Climate Counterfactuals

Brad Plumer has a nice post about climate change counterfactual scenarios asking various “what ifs” and wondering whether they could have led to a bill.

I’ve been interested in various aspects of counterfactual since college when I read Niall Ferguson’s excellent book Virtual History, studied David Lewis’ work on the metaphysics of counterfactuals, and did a philosophy of history class with Robert Nozick. To make a long story short, the upshot of that kind of analysis is that it really depends how you specify your counterfactual. If you want to ask “would a McCain administration have led to a better outcome for climate legislation,” in other words, you need to ask yourself “why in this scenario would McCain have won the election?” After all, it’s very hard to imagine a scenario in which the 2008 congressional elections come out the exact same way but Barack Obama somehow loses. In the real world, the same dynamics that powered Obama to victory also drove the election of Kay Hagan and Tom Perriello and Mark Begich and any number of other downballot candidates. A scenario in which Democrats win landslide congressional victories but Obama loses would have to entail something pretty odd happening and the precise nature of what that is would have a big impact on subsequent events.

Something similar happens when you ask about “what if climate had gone before energy.” During 2007 and 2008 both Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama fairly strongly signalled personal preferences for energy reform as a higher priority than health reform, I judgment that I also share. But Obama reversed course on this for reasons having to do with the different status of the issues inside the progressive political coalition. So there’s a difference between asking “would the outcome have been different if the underlying coalition dynamics that drove Obama’s choice had been different” (plausibly yes) and asking “would the outcome have been different if Obama made an idiosyncratic effort to swim against the tide of coalition dynamics” (almost certainly not).

The best-specified counterfactual I can think of that leads to a more successful outcome actually has nothing to do with the specific political dynamics of the climate debate. That would be something like “what if decisive Federal Reserve action had led to substantially more robust economic growth in the second half of 2009 and the first half of 2010?” Had that happened, public opinion on Barack Obama and all Obama-related policy proposals would be more positive. What’s more, narrative about the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act would be much more positive. So GOP rejectionism on the Affordable Care Act would have been a tactical failure and rejectionism on ARRA would have been a strategic failure, and you’d see many more voices from within the conservative coalition urging people to adopt a more cooperative stance to shed the “party of ‘no’” stance.

That’s my view. Which is in part a long-winded way of saying that I’m detecting at Netroots Nation a self-critical vibe within the green community that I don’t really think is justified. In terms of what political advocacy organizations can be reasonably expected to achieve, the climate change groups have been extremely effective. But a whole set of other problems related to the economy have dragged their program down. Much the same could be said about immigration reform, which has also been the victim of a political dynamic that’s extrinsic to the immigration issue silo.

The association of progressive reform with the Great Depression sometimes confuses people about this, but if you look at the timeline correctly you’ll see that even though the 1933-37 period was “part of” the Depression it was actually a period of extremely rapid economic growth following four years of epic collapse and preceding a secondary recession. That “everything was terrible and then FDR came in and conditions improved rapidly” dynamic was highly supportive of the president’s legislative agenda.