Regular readers will know that we’re…not big fans of U-Colorado Boulder political scientist Roger Pielke Jr. For years we’ve called out his hypocrisy, cherry-picking, attacks on legitimate climate scientists, and, more recently, his laughably naive defense of Trump.
That’s why when we saw that his latest piece of climate policy writing for Issues in Science and Technology has been made available on WUWT, we assumed it would be yet another piece of fantastically unhelpful radical centrism--attacking the left while letting the far greater sins of the right go unmentioned. Unsurprisingly, that’s exactly what the piece does: it ignores the actual politics of fossil-fueled right-wing rejection of solutions, and instead focuses on the supposed failings of those working towards solutions. The subheadline makes this thesis clear: “Fudged assumptions about the future are hampering efforts to deal with climate change in the present. It’s time to get real.”
But in getting real, Pielke appears to, perhaps accidentally, ask questions that if accurately answered, lead to a climate policy prescription far more strident than putting a price on carbon (his standard suggestion).
If you read between Pielke’s lines criticizing the IPCC and other climate scientists, the suggestion seems to be that we need a much, much stronger climate policy than what’s currently being considered. Of course he doesn’t actually argue that--or argue anything concrete. Pielke instead concludes his piece by asking a series of questions.
Some of the questions seem to skew to the denier side, like asking about what it might look like if we use the middle-of-the-road projections instead of worst-case scenarios to calculate cost-benefit of policies, or if those costs are counted in terms of just years instead of decades or centuries. (The answer: still worth it, remember that we’ve already passed the point of climate change’s benefits outweighing the costs, according to none other than gremlin-besieged Richard Tol.)
But we’d like to consider one of Pielke’s more pertinent questions: what would policy look like if we don’t assume we can capture carbon dioxide out of the air in the latter half of this century? This is a core assumption of future emissions scenarios, one predicated on a price on carbon making such ventures economically profitable. Without them, we would need to reduce emissions to zero much more quickly to avoid catastrophe.
He asks what a policy based on technological possibility, as opposed to emissions or temperatures might look like, followed by a question about how we’re going to turn off the fossil fuel spigot and fund enough clean energy to replace it. Pielke doesn’t suggest any solutions, but if cap and trade, and a price on carbon, and renewable portfolio standards are well within the existing policy framework, what other solutions is he implying we should consider?
Now perhaps it’s just because it’s been in the news lately thanks to a certain democratic socialist who isn’t a million years old, but opening up Pielke’s climate envelope, and the winner inside looks to be: a Green New Deal, a WWII-scale effort to address climate change.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s climate plan for 100 percent renewables by 2035, driven by a Marshall Plan-level of funding, appears to be the answer to Pielke’s perhaps rhetorical (and perhaps not even offered in good faith) questions. Though Ocasio-Cortez’s plan is currently lacking in details, climate scientists recognize it as strong step in the right direction.
Does this mean Pielke isn’t a denier at all, but actually a closet socialist? (Something Lamar Smith might want to keep in mind the next time he invites Comrade Pielke to testify…)
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