A Note on Scientific Necessity, Part I
Why Biden’s Presidency must be judged against what is scientifically necessary to stop climate change
In the past few weeks, Joe Biden has begun naming appointees to his transition team and key cabinet positions. Many of these picks will play large roles in the ongoing effort to mitigate climate change and limit the climate crisis. In the wake of President Trump’s scorched Earth climate and energy policy — in which the US left the Paris Climate Agreement, blocked California’s fuel efficiency standards, continued a US legacy of dirty oil wars by pushing for a coup in Venezuela, became the largest crude oil producer, auctioned millions of acres of drilling rights, and rolled back hundreds of environmental regulations — it’s all too easy to compare Joe Biden against Trump’s yardstick of mediocre ambition and planned climate devastation.
How then, shall we judge?
As humans, we are often biased in our judgements on any subject by innate tendencies in our thought patterns, or cognition. A few particular heuristics (cognitive shortcuts) facilitate the comparison of Biden’s climate ambition to Trump: recency bias, anchoring and adjustment, and the availability heuristic. Recency bias causes us to disproportionately remember the final entries in lists, in this case, Donald Trump’s climate and energy policy as opposed to Johnson’s, Reagan’s, H. W. Bush’s, Clinton’s, W. Bush’s, or Obama’s (/Biden’s). This shortcut in reasoning can lead us to exalt Biden’s commitment to rejoining the Paris agreement on “Day 1” of his presidency, when more drastic changes are required to combat climate change.
Similarly, anchoring and adjustment is a cognitive process where people bias their judgement about the ‘fit’ or ‘appropriateness’ of a guess or action based on the initial ‘anchor’. If you partake in a contest guessing the number of jellybeans in a jar, the first guess is the ‘anchor’, and people tend to ‘adjust’ their estimates to that anchor, modifying slightly up or down. With climate policy, we have Trump’s abysmal policy anchors weighing down our judgements of what reasonable climate policy might actually look like. It may prove all too easy to ‘adjust’ our expectations of how many greenhouse gas ‘jellybeans’ are appropriate to emit annually by comparing Biden’s climate plans to Trump’s ‘anchor’, under the pretense that less metaphorical greenhouse gas jellybeans is better for the upcoming diet of fossil fuels (hint: we’re going to need to eliminate them completely from our energy diet).
Lastly, the ‘availability heuristic’ is a cognitive shortcut wherein we base our judgements about how likely something is based on how ‘available’ similar examples are in our memories. Oftentimes, people’s judgements about the likelihood of airplane crashes are biased by the ‘availability’ of plane crashes in news headlines, whether it’s the day the music died or the conditioned unforgettability of the 9–11 terrorist attacks. In reality, you’re much more likely to die in a car crash than a plane crash, but the availability heuristic biases our perception of how likely the latter is upwards. Regarding climate policy, our perception of the likelihood of ambitious or even radical climate and energy policy is biased by the ‘available’ examples. Many Americans are unaware that the US is the only country in the world to have backed out of the Paris climate Agreement, and many are also unaware that countries like New Zealand and the UK have already passed ‘net-zero’ carbon emission plans. Without these examples readily ‘available’, Americans tend to underestimate the likelihood of more radical climate change policy from the Biden administration.
These three biases might cause us to let Biden and his administration off the hook for climate policies that seem progressive and ‘the right direction’ after Trump, but are actually woefully insufficient in terms of what climate science and the international community say is necessary to stop climate change. Dangerous impacts of climate change are already underway: record-breaking fires in California and Colorado, back-to-back unprecedented November hurricanes unleashing devastating flooding in Nicaragua and Honduras (two countries with historically low carbon emissions), marine heat waves, and Australia’s Black Summer of raging wildfires. With continued emissions even more disastrous change will come from worse wildfires, sea level rise subsuming island nations and coastlines, unsurvivable humid heat waves, and long-lasting megadroughts. The magnitude of climate damages demands that Biden’s climate/energy policy and cabinet picks are judged against what science says is necessary, and what research says is possible, *not* against Trump’s presidency. It must be judged against what is scientifically necessary. So what, precisely, does science have to say about what needs to happen to stave off the climate crisis?
What the Science Says
For starters, it’s worth refreshing why 1.5°C and 2.0°C are the targets enshrined in the Paris Climate Agreement. The text of the agreement states, “Holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels”. In addition to the “1.5 to stay alive” motivation for low-lying island states, there are many significant risks of warming the planet either 1.5°C or 2.0°C, which Carbon Brief summarized in a fairly thorough interactive page here.
In order to limit global warming to these thresholds, it’s necessary to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions to zero. This means the amount of greenhouse gases we emit does not exceed the greenhouse gases that ‘exit’ the atmosphere, either from plant uptake, carbon capture and sequestration, or natural processes. Climate scientists have strong confidence that if we reduce emissions to net zero, the planet’s temperature will stabilize. In order to limit warming and to stabilize global temperatures at 1.5°C, we need to cut emissions by ~15%/year each year through 2040 (without negative emissions). For the 2.0°C target, it’s 4%-5% per year. For reference, in this year of massive economic downturn (and an associated drop in energy use), some research suggests US greenhouse gas emissions will be 9% lower than 2019. Similarly, global CO2 emissions decreased an estimated 8.8% for the first 6 months of 2020 relative to 2019. In other words, we need to continue reducing our emissions at rates near or perhaps even greater than the reduction brought about by the global covid-19 caused economic depression.
What Research Shows We Can Do
Fortunately, fossil fuels are not the only energy source around, and it’s possible to reduce CO2 emissions without inducing compounding depressions every year. To do so, it’s necessary to rapidly boost the deployment of renewable energy. This isn’t just a theoretical rapid deployment of renewable energy and electric grids, it’s been demonstrated to be feasible by numerous studies. Mark Jacobson of Stanford is the founder of The Solutions Project, which has calculated how Countries, US States, and cities could potentially meet 100% of their renewable energy needs with current technology and available wind, water and solar power sources (accounting for differences in sunlight and windiness).
Earlier this year, Rewiring America released a jobs report demonstrating that a surge in electrification of our grid could create 15–20 million jobs. In addition, David Roberts of Vox points out, the Rewiring America report shows it’s possible America could, “eliminate 70–80% of carbon emissions by 2035 through rapid deployment of existing electrification technologies”. This is outstanding news with direct implications for the Biden administration, who have the ability to lay the groundwork for this planet saving transition. The report demonstrates it’s possible for America to make the changes science necessitates to stop global warming in its tracks. As Dr. Vox notes, electrifying everything cuts total energy demand in half, and would “keep the country on a 1.5°C pathway without requiring particular behavior changes. Everyone could still have their same cars and houses — they would just need to be electric.”
How Our Current Emission Mitigation Approach Has Fared
Importantly, a growing body of research suggests that the prevailing global economic orthodoxy is ill-equipped to accomplish this rapid change from a fossil fuel energy a 100% renewable energy grid. What’s known varyingly as neoliberalism, free market fundamentalism, Friedmanite economics, Reaganomics, Thatcherism, and libertarianism are all variants of the prevailing idea that governments should exert as little influence on their economies as possible. Roberts quotes Rewiring America’s ‘field manual’ in highlighting how this orthodoxy will not suffice to solve the climate problem: “A 100% adoption rate is only achieved by mandate. The invisible hand of markets is definitely not fast enough; it typically takes decades for a new technology to become dominant by market forces alone as it slowly increases its market share each year. A carbon tax isn’t fast enough, either. Market subsidies are not fast enough.”
Echoing these sentiments are Professor Leah Stokes and Matto Mildenberger in a recent piece in the Boston Review. They point out that market mechanisms like a carbon tax and cap and trade schemes for greenhouse gas emissions have not produced the desired rate of greenhouse gas reductions thus far. They cite the political difficulty of implementing a price on carbon, carbon taxes getting foisted on consumers, and prices that are too low to actually encourage producers and consumers to change behavior, in particular in a world where alternative energy sources are some combination of scarce, unavailable, and unaffordable. Stokes and Mildenberger also note, “we lack strong evidence that carbon pricing has rapidly induced the innovation we need in new, cleaner technologies”.
Not only do carbon prices — market mechanisms that tax ‘externalities’, i.e. greenhouse gas pollution — not generate innovation at the necessary rate, Prof. Stokes notes their historical record on emissions reductions isn’t nearly enough. Norway’s hundred dollar carbon tax only yielded a 2% emission reduction in its first decade, the EU’s cap and trade system reduced emissions 4% over eight years, and British Columbia’s carbon tax reduced emissions 5–1% over a seven year period. The rub is that we need that level or higher emission reductions every year until 2030. Roberts notes in his Vox piece that the needed reductions in fossil fuels would require a “command economy” in which the US government directs the development of renewable energy and the electric grid in America with a “wartime mobilizations which entails government taking a direct hand in industry”. This strongly suggest President elect Biden and his cabinet should eschew market mechanisms in favor of Keynesian or Social democratic capital injections to stimulate the economy, generate jobs, and begin our transition to 100% renewable energy.
Yours truly also wrote a master’s thesis asking, “Can Neoliberalism Solve Climate Change?” In the paper, “solve” meant limiting warming to 1.5°C degrees. While there isn’t an easy way to pin down neoliberal economic policy into quantifiable and therefore testable data, neoliberal policies such as flat income tax rates, lower corporate tax rates, deregulation of the financial sector and privatization of government entities tend to produce measurable economic outputs: more income inequality measured by the Gini Coefficient of pre-tax income, more wealth inequality, and more obscene wealth and income shares for the top 10, 1, 0.1, and 0.01%. Of these ‘neoliberal indicators’ for which enough data was available to statistically measure, there was a strong correlation between neoliberal economic indicators and failure to decrease CO2 emissions.
In plain English, free market policies don’t have a track record of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and simultaneously drive up inequality and poverty (inequality which is associated with a host of other personal and public health problems as detailed extensively in “The Spirit Level”). It’s not entirely clear how free market policies that are supposed to create ‘optimal’ economic outcomes as a result of ‘rational’ consumers making ‘informed’ purchasing decisions could ever result in mass behavior change sufficient to stop climate change. This is particularly true when they leave many people too poor to pay for food, rent, or other basic necessities, let alone making the ‘rational’ decision to buy an electric vehicle they can’t afford, or solar panels for the house they’re in danger of getting evicted from. If any readers are interested in my research, feel free to leave a comment asking for it, I’d be happy to email it to you.
Unfortunately, the prevailing capitalist ‘free market’ ideology is fundamentally opposed to government ‘picking winners’ in the free market by direct funding or subsidizing of a given commodity, say, renewable energy. Indeed, as Naomi Klein elucidated in her book “This Changes Everything”, there’s been a push in recent decades towards free trade agreements between global nations that allow corporations to sue countries in “investor state dispute settlement” (ISDS) courts for ‘infringements’ on the free trade deal. In one instance, a renewable subsidy program in Ontario was short-circuited by a lawsuit from fossil fuel industry interests. One of the lesser known but perhaps more important legacies of the Obama/Biden administration was their push to increase the number of international ‘free trade’ deals (in addition to NAFTA: the Trans-Pacific Partnership or TPP, and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership or TTIP) that allow private industry to sue countries, states, and cities for violations of these free trade policies, which includes subsidies and direct funding of renewables. Going forward, we really don’t have the time or slack in our carbon budget for our renewable energy system to be derailed by suits in these ISDS courts. The Biden administration should look to stop empowering corporations to sue governments over renewable energy policies that are scientifically necessary to stop climate change.
Judging on Scientific Necessity
The key point here, is that Biden and his administration must be judged against what is scientifically necessary to stop climate change, not against Trump’s genocidal climate/energy policy. While Joe Biden, his campaign, and Kamala Harris have all publicly stressed the importance of climate change, it remains to be seen if they will attempt to implement policy that will yield the necessary 5%-15% CO2 reductions per year. It’s also unclear if such reductions will feature alongside Keynesian style injections in investment and construction of renewable energy and the electric grid to stop the planet from warming further without devastating global economies by drastically reducing energy supply.
It’s possible the Biden presidency will emphasize market mechanisms to address the climate crisis like the Obama/Biden administration had before, even if scientific urgency demands more direct action from his administration. Indeed, the available evidence suggest market mechanisms will not produce the rapid change we need. At this point, we know that Biden has a climate plan, and has begun making key picks for his transition team and cabinet. These relatively ‘small’ steps of assembling his climate team are potentially giant steps signaling Biden’s commitment to climate science oriented policy, both domestically and as the world’s predominant, hegemonic superpower.
Biden’s Climate Team Assembles…
Stay tuned for Part II of this series, which will cover what Biden’s transition team and cabinet picks suggest about his eventual climate policies.
