can anyone stop it

In his earlier book, The Skeptical Environmentalist,Bjørn Lomborg, a Danish statistician, attacked the scientificestablishment on a number of topics, including global warming, andconcluded that things were generally improving here on earth. The bookwas warmly received on the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal, but most scientists were unimpressed. Scientific Americanpublished scathing rebuttals from leading researchers, and its editorconcluded in a note to readers that "in its purpose of describing thereal state of the world, the book is a failure." A review in Naturecompared it to "bad term papers," and called it heavily reliant onsecondary sources and "at times...fictional." E.O. Wilson, who has overthe years been attacked by the left (for sociobiology) and the right(for his work on nature conservation), and usually responded only witha bemused detachment, sent Lomborg a public note that called his book a"sordid mess." Lomborg replied to all of this vigorously and at greatlength,[1] and then went on, with the help of The Economistmagazine, to convene a "dream team" of eight economists including threeNobel laureates and ask them to consider the costs and benefits ofdealing with various world problems. According to his panel, dealingwith malaria ranked higher than controlling carbon emissions, thoughagain some observers felt the panel had been stacked and one of theeconomists who took part told reporters that "climate change was set upto fail." Lomborg later conducted a similar exercise with "youthleaders" and with ambassadors to the United Nations, including theformer US emissary John Bolton, with similar results.
In his new book, Cool It, Lomborg begins by saying that theconsensus scientific position on climate change —that we face a rise intemperature of about five degrees Fahrenheit by century‘s end—iscorrect, but that it‘s not that big a deal. "Many other issues are muchmore important than global warming." In fact, he argues, it would be agreat mistake either to impose stiff caps on carbon or to spend largesums of money—he mentions $25 billion worldwide annually on R&D asan upper bound—trying to dramatically reduce emissions because globalwarming won‘t be all that bad. The effort to cut emissions won‘t workvery well, and we could better spend the money on other projects likegiving out bed nets to prevent malaria.
Lomborg casts himself as the voice of reason in this debate,contending with well-meaning but wooly-headed scientists, bureaucrats,environmentalists, politicians, and reporters. I got a preview of someof these arguments in May when we engaged in a dialogue at MiddleburyCollege in Vermont[2]; they struck me then, and strike me now in written form, astendentious and partisan in particularly narrow ways. Lomborg hasappeared regularly on right-wing radio and TV programs, and beensummoned to offer helpful testimony by, for instance, Oklahoma SenatorJames Inhofe, famous for his claim that global warming is a hoax. ThatLomborg disagrees with him and finds much of the scientific analysis ofglobal warming accurate doesn‘t matter to Inhofe; for his purposes, itis sufficient that Lomborg opposes doing much of anything about it.
But Lomborg‘s actual arguments turn out to be weak, a farrago ofstraw men and carefully selected, shopworn data that holds up poorly inlight of the most recent research, both scientific and economic. Hecalculates at great length, for instance, his claim that the decline inthe number of people dying from cold weather will outweigh the increasein the number of people dying from the heat, leading him to the genialconclusion that a main effect of global warming may be that "we justnotice people wearing slightly fewer layers of winter clothes on awinter‘s evening." But in April 2007, Working Group II of theIntergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the panel of expertswhose scientific data he prefers to cite, released a report showing,among many other things, that fewer deaths from cold exposure "will beoutweighed by the negative health effects of rising temperaturesworld-wide, especially in developing countries."
In fact, the IPCC poses a serious problem forLomborg. He accepts this international conclave of scientists and otherexperts early on in his book as the arbiter of fact on questions ofglobal warming.[3]Unfortunately for Lomborg, just as he was wrapping up this book theIPCC published, quite apart from the report of its April panel, itsmost recent five-year update on the economics and engineering ofclimate change solutions, which undercuts his main argument.
Consider Lomborg‘s central idea that we can‘t do much about globalwarming, and that anything we do attempt will be outrageouslyexpensive. Lomborg bases his analyses on studies of the Kyoto Protocol,negotiated a decade ago. He argues that that protocol would make onlythe slightest dent during this century in how much the planet warms.This is a debater‘s point to begin with—the Kyoto Protocol was onlysupposed to last through 2012; everyone knew it was at best a firststep, and this first step was further weakened after attacks fromconservative economists claiming that it would bankrupt the earth(attacks that kept the US from ever signing on).
As it turns out, they were almost certainly wrong. Working Group IIIof the IPCC, which reported at the beginning of May, said at greatlength that in fact it was technically feasible to reduce emissions tothe point where temperature rise could be held below 3.6 degreesFahrenheit, or 2 degrees Celsius—the point where many climatescientists now believe global warming may turn from a miserable probleminto a catastrophe. As the IPCC said:
Both bottom-up and top-down studies indicate that there issubstantial economic potential for the mitigation of global GHGemissions over the coming decades, that could offset the projectedgrowth of global emissions or reduce emissions below current levels.
The technologies cited as examples are numerous and varied, andreflect the immense amount of research into alternatives that has beenconducted in the decade since Lomborg‘s estimates based on Kyoto data.They include hybrid cars, combined heat and power plants, betterlighting, improved crop-plowing techniques, better forestry,higher-efficiency aircraft, and tidal energy, among others. Thesereflect precisely the kinds of human ingenuity that Lomborg says hewants to encourage, and they undermine the idea that we can‘t possiblyget emissions under control. By contrast, the report shows thatfollowing the Lomborg path—which essentially calls for some morefunding for research and no governmental action— will see carbonemissions rise as much as 90 percent worldwide by 2030. The IPCCconclusions, it should be said, were compiled by 168 lead authors, 84contributing authors, and 485 expert peer reviewers, spanning a hugevariety of relevant disciplines. This seems to me more convincing thanLomborg‘s "dream team" of eight economists gathered for a few days inCopenhagen.
Moreover, the IPCC team made it clear in their May report that itwas not only feasible to make these changes but economically possibleas well. They calculated that if we made this energy transition, theeconomy would grow very slightly more slowly than before—about 0.12percent more slowly annually, or 3 percent total by 2030. In otherwords, our children would have to wait until Thanksgiving 2030 to be asrich as they would otherwise have been on New Year‘s Day of that year.
This seems to me very good news—I‘ve long worried that the costwould be substantially higher. But it also makes a good deal of sense.Remember how, say, the auto industry warned that first seatbelts andthen airbags would cripple them economically? As soon as the governmentmandated their use, manufacturers figured out how to make them morecheaply and easily than we would have guessed. We‘ve seen the sameresults with other pollutants.
The IPCC report, to put it bluntly, eviscerates Lomborg‘s argument;maybe that‘s why he devotes but a single paragraph to it in the book,scoffing at "several commentators" who called the estimated reductionof 3 percent by 2030 "negligible." But though Lomborg will doubtlesseventually produce a long disquisition on why he knows better than the737 experts collaborating on the IPCC project, his bluff has beencalled. Consider the reaction of his old colleagues at The Economist,which only a few short years ago was underwriting his CopenhagenConsensus work. "Just as mankind caused the problem," the editors said,"so mankind can stop it—and at a reasonable cost." The 0.12 percent ayear drag on GDP? "The world would barely notice such figures," saidthe magazine, hardly noted for its casual attitude about economicgrowth.
Doubtless scientists and economists will spend many hours working their way through Cool It,flagging the distortions and half-truths as they did with Lomborg‘searlier book. In fact, though, its real political intent soon becomesclear, which is to try to paint those who wish to control carbonemissions as well-meaning fools who will inadvertently blockimprovements in the life of the poor. Just ask yourself this question:Why has Lomborg decided to compare the efficacy of (largelytheoretical) funding to stop global warming with his other priorities,like fighting malaria or ensuring clean water? If fighting malaria washis real goal, he could as easily have asked the question: Why don‘t wedivert to it some of the (large and nontheoretical) sums spent on, say,the military? The answer he gave when I asked this question at ourdialogue was that he thought military spending was bad and thattherefore it made more sense to compare global warming dollars withother "good" spending. But of course this makes less sense. If hethought that money spent for the military was doing damage, then hecould kill two birds with one stone by diverting some of it to hisother projects. Proposing that, though, would lose him much of theright-wing support that made his earlier book a best seller—he‘d nolonger be able to count on even The Wall Street Journal editorial page.[4]
In its editorial celebrating the IPCC report, The Economistadds a caveat. Though the new data make clear that "the technology andthe economics of this problem are easily soluble," the politics of thesituation are much harder. "The problem, of course, is that the numberswork only if they are applied globally.... All the world‘s big emittersneed to do it," and each of them will be tempted to take a pass.
It‘s in this light that the new book by Ted Nordhaus and MichaelShellenberger is of interest, for they address the question of how topersuade Americans to take action on climate change. In October 2004,they collaborated on a provocative essay called "The Death ofEnvironmentalism." Naming names (and quoting Martin Heidegger, Zenkoans, and Abraham Lincoln), they accused the environmental movement offailing to deliver progress on global warming for a variety of reasonsboth structural and philosophical. The authors distributed their viewsat the annual meeting of the philanthropists who underwrite many of thegroups they were attacking. The nastiness that followed waspredictable—a certain notoriety for the authors and a great deal ofdefensive reaction from leaders of environmental organizations.
Now they‘ve produced a book that develops the same argument in muchgreater depth. It is unremittingly interesting, sharp, andwide-ranging, and it provides a great deal of thoughtful comment foranyone trying to figure out how to rally public support behind actionon climate change, or indeed behind any progressive change. It goesmuch deeper than George Lakoff‘s widely touted book on reframingissues, Don‘t Think of an Elephant.[5] It also has certain important limitations that stem in part, I think, from the authors‘ background as survey researchers.
They work as managing directors of something called AmericanEnvironics, an offshoot of a Canadian firm that conducts in-depthinterviews with North Americans about their attitudes. Much of theresearch is used by businesses looking for market strategies, butShellenberger and Nordhaus have put it to use for nonprofit groups aswell. Their surveys study attitudes on topics like work, violence,gender, and class, and also on a wide variety of particular issues.They find, for example, that between 1992 and 2004, the percentage ofAmericans who agreed with the statement "The father of the family mustbe the master in his own house" went from 42 to 52 percent. But at thesame time, the percentage who agreed that "taking care of the home andkids is as much a man‘s work as women‘s work" rose from 86 percent in1992 to 89 percent in 2004. Their synthesis of this huge pile of dataleads them to believe that Americans see themselves (as objectivelythey should) as materially affluent, so that efforts to persuade peopleto understand themselves (or others) as victims will fail. Americanshave simultaneously become more insecure about health care, employment,and retirement, however, as wage growth has stagnated—resulting in an"insecure affluence" that they argue has usually led to moreindividualism, not to more community solidarity.
In this kind of atmosphere, they argue, progressives must break away from the scripts of the New Deal and the 1960s:
The time is ripe for the Democratic Party to embrace a newstory about America, one focused more on aspiration than complaint, onassets than deficits, and on possibility than limits.
This would not be easy for the liberal wing of the party to accept,and both in their essay and in this book the authors spend plenty oftime lampooning the efforts of those they view as anachronistic.
Nordhaus and Shellenberger mount a spirited attack,for instance, on Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a leading environmentalist—butalso a leading opponent of developing wind turbines in Nantucket Sound.It‘s not just that he‘s a rich man who doesn‘t want to look atwindmills off the deck of his summer home, they insist; for them, he‘sa telling reminder of the problems that arise
when one imagines that there is a thing called nature orthe environment that is separate from and superior to humans, and thatthis "thing" is best represented by those who live nearest to it.
Environmentalists become, in this telling, champions of the static. Opponents of windmills such as Kennedy
end up functionally championing the continued dependence ofCape Cod and other Massachusetts communities on a nineteenth-centuryfuel source to heat their homes and generate electricity.
In the same way, other groups worried about views or noise or density
end up blocking the transformation of American communitiesinto vibrant, creative, and high-density cities like New York that arefar more sustainable and livable than endless megalopolises like LosAngeles.
Scornful of well-heeled environmentalists, they also attackadvocates of "environmental justice" who have complained that theircommunities are the victims of disproportionate pollution. They contestthe data, and argue that smoking and eating bad food are much biggerproblems for minority communities. In dealing with asthma, for example,the authors, instead of concentrating on emissions from diesel buses,recommend working to improve "housing, health care, daycare, parentingclasses, and violence prevention," which may actually do more to reducethe problem. Such reforms would deal more directly with the goals thatresidents of the inner city cited when questioned in the surveys ofNordhaus and Shellenberger: "jobs, crime, health care, housing." Overand over again, in a wide variety of settings, they make the samepoint: environmentalists have to take a much wider view of the world.If you don‘t want the rainforest in Brazil cut down, you need to beworking in the favelas of São Paulo to prevent the conditions that cause people to migrate toward the Amazon in search of a better life.
This is an important point, marred by overstatement. Kennedy, forinstance, is a strong supporter of environmental causes who made a badcall on the windmills near his house—and as Nordhaus and Shellenbergernote, many environmentalists in the region have effectively organizedto support the turbines, which seem likely to be built. Environmentalorganizers in urban neighborhoods have in fact already emerged aschampions of precisely the kind of campaigns the authors encourage. Notten miles from where they live, Van Jones, the former head of Oakland‘sElla Baker Center for Human Rights, has launched the most tenaciousdrive yet for precisely the kind of Green Jobs campaign the authorsenvision. Their caricature of the environmental movement isincreasingly out of date, and it will grow more so because of thesimple fact that carbon dioxide, the main gas involved in globalwarming, is so different from older forms of pollution. Carbonmonoxide—carbon with one oxygen atom—killed you when you breathed itin. If you put a filter on the back of your car, it disappears from theexhaust stream. There‘s no filter for carbon dioxide; it‘s theinevitable result of the combustion of fossil fuel. To deal with it,you need to deal with the dependence on fossil fuel, which meansdealing with the economy as a whole, which means dealing with how welive.
The question becomes how best to do that. Citing their research thatshows Americans are "aspirational," they advise against anything thatsmacks of limits. It‘s when economic growth is really booming, theyinsist, that we become confident enough to do things like controlpollution. They summarize at some length Benjamin Friedman‘s powerfulrecent argument for economic expansion, The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth,[6]with its conclusion that good times bring out empathy and generosity inAmericans, and that in fact environmental progress has traditionallybeen a product of surplus—when we felt rich, we‘d spend money oncleaning the air.
Unfortunately, at the moment growth means burning more fossil fuel.As Friedman acknowledged (though Nordhaus and Shellenberger don‘tinclude this crucial quote in their retelling), CO2 is "theone major environmental contaminant for which no study has ever foundany indication of improvement as living standards rise." How can thatfact be faced? How to have growth that Americans want, but withoutlimits that they instinctively oppose, and still reduce carbonemissions? Their answer is: investments in new technology. Acknowledgethat America "is great at imagining, experimenting, and inventing thefuture," and then start spending. They cite examples ranging from thenuclear weapons program to the invention of the Internet to show whatgovernment money can do, and argue that too many clean-energy advocatesfocus on caps instead:
Neither Democratic leaders in Congress nor Democraticpresidential candidates can convincingly speak to American greatness aslong as they refuse to put their money where their mouths are.The need for new technology is obviously urgent—it‘sprecisely what the IPCC economists are counting on in the data citedabove. The question is how best to mobilize that investment. Some of itcan and should come from government spending, but there‘s probably asmuch or more to be realized by setting the private sector to work. Thatis precisely what the series of caps on carbon now under considerationare supposed to do. If we say that next year American industry willonly be able to produce 98 percent of the carbon it produced this year,and the year after that the number will be 95 percent and the yearafter that 91 percent, and if we let industries trade among themselvesthe carbon allotments they buy at auction—buying it, in effect, from wethe people who each own some share of the atmosphere—then we should seethe logic of the market start to wring those carbon reductions out ofthe economy relatively quickly. As The Economist makes clear,this system will work much better once it is international—once, thatis, some expanded form of Kyoto is adopted by treaty, something thatcan‘t happen until the greatest carbon culprit, the US, leads by takingserious action here at home. Government can and should invest,especially to make sure that the energy transition produces the kind ofjobs that many Americans really need, but its larger role is to set inplace the caps that will speed the whole process. And speed is of theessence because, pace Lomborg, each new round of scientific analysismakes clear just how fast global warming is coming at us.
The antipathy of Shellenberger and Nordhaus to placing limits oncarbon emissions, an antipathy based on their fervent belief in whatthey hear in their surveys, locks them into accepting slower progressthan is necessary and possible. No one thinks we can stop globalwarming, but the IPCC data makes it clear that it is still possible—ifwe begin immediately and take dramatic steps to limit carbonemissions—to hold it below the thresholds that signal catastrophe. Theauthors concede too much to the enemies of regulation, a concessionthey‘re willing to make partly because they‘ve convinced themselvesthat clinging to the static biological world we were born into isimpossibly conservative. Global warming, they write,
will force human societies to adapt in all sorts of ways,not the least of which could be bioengineering ourselves and ourenvironments to survive and thrive on an increasingly hot andpotentially less hospitable planet.
This is improbable; indeed it sounds flaky.
But in the reams of analysis provided by Nordhaus and Shellenberger,there are also many kernels of hope for even faster progress thantechnology alone can provide. From their surveys, they find thatAmericans not only desire more choice and autonomy and individualism,but also want some kind of functioning community and support system(their analysis of the rise of evangelical churches is particularlystrong).
The first group of attitudes, favoring individual choice, may makethe acceptance of limits more difficult; but the second group holds outsome real possibilities—and it jibes with much new research fromeconomists, psychologists, and sociologists about the dissatisfactionevident among increasingly alienated and disconnected Americans.Consider the fact that the average Western European uses half as muchenergy as the average American (and hence produces half as much CO2).Half is a big proportion, especially when you consider that it comesnot from any new technology but instead from somewhat different socialarrangements. Europeans have decided to, say, invest in building citiesthat draw people in instead of flinging them out to sprawling suburbs,and invest in mass transit that people then actually take. This kind ofinvestment may produce quicker returns than high-tech R&D; at thevery least, it‘s urgently important that these kinds of societies(where reported rates of human satisfaction are sharply higher than inthe US) be held up to China, India, and the rest of the developingworld, in place of our careening model. In addition, given that we willcertainly be facing a disrupted planet, tighter human communities areprobably a better bet for "surviving and thriving" than bioengineeringto achieve different kinds of bodies.
After grappling with these weighty treatises, it‘s arelief to read two short books that cover less ground. Kerry Emanuel isthe foremost hurricane scientist in the US; his original research hashelped us understand and demonstrate the link between global warmingand storminess. In an epic feat of concision, he manages in eighty-fivevery small pages to explain the state of the science of climate change,concluding on the optimistic note that
the extremists [who deprecate the threat of climate change]are being exposed and relegated to the sidelines, and when the mediastop amplifying their views, their political counterparts will havenothing left to stand on.
In the best essay from the collection edited by Joseph DiMento and Pamela Doughman, the New York Timesclimate reporter Andrew Revkin makes it clear that finally (and nosmall part thanks to his own reports) the press and television arestarting to do exactly that. One of the most important jobs ofjournalists at the moment, he writes, is
to drive home that once a core body of understanding hasaccumulated over decades on an issue —as is the case with human-forcedclimate change—society can use it as a foundation for policies andchoices.