Working with Energize America here and the Alternative Energy Action group I'd helped organize a few years ago, increased support for research, development, demonstration and deployment of new energy and efficiency technologies was dear to my heart, and it seemed to be what Nordhaus and Shellenberger were talking about too.
And the first part of the book I found reasonably encouraging, even with their occasional digs at "liberals", "Democrats", "environmentalists", and "scientists", which I took at first to be merely trying to legitimately understand the range of political views in the US these days. In particular, chapter 5 on "The Pollution Paradigm" was mildly eye-opening: their claim is that treating CO2 as a pollutant, the traditional environmental approach, is politically unworkable:
To succeed over the long term, global emissions trading must be understood more as a national economic development agenda than as a regulatory framework to limit carbon emissions.
The central "new idea" is that environmentalism can't succeed on its own, it must include bigger picture issues relating to human needs as well. While this may seem new in the U.S., this isn't a particularly new idea internationally - the idea of the "Clean Development Mechanism" central to the Kyoto treaty, the UN Development Programme focus on "sustainable development" and the Millennium Goals are all efforts by the international community to address the needs of humans in developing nations in ways that include environmental goals as well.
But in fact, aside from an interesting early chapter and some later discussion on the issue of rainforest destruction in Brazil, it's not the needs of people in developing nations that this book is talking about, but the perceived (political) needs of Americans. The authors spend a lot of time talking about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and they assert that a key ingredient of the rise of environmentalism in the 1960's was the prosperity of the time. With basic needs met, Americans were looking for new ways to find fulfillment. But now, they claim, Americans have retreated down the hierarchy and are, while still affluent, insecure. Traditional environmentalism feeds that insecurity by magnifying threats and risks - and so sends the bulk of the people into the arms of conservatives.
Nordhaus and Shellenberger should have some credibility; they have been involved with a number of creative ideas such as the Apollo Alliance and Health Care for Hybrids, and have worked with Rep. Jay Inslee and Barack Obama in the past. But with this book they seem to have hit on the magic formula to get media attention: attack your own side. A Siegel here just wrote about one attention-getting review where Nordhaus and Shellenberger shared billing as "centrists" on climate with Newt Gingrich and Bjorn Lomborg.
Maybe this is all part of some secret Machiavellian plan to win over the conservative side to actually doing something about climate change - I can imagine such a plan working, but I can't believe this book is the one to make that happen.
Part of the problem is just incoherence. Sometimes they're blaming environmentalists, sometimes liberals, or Democrats, sometimes scientists, or some conflation of the four. Somehow the blame never rests on corporations or the wealthy, or on the increasing gap between poor and rich which is endemic in places where environmental destruction is worst, and is likely related to increasing insecurity in American society. At other times environmentalists or liberals are at fault for not listening to the scientists. And we have page after page of straw-man arguments with little in the way of concrete examples (beyond the first few chapters, which are useful in themselves, if a bit limited in scope).
You would think, in a book title "Break Through", they would actually talk about some of the technological breakthroughs that could make a difference in energy - wind and solar power, electrification, biofuels, new batteries, a better transmission grid. There's essentially none of that detail here though. There is a strong endorsement on much higher funding for energy research - great, and as they point out, the scientists have been pushing for this for a long time. But how should it be organized, where should it be focused? Funding for research doesn't lead to jobs directly - how is that supposed to work, in their scheme of things?
You might also think that people whose legislative proposals (Apollo and Healthcare for hybrids) have so far failed to gain traction would have a bit of humility in attacking environmentalists and liberals over policy failures - but not these guys:
p. 181: "There is perhaps no better case study of the political dangers in using an industrial-era mentality to create a postindustrial social contract than the repeated failed attempts by Democrats to fix health care. [...] Reformers spend most of their time talking to the 250 million Americans who have health insurance about the 50 million who do not."
Indeed, humility is for wimps:
p. 242: "Few things today are more offensive to liberal and environmental leaders than the notion of humans creating new realities, political or otherwise. But a certain hubris is always required of people, be they environmentalists or neoconservatives, who wish to change the world. Ironically, environmentalists and liberals today view hubris as a transgression to be punished, whereas conservatives see it as a point of pride." [...]
"to remain reality based is to accept a status quo that is bad for progressives everywhere"
The worst part of the book for me were the attacks on science itself. Nordhaus and Shellenberger seem to have bought into the "constructivist" arguments about science hook, line and sinker - arguments that no working scientist would agree with, and which run contrary to many important strands in the philosophy of science itself. In fact, they rather disturbingly resemble the relativist philosophy of modern conservatism, and the authors seem completely unaware of the Marxist backgrounds of neo-conservatism when they get to that point. But on science they approvingly quote Feyerabend and Latour, and have long diatribes along the following lines:
p. 141: "This faith in science is often accompanied by the antiquated view that there are facts separate from values and interpretations. But the fact that there is a strong international consensus among scientists that global warming is caused almost entirely by humans does not make it any less of an interpretation. And simply deciding what to study, and what kind of hypotheses to form, is a value judgment. The facts one chooses to give greater weight to in the case of global warming are deeply informed by one's values."
And this they follow with, first the scientific basis for concern about warming and then a list of contrarian arguments that bear no rational relationship to the facts causing concern. Of course "rationality" is apparently something we environmentalists also over-value:
p. 231: "Science has never been a reflection of nature, much less the only vehicle for the expression of the truth. There have always been multiple, contradictory, and overlapping sciences, truths, and natures."
p. 234: "The endless debates between environmentalists and market fundamentalists ultimately pit one theological construct, nature, against another, the market. For either camp to expect that reason or science or economics will prevail in such a debate is folly."
Of course, science is religion, who can argue with that!
p. 201: "Throughout this book we have criticized the ways in which environmentalists treat nature and science as a religion, which we believe lies behind environmentalism's ideological orthodoxies -- its pollution paradigm, its politics of limits, and its policy literalism -- and which prevents environmentalists from achieving their goals."
Which they then follow with a long section extolling various evangelical ministers and how, since environmentalism is a religion anyway, we ought to adopt more of those religious trappings, stuff that works, to bring meaning to people's lives and all that. Right...
Then there's the stuff that really makes no sense thanks to its tortured logic. Like their analysis of CAFE:
p. 226-227: "[CAFE] was crafted in 1975 [... when] U.S. automakers, the UAW, and environmentalists alike agreed that a modest fuel-efficiency requirement made good sense and would help Detroit more effectively compete with foreign competitors, would reduce dependence on foreign oil, and would reduce air pollution."
"[...] for two decades environmentalists have failed to imagine a political strategy or policy framework that might address fuel efficiency in the context of the larger crisis faced by the American auto industry."
<snark>So there you have it. It's the environmentalists' fault that for the last two decades U.S. automakers and the UAW have doomed themselves to irrelevancy by fighting CAFE increases. If only environmentalists hadn't been so strident, if they'd used a calmer tone, we could have had high mileage standards and a vibrant auto industry. But no, environmentalists have killed the auto industry in the U.S. by, uh, what exactly?</snark>
Their analysis of the 2006 election is equally perverse:
p. 256-258: "When Americans heard the specifics of the Democratic agenda, they mostly shrugged. Raising the minimum wage, cutting interest rates on student loans, pay-as-you-go spending -- these small-bore policies aroused little passion from anyone. [...] Unlike raising the minimum wage and cutting the interest for student loans, which are popular ideas but not strongly felt, support for a major energy investment is intense".
Funny you mention that. Because in addition to the minimum wage and student loan bills, House democrats had in their first 100 day agenda:
Make America more energy independent and help fight global warming
* We voted to roll back multi-billion dollar taxpayer subsidies for Big Oil companies – already enjoying record profits.
* We will reinvest here at home in renewable energy and energy efficiency – spending our energy dollars in the Midwest, not the Middle East.
I know it's really hard to find stuff like that when it's hidden away on the website of the Speaker of the House! Of course, unlike the minimum wage and student loan bills, the energy bill is stuck, blocked by Republican senators from going to conference - and now all the renewable stuff may disappear anyway so perhaps they have a point about Democrats.
But it's not really that different from the point of this site every day, or of "Crashing the Gate", "Hostile Takeover", or all those others. Except that Nordhaus and Shellenberger spend the majority of their book praising Republican ideas and promoting what seems to be more a "go-slow" approach than an actual focus on solving global warming.
In particular they talk a lot about adaptation. Now, we ought to prepare - that seems obvious. Build sea walls where we need to, look at changing rainfall patterns and plan for water use, etc. But that doesn't mean we don't need to act - and yet the book makes misleading statements that seem to imply a very definite fatalism:
p. 221: "Even if humans had stopped emitting greenhouse gases starting in 1988, when NASA scientist James Hansen announced to Congress that global warming had arrived, all of the changes today resulting from global warming -- the melting of Greenland's ice sheet, the slowing of the North Atlantic Gulf Stream, warmer ocean surfaces, and more intense hurricanes -- would still be under way. There is so much carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that even if humans stopped emitting new greenhouse gases tomorrow, the planet would continue to heat up for several more decades and probably longer. [...] a dramatically warmer and transformed climate is almost certainly inevitable."
This followed by a typical attack on the failure of "environmental leaders and scientists to acknowledge the irrevocable reality". This statement is simply misleading because the "changes today resulting" are really quite small, and if we had indeed stopped emitting greenhouse gases in 1988, CO2 would have dropped enough by now that the prospect for future change would be almost zero. Greenland's ice sheet hasn't changed much yet - it's the next century of change we're really worried about. While a warmer climate than now is inevitable, the sooner we stop, the better things will be; far from ignoring these facts, that's the focus of the IPCC studies!
There's more along these lines:
p. 222: "a pragmatic politics needs a definition of global warming that is easy to represent by a mental image; communicates an abrupt, perceptible, immediate change in the environment; does not make people feel guilty; has a solution that is not perceived to require tremendous sacrifice; and gives people a sense of control."
What they're promoting here is "Global Warming Preparedness". That's a fine idea, but if your goal is to "not make people feel guilty" then you're peddling false comfort.
Maybe that is their plan. It certainly fits into the relativistic make-your-own-reality newspeak of our present administration. But this is one kind of politics I personally will run from. The time for political groupthink passed with the ending of the Soviet Union, and it has greatly worn out its welcome in this country. Can't we get this administration impeached now and move on to the stuff that really matters?
