The climate war is over: Column
Republicans and Democrats alike can support policy that makes clean energy cheaper.
Monday’s announcement by Bill Gates, the Obama administration and dozens of billionaires and governments that they'd double the amount they invest in developing clean energy technologies was heralded as a positive start to the U.N. climate summit.
But it was in fact much more: The announcement signaled the end to the climate wars that raged over the past 20 years.
The reason is easy to understand. All the climate actions that Republicans, as well as British and Australian conservatives and skeptics, once feared — a United Nations treaty, a national cap-and-trade regulatory regime or a carbon tax — are politically dead in the water.
Though diplomats and environmental journalists justify their participation in the Paris summit by suggesting there could be a treaty, it has been obvious since the last global climate meeting in Copenhagen in 2009 that none of the big emitters — the U.S., China, India — would allow the U.N. to dictate its energy futures. In fact, a treaty was taken off the table before the Paris summit even began.
But there is another, related reason why climate policy is dead: Carbon emissions have peaked and are going down in many rich nations, including the United States. U.S. emissions from electricity production declined 15% between 2007 and 2013 — a huge shift in a slow-moving sector.
The main reason is the abundance of cheap natural gas from hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," itself the result of a 35-year effort by the U.S. Department of Energy and oil and gas companies in Texas, from the early 1970s to 2005.
How fast emissions peak and decline depends on how quickly developing nations such as China and India can move to cleaner energy technologies, from fracking for natural gas to solar to nuclear.
The Gates-Obama technology announcement signaled that the whole framework for dealing with climate change has shifted from making fossil fuels more expensive to making clean energy cheap. One of the main inspirations for their effort is the fracking revolution.
To be sure, conservatives oppose spending tens of billions of dollars subsidizing green energy, as Obama did through his 2009 economic stimulus. But conservatives have long supported government funding basic research, which includes promising new technologies. And there is a precedent for Republicans and Democrats working together to increase funding for basic science.
In 1998, then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich worked with President Clinton to increase the budget for the National Institutes of Health from nearly $14 billion in 1998 to almost $30 billion in 2003. That’s about the same amount many energy experts say we should be spending on energy research (today, we spend about $5 billion).
I asked Gingrich in 2013 whether he thought we should increase the budget for energy research and he said yes — as long as the government didn’t pick winners and losers.
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That approach worked well for fracking. My colleagues and I did an extensive history of the fracking revolution, interviewing former government and private sector players. All said the key was that the government funded many experiments, from geothermal and solar to nuclear to oil and gas.
Most research investments fail, but the few that pay off, pay off big time: The shale revolution contributes $190 billion to $330 billion every year to the U.S. economy in the form of cheaper energy prices.
As such, increased energy innovation funding is a good thing for the economy and national security. It reduces our dependence on foreign imported oil, and it curbs air pollution and other environmental impacts, regardless of whether you care about global warming.
Just a few years ago, this might have led rich countries to hector the Indians and the Chinese over their refusal to agree to binding limits. But India’s new prime minister, Narendra Modi, successfully made his case for India’s right to develop by burning cheap coal, while also pledging to install a lot of solar panels — both of which mollified mainstream environmentalists.
Even if U.S. carbon emissions were to flatten, or modestly rise, future governments are more likely to implement modest regulations through the Environmental Protection Agency than pass a complicated new regulatory policy, global treaty or tax.
To be sure, extremes on both sides will continue to argue over the accuracy of temperature readings, the Antarctic ice melt and whether heat waves are getting worse. But without any significant policy implication, the public and the news media will lose interest, and the climate war will go out like a fire untended.
What will emerge in its place is a new climate policy pragmatism, one that acknowledges global warming as a gradual, long-term challenge — best dealt with through technological innovation and cooperation so we can all move to cleaner sources of energy, faster.
Michael Shellenberger is co-author of An Ecomodernist Manifesto, with 17 environmental scientists and scholars.
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