This weekend, the Southwestern US is experiencing a record breaking heat wave. Just last weekend, Alaska experienced a record breaking heat wave. These are predicted symptoms of changing weather patterns due to climate change. Yet the 'debate' about climate change rages on, with no substantial progress being made.
A 2012 poll by the Pew Research Center found that only 42% of Americans believed that the earth is warming due to human activity. While the poll also ascertained that a solid majority (67%) did believe the earth was warming, only 45% believed that there was a general consensus among scientists with regard to the planet warming due to human activity.
This should be surprising, given that somewhere between 97% (source) and 99.8% (source) of peer-reviewed scientific articles over the last 20 years conclude that the planet is warming due to human activities. However, most of us are no longer surprised by this because we have - on too many occasions - found ourselves caught in one of those unwinnable arguments with someone who is thoroughly convinced there is some international conspiracy to trick everyone into thinking our actions have consequences, and who has an unending supply of disinformation to back up their view.
If we are to have any hope of ensuring that this planet is not irreversibly altered by the time our grandchildren are our age, I think we may need to re-evaluate how we go about winning the broader climate argument.
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We have a number of options available with regard to how we can go about ensuring that we leave behind a planet that is at least inhabitable. Ideally, carbon emissions would be cut drastically and infrastructure would be put in place to prepare for the levels of warming that are already unavoidable. Unfortunately, it is difficult to imagine any of the necessary movement on the issue being politically feasible anytime in the near future, even though time is very much of the essence.
Why are carbon cuts so unfeasible?
As things currently stand, the likelihood of meaningful cuts to carbon emissions is negligible. Public opinion on whether there is a human contribution to climate change is more of an effect of the root cause of this rather than the cause itself. The primary reason for the lack of feasibility in making a meaningful reduction in carbon emissions is a practice known as "Reserves Based Lending" which provides a massive source of capital for companies and governments that own or control fossil fuel reserves. This common practice means that not only is there a financial incentive for ensuring that carbon emissions continue unabated (in the form of share prices based on existing, available but unburned fossil fuel assets), but there is actually a financial requirement to ensure these reserves can still be utilized (with all the carbon emissions that entails) because to not do so would literally erase trillions of dollars from the world economy. As you can imagine, those who have borrowed with their reserves as collateral simply cannot allow those reserves to be taken off the table, and so aggressively oppose anything that might lead to carbon emission reduction and the possibility that those reserves couldn't be used (thus destroying their value as an asset).
Aside from the less apparent effects of this monetary incentive to maintain the status quo (such as political campaign contributions from these companies in return for stymieing any movement on global warming) the most notable effect is in the American mainstream media. For every article on climate change that references a scientist or scientific paper discussing climate change, it has become mandatory to give equal time to a "climate skeptic" - someone who seldom has any qualification whatsoever in climatology, but who will provide a quote to "balance" the article due to the allegedly "disputed" nature of climate science. This "balance" has absolutely nothing to do with journalistic integrity nor an attempt to ensure there is no bias in reporting - in fact, on many issues about which there is far less certainty no effort is made at all to balance an opinion. For example, it has become widely accepted that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons (even though there is no current evidence to support that conclusion) because for years the assertion has been made without providing any opposing argument in articles on the subject, the reason being that there's no incentive to do so. On the subject of climate change however - a subject with an exponentially higher level of certainty - news outlets run the risk of incurring the wrath of those with multi-trillion-dollar vested interests in the matter, so the result is that the media overall are left with little choice but to "balance" facts with skeptic sound bites.
With this, those with a vested interest in ensuring carbon emissions are not meaningfully reduced demonstrate their power and influence - with so much money at stake, no significant movement appears possible.
So what can we do?
I think I should explain a bit where I'm coming from with my assessment of the situation; I too was once somewhat skeptical of man made global warming. The dire predictions I had heard as a child that linked warming to a "hole in the ozone layer" and warned of catastrophic consequences by the millennium all fizzled and died like Y2K (anyone even remember that world-ending problem?). As a result, for years I tended to stay out of climate arguments altogether due to a lack of both knowledge and interest; after all, Bush and Cheney had us hopping from country to country building colonies with a sort of brutal efficiency that imperialist Europeans of centuries past would have envied, so my political attentions were focused elsewhere.
At the time I was a frequent reader of the Financial Times, a conservative British daily newspaper. By conservative I don't mean in the Fox News or NY Post sort of way, being a propaganda tool for elites to mislead and misinform the masses; rather, FT is a paper by elites for elites, written by (forgive the OWS parlance) the 1% for the 1%. In other words, it has a very elitist slant, but it is full of genuine information. In October 2006, the FT did something shocking that brought the issue of climate change into sharp focus, at least for me.
I don't remember the exact date of the paper (and it's difficult to find given FT's subsequent in-depth coverage of the topic) but I remember opening it to find four full pages of coverage and analysis about global warming and climate change. The findings of their analysis and coverage were best summed up in an editorial that followed, which opened with this:
The science on global warming is now incontrovertible: the climate is changing, man is helping to make that happen, and the damage could be irreversible.
What brought about this stark presentation of the threat of climate change boiled down to a basic risk calculation common in business (particularly finance, see
CBA). Essentially you take the probability of something happening and multiply it by the likely cost incurred by that event happening, and that gives you the risk in monetary terms. You can then take that monetary risk and, depending on the situation, either compare it to the possible monetary gain of taking that risk, or (in this case) the monetary cost of taking steps to avoid that event occurring. The end result that was
found at the time, and which
still holds true today, is that the risk-based cost of not addressing climate change is
significantly higher than the cost of addressing it.
Therein lies a possible solution for breaking the deadlock of science v. 'skeptical' punditry: start putting more dollar amounts on probable effects of climate change. If we set aside, momentarily, any discussion of whether the climate is changing for natural reasons or whether human activities are contributing to it, then we can instead focus on the fact that it does appear to be changing, and thus look at what the possible effects of that might be.
By way of example, let's take a hypothetical outcome: some figures put the cost of climate change at 5% of world GDP per year by 2030. If we make a conservative projection of world GDP at that time to be $60 trillion per year, then we're looking at a cost of $3 trillion per year. If there's only a 1/3 chance of that occurring, we are still looking at the risk of the entire value of the assets the 'skeptics' are trying to protect being wiped out in 7 years at best, with the costs to the global economy of climate change continuing indefinitely long after the value gained from leaving the carbon-emitting assets in the economy has been entirely wiped out.
We, however, don't even need to be hypothetical in illustrating the effects of climate change as they begin to manifest around us. Parts of the US are becoming uninsurable due to the risks associated with climate change. The Government Accountability Office is warning that dealing with the effects of climate change pose a "significant financial risk" to the federal budget. Lost worker productivity and damage to infrastructure are just some of the risks posed by climate change, whether it be due to human actions or not. The sheer scale of the economic cost of climate change is so significant that even if there was only a 50/50 chance that the planet is actually going to continue to warm, that is a financial risk not worth taking. Anyone who is concerned with budget deficits and excessive government spending should be very concerned by these effects.
Reducing carbon emissions is the most cost-effective method by which to reduce the debt burden we will be incurring due to the effects of climate change, given the high probability - not absolute certainty, as skeptics will point out, but a high enough probability for professional risk assessors to consider extremely dangerous - that at the very least carbon emissions are likely adding to the warming of the planet.
Quite frankly, we need to get the business community behind the idea of tackling this problem, so we need to start speaking their language. At the moment, the small number of big companies that benefit greatly in the near term from the burning of fossil fuels are too effectively controlling the conversation, and the risk that poses to the rest of the business community - not to mention to us as a people - is immense.