Democrats promising to act promptly on climate change when they take majority control of the US House next January will show just as quickly how serious they are about the issue. Indications so far are not encouraging.
“Our rapidly changing climate, and the Trump administration’s efforts to take us in the wrong direction, seriously jeopardize our future,” Democratic Reps. Frank Pallone Jr. (NJ), Raul M. Grijalva (Ariz.), and Eddie Bernice Johnson (Tex.) declared in a joint statement Nov. 14. They’re in line to chair committees addressing climate change—Pallone at Energy and Commerce, Grijalva at Natural Resources, and Johnson at Science, Space, and Technology. “We plan to hit the ground immediately with a series of hearings early in the next Congress on how best to combat this growing global crisis,” they said.
Evidently, they’ll try to reignite traditional political responses to climate change. Too bad.
The pattern
Traditional political responses to climate change follow a pattern. Activists and their friends in government make dire predictions, demand radical change, and scoff at dissent. They claim scientific “consensus” about the degree of human responsibility for warming in a complex, poorly understood system. And they advocate taxation of affordable energy and forced use of costly alternatives, claiming that intrusions such as these by government can be undertaken painlessly. When their policy successes make energy costs rise, as they always do, political support for their agenda dissolves.
This cycle has progressed to varying degrees in Europe, Australia, and Canada. In most cases, leaders craving renown as climate leaders have been weakened by the political backlash if not forced from office. It would happen in the US if House Democrats somehow reinstated the centralized energy planning attempted by former President Barack Obama. Many if not most Americans, like many if not most Europeans, Australians, and Canadians, will neither surrender freedom of energy choice nor tolerate the cost. Many of them, too, sensibly dismiss apocalyptic warnings like those of the incoming House leaders as propaganda. Some act as though no problem exists at all and become hardened in this indefensible position by the moralistic shunning that greets any dissent from worst-case orthodoxy.
Human activity, especially the combustion of fossil fuels, does influence climate. Some of that influence is malign. The damage does warrant response. But the response should embody reasonable hope for success, which the traditional approach does not.
A better, more practicable approach would reject temperature targets, such as the Paris Treaty’s ambition to hold Industrial Age warming to 2°C. Numerical targets create the appearance of political seriousness but misrepresent science. Climate specialists can only guess about cuts to greenhouse gas emissions needed to influence global average temperature measurably. And if the best guess underlying Paris is valid, people would have to change much more than energy behavior to have any chance of meeting the 2°C. goal. Paris advocates and their political supporters seldom mention any of this.
A more practicable approach also would combine achievable mitigation with adaptation. Achievable mitigation would target greenhouse-gas emission rates from exiting systems instead of trying to install whole new systems of huge cost, doubtful use, and—too frequently—suspicious profitability to select political constituencies. Increased attention to adaptation would give political proposals balance now missing and recognize that, for now, some warming will occur no matter what people do.
Accommodating science
And a practicable approach to climate change would accommodate science, all science, not brandish a supposed “consensus” as a bludgeon against contrary opinion. Disagreement is the essence of science, not an abandonment of it. Popular discussion about climate change consistently gets this backward. Any truly promising, affordable, and therefore politically palatable approach to climate change needs science from every perspective.
House Democrats have made clear they want to reopen consideration of an important topic. Their move is welcome and necessary. To be determined soon is whether they plan fresh work toward viable solutions or the same old moral grandstanding.