The Lost Decades
The Lost Decades
Climate change isn't like any other political issue. Politicians are out of their depth.
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Ten years ago, in December 2009, President Obama traveled to Copenhagen to try and salvage the highly anticipated COP15 climate summit, which was teetering on the edge of failure. He said some lofty, well-intentioned things.
For example:
As the world's largest economy and the world's second largest emitter, America bears our share of responsibility in addressing climate change, and we intend to meet that responsibility.
And also:
And that is why we have taken bold action at home – by making historic investments in renewable energy; by putting our people to work increasing efficiency in our homes and buildings; and by pursuing comprehensive legislation to transform to a clean energy economy.
And then, having secured at least some agreement between the 200 or so nations that had almost bickered and Prisoner's Dilemma’d their way into the abyss, he went home, and presided over maybe the most massive seven-year expansion of oil and gas production ever seen in human history.
Of course, Obama’s team went back to one of the COP meetings a few years later and helped lead the way toward the Paris Agreement. The administration tried to accelerate the market-driven collapse of the coal industry, with policies like the Clean Power Plan. But at least publicly, there wasn’t much push at all from the White House to enact serious, save-the-world-style climate legislation; yes, that would have taken a non-functional Congress’s participation, but hey, we got the Affordable Care Act. The conventional wisdom is that the healthcare push essentially blew all his “political capital,” as if that can somehow be quantified, and other big goals were thus dead in the water.
And sure, there’s probably some truth to that. But I would argue that Obama, like almost every other politician out there, understood the science perfectly well and still wasn’t quite capable of seeing climate as a fundamentally different issue than all the others politicians deal with. It is different for two reasons: timing, and irreversibility.
No matter what time point you were starting from, the only logical argument for when to start whatever climate action has always been “right goddamn now.” Though the discussion surrounding tipping points and deadlines—like the IPCC’s suggestion that 1.5 degrees Celsius could be breached as soon as 2030—is fraught and often not all that scientific (“We have 11 years before catastrophe strikes” is, uh, not how it works), the fact is that every bit of delay means that many more tons of CO2 in the atmosphere, that much more heat absorbed by the oceans, that much more melted ice, and so on. Waiting does not make sense, and hasn’t since at least 1965, if not 1896.
[Quick aside: though the discussions about climate in the Democratic primary race have been encouraging in many ways, I still find it odd that no one ever really talks about the built-in delay we still have. It is just fully assumed that none of the ideas for slowing down the asteroid can possibly even begin before January 2021, which is wild considering those incredibly short timelines the IPCC now tells us we have. I know nothing can be done about this. It just sucks.]
And then problem number two: those extra tons and heat and meltwater are not going back where they came from. On meaningful human time scales, the CO2 will stay up there, the heat will stay in the ocean, the ice will stay melted. There is no going back.
What other political fight functions this way? If you fail at your new healthcare bill, sure, people suffer and die and go bankrupt and it sucks; but if you pass the bill a few years later, you can create a new system where fewer people suffer and die and go bankrupt. With climate, even if we fail for another 15 years but then start the real transition and eventually, 30 or 50 years after that, end up with a shiny new energy system where every car is electric and they’re all plugging into wind or solar or hydroelectric power and we’ve stopped cutting down the Amazon and someone invents a new way to make cement and so on, south Florida is still under water. So is Bangladesh, and Shanghai, and Jakarta, and Houston, and a decent chunk of New York. And the 500 million people who lived in places like those are now wandering around the rest of the world looking for a place to live. And now your shiny new energy system is maybe humming along but also the entire globe’s geopolitical stability is veering toward collapse.
And all that was also true in 2009. How’d those lofty promises turn out?
The problem with letting politicians—even good, well-meaning ones—handle this is that they don’t function in irreversible worlds. In politics, one side wins for a while, then another side wins, and hopefully you make incremental progress toward more people being happy and included and safe than before. The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. Until Greenland melts.
Today, the most ambitious climate plan put forward by any of the Democratic candidates is the Green New Deal, or some version of it. It has been bashed as unrealistic from a wide variety of corners, both obvious and unexpected. I mean, here’s Slate’s headline from a little while ago:
“Reality,” in this case, does not appear to include the consequences of inaction, only the difficulty of action. Which is an issue.
This week, the latest COP climate summit kicked off in Madrid (fun fact, it was originally scheduled for Brazil, but Jair Bolsonaro is busy burning down the Amazon and blaming Leonardo DiCaprio). John Kerry, Obama’s second Secretary of State and one of the leading voices that led to the Paris Agreement, just launched a new climate coalition involving Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton (and hey, also Leonardo DiCaprio, fresh off his stint burning down the Amazon). Groups in the U.S. like the Sunrise Movement have gained an incredible amount of visibility in a remarkably short time. There has never been more momentum toward actual climate progress than right now.
Of course, that’s what people said in 2009 too. “I think there is a realistic basis for optimism,” Al Gore told Der Spiegel in November of that year. October defections from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce by Apple and others over climate change were considered a sign of “momentum” toward climate change legislation. Headlines declared a solution was within reach.
And here we are ten years later, sporting a new record for CO2 emissions and that massive oil and gas expansion behind us. Except not really behind us: the world consumed more oil in 2019 than 2018, when it consumed more than 2017. And we will consume more still in 2020. If it were up to the Trump administration, there would already be oil rigs in the middle of your favorite National Park.
Yes, we have built a whole lot of solar power and wind power in recent years, and those keep getting cheaper and in the U.S. and Europe coal power is really on its way out, but meanwhile China has a France-sized number of coal power plants currently under construction and oh yeah, there is no sign that asshole Leonardo DiCaprio will stop burning down the world’s most important non-ocean carbon sink any time soon.
A group of House Democrats went to Madrid to show support for the climate summit, and again proved that point about well-meaning politicians. Here’s what Nancy Pelosi had to say about the Green New Deal:
I salute the enthusiasm that it has engendered. But I do think the idea of working together is very, very important.
Whew! I’ve never felt more inspired. What you want to hear in any statement about saving the world is a “but.” Seriously, that’s like the Slate headline up there took human form and flew to Madrid to gently crap all over one of the only ambitious-enough ideas floating around.
So anyway. In 2009, in Copenhagen, Obama also said this:
Or we can again choose delay, falling back into the same divisions that have stood in the way of action for years. And we will be back having the same stale arguments month after month, year after year – all while the danger of climate change grows until it is irreversible.
Which, turns out, is largely what we chose. And until your average politician starts recognizing that irreversibility for what it is, we’ll probably choose it again.
random bits
Samoa is in the midst of a massive measles outbreak. There are more than 4,000 cases, and more than 60 people have died, and it is likely to get worse. The good news is that the government started a massive vaccination campaign a couple of weeks ago, and has already managed to immunize more than 50,000 people—which is a quarter of the entire population. But anyway: someone should probably pay for this shit.
Super strange story: around 10 people with Parkinson’s disease who have a certain type of brain implant have reported losing the ability to swim when the implant is turned on. They were good swimmers before, but they just kind of… forget… how to move their limbs in appropriate fashion. No one really knows why the implants do this. When they turn them off, the people can swim again, and the people affected have generally said the strange side effect is worth it, because otherwise the implants provide immense relief from symptoms. Wild!
Okay here’s one for the Good News Department: an Indian drug manufacturer is now making a very cheap version of HIV drugs that come in, basically, candy form, so that babies born with HIV can take it more easily than in the past. This is an extremely good thing.
Hey, if you made it this far and enjoyed it, do me a favor and hit that like button. Gets more eyeballs on it, which I would appreciate. Thanks for reading everyone.
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