What might work

Political futility of the Green New Deal, which combines decarbonization of the US energy economy with governmentally guaranteed employment and health care, results from more than economics. As noted here last week, the current version of the initiative pivots on authoritarianism for which little support exists outside groups craving political and intellectual control (OGJ, Jan. 14, 2019, p. 18).

Americans will yield to central energy planning no more readily than will the French, throngs of whom demonstrated their distaste for elitist authority with the Yellow Jacket protests of late 2018. Alliance with foes of capitalism and freedom undermines the aggressive climate agenda and discredits the myopically gloomy strand of science to which it is bound.

Serious treatment

Humanity’s link to climate change deserves more serious treatment than this. Abatement of human emissions of greenhouse gases is very much in order. But it must occur within a framework of what’s physically possible and politically acceptable. No such framework now exists.

Democrats this month took control of the House of Representatives promising to make response to climate change a priority. If they propose anything like the Green New Deal, as loosely described in a draft resolution circulated late last year by then Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasia-Cortez (D-NY), they’ll prove not to be serious. Such a proposal never would be passed by a Senate still controlled by Republicans or signed into law by President Donald Trump. If it somehow did become law, Americans would revolt at the costs.

Democrats must know this. They might push a futile agenda anyway to appear righteous to liberals terrified by climate change and welcoming of governance. Because most Americans don’t share those dispositions, no significant policy will emerge. But the moralizing against opponents, especially Republicans, will be tiresome.

A more serious approach to climate policy would seek politically survivable action that might work. It would resist the scare tactics that have driven climate politics into a wall of weary indifference and begin to address climate change as one concern among others, rather than as a drop-everything threat to humanity. It therefore would have to quit enshrining worst-case outputs of computer models as uniquely valid science. Other approaches and expectations exist but don’t get much press.

A serious approach to climate policy also would discard temperature targets. The application of numerically precise goals to unpredictably complex systems serves politics better than policy. Not enough is known about relationships between greenhouse-gas concentrations and average global temperature to give temperature targets more than symbolic value. What is known is that increasing GHG levels impose a warming influence that interacts in poorly understood ways with other influences, warming and otherwise. Lowering emissions of GHGs is prudent but probably not a matter of saving the planet.

A reasonable policy goal, one that might survive politically and be measurably achievable, would be to lower GHG emissions into the atmosphere, in amount and in relation to economic performance, steadily over time. Free of impossible and arbitrary temperature metrics, policy-makers could explore a range of methods for lowering emissions and capturing and storing GHGs emitted by large sources. Progress would be incremental and slower than activists now demand. But it would be progress, affordable and therefore durable. No matter what doomsayers claim, it probably would be enough to keep whatever threat exists from humanly induced warming less than catastrophic.

Toward realism

A turn toward realism in climate politics further would acknowledge that decarbonization of useful energy won’t happen quickly and that oil and gas will continue to be needed in large amount for decades. Logically following this accommodation to the inevitable would be overdue renunciation of the keep-it-in-the-ground fantasizing now at the base of knee-jerk opposition to oil and gas projects.

Extremists demanding impossible precaution would resist such a turn. To act constructively on the climate, Democrats must disappoint that noisy faction. Otherwise, all they can do is nag.