Here's My Solution to Climate Change Part II
In which we have to deal with some people's feelings
It’s a tale as old as time. Man decides he wants to start a Substack about the interplay of technology and culture and politics and mass psychology. Man decides he’s going to write a multipart series on climate change because it’s the confluence of all these things. Man begins writing a piece about how we’re developing technologies that will allow us to cut our carbon emissions and, while engaging in his lawyerly bad habit of over citing, discovers an entire strain of thought so ridiculous he goes down a rabbit hole and has to write an entirely new article. We’ve all heard that story before, and never thought it would be about us, but this time, it was.
When I originally sketched out this series, I knew I’d need to touch on carbon capture and sequestration because it’s the technology that could be our best tool in the fight against climate change. I figured it was so uncontroversial – and for reasons I’ll discuss later something we should view as a complement, not a substitute – that I would spend a lot more time writing about new energy sources and carbon neutral airplanes. But then I stumbled into the wild world of people who oppose carbon capture technologies, and there was no way I could just deal with this in a paragraph.
This opposition to carbon capture is rooted in the fight over zero carbon emissions versus net zero carbon emissions. The basic idea here is that some people – including oil companies for obvious reasons – want us to move towards net zero carbon emissions. Meanwhile, other1 people dislike this idea. If you don’t feel like clicking all those links, it basically comes down to “net zero won’t do enough and/or is just corporate nonsense so we need carbon zero.” Which, I mean, sure, yeah, obviously if people don’t meet their pledges, it’s pointless. Children understand this concept. And this had led some people – including important organizations – to actively oppose carbon capture. I encourage you to read that press release to view the nadir of activism. They’re actually calling for this technology – which could improve if not cure our situation – to be banned. That is a level of dysfunction and, frankly, insanity that it’s difficult to find anywhere else.
The last piece I linked to has a couple of quotes that highlight this ridiculous thought process. That author, criticizing carbon neutral policies, states that “[c]limate change plans that rely on carbon removal, capture, and storage are playing an incredibly risky game.” No shit. Would you also like to try and tell me that water is wet? Going all in on carbon capture is about as smart as pushing all in on an inside straight draw. Unless you’re the oil industry2, you don’t believe that we’re on the verge of having the level of carbon capture technology that we need to be able to get to net zero emissions. And if we don’t price negative externalities – which is a fancy way of saying making it expensive to pollute – it’s unlikely it’ll ever be cheap enough to make a real difference. That’s to say nothing of the expense of removing what’s already in the air. But this is not some novel technology we’re trying to develop. We are already doing this! The problem is that we’re just not doing it nearly enough and we need the legions of engineers working on this problem to come up with ways to make it more economically viable.
So, yeah, obviously betting everything on carbon capture is dumb. We may never make the price of capture cheap enough that it achieves widespread adoption. But to actively oppose it is even dumber. That author then lays out her version of this solution:
We know exactly how to reduce carbon emissions — decreasing the use of cars and planes, reducing consumption of meat and dairy, reducing energy demand and moving to a renewable energy system, improving the energy efficiency of our buildings — so let’s focus on that, instead of relying on uncertain technologies to come along and fix our mess.
Oh, that’s all? Great, let’s get right on that. Again, the argument here is that changing the habits of billions of people is much easier than perfecting existing technologies. If this was one crank on Medium, that’d be one thing. But go back and look at those links, and that press release. This is an incredibly powerful and important strain of thought.
More relevantly, they’re exactly one of the things this newsletter is about. I’m not just interested on the impact of technology on society but also the impact of society on technology. Here we see people devoting themselves to opposing a technology that, if it worked, would be able to solve the very problem they claim they’re committed to solving. Something doesn’t seem right there.
This wonderful piece on eco-socialism gets towards what I think is the issue here, which is that, for many people this is an attempt to fight capitalism. Or, as we’ll talk about in future pieces, all the SUVs and steakhouses and sprawling suburbs they don’t like. Or, just any old way they want to see the world change. For example, the Green New Deal describes itself as a “jobs and justice-centered plan to decarbonize the U.S. economy within ten years” which sounds like it’s about more than just decarbonizing the U.S. economy.
Let’s take a step back and talk about Abraham Lincoln. In addition to being one of my heroes3 he’s also arguably the most successful political figure in the Republic’s history. He got stuff done. And there’s a line he wrote that gets him into a lot of hot water in these dumber times of ours but perfectly explains how people trying to solve problems should think. Let’s look at the entire relevant paragraphs from Lincoln’s letter to Horace Greeley in 1862:
I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be "the Union as it was." If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors; and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views.
I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free.
The GOAT, everybody. This is how every politician, government official, leader, activist, and problem solver should think. You may be familiar with these lines from dishonest portrayals of Lincoln as a racist. Lincoln personally detested slavery and wanted all men to be free. But he also knew that his paramount responsibility was to save the Union. Lincoln was also intelligent enough to understand that he would be able to free all the slaves if the Union was saved, but if it was lost there was nothing he could do about the slaves in the Confederacy. Everyone is worse off if he loses the war. And history vindicated him fully just three short years later when he saved the Union and freed the slaves.
If you believe that climate change is a real problem – particularly if you believe it is such an emergency you’ve rebranded it the climate crisis – you must prioritize stopping it. Whatever that means. And yet, here is a sizable slice of the activists who are most engaged in this issue who are actively working against a potential technological solution. The last part of this series is going to talk about how we need to stop culturally rejecting technologies (for example, nuclear energy) that can make a difference. But that’s about broad, societal views, not the views of the most committed activists. This is akin to (WARNING: imprecise analogy incoming) the zealots who hate vaping. Sure, vaping is probably bad for you, but we know it’s a hell of a lot better than smoking cigarettes (what isn’t?). If we actually care about public health outcomes, we’d rather people do something less bad than worse bad. At a certain point, you need to admit you just hate smoking. At a certain point, you need to just admit you hate the modern world. If you’re not going to do that, it’s up to people who care about this to exclude you from the conversation. When we stop letting people who are using climate change as a Trojan Horse for social justice, eliminating Applebee’s, or getting back at their dad for being too much into his pickup, we’ll have an easier time making progress.
The second problem here is the nonsensical fight between whether carbon capture is the solution or whether going off carbon is the solution. And, considering the next piece is entirely about dozens of technologies that are all open to the complaint of “this is not a solution” I figured it’d be better to address this here. The anti-carbon capture people are right: carbon capture is not a solution to climate change. But that’s because there is no solution to climate change.4
This is drive by the Solution Fallacy, which is a common issue in public policy discourse. When we’re dealing with large problems – particularly those with multiple causes – there’s never an actual solution. Instead there are things that can exacerbate the problem and things that can alleviate the problem. This is both difficult to think about and emotionally unsatisfying. It’s also difficult to analyze how much of a difference anything is making. We see this all the time with crime, where things like police, sentencing laws, availability of guns, economic issues, historical issues, cultural issues, social interventions, and on and on all interact in a way that is essentially impossible to isolate and analyze. Both our emotional and intellectual responses to the exacerbate/alleviate matrix are worse than they are to a silver bullet.
Part of this problem is because any one “solution” – be it technological, cultural, social, political, legal, economic, etc. – usually requires other factors to make it effective. To take an example I see often in my line of work, surgeons can repair a rotator cuff, but how successful that repair is going to be depends on a lot of factors other than just the surgeon. Lifestyle changes, therapeutic care, and rehabilitation are all important. Why can medical professionals grasp this but people discuss policy can’t?
To a degree, this is about understanding risk management. Let’s talk pandemic. Say we bet everything on a pharmaceutical solution. And we get it. But what happens if we don’t have high enough trust in the medical and pharmaceutical institutions to get everyone to buy into that. And let’s say we don’t have enough distributive capacity. And let’s say the problem is made worse by behavioral and cultural factors and we haven’t done an adequate problem of addressing those, in part because the institutions addressing those are so distrusted by the people we need to change their attitudes and behaviors. Then what happens? Well, we have the continuing AIDS pandemic.5
None of the individual things were useful enough to be considered a solution. If tomorrow we came up with a 100% effective AIDS vaccine and a pill that completely cures it, we still wouldn’t be able to end the pandemic. There is no single solution. There’s a variety of things we can do that can make the problem better, and they work together to create a virtuous circle of improvements. Just like Lincoln couldn’t save the Union just by freeing the slaves, or winning a big military victory, or strangling the Confederacy’s economy, or denying it international recognition. He had to do all of those, and they interacted with each other, and eventually, it worked.6
Climate change is the same thing. There is no one solution. It’s going to take a lot of things to get this done. That includes Elon Musk driving clean energy transportation in between obnoxious tweets and the much less famous people cooking up a car that runs on beer. That includes some executive at Burger King deciding to make the Impossible Whopper and the chefs coming up with new meals that don’t rely on walking methane producing machines. It’s the scientists who are getting us that one little bit closer to nuclear fusion and the legion of nerds on the internet making the case for nuclear power. It’s the engineer department, the marketing department, and the sales department. And yes, it includes the engineers toiling away at coming up with a slightly better version of carbon capture and sequestration and the politicians toiling away at coming with a bill that will slightly hire price carbon. It’s all of these things and all of these people and countless more that I can’t even think of. But I can tell you that it definitely is not: let’s get the government to force people to give up centuries of civilizational progress. And if you think that it is, you’re probably more in need of trying to work out your feelings than in trying to solve the challenge of our age.
This is my least favorite of these pieces because of the passive aggressive “net zero versus science based” framing. Ignoring anyone using “science based” in their language is a helpful heuristic.
The headline there is clearly what I would expect from an oil industry trade magazine but the actual article is a good encapsulation of the promise and perils of carbon capture.
I’ve carried an Abe Lincoln trading card in my wallet for 30 years which I feel makes me sound a lot dorkier than I actually am. I’m just a big Honest Abe fan. And yes, I had a series of trading cards of the U.S. Presidents. Again, supercool as a child.
The title of this series is so deeply tongue in cheek I look like these guys.
Yeah, that was a cheesy trope, making you think I was going with COVID-19. But I’m proud of myself for it, even if I had to be vague about the medical and pharmaceutical portion. Obviously, we don’t yet have an AIDS vaccine and we don’t yet have a widely agreed upon COVID-19 treatment, making them inverse. But remember, if analogies were “two identical situations” they would not serve any purpose.
Long footnote incoming: The obsession with winning a big battle against the Confederacy or taking Richmond – the Solution Fallacy – cost countless lives. The early war is a great example of so many modern problems, as Lincoln chose to trust George B. McClellan – one of American’s earliest archetypes of the incredibly smart and accomplished idiot – over Winfield Scott, whose Anaconda Plan formed the basis of our eventual victory. Once Washington switched from leaders who were looking for a Solution and to brilliant men like Grant and Sherman who understood multifactor problem solving, the war didn’t take very long at all.
Great post. I clicked through the links and found that the letter opposing carbon capture says that it's racist. They say that "CCS is not consistent with the principles of environmental justice" because it will "impose new pollution and safety hazards on Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities already suffering the disproportionate and deadly impacts of environmental racism."
But it's not racist to ask developing countries to sacrifice prosperity in the hopes that it will make some tiny difference after we're dead.