Here's My Solution to Climate Change

I'm a new Substack with few subscribers, let's launch a multipart series tackling the biggest problem in the world.

"How Do You Think We Should Tackle Climate Change?" by americaspower is licensed under CC BY 2.0

When I was a little kid me and my cousin (who was a few years older) were given these maps of America to color. This is apparently how children were taught to pass time in the late 1980s. This wasn’t the type of realistic map that would help fuel my later rise to make regionals in the National Geography Bee – the far superior version of the spelling bee – but one of those silly ones with snowcapped mountains and amber waves of grain and such. My mother looked at them when we were done and my cousin’s was, unsurprisingly, perfect. She really nailed this assignment. Mine was – like every bit of visual art I’d make in my life – a complete mess. I was not good at coloring inside the lines, so this was pretty ugly looking. But for my mom the weird thing was the coloring choices I made, or one in particular. She asked me why I made all the water brown. My reply was because it was polluted. And that, at five years old, was the first political statement I ever made.¹

I’ve been an ardent environmentalist ever since. My favorite holiday as a child was Earth Day. I devoured all the books in my school library on Teddy Roosevelt because, for other reasons, I found his conservationism cool. And, like many people on the internet, I take the threat of climate change seriously. I’m no climate scientist, and let’s be clear, you probably aren’t either, and if you’re feeling very certain over climate change you’re probably falling prey to the scourge of internet powered confirmation bias.² But from what I can understand it seems that the climate is changing, it’s reasonable to conclude that it’s being caused by humans, it’s reasonable to conclude that this has potentially serious complications, and it’s reasonable to conclude – even if it’s only a Pascal’s Wager type situation – that we need to do something to fix this problem.³

I am, unsurprisingly considering the name of this newsletter, optimistic that we will rise to the challenge climate change poses. I was going to link to some articles to show how unpopular that opinion is on the internet in comparison to discourse about how we’re all going to die, but a few Google searches later I realized I’d need to link to every major non-conservative publication in the English-speaking world. So, I’ll leave it to you to Google if you think I’m being hyperbolic, but the internet is very convinced we’re already screwed. Because of that, I want to spend the next few weeks laying out why I think we’re not.

To explain why I think we’re not screwed, we need to discuss the four camps that, broadly defined, make up the four main perspectives on climate change. The first are those widely known as Climate Deniers, although I’m sure they would prefer a different name if they could coalesce upon one.⁴ The maximalist version of this position claims that there’s no climate problem and it’s all made up. Some of those people (I have no statistics, but this seems like it’s the vast majority) claim a variation, namely, that climate change may exist, but we don’t know if it is human caused. Either way, they serve the same purpose in this debate.

The Climate Deniers have their own subgroups, including those who believe it’s part of a larger government plot to control the populace.⁵ The less conspiratorial generally break down between those who are getting so rich off the current system they have incentive to promulgate this argument, and then those who follow the previous group and think they’re genuinely correct. It’s about the difference between a 1950s tobacco executive and the person who genuinely thinks that cigarettes are safe because four out of five doctors prefer their brand.

Climate Deniers, of all stripes, will have little play in this series. Frankly, we’re starting from such diametrically opposed assumptions I don’t see the point in discussing them. Moreover, their position in this debate is to disagree with almost every attempt to stop the problem. This doesn’t seem useful for our purposes, so don’t expect this to be 8,000 words trying to convince people climate change is real. If you don’t, this is probably going to be a pretty boring series for you to read. There is one especially important part Climate Deniers play and we’ll discuss that later.

Next up is the group I fall into, those who are optimistic that we can innovate our way out of this solution. Even that has a bit of a subgroup, as you have people who think this means we’ll just move to Mars. This is an infinitesimally small group of people who are all online and all extremely vocal. I’m only bringing them up because it’s always funny to me when people dream of living on a foreign planet as an employee of Elon Musk. They’ve almost certainly never met someone who works at Tesla.

The rest of us believe that we’ll develop enough stuff off a broad menu of technologies – including energy, transportation, alternative foods, water usage, building techniques, carbon capture, etc., etc. – that we’ll be able to beat this problem. I’ve linked to this before, but it’s a piece so good that it made me end my years long boycott of Matt Yglesias. That’s one of the best summations I’ve read of our need to come up with new solutions – in that case more energy – to fix environmental problems. What I want to do in the next part of this series is make the case why this is the correct position.

If you’re doubtful that we can build and innovate our way out of this problem, I’m just going to ask you to look back as far as earlier this year. We’ve spent so much time arguing over vaccines we’ve all seem to have forgotten that a year and a half ago it was widely mocked that we would be able to have a COVID-19 vaccine developed before 2020 was done. But, of course, we did do that. And not just in America. All over the globe we did this. Cuba – a country with a population smaller than Ohio and a GDP about equal to Puerto Rico – developed vaccines. There’s a version of the COVID-19 pandemic narrative that’s a Star Trekian story about human ingenuity and spirit with some hopeful and triumphant music in the background. We are amazingly good at fixing problems and next week I want to talk about the innovative technologies that are going to let us fix this problem. But, to do that, I need to talk about the two other groups.

The reason the next group is important was on display last month in the debates that accompanied the COP26 in Glasgow. It’s easy for countries to make a commitment to decarbonization. But there’s a big question over how to do that. The techno-optimists believe we’re going to do that through building better alternatives. The Degrowthers – and if I was a better writer, I’d coin them something pithy like Thunbergers, but I’m not, so I won’t – believe we’re going to do that by cutting back on carbon. Just through, well, stopping the things that produce it. I’m skeptical of this group for many reasons, primarily because I believe it’s just warmed-over Malthusian ideology pushing a range of wildly unpopular ideas that have no realistic chance of ever being adopted.

Considering I’m dismissing them more harshly than I did the Climate Deniers, it seems like they’d be another group I wouldn’t be discussing. But they’re incredibly important in this debate. They hold a lot of sway, including over the coverage of climate change. Degrowth is the climate change (and thus important) version of the culture war nonsense we see where elites can hold fringe opinions but have large sway because of their hold on power. Steven Chu, a former Secretary of Energy, subscribes to this nonsense. Almost every celebrity climate change activist preaches a carbon diet, despite the impracticality involved. This is an important group because of how much power they hold. And they’re wrong. But for the purposes of this series, their wrongness is most important in one specific way: they have the entire calculus backwards. We’ll talk about why that is after I introduce the next group, but if you’re pessimistic about climate change, it’s probably because of them.

The final group, and the one I personally find most annoying, are those who don’t really fall into either the techno-optimist position or the degrowth position. They may hold either, or both. But they agree climate change needs to be addressed. Their problem is they are addicted to the status quo.⁶ This isn’t the same addiction to the status quo as BP execs claiming there’s no such thing as man-made climate change because they’re addicted to sweet fossil fuel profits. They’re addicted to it in that they just think every attempt to change it is pointless. They’re characterized by being relentlessly negative about any attempts at change. Go back and read the comments to that Yglesias piece if you want examples. Lots and lots of examples. The internet is replete with these people. Their modus operandi is to take a solution someone is proposing and nitpick it to death based on the idea that it’s either currently technically infeasible, currently technically feasible but not to a high enough scale, doesn’t offer a total solution to our problems, or is somehow “not how people act.”

Status Quoists drive me nuts. I generally believe that we’re very good at innovating because humanity is literally based on being able to innovate. Because of that there’s also probably always been Status Quoists riding that wave. I imagine 2 million years ago conversations going like this:

“Grog tired of eating just plants, Grog build spear, bring down mammoth, eat mammoth.”

“Listen Grog, great idea, totally unrealistic. First off, eating copious quantities of meat is completely against human nature. No one is going for this. Second, you only have one spear, so, lol. And even if you could somehow magically create more spears, you can’t live on a diet purely of mammoth.”

Grog then went and made more spears, got a band together, killed a mammoth, and got a bigger brain. But the status quo cavemen still ate the meat Grog and his friends killed and went along for the ride, even though they spent all their time posting memes on the homo habilis version of Twitter about how crazy it is to think you could create fire. Their descendants today are the people claiming we can’t get out of the climate change problem because current battery technology doesn’t allow us to save enough solar power. Or that wind power can’t replace 100% of fossil fuels. Of course, we all know that. That’s irrelevant. Widespread societal change never comes about because a perfectly formulated solution comes about. We trial and error enough things that eventually we have a momentous change. That’s history.

Now that we’ve discussed those four groups, I can lay out how this series is going to work. Each of the following four parts will address one of those groups.

The next part is, as I said, where I lay out my version of the techno-optimist approach to fixing climate change. It starts from the basic idea that this is, primarily, an engineering problem. Better yet, it’s an engineering problem we can solve. At the end of the day, we need to reduce our carbon emissions, and we either already have or are close to having superior technologies that can replace our current ones. If we can do that, we have a good chance of accomplishing what we need to – unless the most skeptical models are right, in which case, we don’t have a chance anyway.

Then I’m going to take a look at the main source of disagreement with Degrowthers. They believe that this is, primarily, a societal, or governmental, problem. That we’re going to beat climate change by having a monumentally large group of people massively change how they live, that we will reorder society, smash capitalism, and we’ll probably accomplish a lot of this through government intervention. In that part I’ll explain why this is all a fantasy and the “just build better stuff” approach is the one based on how humans actually act.

After that we’ll look at the parts of this problem that Degrowthers think are the most important. We’ll acknowledge that this is, in fact, a political problem, but not in the way Degrowthers would want you to think. This is where we’ll pivot back to the Climate Deniers because this is where they’re important. The political problem isn’t over whether we can use government to force people to stop driving SUVs and eating beef. The political problem is whether better versions of SUVs and beef will be allowed to fix this problem or if the political pull of the people making billions off the climate destroying products can stop them.

Finally, we’ll look at the societal problem. But not in the way Degrowthers think it exists, as one about whether masses of humanity will give up all the things that make their life more enjoyable (spoiler alert: they won’t). Instead, it’s about whether even if we can create superior alternatives to greenhouse gas emitting ways of living, it’s no guarantee that we as society will adopt them. We need new Gmails, but we may end up with new Google Glass. Or new Google+. Or new Google Wave. Or – okay, I’m going to stop listing failed Google products. You get the point. If Part III of this series is essentially “better products win” then Part V is where I add “usually” to the end. And yes, this is going to involve discussing nuclear power. This is why I discussed the Status Quoists, because this is where they reign, and this is where they have some good points.

I’m excited to see how this unfolds. I’ve already told you that I believe there is a – feasible and achievable – solution to climate change. But I’m hoping that this series will put forth a perspective that doesn’t get discussed enough and give you some interesting things to think about. Next week, let’s talk about wh

1. The following year the kids on the school bus taught me to say, “Bush sucks.” I don’t know if I fully agreed with that. I did watch the Presidential debates, but I didn’t experience my political awakening until the fall of the Berlin Wall. That said, I was a first grader, and they were fifth graders and elementary school is a hierarchical system.

2. Originally, this week was going to be on that topic, but I decided to go big instead. Expect something on this once I’m done this series.

3. I’m trying to wean myself off footnotes because I don’t like how they work in the emails, but this is going to be a long one. I’m fond of saying that if you go through a globally historic event and you don’t change your views on anything your views aren’t worth much. One of the views I changed after the pandemic is that I’m more skeptical of claims that the problem is as serious as many experts claim. That doesn’t mean I’m disagreeing, that just means that it would seem foolish to have lived through a world historic event where experts, public officials, and institutions were repeatedly shown to be wrong, lacking in transparency, alarmist, and even willing to engage in outright deception, and then assume that another group of experts, public officials, and institutions are both completely accurate and forthright.

4. I should broadly note that, at least in this introduction, I’m going to be unnecessarily uncharitable to some of these groups. I’m not happy about that but the solution would’ve been to make this excessively long and this is already too long. I’m hoping to be a bit more forgiving in the future parts. I will say that soft Climate Deniers – those who primarily disagree with the more extreme predictions about climate change – have what looks to me to be good points.

5. My gut reaction to this is that it’s a pretty insane conspiracy theory. But then every time Fauci opens his mouth, or Australia does something insane, I find it more difficult to completely dismiss these people as kooks. This is my way of pleading with public officials to do less dumb stuff.

6. As much as I am trying to avoid giving people cutesy nicknames, I’ll often refer to them as Status Quoists.