Cross posted from the Breakthrough Institute.
The New York Times editorial board, including respected environmental writer Bob Semple, broke from its past focus on carbon pricing as the primary solution to climate change in an editorial about Obama's newly announced energy and climate team. The piece praised Energy Secretary-designate Dr. Steven Chu for his views on the climate challenge:
"What sets [Chu] apart is his fierce conviction that innovation is just as important as regulation, and that big energy problems, like climate change and the world's dependency on fossil fuels, will not be solved without major private and public investment in the development and deployment of nonpolluting technologies."
This implicit affirmation of the importance of innovation and the need for public investment comes a few weeks after an editorial published the day before Thanksgiving entitled, "Save the Economy, and the Planet." This opinion piece spoke to the economic opportunities embedded in Obama's "climate policy wrapped inside an energy policy wrapped inside an economic policy":
"Mr. Obama's second pledge is to invest $15 billion a year to build a clean economy that cuts fuel costs and creates thousands of green jobs. That includes investments in solar power, wind power, clean coal (plants capable of capturing and storing carbon emissions) and, as part of any bailout, helping Detroit retool assembly lines to build a new generation of more fuel-efficient vehicles."
All this pro-investment rhetoric comes from a paper that was arguing little more than a year ago that the only way to address climate change was to make energy costlier for everyone with carbon pricing/regulation. A July 2007 editorial reads:
"But unless Americans understand and accept the trade-off -- higher prices today to avoid calamity later -- the requisite public support for real change is unlikely to build.
Energy is currently underpriced in part because its cost does not reflect the damage inflicted by fossil fuels. Underpricing leads to overconsumption. Worse, it leads to underinvestment in alternatives. As long as today's energy is relatively cheap, there is little incentive for private firms to develop new fuels and technologies.
When the market, on its own, fails to arrive at the proper price for goods and services, it's the job of government to correct the failure. There are two ways to do so: higher taxes and new regulation."
Even more recently, in the week preceding the debate and now infamous collapse of the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act, the Editorial Board described the bill thusly:
"It calls for a 70 percent reduction in emissions by 2050 -- requiring, in turn, a huge change in the way the country creates, delivers and uses energy. It imposes a price on carbon to make sure that happens."
Debates about climate change's solutions have long been conflated with debates about climate change's existence. There was a general disposition among global warming advocates that if you believed it existed, you believed in hard caps, and if you stood in the way of those caps you were an enemy of the environment and humanity. But recognition is growing that global warming exists, and deniers have largely been pushed to obscurity. That fact, coupled with an incoming President who has pledged to take action on climate change, has allowed the debate to evolve to its present, more open state.
The consensus on how to effectively address climate change is shifting. And it is clear that the financial crisis played a big role in speeding up that shift--at a time of deep recession, unless one wants to be permanently relegated to the margins of influence, no one is going to continue advocating policies that raise energy prices when it is bad for politicians, voters, and the economy.
Climate and energy experts like Steve Rayner and Gwyn Prins have done a lot to advance the investment banner, as have people like Robert Pollin with his Green Recovery report and recently, Nobel Laureate Al Gore. We at the Breakthrough Institute have also obviously done our best to move this wagon forward.
But the truth is, more than any one person, the change can be attributed to the events of the past few years. The European Union's cap-and-trade program, the ETS, has failed to reduce emissions, and recent reports have posited that the carbon reduction system actually undermines its own efficacy with dubious, inefficient and short lived carbon offsets in the developing world. Furthermore, the EU plans on meeting its emissions reduction targets buy purchasing more of these offsets as it breaks ground on new coal plants.
At the same time, the past few years have seen the fast-paced development of heavily populated countries like China, India, and Brazil for whom greenhouse gas reduction is far from a priority. Add to this the repeated failures of enacting a carbon price in America and the punishment that leftist political parties like Canada's Liberals have suffered when proposing to raise energy prices in order to reduce emissions, and it is hard not to see the carbon pricing paradigm collapsing on all fronts.
But it is heartening to see the New York Times leading the way in this shifting discourse while placing public investment in its rightful place as a core solution to climate change. This is especially true when other major newspapers like the Washington Post were advocating for revenue neutral cap-and-dividend plans in the run up to the election. Thanks to perceptive and dedicated writers like Semple, the Times is beginning to carve out the space for a public dialogue around federal investments in clean energy. Perhaps it is time for the Post to follow suit. As renowned 20th century economist John Maynard Keynes said: "When the facts, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"