In addition to his Oscar and his Nobel Prize, Al Gore may be in line for the title of Prognosticator of the Year. Last January while I was attending his training program in Nashville, Gore predicted that by the time of the 2008 presidential election, climate change would be the hottest issue in the race.
That prediction hasn’t come true yet, but things are moving that way. Climate change is emerging like a tropical storm building to Category 5. It may become the issue that most clearly defines the candidates’ courage, vision, ability to unify the nation and willingness to be honest with the American people.
“The most remarkable thing about the environmental debates taking place in this year’s presidential campaign is that they’re occurring at all,” TIME magazine reported this week. “Once the stuff of a few hug-the-planet bromides in green states like Vermont and Oregon, the environment is one of the hot topics of the 2008 campaign.”
With that introduction, TIME dedicated a page to comparing the candidates’ positions on global warming and related energy issues. Its conclusion: With the exception of John McCain, the Republicans aren’t saying much yet. (Don’t expect them to until after the primaries.) But on the Democrat side, virtually all of the candidates have taken substantive positions, some bold. That’s not a surprise from Chris Dodd or Bill Richardson, who don’t have to worry about protecting a lead. But the front-runners are going on record, too. In fact, we may see them competing against one another for the strongest climate platform. Word is circulating in the climate-action community that John Edwards, who came out early with proposals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, is gathering ideas for a new and improved climate plan that he wants to announce in the next few weeks.
Why is the political climate heating up? The candidates’ polls may be showing that voters have reached the proverbial “tipping point” on the issue. For example, a poll conducted last July by Yale University, Gallup and the ClearVision Institute registered some startling numbers that haven’t received enough public attention. Among its findings:
- 71% of respondents are personally convinced that global warming is happening;
- 69% believe global warming is caused at least in part by human activity;
- 48% believe that climate change already is having dangerous impacts on people;
- 68% of Americans favor an international treaty that requires the U.S. to cut its carbon dioxide emissions 90% by 2050;
- 85% support a higher CAF‰ standard, even if it raises the price of a new car by $500; and
- 75% of respondents said the presidential candidates’ position on global warming will be a factor in deciding whom to vote for.
The pollsters didn’t ask whether the respondents would cast their votes for climate action or against it, but global warming seems to have become an issue the candidates cannot long avoid.
My crystal ball is opaque compared to Mr. Gore’s, but I would like to venture three predictions of my own, along with some unsolicited advice to the candidates.
1. On Dec. 4, a new nonpartisan climate action plan will be announced by a group — the Presidential Climate Action Project — that has been toiling away on the issue for the past 11 months. It will be the most comprehensive blueprint for presidential action presented so far, designed to help the next White House show decisive leadership in the first 100 days after Inauguration. It will contain more than 100 distinct action items in climate and energy policy, national security, jobs and business development, adaptation, public health, natural resource stewardship, buildings, transportation, and carbon neutrality in federal operations.
If the candidates have been kicking the tires on climate action, the December plan will get under the hood to show how the engine and the fuels of national policy must change. On this prediction, I’m cheating because I’m one of the people constructing the plan.
2. I predict that concern about global warming will get even more intense next spring. The National Intelligence Council will issue a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that details the security implications of climate change. It will look ahead 30 years to address the safety of people and property in the United States, the possibility of worldwide humanitarian crises that require military response, the impact on the U.S. military at a time it already is stretched thin, the likely impacts of extreme weather and other factors. The NIE will start with the assumption that the conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are based on outdated science and that climate problems will be larger and will occur sooner than the IPCC has predicted.
3. As global warming becomes a more visible issue in the campaigns, the die-hard defenders of the carbon economy will try to make climate action the wedge issue of the decade. Their lead argument will be that climate action will ruin the economy and raise everyone’s energy bills. They will counter fear of climate disaster with fear of an economic disaster.
See Part II for my suggestions of how 2008 Presidential candidates should respond to the defenders of the status quo.
– Bill B.
Previous in TP Climate Progress
I would say that I am surprised those numbers are as high as they are. Now if that just gets converted to action.
These numbers are not meaningful, a pol of the same type pointed that moe people believed in UFOs than social security. True science means full and complete debate not unproved theory or just a feeling.
The earths climate is like all other objects in the universe, it is in a constant state of change. Each living person is changing ever second it is called aging. Do not fight change embrace it because bad changes to good.
Al Gore may as well have been forecasting earthquakes for all of the solutions he has put on the table. Not much you can do stop an earthquake.
Climate change (and its alter ego, resource depletion) are different. They represent a calamity that, theoretically, can be avoided. Most likely it will not.
I point to the complete inability of analysts and bloggers to identify climate change as a cultural phenomena. The same green bromides that mercilessly waved their arms trying to alert the public about the greenhouse effect also had solutions. Simplify your life, use less.
Now that the science has been done, and politicians have begun to realize the hay to be made, every useless policy wonk that lost traction during the previous episode is advancing a list of solutions. Every one of them promises a marginal improvement without an interruption to the ebb and flow of gratuitous consumption.
You will never be able to do it that way. The same rigors of scientific and mathematical reasoning that have provided convincing evidence of planetary change have also demonstrated the numerical reality of our consumption of carbon based fuels and rates of ecosystem transformation. Even more telling, are the things that science is not investigating. The Major Research Institutes are not releasing studies that accuratley describe the probability that individuals will change their habits and significantly reduce their personal consumption. The policy wonks are not pouring through the data to determine which item on their laundry list best capitalizes on the human energy that will be required to address climate change.
Instead, every deck chair rearrangement diagram that is shuffled into a policy position is hailed as progress, and the blogosphere gets all excited.
Real change would require a significant disruption of our culture. Individual’s relationship with the physical world would have to undergo a metamorphosis. Our society would have to be rearranged so significantly that history offers no parallels. Leninsm? Maoism? Trivial speed bumps in the history of mankind compared to the hairpin turn we must negotiate.
I also point to the inability of policy wonks to endorse the effective agents of change over the ineffective. Sure, they like to look down the end of their nose at hydrogen cars. But why call for taxation of known climate change vectors, when there are so many marginally effective, misunderstood solutions to promote? The list of goon du jour, pseustainable technologies is long enough to fashion another short career.
The most significant, realistic, tangible and workable strategy for government to address climate change is taxation of economic activity that results in greenhouse gas emissions. Our government is broke, our infrastructure decaying and the financial need to invest in resource reduction is great. But nobody who wants to keep their job at the think tank is willing to invite THAT type of criticism.
Carbon pricing sounds soooo much better than taxation. Cap and Trade will not work unless the economic pain assocaited with waste and inefficiency is the same as it would be under a taxation plan. The difference is that, with taxation capital can be diverted to public projects like transit and weaherisation of low income housing. Schuck and Jive will never get you there.
If a forward looking policy position were announced and endorsed by the climate solutions gallery, just the signal would begin to effect change.
Would a comprehensive GHG tax be painful? Certainly. But so is doing nothing.
Would it disproportionately injure the most vulnerable members of society. Certainly. So would doing nothing. But investments made with diverted capital could disproportionately address the problems created. (Transit, weatherisation).
Would the weathy still consume a disproportionate amount of resources and generate a disproportionate amount of pollution? They always have and it is time that they pay their fair share based upon consumption.
All you policy wonks that were given a new lease on life by the high priest of carbon neutrality and his Little Golden Idol – your new opponent in the debate is not the climate naysayer. It is the citizen that is not going to allow ineffetive policy intitiatives to gain traction in this debate. It is the same caustic crowd that first told you about greenhouses.
Eric Sutherland
(970) 224 4509
Carbon taxes fall on consumer. The tax money consumers pay does not go to implementing post carbon technology. By taxing consumers you remove from them some of the means to chose post carbon technologies. For example, most consumers will be paying for replacement autos during the next 20 years. It would highly desirable if they replaced their present gasoline powered cars and trucks with plug in hybrids that have 50 to 130 miles battery range. Such a range would enable consumers to make most of their every day trips without using fossil fuels. Government policy should facilitate the presence of such vehicles on the market, and in effect encourage consumers to make the choice.
A second major replacement technology would involve replacement of fossil fuel technology in electrical generation with post carbon technologies that are capable of providing 24 hour a day base power. There are three such technologies. Solar thermal, geothermal, and nuclear. The first two may not be effective in many areas, which leaves us with nuclear power as an indispensable element in the solution.
Taxing carbon fuels also brings penalties against consumers without providing producers with money to replace carbon emitting technologies with post carbon technologies. A more effective technology would give tax credits for more desirable behaviors, and facilitation of the massive productive capacity needed to replacement of carbon technology with post-carbon technology. Thus a set of policies, subsidies, limits, and exclusions would be requited to quickly achieve our desired goal of producing carbon free electricity.
Thus we need to think back from our goals, to the proven technologies that are most likely going to allow us to accomplish our goals, and then identify policy plans that are most likely lead us to that accomplishment. Carbon taxes throw us into competition for resources, without paying for desired changes. We have an idea what will work, and what choices need to be made. In order to replace coal fired power plants with reactors, hundreds of reactors would have to be built. France demonstrated that it is possible to build large numbers of reactors quickly and at a reasonable price, if it is a national priority. The United States, Western Europe, India, China, and Japan are capable of realizing this goal with national commitments, and cooperation.
Replacing carbon technology is a matter of utmost urgency. It is possible, but it requires national efforts that is comparable to World War II, with close cooperation between all the nations involved,
Joe,
Please post the whole plan when you release it so we can pick at it.
Thanks very much for Charles Barton to for his arguement against Carbon taxes. I am still looking for a well reasoned arguement against taxing carbon based fuels.
Mr. Barton’s arguements identify him as a card carrying cornucopianist. The concept that “post carbon” technologies are capable of supplying anything resembling our present energy usage is speculative and flies in the face of the reality of our situation.
All so called “post carbon” technologies are more expensive than “pre-post carbon” ones. To make the former competitive with the latter, some financial mechanism is required to level the playing field.
CB writes:
“It would highly desirable if they replaced their present gasoline powered cars and trucks with plug in hybrids that have 50 to 130 miles battery range. ” Because it is highly desirable to you won’t make it happen, Chuck. There has to be some financial incentive. What will it be?
CB writes:
“Carbon taxes throw us into competition for resources, without paying for desired changes.” We are already in competition for resources, Charles. If the revenue is diverted properly, then we have capital to pay for desired changes, like getting people’s butts out of their cars.
It would be terrific if somebody could come up with some real arguements.
Eric Sutherland, The price of crude oil was as low as $12 a barrel in 1998. The closing price today was above $96 a barrel. $100 a barrel could very well be reality before the end of the week. How long will it take for us to see $150 a barrel oil? Under what conditions will the price of oil peak? Won’t the price of oil peak when gasoline consumers switch to some alternative transportation energy source or alternative means of transportation? It is clear that peak oil will quite quickly drive consumers to seek alternatives, the real problem then is the availability of alternatives. We clearly do not need a tax to force consumer change in the face of increasing oil scarcity
You have appear to have decided that “getting people’s butts out of their cars” is a “desired change.” But desired by whom? Not by most people, I would suspect. Is the point of your carbon tax to get us into a post carbon economy. or is it to force people to do things which you but not they think they should do. Have you replaced George W, Bush as the decider?
At present it is becoming increasingly difficult to get new coal fired power plants licensed in the United States. In Texas utility companies have scrapped plans for a dozen coal fired power plants during the last couple of years. We could get ride of coal over time without a tax, by simply requiring utilities to close coal fired plants when they are 50 years old. The cost of natural gas is making the price of electricity generated with it to expensive for the market. Texas electrical utilities are increasingly turning to nuclear power to replace gas powered generators. As it is the market and public opinion are deciding. Government policy should push the technologies that the economy is already starting to turn too.
A valiant effort Charles, but I suggest that you mount a direct offensive against the viability of carbon taxes if you wish to argue against them.
Generally, when I hear the term “peak oil” I think of peak production. A hypotheitical point in time when depleted supplies of easily accessable crude drive the world’s petroleum production into a downward slope on the graph. You seem to indicate that this terminology refers to a point where decreased demand from some miraculous social transformation drives demand into a negative slope bringing the price of petroleum with it.
There is no energy source in existance that can match gasoline or diesel’s portability, energy concentration, etc. Petroleum will always be the fuel of choice, if one can obtain it.
The price of petroleum will hereafter continue to rise. It is very unlikely that any series of events will cause the graph to plateau and start falling. Advocates of carbon taxes, realizing this probability, suggest accelerating the price curve artificially to stimulate the replacement technologies that cornucopianists like yourself think are around the bend. In this way, reserves of fossil fuels may be marshalled to assist with the economic transformation that must take place.
You don’t think people want to give up the pseudo-infinite mobility that the single passenger gasoline powered automobile allows them. Unfortunately, the reality of the problems facing us demands that this luxury becomes less prevalent.
I don’t think that people, if they knew all the facts, would want to see an explosion of Nuclear Reactors. Don’t kid yourself that nuclear energy is free of GHG emissions. It may be better than coal, nothing is worse, but the combustion of fossil fuels is required from the beginning to end of the Uranium life cycle. We have no idea how much fossil fuels will be requred because we have no idea how we are going to safely store the waste for the next forever and a day.
At this moment, your thinking, your inability to wrestle with the subject in totalality, -your cornucopianism- is a distinct threat to efforts to craft meaningful and effective strategies to address resource depletion and climate change. The concept that civilisation can continue the level of consumption and waste that it currently enjoys while solving the problems in front of us is a mathematical absurdity endorsed by the uneducated.
To promote a forward looking vision with promise, you need to understand that a healthy, happy society that can exist without excessive consumption. It is a very different picture from what you see before you today, but it is within the realm of possibilities. In fact, the only people that are making any difference in the world are those that have accepted this vision as their guide. The unthinking missives from those that think someone killed their electric car and robbed them of emissions-free mobility are really not helping.
Eric Sutherland, My view is that we have reached a de facto peak in oil production because new consumers in India and China are entering the market and raising the priceof oil, yet no significant increase in supply emerging. The consequence is an ever growing competition for a limited oil supply. Given a choice between affordable but limited range plug in hybrid or all electrical vehicle and a longer range, but prohibitively expensive to operate gasoline vehicle many and perhaps most consumers would prefer the former. Consumers certainly would all electric of hybrids to no autos, which is the option you seem to prefer.
You keep engaging in mystification by using the word “cornucopianism” without supplying a definition, thus substitution pure verbosity, or the warmer kind, for facts and analysis. I do know where resources are going to come from. I can point to proven means of generating electricity through nuclear power, thermal electric generation processes, and geothermal energy.
You come across as a neo-luddite, forgive me me if I am wrong. I do not know what your cradintiasls are, but I have yet to encounter a critic of nuclear power who understands such fundamentals as the differences between reactor types, the half life of fission daughter products, or the difference between weapons grade plutonium and reactor grade plutonium.
Your views of an impoverished but happy society are to say the least absurdly utopian. It is not clear whether you believe that a post carbon society is technologically impossible, or if you are simply a romantic anti-materialist, but an impoverished soiety such as you desire could well be one riddled with conflict and tension, rather than happy and healthy as you think.
You do seem to have a very good oppenion of yourself and people who accept your “vision as their guide.” You claim that you and they are”the only people that are making any difference in the world.” Oh but aren’t we pleased with ourselves.