Before everyone immediately goes nuclear on Kevin Drum, it’s hard to argue with when he talks about Why Climate Change Is So Hard. Drum has been looking at the numbers and has been studying this for some time. This isn’t something he just decided to write about.
Drum is responding here to a Washington Post commentary by Jamil Zaki, who notes that while a majority of Americans believe climate change is real and a serious problem, he can’t understand why they are willing to spend so little compared to the effort that will be needed to address it effectively. He blames it on a lack of empathy for future generations.
Kevin Drum thinks it’s more immediate and that it’s a bigger problem than that.
...the key difference is that halting climate change requires us to dramatically alter our way of life. All of us. For a very long time.
Human beings aren’t wired to do this. You aren’t doing it. I’m not doing it. Europeans aren’t doing it. No one is doing it. We’re willing to make modest changes here and there, but dramatic changes? The kind that seriously bite into our incomes and our way of life? Nope.
When I mention this to people, a common reaction is disbelief. You really think people will let the planet burn before they’ll give up their cars? That’s exactly what I think, because it’s happened many times before. Over and over, human civilizations have destroyed their environments because no one was willing to give up their piece of it. They knew exactly what they were doing but still couldn’t stop. They have overfished, overgrazed, overhunted, overmined, and overpolluted. They have literally destroyed their own lifeblood rather than make even modest changes to their lifestyles.
emphasis added
How Top Tier Democratic Candidates Rank on Climate*
* According to Kevin Drum.
Drum has held this position on the problem of addressing climate for some time. Unless we get some way around the inability of people to make the necessary sacrifices and changes, nothing much will happen. Drum has evaluated the top tier Democratic Presidential Candidates on their climate plans, and he has three criteria:
- How practical is the plan? I’m not interested in kitchen sinks. It’s easy to propose a plan that does everything, but if it has no chance of gaining public support then it’s not a serious effort.
- The plan should allocate huge sums for energy R&D. The past two decades have made it clear that the public—and that includes everyone reading this—is not willing to endure huge lifestyle changes in order to save us from planetary suicide. The only way we’re likely to beat climate change is by finding new technologies that provide lots of carbon-free energy at low prices.
- The United States is responsible for only about 15 percent of global carbon emissions. This means that while subsidies for things like solar and wind are good ideas, they are nowhere near enough. Even if the US completely decarbonized by 2050, it would have virtually no effect unless the rest of the world joins us. Any serious plan has to address this head on.
Repeat — this is the core of Drum’s argument about why climate change is hard:
The plan should allocate huge sums for energy R&D. The past two decades have made it clear that the public—and that includes everyone reading this—is not willing to endure huge lifestyle changes in order to save us from planetary suicide. The only way we’re likely to beat climate change is by finding new technologies that provide lots of carbon-free energy at low prices.
Read The Whole Thing. I’m going to give the candidates grades here; Drum goes into a little more detail with a table of summaries at the link. You may be surprised at some of the results.
Joe Biden: C+
Cory Booker: Incomplete
Pete Buttigieg: Incomplete
Kamala Harris: Incomplete
Beto O’Rourke: F
Bernie Sanders: D-
Elizabeth Warren: C-
If you want more detail beyond the summary of the candidates at the link, Drum spent some time looking into them with separate posts over the past few days. Here’s what he has to say about Booker and Buttigieg. Here’s his take on Beto. Here’s why he gives Biden the highest grade of the bunch. Kamala Harris doesn’t have more than a placeholder yet. Bernie Sanders may have proposed $16 trillion, but Drum is not impressed. His analysis of what Elizabeth Warren has is interesting, and it shows how he is applying his criteria.
Jay Inslee attempted to make Climate the key issue and get at least one debate on it. The DNC wouldn’t buy it. I suspect Drum is saying out loud what they are not willing to say openly: a candidate who calls on Americans to sacrifice any part of their way of life to effectively combat climate is going to be rejected for those peddling happy talk, unless the voting public comes to see climate as an immediate existential threat.
The GOP has already rejected anything that will ‘kill jobs, raise taxes”, etc. etc. and will attack any Democrat on those grounds. Will it take a Climate “Pearl Harbor” to change the public’s mind? What would it be?
FWIW, here’s what Drum had recently on how people are ranking environmental concerns, including climate change. You can draw several conclusions from it, but going by what issues rank higher, my impression is that what people see as an immediate personal threat or is in the news gets their attention; climate isn’t quite there yet.
The year 2050 has been turning up a lot lately in climate plans. I am concerned that while it sets a deadline of sorts, it is simply giving everyone more time to kick the can down the road. So much for urgency. It’s a nice round number, right in the middle of the century, but it is far enough away to make it seem like there’s plenty of time left. Until there isn’t.
The REAL Liberal Agenda Behind the Climate Trojan horse...
If anyone would like a climate plan that can be realized quickly and with modest cost, Drum offered a semi-serious suggestion back on July 23, 2019 while posting Regulated Capitalism Is The Answer to Global Warming. Drum is addressing another side of the issue: a lot of the Green New Deal is about rewiring the economy to a different set of ends, including the things that currently incentivize fossil fuel use. Conservatives have this take on it:
The notion that liberals don’t really care about the environment, but just want to control the economy, is an old conservative accusation. It fits in with their belief that liberals don’t really care about racism (in fact, we want to keep it alive so we have something to get out the black vote) and don’t really care about the poor (we just suffer from class envy and want to take everything away from the rich). Still, it doesn’t help the climate change cause when folks on the left publicly admit that controlling the economy really is their main goal and climate change is just the excuse.
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Drum offered up a plan as part of it to show how giving capitalism some tweaks could serve:
Over the next ten years, build about 5,000 standardized 5 TWh nuclear reactors worldwide and retire all fossil-fuel plants. Mandate a 20-year switch to electric vehicles. This would cost around $3 trillion per year, which isn’t much, and would cut carbon emissions by about 80 percent. Done...
...Now, this would, obviously, require a vast global agreement to outlaw fossil fuel plants and build nuclear reactors. One way or another, this would demand government interference in the free market. However, the interference would be relatively small (a few percent of GDP) and very tightly focused. Nothing outside the power and vehicle sector would be much affected.
This is not our best solution to climate change. But it’s certainly a feasible one and would allow all of us to continue living our energy-intensive lifestyles at a cost so low we’d barely notice it. That’s the power of capitalism, if we’re willing to harness it.
TANSTAAFL: Nothing is free. The questions always come down to what is the price, who pays for it, and how. Give Kevin Drum credit for bringing this up. YMMV.
Discuss, but be fair. If you want to take issue with Drum’s three criteria for evaluating climate plans, okay — but they explain how he gets his answers. If you want to critique his analysis of the candidates on a different basis, explain why and how.
Let me add a few caveats. Drum puts a lot of faith in research — but you can’t produce results on schedule. At best it’s a gamble that we can find enough things to bring the cost of climate actions down to where people will accept them soon enough to make a difference. It may end up as a Red Queen’s Race. As global warming continues, we are seeing new consequences upping the ante: methane releases from thawing permafrost; circum-polar forest fires; accelerating ice pack and glacier melting; spread of diseases into new places, etc. etc. Increasing political instability and collapse may make it all moot.
To quote Rush, “The odds get even; the stakes are the same: you bet your life.”
UPDATE: The responses to this post have been interesting, to say the least. While some of the responses to Drum’s have been interesting and informative, others have been of the “kill the messenger” type.
Kevin Drum has pointed to a critical problem. The technology is there, now, to start doing things to bring down carbon emissions. If anything, there’s no lack of answers — and that doesn’t include draw down technologies as some have pointed out. But here’s the problem Drum is pointing to that is the real obstacle: humans.
To summarize his three criteria (and reorder them):
- Any proposal to deal with climate change has to be one that will be supported by the public — and that support will have to be broad and deep enough to enable a program on the scale necessary — or it will never get enacted. The perfect program that will never happen is not an answer.
- Any proposal to address climate has to be broad enough to cover the entire planet. It has to work everywhere, or just doing it in America is not going to be enough. (And if you think the rest of the world will accept a low-carbon future if it means their standard of living is frozen at a level below the developed world, well good luck with that.)
- Human behavior and history show that people will not do what needs to be done if they think it’s going to impose too great a burden on them. It’s not enough to say “We have an answer” if you can’t get people to pay the price for that answer.
That’s why Drum puts such a high priority on research to find ways to make that price trivial enough to not matter, or to provide solutions that are so attractive on their own merits, people will rush to adopt them.
Let me do a little more to flesh out that last point. If you could market an electric car that would sell for the same price as ICE cars, had the same load and size capacity, had unlimited range and could fully charge in minutes instead of hours, and could charge itself just by leaving it parked in the sun… people would be lining up to buy them.
Or let’s look at another problem that shows how hard dealing with people is. Every knows being overweight and out of shape carries serious health risks — yet obesity is a huge problem in this country. It imposes huge costs on our healthcare system. We also have an effective answer to the problem: 1) Eat less, 2) eat right, and 3) exercise more.
Putting a health club on every block and giving everyone a membership, subsidizing the purchase of home exercise machines with tax incentives, banning fast-food franchises and imposing calorie limits on meals — those would all work, but what are the odds of that actually being supported by the voting public? You also have to factor in market forces and the profit motive; there’s a lot of money to be made selling people things that are bad for them — but they love doing. Super-size me, right?
And it also points up something that has come up in discussions here. You can try to motivate people to lose weight by scaring them to death and telling them they’re going to die. Creating a sense of urgency — especially when it really IS urgent — can work up to a point. Several commenters have noted that approach can be counter-productive; people stop listening to what they don’t want to hear.
You can try to motivate them by telling them how much better their lives will be. That can work as well — but without urgency, the tendency to put things off, do less than necessary, or not even start because it looks too hard to get to that better life… well that approach has its limits too.
You can kill the messenger all you want, fault Drum for whatever sins you think he has committed — but take another look at the poll question and the responses to it. Don’t dismiss what Drum is saying until you have an answer for that.
Thank you for all of the contributions to this diary; if the discussion is making people think, so much the better. If it leads to effective climate strategies from our prospective candidates, that will be a real plus. I’m going to post this update as a follow up diary.