Comments Ted Nordhaus has made

correct

yes that's correct. private sector is probably sufficient for efficiency, NG, and wind but not for PV, CCS, and not to make big gains in battery and other storage technologies.On Stabilizing the climate requires technology, public investment, and global economic development posted 2 years, 1 month ago 24 Responses

Criticism vs. Cynicism

With the exception of CCS, which will require carbon prices well beyond what Congress is likely to establish (as noted in earlier posts, every cap and trade bill before the Congress, including Boxer/Sanders, has some form of safety valve built into it that will limit that actual price of carbon), every step you have listed above will result in modest, not deep reductions, in the neighborhood of 20 to 30%, not the 60 to 80% we need, and that's just in the US and other developed nations that establish such policies and only if they succeed wildly. It should be sobering to note that the EU, where most of these same policies have been established, along with a cap and trade system, has seen it's emissions go up since 2000, not down.   That's why all of the sources cited above call for major public investment now, not later and not as an afterthought or secondary priority. Why not acknowledge this reality Joe? And why don't you see doing so, and having a serious public technology policy as consistent with, indeed an asset to, any effort to establish needed regulatory policies? Because Bush and other conservatives have cynically suggested that the lack of low cost alternatives and the economic costs of pricing carbon at levels necessary to drive deep reductions are reasons not to cap carbon emissions? If as you say this has been the reason for delay and not say, the single minded obsession of environmentalists with defining their global warming and energy agenda around limiting pollution, then why would you not define your agenda such that it coopted those arguments rather than ignored them?

I don't doubt that you have been advocating clean energy investment since before any of us were born Joe. But your posts make pretty clear that it is not a very high priority for you and a quick perusal of what the national environmental groups are actually advocating in Congress makes pretty clear that it is not a high priority for them either, no matter what they may say on their websites. Perhaps that is as it should be. But to suggest that any one with a divergent view who questions those priorities is essentially a global warming denier, or is trying to delay action to address global warming is outrageous and cynical. On Stabilizing the climate requires technology, public investment, and global economic development posted 2 years, 1 month ago 24 Responses

Confusing or confused

Adam,

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.
On Ted Nordhaus responds to NRDC's Dave Hawkins posted 2 years, 2 months ago 14 Responses