It’s a little funny how climate change is an issue of belief. Most controversial issues, like evolution, are framed in terms of faith. But we wouldn’t ask someone if they believe in antibiotics or gravity. I understand how evolution could be controversial, because it revises long-held ideas about our origins. I also understand that confronting climate change is a hard sell, because it’s a long-term problem that’s expensive to fix. But why deny climate change altogether? Climate change isn’t inherently political, and passes a basic test of common sense. Human action has caused animals to become extinct, rivers to catch on fire, and acid rain to fall from the sky. Why couldn’t seven billion people affect the Earth’s climate?
Climate change seems to be controversial because solving it demands collective action, and this action must adversely affect staple American industries and basic individual habits. The organization best equipped to create this change is the federal government, but if your political philosophy states that government is always the problem and never the solution, it’s hard to wrap your brain around climate change. Instead of trying, it’s easier to label it junk science and move on.
As a believer in climate change, it’s hard not to rub Hurricane Sandy in the face of skeptics. Bloomberg Businessweek ran the headline “It’s Global Warming, Stupid.” But blaming Sandy on climate change is not scientifically accurate. An excellent blog post by Jason Samenow at the Washington Post reviews current scientific thinking on climate change, and comes to the following conclusions:
1) We should not blame climate change for Sandy, 2) Climate change likely made Sandy’s effects marginally worse, and 3) The future favors stronger hurricanes and higher seas but perhaps fewer storms overall.
The most important political result of Hurricane Sandy might be in providing an opening to pass climate change legislation. Political science professor John Kingdon defined the term “policy window” as describing moments of opportunity for political action. Kingdon argued that these windows don’t stay open very long and policy advocates must have a policy solution ready to go. New polling indicates that 65 percent of Americans believe the government should act to mitigate climate change, which (at least for now) reverses a long trend of declining concern about the issue.
Among those who believe in climate change but don’t favor action, the most popular arguments against doing anything are: 1) global warming is natural, 2) increasing pollution in less developed countries will offset anything we do, 3) it’s too expensive to fix, and 4) it’s too late to do anything. Although science has mostly disproven the first objection, the remaining arguments are powerful. But climate change is an issue so fundamental to our continued prosperity and that of our descendants, adopting a fatalistic attitude seems foolish. We’re willing to pour billions of dollars into defense spending to fight threats real and imagined, but hesitant to tackle an even bigger threat of our own making.
There is hope, because workable policy solutions exist and we’re been able to implement them in the past. President George H.W. Bush’s administration passed cap and trade legislation that helped eliminate acid rain. President Reagan, after conducting a cost-benefit analysis, decided that eliminating ozone-depleting chemicals was worth the cost. Cap and trade legislation for carbon emissions passed the House in 2009 before losing momentum in the Senate. Cap and trade allows business and buy and sell carbon emission permits, which is a market-based approach to regulating carbon emission levels. Cap and trade efficiently allocates a share of the carbon output to individual businesses, and allows the government to gradually reduce total emissions. While some environmentalists believe cap and trade doesn’t go far enough, it’s a bipartisan solution supported by many economists, and allows the federal government to take an active role in regulating carbon emissions.
However we choose to tackle the climate change problem, the first step is admitting we have a problem. Hurricane Sandy has pushed us down that path. Climate science doesn’t belong in realm of partisan politics, and we need to start seriously considering pragmatic policy solutions.
(Note: An earlier post exploring the electoral implications of climate change from columnist Alexis Stern is available here.)
Climate change is the lynchpin of the new truthiness-vortex in the 21st century. The idea that one side can literally un-truth-itize something is kind of amazing; remember Newt Gingrich sitting down next to Nancy Pelosi on the PSA about Climate Change? The minute some Zoot suit lobbyist realized this was going to cut a chunk out of their profit margin everyone started talking about the "conspiracy" on the part of scientists, with complete and frankly impressive unselfconscious irony.
I think one problem I'd add is–who stands up politically for climate change? If it's scientists, you have a particularly unnder-equipped group to levy a political argument. Thomas Friedman has written about this. Scientists are cautious, measured, precise; it's against the charge of their vocation to make dire apocalyptic announcements. That not only makes them toothless, but vulnerable; remember "Climate gate"?