Climate Catastrophism Leads to Illiberalism but Doesn’t Solve the Problem
Climate Catastrophism Leads to Illiberalism but Doesn’t Solve the Problem
There are liberal solutions available but the right’s denialism and the left’s alarmism are getting in the way
We are pleased to bring you the latest entry from our inaugural Liberalism for the 21st Century conference convened earlier this summer by ISMA, our publisher. The conference, which received rave reviews, required attendees to make a truly hard choice during one segment of the schedule: the breakout sessions. Since these were held concurrently, and since there were four fascinating discussions to choose from—on economic populism, misinformation and censorship, social justice, and climate change—conference goers had to pick one to attend and that unfortunately meant missing out on the other three.
But not to worry, we’ve been gradually rolling out the full conference over at our YouTube page (which you should subscribe to if you haven’t already!), and publishing select sessions here at The UnPopulist.
Today’s entry that we’re sharing with you is on finding liberal solutions to climate change. This breakout session was moderated by
, author of the widely read Slow Boring newsletter, Bloomberg columnist, Vox co-founder and former senior correspondent, and author of the book, One Billion Americans. The panel featured Jonathan H. Adler, director of the Coleman P. Burke Center for Environmental Law at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law, and author of Climate Liberalism: Perspectives on Liberty, Property, and Pollution; Nils Gilman, chief operating officer and executive vice president at the Berggruen Institute, deputy editor of Noema magazine, and co-author—along with Jonathan S. Blake—of Children of a Modest Star: Planetary Thinking for an Age of Crises; and Joseph Majkut, director of the Energy Security and Climate Change Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).We encourage you to watch the video of this breakout session in its entirety, which contains a Q&A section toward the end that is not included in the transcript below.
The following transcript of the panel discussion has been adjusted for flow and clarity.
Matthew Yglesias: One of my hot takes is that the climate issue is central to the global crisis of liberalism—more central than a lot of people realize. Because there isn’t as much debate about it inside of intellectual circles as there is about other topics. But I think that the push to address climate change both drives left-wing people towards very illiberal approaches—substantively and procedurally—and then global efforts to address climate change is fuel for a lot of right-wing populist backlash.
In America, climate movement people used to look across the Atlantic very wistfully and say, “Why can’t we just have this great bipartisan consensus like they have over there?” But where you have a bipartisan consensus, you get a backlash from people who are outside the system. The far right has definitely gained steam off of immigration, but also off of climate backlash stuff. And in a way, the liberal answer to climate backlash is less obvious. Liberal politicians are comfortable saying, “Okay, people got mad about the border, so we got to send some more agents down there.” Climate is tough. A large, well-funded movement that has a lot of purchase in the media, a lot of activist clout, will tell you, “You are dooming society to extinction if you don’t do exactly what we want,” which creates limits to political flexibility, which creates a lot of problems.
So we want to talk about both that dilemma and possible solutions. We’ll go first to Nils on apocalypticism and liberalism and how it works together.
Nils Gilman: I totally agree with you, Matt, that this topic is a really critical one—not just for the substance of, How do we address climate change?, but also for thinking about, How do we do that while preserving liberalism?
Mark Lilla this morning was talking about the historical dramaturgy that is driving people on the right. There’s also historical dramaturgy which is driving people on the left regarding climate change. To quote Greta Thunberg: We only have 11 years or so. If we don’t [solve it], the sky quite literally will fall on us. There’s a lot of evidence in the political science literature that extreme predictions don’t drive people towards solutions that are really about give and take. One of the things I’ve been frustrated by is that what we mean by “liberalism” is kind of a shifting and moving target. One of the hallmarks of liberalism is the idea of turn-taking in policy-making—the idea that there’s a legitimate opposition and you’ll each get a turn, a bite at the apple every four or six or eight years, and that you should expect that the other side will get a turn. If you drive towards apocalyptic rhetoric about any particular topic—and there’s a ton of that associated with climate change on the left in particular, which says that this topic should be taken off the table of politics; that there’s one solution, and we only have one way of doing this—the thing I worry about is not just that that’s illiberal in itself, but that it drives the backlash that Matt was just talking about. If we think about the extremist demands with respect to climate change—and I’m talking here about people who aren’t denying that climate change is happening—I'm not sure that the left has a more plausible story to tell than the right and it's actually tied up with the issue of immigration.
One of the ways to think about what’s driving climate change is overconsumption. And the Number One thing that drives increasing consumption is people getting richer. The fastest way for somebody to get rich is not by staying in the Global South, but to move to the Global North. And so the migration issue is deeply tied up— particularly on the right, at least with the non-climate-change-denying right—with the issue of immigration. People don’t remember this, but the Number One anti-immigration organization in the U.S. throughout the Cold War was the Sierra Club that said, If we bring more people to America, there’s going to be more consumption and more use of natural resources and this is just bad. They weren’t really focused on climate change at that point. They were focused on environmental preservation and conservation in general. But the point still holds now. (There was a purge in the 1990s and they dropped that kind of politics.)
“There’s this fear: Which am I afraid more of, climate change or climate change policy? And if climate change policy means the government is going to decide how much, and what sort of, energy each industry gets to use, and in what time frame, and what car you drive, and what kind of stove you have, what kind of house you live in, and so on … well, then, climate change has got to be really, really bad to justify that.” — Jonathan H. Adler
But if you ask yourself a question, What's more realistic: the proposals by the left that wants some sort of a global government that’s going to dictate from the top down carbon emission and consumption standards (to make everybody put on the hairshirt all over the planet), and figure out what we're going to do in terms of equity with development in the Global South … is that a more realistic thing? Or is it more realistic just to shoot people at the border if you buy that we only have six years now?
I also want to say that we don’t just have six years—[Greta Thunberg said we have 11 years left in 2019]—and it’s absurd to think that we do. This is a long-term problem. It’s been literally hundreds of years in the making in terms of building a carbon-based civilization all over the world, and it’s going to take us probably almost as long to unwind that, and we’re going to have to live with the consequences of the fact we put a ton of carbon—I mean, gigatons of carbon—into the atmosphere. That’s just something we’re going to have to deal with. Acting like this is a policy solution that has to happen overnight, and that there’s going to be no give-and-take on this politically, is deeply illiberal. The more one says that, the more one pushes away from liberalism as a general set of principles.
Yglesias: Yeah!
Jonathan, you’re the expert in this. There is a “liberal” way to think about climate change, right?
Jonathan H. Adler: There certainly is, and a lot of folks who take at least the libertarian manifestations of liberal policy positions in a lot of other contexts abandon it in the context of climate change, which is a problem.
[When] we step back and think about environmental protection generally as something that we ask government to do, or what the liberal case for environmental protection is, it begins with the government protecting people and their property from harms caused by the misuse of other people’s property. One of my favorite old cases is William Aldred’s case from [1610]. A guy has a pig farm, and his neighbor’s like, “The pig stink, and I can’t sit at my table and have dinner because of the odors.” And this opinion sounds like something that some law and economics person would have written in the 1970s, because the farm owner is like, “Well, I’m producing valuable stuff for society. I am helping people be fed. If it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t have pork on your dinner plate. From a welfare-maximizing standpoint, I have to be allowed to do this, and your nose shouldn’t be so sensitive.” The court says, “No, that’s not how it works. You have the right to do things on your property. He has the right to do things on his. But when you start to intrude” … it’s the pollution version of the aphorism about my right to swing my hand ends at the tip of your nose. It’s the same principle.
Historically, that was the beginnings of environmental policy, before we had big federal regulatory agencies. Over time, we realized that it’s often not this bilateral problem. It’s not one farmer and one homeowner; it’s lots of people, lots of activities—the accumulation of many activities in a particular area, so that the concentration of effects reaches a point where it actually becomes a problem. Again, the same principles would underlie the early zoning laws that were designed to deal with this. How do we prevent these sorts of conflicts ex ante rather than ex post? The Progressive Era smoke control movement [was] very much designed to make sure you can burn coal, but you can’t burn it in a place that’s going to make people nearby sick, and that resulted in moving a lot of these facilities outside of the cities.
At a certain point, the politics of environmental issues, as the problems become more complicated, as the stakes become larger, make these coordination problems look more difficult, and they’ve produced this illiberal response of not merely saying, not just in terms of the policy measures, but the reaction of being involved, “the problem can’t be real.” The need to deny the problem so as to deny the rationale for government intervention. It’s this binary choice: if it’s a catastrophe, yes, we have to do terrible things. But if it’s not, we can ignore it. But of course, that’s not the traditional liberal way of thinking about these sorts of problems.
I worked at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which I guess is still today the leading don’t take action on climate change organization here in D.C. A few years after I left and went to academia, I wrote a paper saying, “Look, if we take these ideas about protecting property rights—not merely from the government but from others—seriously, you don’t have to be [a catastrophist] to think that climate change is a problem within this traditional, classical liberal framework.” You can take very modest, non-apocalyptic scenarios about things like sea level rise. And you can point out that just as there are old cases about pig farmers, there are old cases about land modifications that cause the flooding of a neighbor’s property, and it was recognized [that if] you do something on your property that causes standing water on your neighbor’s property, that’s a trespass, that’s a property rights violation. We can have a discussion about when it’s not one landowner versus another landowner, it’s millions of people emitting stuff, and millions of people’s land being affected very far away, about what sort of institutional mechanisms we want to have to deal with that … but you don’t actually need to prove very much. You don’t need to prove we only have six years to show that that’s a problem.
Similarly, if we just think about it as a risk problem, is it all that different from national defense? We don’t invest in national defense because we know with certainty that Russia, China, pick the country you want, is going to do x by a particular date. We know that the risk of them doing something sufficiently bad is such that prudent investments that can reduce the likelihood or the consequences of those actions are worthwhile. You think of it kind of like an insurance problem. In terms of thinking about the problem, it is very useful to not think about climate change as this kind of separate category—apocalypse—that means all the rules are thrown out the window, but rather just a more complicated, more difficult version of the problem that we’ve been thinking about dealing with liberal institutions and liberal ideas about the role of government for a very long time. Part of the problem is that we’ve forgotten a lot of that, and we don’t talk about climate change in those kinds of terms.
Yglesias: To that point, Joe … I used to not cover climate because I felt like the answer was actually really clear and well known: there is some negative externality associated with these emissions and we should price the externality. People might disagree as to exactly what the price should be, but that’s democratic politics. The answer isn’t zero, and it’s not a million. That is not what is happening. So how does policy-making address the fact that we’re not landing on that kind of liberal solution?
Joseph Majkut: I agree that this liberal solution kind of comes out of a textbook, and it feels quite simple. But here’s a couple challenges. One is: the way that the problem of climate change has been framed is that the goal is to avert dangerous climate change. One of the things that happened was they asked scientists to figure out what dangerous climate change meant, and that led to the imposition of certain temperature targets associated with climate safety, climate danger, and climate apocalypse. That’s all highly uncertain. We don’t really know [what exactly] two degrees centigrade of warming means, and whether that is the tipping point that things become a real problem. But rather than treat them as rough guidelines, they’re treated as barriers in the policy discourse.
That imposes two challenges for the textbook liberal solution. The first is: you have no idea what price will give you emissions reductions consistent with that temperature target. And the second is: you need to establish that price, not in a world where there’s a unitary, rational decision-maker, like where the economist Bill Nordhaus gets to say, “The appropriate price to reach that target or to capture this externality is $65 a ton of CO2 emissions—and everybody go do it.” You have wildly disparate decision-makers across a bunch of different countries engaging in a sort of a collective action problem. So the path to a global, harmonized carbon price is looking very, very long for those two reasons.
Then there’s a whole bunch of secondary reasons: How much are democratic institutions willing to impose costs on people today for benefits that are realized in the future? Because if you’re honest about the scale of both the problem and of a transition to a near zero carbon emissions economy, the disruption in economic activity is quite large. That raises a third issue, which is a relative value judgment. One of the critiques of global climate action is that it prevents human flourishing, particularly in the Global South, where energy is still quite spare. People live desperate lives, and there’s a real concern that if you move too quickly on climate and you prevent people from using fossil fuels as we use them today, then you’re preferencing people who don’t exist far off in the future over desperate people today.
Those three challenges are why we don’t have this textbook example. Where we are underdeveloped is we haven’t really thought through and have only started thinking through recently is … how do you get closer to that world from where we are today? What are the ways that liberal insights about using markets, about individual choice, about price signals can be leveraged to approach decarbonization and, not solve for 2050 today, but push us in the right direction right now?
Yglesias: So why is it, Jonathan, that this property rights viewpoint that you have seems to have so little purchase on the political right? You worked at CEI, right? Joseph is explaining why conservative-minded people don’t want to do what the science allegedly tells them, but why is the alternative nothing?
Adler: When I worked at CEI, and I began there in 1991, there was this great quote from former Senator Tim Wirth that was always kind of fun to deploy about climate change. This is in the ’90s, and I’m paraphrasing, but it was basically, “We’ve got to ride this issue, because even if it’s not really a problem, we’ll still be doing the right things.”
So there’s this idea that’s very pervasive, that’s not wholly unfounded, that climate change creates an excuse to give government control over lots of things, energy in particular, and that if your view of government is that that’s threatening, that’s scary, something that’s ultimately very illiberal, in the sense that it’s hostile to innovation, hostile to market dynamism … that’s a really scary thing. It’s okay to be defending property rights, if you’re talking about defending the property owner from the farm next door—that’s just a little localized problem. But if you’re talking about energy use throughout the global economy, oh my gosh, that’s really scary.
“One of the things that was really catastrophic in terms of public messaging around the pandemic was ‘trust the science,’ which often got transmitted into, ‘trust the scientists,’ which you definitely don’t want to do … because they’re human and they’re fallible … and science is always provisional. One of the things that I think liberalism and science have in common is they’re trying to be less wrong, and they’re willing to revise their results. And one of the things that autocracies are notoriously bad at is revising results based on evidence. ... I think there is a deep linkage between the scientific method as a mode of inquiry into empirical reality and the democratic method as a mode of inquiry into popular opinion. It’s subject to constant revision. So that’s another way in which we can try to celebrate a connection between these things.” — Nils Gilman
I think part of what feeds that is the only way we want to talk about climate policy is: How do we hit that target that Joe mentioned? How do we know that the policy we’ve adopted will hit that target? So even on the left and with the environmental community, there is a preference for regulation over pricing, because regulation at least gives you the illusion that you have a target that will be met by a particular day. I say “illusion” because it turns out environmental law does not work that way. It has never worked that way. We don’t meet targets. I did a paper for Joe at Niskanen that actually points out that we pretend as if you say, “We should have regulations,” and you snap your fingers, and suddenly they’re in place and they’re complied with, and their targets are met. And that’s just not the world we live in. The throughput capacity for right environmental regulations is kind of like the throughput capacity for environmental impact statements—the government can’t do the volume that we need if that’s the way we’re going to decarbonize.
Majkut: I send that paper to somebody at least once a month.
Adler: I appreciate that! I should get royalties! But the big point is that there’s this fear: Which am I afraid more of, climate change or climate change policy? And if climate change policy means the government is going to decide how much, and what sort of, energy each industry gets to use, and in what time frame, and what car you drive, and what kind of stove you have, what kind of house you live in, and so on … well, then, climate change has got to be really, really bad to justify that. And I would argue that not only is that not the choice we face—that in fact, going down the road is actually not even the best way to deal with climate change—but that’s what feeds the right side of the political spectrum’s fear of climate policy.
Yglesias: And to some people on the left, that prospect is thrilling.
Gilman: That’s right. Some of you probably know in Germany, the Green Party, when it emerged in the 1970s, was known as the watermelon party, because it was a bunch of former communists, and they were green on the outside, but red on the inside. And, you know, I have a coinage that I’ve tried to promote with limited success, that there’s also a version of that on the right, which is avocado politics, green on the outside and brown on the inside. So, because you can’t get from “is” to “ought” … what exactly the policy is, even if you acknowledge that you have this problem, is not obvious.
We’ve been basically talking about climate change mitigation issues. But there’s another dimension of liberalism that I want to bring up, which is on the adaptation side. And here I think there are more opportunities for doing things that are liberal. I’m going to plug the book I just published—[Children of a Modest Star]—which has a chapter where we talk about a more local solution, especially on the adaptation side, and possibilities for what me and my co-author called translocal collaborations around climate change adaptation strategies. So, for example, I’m probably more sympathetic to government regulation than you [Jonathan H. Adler] are—I’m not as ideologically scared of it, but I also agree that it can get very heavy handed in ways that are not productive—but one of the things that’s definitely true is that, in terms of the actual impacts in climate change, you look at a country the size of the United States, especially … it’s radically different. I mean, the climate change adaptation challenges that a city like Miami is facing are totally different from the ones that a city like Los Angeles is facing, but the kind of challenges Los Angeles is facing are very similar to the ones that Cape Town is facing, Perth is facing, Lisbon is facing. These are all cities in the southwest corners of continents that have desiccating Mediterranean climates where it’s fire, drought, heat waves. Those are the challenges.
So there’s all sorts of opportunities, I think, for transnational collaboration. Some of these networks are, in fact, already emerging—the C40 network, the Fearless Cities network—that are actually fomenting that kind of exchange of expertise: sometimes resources, sometimes technology. I think there are a lot of opportunities for things that are perfectly amenable with liberal solutions at the level of adaptation,
Majkut: Liberals like growth. Last year the world had about 2% GDP growth overall. Greenhouse gas emissions last year went up about 2%. So, if you take solving this problem seriously, you need to envision a fairly different pathway for economic growth. I think that explains a lot of what liberals are thinking about. Because if you take that property rights [argument] seriously, I don’t get to do anything, right? I can’t drive, I can’t use electricity—because I’m worried about damage to somebody’s property a long time away. The end state is quite severe.
Adler: I mean, perhaps. There are ways of thinking about the collective action problem where we think about reciprocity of advantage, and where we’re all allowed to engage in equivalent types of conduct, and we engage in some sort of collective enterprise to make sure it’s not too excessive.
“[In 2015], if you asked a Republican member of Congress what they thought about climate change, they would say either, ‘it’s a hoax’ or ‘I’m not a scientist.’ Like, ‘Don’t ask me. I don’t want to deal with that.’ And the Obama administration, at the time, was pursuing a very significant regulatory agenda, and it had become highly politicized after an attempt to pass a cap-and-trade bill a few years before. So there was a little bit of partisan positioning. But that is one of the key areas where a rampant anti-intellectualism and a rejection of the problem infected the right. [During] Covid, when a bunch of people started embracing weird conspiracy theories or just said, ‘Screw it, we’re gonna just lose a bunch of people, and that’s worth it,’ that was no surprise to those of us who’d been trying to pay attention to climate issues. Similar phenomenon.” — Joseph Majkut
On this issue of adaptation that was just brought up, though, I’ve been pointing this out to people for close to 20 years that the UN IPCC on issues like water rights is more liberal and more market oriented than pretty much any major environmental NGO in this town, and certainly than the U.S. government’s policy. Because for 20 years, the UN IPCC has noted that on the issue of water availability and access to water—which is a huge issue, and something that climate change is going to affect in a lot of unpredictable but significant ways—you’re not going to be able to build your way out of that with infrastructure, especially in the Global South, but not only in the Global South. You’re going to have to have ways of pricing and reallocating water in response to demands. And we know how to do that. We’ve shown how to do that. Water markets are very robust where they’re allowed to operate. And … crickets. Policy-makers don’t want to talk about that. It feeds into the idea that it’s a watermelon thing, because here’s an example where we have clear empirical evidence, we know how to deal with dramatic changes in the availability and supply and timing of water, and we know what sorts of institutions can handle that sort of thing—and yet, we don’t want to talk about that. We want to tell you what shower-head you use.
Yglesias: I want to slice open the watermelon. If you read The Communist Manifesto, there’s a bunch of stuff in there that’s like, there should be public schools, or like, the government should regulate the provision of credit, that today would be considered totally non-radical and common-sensical. Now, if you read that in the 1840s you could be like, “These guys are fucking communists”—because, literally, they are, right? And they were. But part of the way we have functional politics is that people on the left, over history, have put a lot of issues on the table, have sometimes had plausible solutions, have sometimes not had plausible solutions, have often said the only way to solve this problem is to completely remake society. And movements of the right have tried to accommodate these concerns.
So all around the world we have public sector pension programs for the elderly—even in Singapore, where it’s a mandated savings … like, there’s no place that is a pure market solution to that kind of problem but that’s involved people from a market liberal tradition saying, “You know what, I’m not gonna just be like, ‘These guys are [secret] communists’—I’m gonna take responsibility and try to do something.” At Niskanen, when you [Joseph Majkut] were there, that was part of the original vision. And it seems like we’ve gotten no traction.
Majkut: More than you would think. We kind of came in at a low point when I started at Niskanen. That was 2015 and if you asked a Republican member of Congress what they thought about climate change, they would say either, “it’s a hoax” or “I’m not a scientist.” Like, “Don’t ask me. I don’t want to deal with that.” And the Obama administration, at the time, was pursuing a very significant regulatory agenda, and it had become highly politicized after an attempt to pass a cap-and-trade bill a few years before. So there was a little bit of partisan positioning. But that is one of the key areas where a rampant anti-intellectualism and a rejection of the problem infected the right. [During] Covid, when a bunch of people started embracing weird conspiracy theories or just said, “Screw it, we’re gonna just lose a bunch of people, and that’s worth it,” that was no surprise to those of us who’d been trying to pay attention to climate issues. Similar phenomenon.
Gilman: Can I just weigh in briefly on that point? Another way one can think about the relationship between climate change, or, for that matter, pandemic risk and mitigation management issues, and liberalism, is there is a deep linkage and a long intellectual history of this between—I want to be very precise here—the scientific method and liberalism. One of the things that was really catastrophic in terms of public messaging around the pandemic was a trust the science, which often got transmitted into, trust the scientists, which you definitely don’t want to do, necessarily, because they’re human and they’re fallible, they’re not necessarily going to be right about things, and science is always provisional. One of the things that I think liberalism and science have in common is they’re trying to be less wrong, and they’re willing to revise their results. And one of the things that autocracies are notoriously bad at is revising results based on evidence, or suppressing evidence, believing their own press releases, and so on. I think there is a deep linkage between the scientific method as a mode of inquiry into empirical reality and the democratic method as a mode of inquiry into popular opinion. It’s subject to constant revision. So that’s another way in which we can try to celebrate a connection between these things.
Yglesias: And it seems to me that scientists working in this space have been either ineffective or unwilling to articulate the gap between: What does the IPCC report say?, and, What do the environmental NGOs say that [it says]? It’s been really striking to me, as somebody who didn’t cover climate much and then waded into it, that the people who talk the most about trusting [what] the science says … they’re not characterizing it correctly.
Adler: There’s a lot of pressure to maintain what is ultimately a similar narrative. There’s a belief, and it’s a well-intentioned belief, that the nuts and bolts on climate change are complicated: It’s not immediate, so it’s a long-term problem, but it’s still very important. And the way you get—in a democratic society—people to act is simplifying it and scaring people.
So the folks [who] want to attribute every hurricane or whatever to climate change aren’t trying to … this isn’t a stalking horse for some broad liberal agenda. It’s, well, “We’re oversimplifying some, but this is the sort of thing we are worried about over the long term, and we don’t think the democratic process will be able to handle the complexity that what’s really going on is we’re increasing the upward potential of hurricane damage and hurricane storms and the likelihood over a longer period of time. But we can’t say it about a particular storm.” And if you try to say that on the evening news, people are going to change the channel, or they’re going to fall asleep. Whereas, if you say, “Oh, my God. [Hurricane] Beryl or whatever is the result of climate change,” maybe that gets politics in action. The problem, of course, is that when someone goes and looks at the science, and they pull out the IPCC, and they talk about, “Okay, what are the different levels of attribution we can engage in with regard to different types of changes in weather?,” and they see the IPCC is saying, “Hurricanes? Yeah, we can’t really tie the knot yet,” well, it’s like we saw with Covid: “Well, now they’ve exaggerated. Climate change is still a problem, but the specific thing they led with wasn’t true, so maybe that’s an excuse that gives me permission now to say they’re lying about everything.”
In a democratic polity, it’s undermined the ability of science to inform the policy process, because the way the science of climate is presented oversimplifies and glosses over a lot of complexity, and, in some cases, just says stuff that isn’t quite true.
Majkut: I think there’s three issues that need to be [brought in]. The first is, for much of the last two decades where this was a big issue for public policy, we were so far behind the envelope of uncertainty for Is climate policy working? that a lot of scientists or analysts in the field were kind of like, “You know, I don’t need to debate whether we’re going 50 or 60 miles an hour— we’re going five, so until we’re going 50, that’s not really worth talking about.” I think that was a real dynamic.
Secondly, scientists [are] not always known as great communicators, and at least in the United States have a very strong progressive inclination. They’re just open-minded people. They exist in university communities. So there’s a political mapping that does affect how they talk about stuff. It’s self-reinforcing, socially.
“I think that the push to address climate change both drives left-wing people towards very illiberal approaches—substantively and procedurally—and then global efforts to address climate change is fuel for a lot of right-wing populist backlash.” — Matthew Yglesias
And then the third is, what kind of scientist you’re talking to also matters. So I wanted to ask my advisor—I was a science graduate student—like, “Why is Jim Hansen (very famous, prominent climate scientist) so worried about climate change?” And he showed me a couple charts, and one of them showed, if you look at the glacial and interglacial cycles—the difference between the planet when you’re in an Ice Age and when you’re in a condition that looks roughly like today, or in these kind of like hot house worlds—the difference in radiative forcing or in CO2 levels in the atmosphere is not as large as the one that we’re provoking. The changes happen over a really long time, but they’re like a qualitatively different planet. So oftentimes in the science community, you have people who are thinking about these planetary changes that are occurring on vastly larger scales than anybody is prepared to think about unless you work in that field. And they take that to heart and don’t communicate it well, whereas meteorologists are like, “two degrees … that’s five minutes, man. Like, who cares?”
Yglesias: Right, “But it was 10 degrees warmer yesterday, right?” These last two responses touched on the long-term nature of the harms. It seems to me that this is kind of a classic critique of democracy: that democracy cannot engage in long term thinking. I remember I went on a Chinese government propaganda tour, and the thing they drilled in all the time was: “We’re gonna crush the West—because we have this long-range plan for greatness, and your people are looking to the next election in November.” I think that’s an argument that transcends climate—these Chinese guys were not talking about climate. It’s a classic authoritarian criticism of democracy that we can’t handle these kind of long term issues.
Gilman: I have several responses to that. I spend a lot of time in China for my sins, and I talk a lot about climate issues when I’m there. So, first of all, just as a matter of historical fact, the evidence that autocracies are better at thinking, much less acting, long term is scant on the ground. I mean, these guys are often very worried about whether they’re going to get overthrown by the next junta. So they’re very worried about short term things. You look at the environmental impact of the major autocracies of the 20th century, it’s horrific. People can talk about the Nazis’ forestry policy, but the actual thing that happened between 1939 and 1945 was not good for the European environment, let alone for the human beings who live there. Let’s not talk about the Soviet Union. And anybody who was in China over the last 20 years has experienced the unbelievable environmental degradation that’s gone on there. We could go into smaller countries that have similar stories. So the evidence that there’s actually better long term thinking from autocracies than democracies is just not true. It’s propaganda that these guys promote.
Revitalizing Liberalism Requires Understanding That It Is a Natural Response to Diversity Everywhere
The second thing I would say, though, is that one thing that the Chinese regime in particular has been extremely good at is scaling up technology production, particularly around green technology. They completely dominate the solar cell market right now. They are going to dominate the EV market in the next 10 years, unless radical measures are taken. This is a major strategic problem for the United States. Fifteen years ago, when I first started getting into this, I worked a lot with three-letter agencies here in this town, and I’ve since become much more leery of the process of securitizing the climate change debate, because I think it leads to bad outcomes of the sort I described in my first comment, and also just gets used by many agencies to justify their budgets for other reasons, anyhow. But I do think that there is this quality to technology that the Chinese government in particular is good at, and probably better than us at. Technology planning—they have proven over the last 15, 20 years to be better than us at that … although I don’t know that that has anything to do with democracy per se. We used to be better at technology planning back in the 1950s and ’60s.
Adler: Yes, it’s true that we are not good at building some Grand Cathedral that takes 150 years to build, but we do a lot of other things much, much better. China’s gonna be able to build lots of stuff if they wanna do it. The evidence that we have so far … and there’s some research coming out soon that, actually, when you look at it qualitatively as opposed to quantitatively, they obtain far more patents for clean energy products, but the patents they’re obtaining are very low value patents. All the high value patents are still here. They’re not in China, they’re not in Europe. The problem we have here is that we make it too difficult to do stuff. The discussion we’ve been having about permitting for transmission lines is a very salient example of a problem that is endemic of that we’ve made it too hard to do stuff, and part of what we’ve made it too hard to do are the natural things that make problems like climate easier to solve.
So the least talked about and yet most important environmental trend of the 21st century in countries like the United States is net dematerialization—using less stuff that’s physical material year over year. The United States will use fewer molecules of physical stuff next year than this year. That’s mind blowing. That wasn’t planned. That wasn’t designed. That wasn’t programmed. That wasn’t scheduled. It was because stuff costs. We pay for stuff. We pay to get it, we pay to manipulate it. We pay to deploy it. We pay, unless we can figure out a way to turn it into smoke, to dispose of it. In a world in which you can innovate, that over time leads to these trends. We don’t do that with energy because we don’t fully integrate it into those market processes, those very liberal processes that encourage all of us, collectively, to try to make more with less tomorrow than we did today.
So if we want these bigger, longer term trends, we know what the institutional framework needs to look like to decarbonize. And we don’t do that. China’s not doing it either. Now, if we figure stuff out, China will build a ton of it, and I’m not sure that’s bad if they build a ton of it, and it’s less expensive for us, so then it’s even easier for us to deploy it. The real challenge for an issue like climate change that’s global is: Are we able to be the engine of figuring out how to how to decarbonize? And we’re kind of failing at that.
Gilman: I would add one other thing: the other major factor—and I am in California, where this problem is probably as bad as it is anywhere—is this permitting issue and also environmental impact statements. This is something where I don’t want to say it’s too much democracy, but I would say it’s the wrong kind ofdemocracy.
Community engagement around how to build things is something that’s really important. I’m not here to denigrate that at all. But the particular way in which it’s been institutionalized through the legal system in the United States is incredibly destructive to our ability to actually deploy stuff at scale.
Adler: And it’s not clear it’s democratic, right? Because the people who show up at the planning meeting to complain about the wind turbine that’s going to go on the other side of the hill that they heard about, and they’re afraid they’re going to see when they drive to work, are not necessarily representative of the people as a whole. And I should just note: the more you dig into it, [when] we talk about NEPA and environmental impact statements, especially for energy infrastructure, state and local barriers are probably greater than federal barriers for everything but large transmission projects that have to go across federal land, and perhaps across tribal lands. Otherwise, the state and local barriers are greater. We have things in federal law that magnify those state and local impacts. And I’ll say, as someone who loves decentralizing political authority, that’s a hard fact to wrestle with. Because I like letting different communities make different choices. But letting different communities make different choices means it’s really hard to build linear infrastructure. And you can’t electrify and decarbonize through electrification if you can’t build linear infrastructure.
Yglesias: [Joe,] it seems like you wanted to say something on the securitization of the climate issue.
Majkut: Well, people come to me all the time because I work at a national…
Yglesias: …you have “Strategic” and “International Studies” in your job title.
Majkut: [And they say:] “Oh, do you think we could break the political problem if we just started talking about national security? Like, Republicans like national security, and then we’ll get them on the climate, get some third-rate retired generals to talk about how climate change is a threat multiplier.” No, it doesn’t work.
Gilman: I literally spent a big chunk of my career trying to do exactly that, and I can promise you it doesn’twork.
Majkut: I tried to get a bunch of Republicans to support carbon pricing. That didn’t work either. It’s ok, it’s worth doing.
I wanted to raise the issue of the Chinese EVs, because this is where I think liberalism can confront the problem in a way that’s going to be really important and have pragmatic impacts like now. The reason for that is whether it’s in electric vehicles … that’s the place where we’re doing the most—the Biden administration, climate champions, raised a 100% tariff on the import of Chinese EVs, of which we import, like, near zero. They are totally a specialty product. But you could imagine them coming to U.S. shores, maybe branded as U.S. vehicles, maybe in conjunction with GM or whomever, and it would bring a low cost, almost a new product category to the United States, which could favor decarbonization and give consumers lots of choice. And we’re not looking like we want to do that, because it would disrupt political balances here in the U.S. related to auto manufacture, the unions don’t like it, and this is a place where liberals, actually, have a lot to say, and would be an important part of the debate—if they’re willing to engage with the actual issues that we face today.
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I can't see that Europe has much better climate policies than US. Loads of anti-fracking anti nuclear wind-NIMBYism. Their carbon trading system only gestures at a tax on net emissions. They are totally on board with the failed COP process. Their policies no more satisfy cost benefit analysis than ours do.
The "liberal" way to address climate change is just like other economic issue. The emission CO into the atmosphere will cause harm. We need to model the costs and benefits of different policies and argue for the set of least cost solutions. No different from tx reform or trade policy or immigration.