The following post is from Ted Nordhaus, responding to an essay from David Hawkins of the NRDC.
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David,
You and I have always maintained a respectful relationship so I'll pass on the name calling and just respond to the content of your response.
You say, "the authors are wrong in their claim that we have to wait for new 'breakthrough' technologies before we can move away from dirty resources." You know this in not true. We have never suggested such a thing. We made clear in our book, we made clear in the New Republic excerpt, and we made clear in our most recent post here at Grist that we support regulating carbon, we support doing so now, and that taking these steps will indeed help us begin the move away from dirty energy sources. We have a longstanding record of supporting efforts to regulate carbon, going back well before the publication of our original essay, and we continue to hold a clear and consistent position on the subject.
You further misrepresent our argument by suggesting that, "in arguing for 'breakthrough' technologies rather than deployment of today's clean energy solutions, Nordhaus and Shellenberger are peddling the same false choice the Bush administration has used to justify its retrograde policies for the past seven years." Again this is patently false. I challenge you to find anything that we have said that would suggest that we should delay deploying present clean energy technology while we wait for future technology. To the contrary, we have advocated buying down the price of clean energy technologies through procurement and other incentive policies in order to speed their deployment.
What we did say was that carbon regulations and pricing, while sufficient to achieve modest reductions in global carbon emissions, would not be sufficient to achieve the deep reductions that climate scientists and environmental organizations, including your own, have called for. You, in fact, acknowledge this to be the case when you write, "while necessary, it is also true that an emissions cap on carbon isn't sufficient to drive the more profound technology changes we need to harmonize economic growth and climate protection."
It is you, not we, who is promoting a "false choice." We state clearly that a regulatory framework is a necessary part of the solution to the climate crisis. It is you, not we, who suggest that doing so contradicts establishing a serious public technology policy and investment agenda. This is the real false choice and reveals the true priorities of the environmental movement, or at least your corner of it. One can acknowledge the need for a regulatory framework while also recognizing that it is not the silver bullet that NRDC and others suggest that it is. One can take the need for a regulatory framework seriously without insisting that it subsume all else. One might even have the temerity to suggest that it is indeed not the most important element needed to transform the global energy economy without "dismissing" the need for regulation.
Finally, I would suggest that we might not be the ones who are "passionate, but confused" in this debate. IPCC and Stern both are clear about the need for exponential increases in the level of public investment in clean energy technology. Moreover, any effective regulatory strategy must be global and must, by most accounts, establish a harmonized price for carbon. Perhaps you would like to take a few minutes to explain to the good readers here at Grist how you intend to prevail upon China and India to establish such a price?
You are correct that Socolow and Pacala demonstrated that global warming emissions could be cut deeply through the deployment of current technology. What you neglect to mention is that they estimated that doing so would require establishing a price for carbon that is dramatically higher than anything being proposed by NRDC in either the U.S. Congress or international negotiations to renew the Kyoto treaty. Moreover, among the wedges used by Socolow and Pacala were "clean coal" and nuclear, technologies that NRDC has, to date, been unwilling to endorse.
Update [2007-9-30 18:33:27 by David Roberts]: Somehow when I originally posted the essay, I omitted the last paragraph. My apologies! Here it is:
David, it's time that we leveled with policy makers, the rank and file membership of the environmental movement, and the American public, about what we can and cannot expect carbon regulations and pricing to realistically accomplish. Yes it will achieve meaningful reductions and yes it can help set the table for and establish market conditions more amenable to the much deeper reductions we will need to make. But you know as well as we do that those steps, of themselves, will not achieve the deep reductions in CO2 emissions that we need to make. It is unfortunate that some one who is so deeply committed to addressing the climate crisis is so sanguine in his faith that the private sector will make unprecedented levels of investment in early stage research, development, and deployment of breakthrough alternative energy technologies in response to carbon prices that no serious energy expert or economist, including those you cite, believes to be sufficient to justify such an investment. It's time to take the technology challenge as seriously as the carbon challenge rather than simply wishing the problem away by assuming that with the right market conditions the private sector will simply take care of it.
Comments
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Adam Stein Posted 10:16 am
30 Sep 2007
The main thrust of Nordhaus' defense here seems to be: "We didn't technically say what you're accusing us of having said. We never argued against carbon regulation. We never suggested that deployment of clean technologies should be delayed. Etc."
Perhaps not, but they should be aware that I read their essays in exactly the same way as David Hawkins and presumably many others did. Due to either emphasis or tone, N&S seem quite clearly to be hunting for silver bullets in the form of new technologies, downplaying the deployment of technologies already on hand, and pushing meaningful action out into a distant future. Further, their rhetoric on this really does eerily mirror the rhetoric of those, like President Bush, who would seek to delay action. (For example, the mention of India and China is just unbelievably tone deaf, given the shape of the political debate in this country.)
Again, I say this as someone who genuinely agrees with much of N&S' framing of the climate change problem. I look forward to reading their book. But unless they sharpen their thinking on policy, they risk alienating those they most need to convince.
In their essay on the death of environmentalism, N&S accused the environmental community of "policy literalism," a charge that carried some weight. Unfortunately, the now seem guilty of the reverse sin: policy poetry, the crafting of solutions around a tidy political message, rather than real results.
www.terrapass.com/blog
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Colin Wright Posted 10:50 am
30 Sep 2007
Your "projections" of delaying action onto N&S seem unfair.
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Teryn Norris Posted 10:59 am
30 Sep 2007
The problem is that Roberts fails to explain, let alone even mention, how high carbon would have to be priced to actually achieve the kind of results he's talking about. Facts please!
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GreenEngineer Posted 11:13 am
30 Sep 2007
I read the essay in the same way that Adam did; having read N&S's response to NRDC, I see that what I heard initially was not what they intended. Be that as it may -- and granted that it is hard to communicate subtleties of emphasis without getting totally didactic -- the thing that matters in these essays is not the message that was intended, but the message that was received.
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trock Posted 12:09 pm
30 Sep 2007
Does that mean if I go to school, I don't have to study and pay attention, we can just talk about education investments?
How about Iraq? We don't have to actually go door to door to rout out insurgents. Just talk about national defense investments.
The farther we get from actually doing the actual thing we need to be doing, the less effective we are.
Reseach better renewables. Yes. Increase government spending on renewables from less than one billion to 10 billion a year. Yes. But the real work is to actually do the carbon release reductions. How fuzzy we get about how we do that matters.
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Ted Nordhaus Posted 12:16 pm
30 Sep 2007
There is a difference between finding our argument confusing and suggesting that it is confused. The former would suggest that the reader might bear at least some responsibility for not having understood the argument, the latter suggests that the argument just isn't right, doesn't make sense, or ignores some critical and relevant data or information.
Indeed, the fact that you and David Hawkins read our New Republic article and our subsequent posts here to suggest that we supported delaying action to address climate change or that we were "anti-regulation" might tell us as much about those who made those assumptions as it does about our argument.
Many environmentalists have long seen any suggestion that technology might be the answer to environmental problems as hostile because they have long seen technology, and economic development along with it, as the problem and cause of environmental problems. This hostility to technology long predates the dissembling of the Bush Administration and has long been a central feature of environmental ethics, going back well before Rachel Carson's jeremiad against modern agriculture in Silent Spring. One need only follow the many comments on grist mill in response to this argument to see that this is so.
As we argue in our book, to suggest that technology and economic development might be the answer to those problems runs headlong into the belief that limits, sacrifice, and fundamental changes to our lifestyles are what is required to address the crisis. Indeed this view long predates environmental concern over climate change. But notwithstanding the merits of downscaling ones material consumption and lifestyle in affluent nations such as the United States, doing so is simply not going to address the climate crisis. China, India, and the rest of the developing world are going to exponentially increase their energy use over the next 50 years whether we like it or not. Whatever it is that western environmentalists think they have learned about the false promise of materialism and consumption, the 5 billion humans on the planet who have not yet had the opportunity to avail themselves of prosperity and its comforts are not going to just skip it because we tell them to.
Sure, the Bush Administration and other opponents of action on global warming have long pointed out that the absence of low cost, low carbon technologies, and the unwillingness of China and India to limit their economic development in order to reduce their carbon emissions are profound challenges to current efforts to address global warming. And it is understandable that many environmentalists thereby assume that any suggestion that we need major advances in clean energy technology to address the crisis, and that we need to dramatically bring the cost of those technologies down so that they might be deployed quickly in places like China and India is an argument against action. But this only demonstrates that environmentalists are as locked into their thinking about global warming as are their opponents. The problem with the Bush Administration position is not that they have pointed out these challenges. They are the elephants in the global warming room that environmental advocates mostly prefer to ignore. The problem is that the Bush Administration isn't serious about addressing those challenges. When environmentalists deny them too, or suggest that acknowledging them is tantamount to opposing action to address global warming, one might reasonably wonder how serious environmentalists are about advancing real solutions rather than, say, a tidy political message.
So while we appreciate the advice, I'd suggest to you that the debate that we are having here, about what the climate crisis demands of us, what we can expect of regulatory solutions and what we can't, and what it will take to make the transition to the clean energy economy is precisely the discussion that we need to have.
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Michael Shellenberger Posted 12:21 pm
30 Sep 2007
Thanks for weighing in.
You may have missed a much longer piece we wrote that laid out the technical, economic, and political reasons why large public investments to quickly bring down the price of clean energy, both through R&D and outright deployment, are more important than pollution regulation. (Understandable since it's elsewhere on the Grist blog.)
It's here:
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/9/27/12312/0380
We were about as explicit as we could be given the constraints of space in the New Republic piece. We said investment was more important than regulation, and explained why.
I would suggest that some people misread the New Republic piece because they are unaccustomed to a critique of regulation coming from individuals who believe we must move quickly, rather than slowly, in addressing global warming.
Michael
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sunflower Posted 12:55 pm
30 Sep 2007
New technology will not stop coal soon enough.
The old ways will continue from the inertia of the old routines. Our best chance is to get ahead of the curve, be bold, and shut down coal with regulation. Then we can look to new technologies for displacing natural gas. But, for the moment, shut down coal. Any risk of failure to shut down coal is unacceptable. Carbon taxes, caps and auctions, regulations, new alternate energy technologies, off-sets, and other not scalable ideas are negatives if they distract us from our primary mission.
Further, and this is important, subsidizing new energy technology manufacturing is not sustainable here or overseas. Energy is too big, and consumes too much capital for market manipulation to succeed beyond the gee-whiz stage.
We need well funded peer review to move forward, otherwise we are going to be up to our eyeballs in Ponzi schemes.
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Teryn Norris Posted 1:48 pm
30 Sep 2007
It's not only unrealistic to imagine China limiting its coal development, it's socially unjust. We should do all we can to get a moratorium on coal in the United States. But don't expect China to do much about its coal-based emissions use unless we give them carbon capture & storage technology. We can only do this once we make the right investments in CCS technology to bring down the price as quickly as possible.
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sunflower Posted 2:11 pm
30 Sep 2007
We have the vision and economy to make the leap forward out of coal. China will follow the evolution of low-carbon energy technology in a post coal world. And China will export low-carbon technology.
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mleonard Posted 3:07 pm
30 Sep 2007
And in response to China's use of coal - I think to imagine China "limiting" it's coal use is the exact opposite of what Teryn states. NOT Limiting coal use globally (including China) is truly what is unjust - from cradle-to-grave coal use has devastated communities and our climate. 400,000 premature deaths are attributed to air quality in China, and "official" reports acknowledge an average of over 6,000 deaths of coal miners annually (unofficial estimates are much higher). Is this worth it? This use of coal is what is socially unjust - and encouraging the continued use of it perpetuates that injustice.
While we can cross our fingers and wait for carbon-capture and sequestration to become technologically and economically viable - but coal use is expanding globally in the meantime. That massive source of carbon is pushing us further and further towards climactic tipping points. Far more poverty, destruction, and death will be wrought by climate change than by moving away from coal. In fact - I would argue strongly that by embracing a clean energy economy China can bring far more of it's population out of poverty, and do so in a FAR more equitable way.
A coal moratorium may start here in the US - but it should be global in scope. We can continue arguing over how best to do that - but CCS is a fantasy that even the coal industry recognizes is a marketing concept more than anything else. THIS is the "false solution".
-Matt
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Adam Stein Posted 4:09 pm
30 Sep 2007
Many environmentalists have long seen any suggestion that technology might be the answer to environmental problems as hostile because they have long seen technology, and economic development along with it, as the problem and cause of environmental problems.
The thing is, I'm not that environmentalist. I believe that clean tech is the only long-term solution to climate change. I believe that an excessive focus on personal sacrifice as a solution to climate change is misguided and counterproductive. I believe that economic development is a moral imperative. I believe that climate change, if addressed appropriately, is a potential opportunity to transform our economy into something truly sustainable -- an opportunity that could make the world both healthier and wealthier.
So, to a large degree, it feels like you're shadowboxing with an imagined adversary. Yes, I know there probably are a bunch of environmentalists out there who are genuinely anti-development. But probably less than you suppose, and anyway they aren't the ones you should be targeting your message toward.
www.terrapass.com/blog
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Michael Shellenberger Posted 12:35 am
01 Oct 2007
We're glad that you're not an anti-technologist.
However, our critique of your post was that setting a price for carbon can't, alone, get us where we need to go, and that investment is more important than regulation.
You posted your reply before you had read Environmentalism's Existential Moment. I'm wondering if your opinion has changed since reading it.
Best,
Michael
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Adam Stein Posted 6:10 am
01 Oct 2007
Some further thoughts:
our critique of your post was that setting a price for carbon can't, alone, get us where we need to go
I don't think this is an argument particularly worth having. It seems clear that all parties to this debate recognize that a multipronged approach is necessary to combat climate change.
investment is more important than regulation
I find generalities like this too slippery to really engage with. Investment: do you mean infrastructure investment or R&D investment? Regulation: do you mean a tax system that favors carbon reductions in a technology neutral way, or command-and-control style mandates? What category would something like Al Gore's Connie Mae proposal for carbon neutral housing mortgages fall under -- investment or regulation?
I think this is perhaps the major problem with your essays -- the gulf between the language of framing and the language of policy is so great that it's really hard to know exactly what's being advocated. Further, your rhetoric is at times uncomfortably close to the rhetoric of those who aren't sincerely interested in swift action. Of course, as you've noted, that doesn't mean you share the priorities or policy goals of those people, but it does seem incumbent on you to at least make the distinction clear, rather than reflexively assuming that every critic is anti-technology.
If in fact you do support both putting a price on carbon and investing in technology development, then we don't really disagree about much at all. I happen to think that pricing carbon ("regulation") is vastly more important than funding research ("investment"), but since we don't have to choose, I'm not sure how much the disagreement matters.
You posted your reply before you had read Environmentalism's Existential Moment. I'm wondering if your opinion has changed since reading it.
Nope, although this is the sort of wonky topic on which I'm always open to persuasion. Some initial thoughts on reading your essay:
Your estimate of a necessary price for carbon of $600-800/ton is way higher than estimates I've heard elsewhere. It seems unreasonably high.
I think you confuse the process of R&D with the process of technology commercialization. Gov't is good at funding blue-sky research that won't yield returns for many years to come. Industry is great at driving commercial technology down the cost curve. We need the latter more than the former.
I think you miss the point when you say that pricing carbon favors efficiency and conservation over technology development. Efficiency and conservation will yield the greatest quick wins, which is exactly what we need to forestall the construction of new coal plants. This is not a bug of pricing carbon, it's a feature.
You say that environmentalists alone seem unable to grasp the notion that public investment is the single most important factor in combating climate change, but you provide no arguments in support of that position. The quotes from the IPCC and Stern reports are basically non sequiturs -- just generic statements in favor of public investment in clean tech development, hardly a controversial stance in the environmental community.
OK, I've probably said all I can based on a few blog posts. I look forward to reading your book and getting the more detailed argument.
www.terrapass.com/blog
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