance functions save those far below the political line of sight (like the IBS and the UPU), there is an unavoidable tradeoff between efficacy and legitimacy, so those who would design such efforts must choose with eyes wide open.
Second, taking a lowest-common-denominator approach in order to achieve maximum legitimacy cedes bargaining power to the weakest but most recalcitrant players, in this case to countries like India. The key result is a legitimated consensus approach that in fact delegitimizes the result in the countries implicated most in implementing the accord over time. A related secondary result is an undermining of trust between wealthier countries that have agreed to subsidize the implementation of the accord and poorer countries that have promised to spend the money as intended, but likely won’t. This arrangement essentially smuggled into the Paris architecture the charity model redolent of the traditional foreign aid business, a very bad and unpropitious idea.
Third and most important, Kyoto and Paris have both been based on the premise that the long-term benefits of reducing fossil fuel emissions justify the short-term economic costs of transitioning to renewables—as though no environmental problematics are associated with renewables should they rise to scale at current and future global GDP levels. We need to take apart this third problem with some care, since it constitutes a veritable cornucopia of error.
At present, if any of the relevant numbers can be believed, about 83 percent of energy use worldwide remains fossil fuel in origin—oil, gas, and coal mainly. No serious person believes that this level of use can be driven below 50 percent within the next twenty years if we trust to some combination of voluntary national emission caps and normal market behavior alone. To drive it down faster would require either: draconian government-enforced reductions in fossil fuel use that would depress GNP levels in wealthy countries and induce sharp constraints on the growth of developing countries; or a concerted international effort to accelerate the process of technological innovation, dissemination, and application to reduce emissions—and that innovation could include new ways of using fossil fuels as well as renewables of known and yet unknown types. The former approach overflows with political poison, and simply will not happen. The latter requires imagination, leadership, hard work, astute management, cooperation across national boundaries, and a bit of patience. Some choice, huh?
Now, some critics of the Kyoto/Paris approach to climate change issues have distorted the issue of costs. Even Bjorn Lomborg, who in my view has the basic idea right—that indeed, concerted and accelerated green-tech innovation is the best way forward—is guilty of this. The common criticism made by him and others is that even if Paris works as claimed, it’ll reduce emissions by less than 2 percent of what is necessary to get to the -2 degrees Celsius ten-year goal at a cost of $1-2 trillion. Lomborg’s numbers have come under fire by critics who accuse him of focusing on worst-case scenarios, but the basic message still shines through: Paris is a wildly expensive way to accomplish next to nothing.
Alas, it’s not so simple. First of all, to be able to calculate how much any reduction in emissions will lead to a slowing of warming trends implies that this relationship is well understood. It isn’t. There is more evidence of correlation than there is confidence in cause. Something similar is true in cardiology, for example, where there is correlation between cholesterol levels and incidence of heart attack and stroke, but the causal relationships are elusive, giving rise to the phenomenon wherein many pharmaceuticals that reduce cholesterol levels do not affect the incidence of heart attack and stroke. Something as complex probably makes it hard to get from CO2 measures to effects on temperatures. There are problems yet to solve, as most scientists recognize.
To take just one of these problems, not that not long ago an article appeared in the New York Times revealing that warmer temperatures, and the added moisture in the atmosphere that warming implies, has led to more vegetative growth on the planet. I had been waiting for years for a mainstream press article on this very subject. Again, for those of us who passed high school earth science, it’s sort of obvious that warmer temperatures and more moisture are going to accelerate plant growth, and plants—in case you forgot—take in CO2 and give out oxygen. So the idea that CO2 emissions just accumulate and float around up there forever isn’t true. The ecosphere has a way of cycling gasses (and pretty much everything else), which is why anyone with a pragmatic attitude toward this problem has recognized for years that a cost-effective and multi-useful way to mitigate the warming problem is to plant a whole lot of trees. Not that plant life can absorb gobs of added CO2 indefinitely; the point is that the relationship between temperature and the mix of gasses in the atmosphere is a dynamic one that current models do not capture with exactitude.
Then there is the matter of how CO2 gets into the atmosphere in the first place. Burning fossil fuels is one way, but it’s not the only way. Capital-intensive monoculture agriculture is another. A few estimates hold that deep tilling and a failure to re-seed agricultural land after harvest is responsible for as much as a third of carbon emissions. Most other estimates range from 10 to 24 percent, showing, once again, that it is not easy to trust any of these numbers. But even 10 percent is a lot and just half the highest estimate is even more, such that government-mandated smart agriculture techniques could reduce emissions much faster and in a vastly cheaper manner than Paris ever could.
That is not the end of error in this third problem domain. What does “cost” actually mean when it is used in this context? Who exactly pays the $1-2 trillion over ten years?
Well, one way to think of this is in terms of lost production, and hence lowered or constrained GDP levels. Any such costs would be borne by economies and hence societies as a whole, but the distribution of costs within societies would vary with their political economy arrangements. Such costs would be real, but as already suggested, neither wealthy nor developing countries are politically inclined to pay them beyond a very modest level. The other way to think of what “costs” means is in terms of the investments and adaptations involved in moving away from coal and oil and toward natural gas within the fossil fuel category, and moving away from fossil fuels toward renewables over all.
There is obviously a huge difference between thinking of a “cost” as production foregone and thinking of “cost” as saved capital spent as an investment in innovation. Since politics makes the latter sorts of “costs” vastly more likely than the former, it becomes easy to understand why practically every large corporation in the United States and abroad, especially those involved in energy, likes Paris. They stand to make a lot of money from the transition, and they are eager to attract investment of all sorts to make the necessary innovation happen. Yes, their stand on Paris has a public relations dimension, and yes, their employees and shareholders are as green-minded as the public in general. But make no mistake: Their attitude is not based mainly on unctuous sentiment, but rather on sound business sense.
One can think of the Paris approach, then, as constituting a large, sprawling, and essentially unmanageable incentive generator. It implicitly expects various national private sectors to innovate in such as way as to drive economies toward more environmentally responsible destinations. Fine; maybe this will happen. And maybe it won’t. It isn’t clear that the participation of the United States matters very much one way or the other: U.S. emissions are falling because of the greater use of gas as opposed to coal for electricity generation, and because of relatively slow demographic and economic growth. (Many European countries are in the same boat.) Alas, one of the “secrets” of the climate change business is that until very recently emissions have tended to rise in lock step with GDP growth, and GDP growth tends to be largely a function of demographic realities, no matter what public policy happens to be.
So the Paris confab may do some good over time, in the fashion described above. But there is clearly a better way. And that better way, alluded to above, is for the United States to lead an international green-tech innovation effort to accelerate the process of transitioning away from highly polluting to less polluting ways of using energy.
How? That’s easy: The U.S. government created ARPA-e to do just that on a national level back in 2007. ARPA-e was based explicitly on the DARPA concept that proved so successful in the national defense sector. Never mind the deeper history of its origins; suffice it to say that Congress failed ever to fund it properly, and the Trump Administration’s budget wants to zero it out despite the successes it has had operating even with a pauper’s budget. Not even a coconut is so stupid as to want to do such a thing, but there you have it. Instead of eliminating ARPA-e, the Trump Administration should be scaling it up and internationalizing it.
Just imagine if last week, when the Administration announced it was pulling out of the Paris Accord, the President had not in essence flipped the rest of the world the bird, but had said instead: “We recognize that you can’t beat something with nothing. We don’t think the Paris Accord is the best way to deal with the problem before us and the world, and we have a better idea. We want to accelerate innovation in the energy sector by creating a massive cooperative international R&D project, even bigger and better than the Manhattan Project was. We are not content to trust the private sector alone to deal with this challenge. We don’t have time for that and we recognize the occasional special need for government to serve the common good, like in infrastructure, with highly targeted investments. And in this case governments need to invest cooperatively for the common good of all mankind. We’re going to create a global ARPA-e.”
It is ridiculous, of course, to expect that the Trump Administration would ever think along such lines, let along say any such thing. But what really grieves me is that the Obama Administration, which so dearly wanted to “lead the world” when it came to climate change issues, suffered such a lack of vision that it failed to even remotely question the Paris paradigm and come up with something better.
If it’s not an outright sin to have wasted such an opportunity, then it is surely a disappointment, for now, in the age of Trump, the United States is locked into a neither/nor box: Paris won’t work well or at all, but neither will we devise and lead anything better. If the Obama Administration had created a global ARPA-e project that was by now showing promise and creating new good jobs here and abroad, could the Trump Administration have so easily walked away from it? Unfortunately, we’ll never know.
