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Will a top down solution ever deal with global warming?
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On a beautiful summer evening at U.C. Berkeley I had a chance to listen to Roger Pielke Jr. talk about the kinds of policies we will need to successfully address climate change. Pielke, who I interviewed here a few days ago, made a variety of compelling points--most of which I agree with. I'm hoping to get my hands on the presentation soon, and I'll be writing about the numbers inside when and if I do. The talk was organised by The Breakthrough Institute, which I will also be writing about (a lot) in future. The book of that name, Breakthrough, was extremely important to shaping my current views on climate change, and I recommend it without reservation.
During a sabbatical year at Oxford, Pielke received the following saying from his mentor, Steve Rayner, something that we need to keep in mind as we try to find policies to deal with global warming:
Wicked problems
Have clumsy solutions
Requiring uncomfortable knowledge
And global warming is wicked, in the sense that it is hard to get our arms and minds around the scope, causes and sometimes even the right definitions. Global warming is likely to have 'clumsy solutions' that will be controversial, shotgun-like as opposed to a scalpel approach. It will require us to learn things we don't really want to know, mostly about ourselves and how we practice politics, in my opinion.
First, he said the current skeptic/proponent or 'denialist'/'doom-monger' debate is counter-productive, something I can absolutely endorse. Treating this issue in the same way that we historically have dealt with creationism vs. evolution or abortion, or stem-cell research is not only stalling progress, it is ignoring the lessons of the debates on those issues. It is also delaying effective action.
Pielke also made the point that technology solutions will precede political action, which I fully agree with. The political decisions today are difficult regarding global warming because no sane politician will choose emission reductions over economic growth (for if he did, he would be quickly replaced). Until technology offers a clearer path to political success, our politics will look pretty much like the ACES legislation rammed through the House last week by Representatives Waxman and Markey.
Probably the central point of Pielke's presentation is that the solution to this issue will not (and should not) come from top-down mandates, noting that emission targets for the European Union have not produced the desired results, but are more likely to come from investment in broad-based research leading to incremental efficiencies and improvements. As this is exactly how progress has been achieved in agriculture, longevity, computer science and other fields fortunate enough to be measured, I think he's absolutely right on this. If you look at why Moore's Law succeeds in the development of microprocessors, you see quite quickly that it is the result of thousands of small improvements all along the logistical chain. None of those improvements were mandated by a Chip Czar, but they have happened nonetheless.
Pielke offered a mountain of statistics, which I will present and comment on later. But the statistic that struck me most had nothing to do with global warming. On several occasions here I have written that we should focus our efforts first on helping the poorest two-thirds of the planet gain access to cleaner and more abundant energy, as this would lower CO2 emissions on the same scale as converting our energy plant and allow us to be true to our humanitarian instincts. But until yesterday evening, I was not aware of this:
80% of the world's population lives on less than $10 a day.
More later. Much more later.
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