No, You Don’t Have the Power to Stop Climate Change
Developing countries are the new emissions hotspots.
“We need to act now to avert a climate disaster.” It’s a 21st century truism, the kind of bromide repeated in mantra-like fashion by pretty much everyone in the climate space. It sounds like motherhood and apple pie, a truism nobody could disagree with. There’s just one problem with it.
It’s not true.
The problem sneaks away in the very first word: we. Who is the “we” that “needs to act now”?
It’s not always made explicit. Sometimes it seems to point to consumers, other times it refers to powerful people in government and industry. Almost always, though, that imagined “we” refers to people like us. People in advanced democracies, and those who run their institutions. The U.S. government, the European Union, Japan, our citizens, our officials, our corporate leaders. If our institutions act, we’re told, we can make a difference.
This may once have been true, but with every passing year it becomes less so.
If global emissions keep rising it is not because we are not acting. What drives emissions growth these days is the billions of poor people in the developing world striving for the security and comfort of middle-class life. And escaping poverty turns out to be highly carbon intensive.
Once a country gets rich, abating emissions becomes far more achievable. Rich societies have the economic means and technological sophistication to let people live better and better lives while producing fewer greenhouse gas emissions. They have the engineering prowess to install the sophisticated smart grids you need to roll out wind and solar energy at scale, and the state capacity to enforce energy efficiency standards. That’s the basic reason why developed country emissions keep falling.
Developing countries don’t have any of that. What they have is masses of poor people desperate to overcome their misery. Which puts officials throughout the developing world under intense pressure. They have to deliver growth without all the benefits that come from leading a rich country. Their technical and economic means are limited and their budget constraints are hard, so they set out to provide growth with the cheapest, most mature and technically accessible technologies. And those emit a lot of carbon.
In 1970, 69% of greenhouse gas emissions came from rich countries. Today, just 33% do. And while rich-world emissions are falling slowly, they are growing fast in the developing world. In fact, according to the International Energy Agency, 85% of the growth in demand for electric power over the next three years is expected to come from developing countries.
In reality, the decisions that will determine the vast bulk of future emissions will be made by people you’ve never heard of running countries you’ve never been to seeking to maximize goals you don’t share in response to pressures you don’t understand.
The people telling you that the big climate decisions will be made in boardrooms in Houston or committee rooms in Washington are living in a 1970s time warp.
The big, pathway-determining climate decisions will be made by politicians in Jakarta, by public utility officials in São Paulo, by oil company executives in Dubai, and, most of all, by cabinet ministers in New Delhi and Politburo members in Beijing.
People that we have near-zero leverage over.
This, I think, is the ultimate taboo in climate circles: the simple, crushing realization that what we in the West do doesn’t matter much to our climate trajectory from here on out. This reality can’t be squared with any pretense of agency for readers in rich countries, and preserving the myth of your agency is the north star of almost all rich-world climate reporting. So, this basic fact is almost never acknowledged. News audiences are routinely expected to swallow all kinds of evils—dystopia, civilizational collapse, famine, war—but even to hint at its powerlessness is verboten.
These are unpleasant facts, but no less facts for being unpleasant. Our determination to ignore them has left us with a dangerously warped climate debate, one divorced from the basic geophysical and geopolitical realities of our age. As we wring our hands over trivialities, we miss the crux of the challenge before us.
As it happens, there are some things people in rich countries could do to materially change our climate trajectory. It’s just that they’re things nobody wants to talk about.
Leveraging our scientific prowess, we could fully fund research programs into the science we will need to pursue climate interventions. We could mobilize our world-leading scientific and engineering resources to, for instance, find ways to increase the earth’s reflexivity by brightening marine clouds. We could make a big push to find out if fertilizing ocean phytoplankton blooms could actually increase the ocean’s capacity to absorb CO2 without becoming more acidic. We could even consider adding tiny aerosol particles to the upper atmosphere to make the sun ever so slightly dimmer, reducing the total heat the atmosphere absorbs.
Our institutions are unwilling to even consider those things for fear that they will sap our willingness to keep cutting emissions. But our willingness to cut emissions is no longer the point.
Our blindness towards our vanished agency keeps us mired in doomerism and despair.
There’s not enough evidence, yet, to know if climate-scale interventions would work, but we do have the scientific capacity to find out. This, unlike the future pathway of global emissions, is within our reach. A little army of atmospheric scientists are working on all these problems today.
If you want to know an actual, no bullshit thing you can do that has any chance at reducing the risks of runaway climate change, think about supporting their research. Call your elected representative and hector them to increase research funding for climate intervention. It may not give you that warm, fuzzy, green-halo feeling you get from recycling a yogurt pot. But it can make an actual difference.
Quico Toro is a contributing editor at Persuasion. He rants about climate policy on his Substack 1% Brighter.
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Or we could be investing in cheap nuclear energy and sharing that technology with the developing world.
But we know so much of the climate change movement is not about preventing climate change, it is about asking Westerners to look inside their souls, confess their wickedness, and repent. Another weird sublimation of Christianity, in other words.
"If you want to know an actual, no bullshit thing you can do" So in the end this rant contradicts itself. There are things we can do. The problem is not about "we" it's that we don't know what to do.
While I agree with his technical proposals, the real problem is with cooperation. Climate is a "problem of the commons." And it's the hardest of that kind we've ever run into. The only answer is cooperation, and the trouble there is that the left's theory of cooperation is: "Let's all be nice (meaning altruistic)." Several social sciences study this cooperation, and they've all found that doesn't work. We need to look for deals that say "We will if you will, and if we both do, we'll both benefit."
In the mean time, Toro's idea to support research is a good one. Reducing fear of nuclear is another. Transferring the money from nuclear fusion to improving fission is my favorite. No new money needed, and we are so close to safe, cost-effective fission, that it could almost surely do the trick.
But learning to cooperate in a practical way is the missing ingredient in almost every social problem.