The Climate Tightrope
The conversation has changed, but there are still more ways to speak progress into existence.
It is difficult to overstate the contrast between the new and old administration’s climate policies, largely because the old administration’s “policy” was more or less to not have one, or perhaps to simply state that “we want beautiful, clean air” as if that has anything to do with it and then encourage companies to drill and emit to their hearts’ content.
The new administration, meanwhile, just pledged to cut emissions by at least fifty percent from 2005 levels by 2030, a dramatic leap in ambition from any previous goal. It beats out the EU, Canada, Japan, and Australia in terms of ambition, while falling a bit short of the UK.
On Thursday’s international climate summit involving a host of world leaders, President Biden said: “The signs are unmistakable, the science is undeniable and the cost of inaction keeps mounting,” an admirable reframing of the “costs” angle that opponents of climate action have harped on for decades.
But a sort of second-level part of the conversation keeps nagging at me: When a big climate goal like Biden’s is announced, everyone rushes to list the things that would have to happen in order to actually meet it. We would have to build this many wind turbines, shut down that many coal plants, replace this percentage of cars and trucks with electric versions, plant this many trees. And since this brand of research is fairly mature we can generally trust the numbers, within reason—but it sort of sets us up for failure to talk about it in such terms.
We find ourselves immediately counting upward, climbing an almost impossibly high ladder toward the pledged emission reduction, when a better approach—purely from a rhetorical perspective—might be to imagine walking a tightrope across a gorge, or from one tall building to another.
Try this: “We will halve emissions by 2030. In order for us to miss that goal, we would need to build that many natural gas power plants without any sort of carbon capture technology, leave most of the gas-powered vehicle fleet intact, maintain the agricultural status quo, and keep this many coal plants open.”
List the dirty, not the clean! The solar panels and wind turbines are the norm, not the pie-in-the-sky ambition. There is obviously still a challenge: stray from the proscribed path and you fall off the rope into a pit of rising seas and melting permafrost. But we’ve seen how shifts in conversation can have impacts on policy, and there is still some rhetorical maneuvering to be done here.
Make what we do now sound just as horribly anachronistic as it is; we’re running a 21st-century world on updated 19th-century technology, and reminding everyone of that as often as possible might just shift that Overton window a bit closer to where it needs to be. If you make the gleaming renewable future sound like the status quo, the soot-covered present becomes just a layer of dead skin we can eagerly slough off.
In a way it actually echoes the “costs” problem that Biden managed to get mostly right at the summit. Yes, the big solar power plant costs something, but not building it costs more. Say that part first. Say the part that makes success a given, and failure unthinkable.
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