Lines of Position - Roberts on carbon-price fixation, CarbonBrief and Feifer on Filling Diversity Gaps
Chart a productive course by seeking a variety of guides
When you're navigating dangerous waters without GPS, the more "lines of position" you draw by checking stars or landmarks, the more your course clarifies. Navigating tough climate and sustainability questions requires the same practice. Here are some beacons I follow.
Once upon a time, David Roberts was an impassioned liberal advocate for climate progress who applied the label "very serious person" to folks he felt were so stuck on the macro view of the climate crisis that they missed the importance of political and other societal roadblocks and levers. Yes, sometimes that included me, with some justification.
Now Roberts is doing his own VSP deep dives on energy policy and technology (duck curves, geothermal, so much more) while staying true to his foundational progressive soul (see his popular Twitter flow).
On Friday, he diverted from his clean-energy focus on his Volts platform to post a "rant on economist pundits," venting some longstanding concerns about what traditional economists, through decades of optimization-centered analysis around setting a carbon price, have done for climate action.
What they've done is maybe not worse than nothing, but close. I agree.
A key line: "In a spreadsheet economy, turning the carbon-price knob is the most efficient way to reduce carbon emissions. But the economy isn’t a spreadsheet and carbon pricing isn’t just another knob on some policy console."
It took a couple of decades for the field to start using the wider lens of "political economy" to chart paths to decarbonization, he writes, pointing to hopeful signs of change and folks driving the shift.
Roberts argues that climate solutions emerge less at some crossroads delineated by experts - in science, economics, engineering and the like - and more through wisdom gleaned in assessing past failures and successes, tracking social dynamics and testing the likelihood something can stick.
A core point: "The best policy is not the economically optimal policy, it’s the most effective policy that can be implemented and enforced."
I agree on the need to focus on what can endure, given decades of whiplash policy. Presidents have taken to wielding energy and climate executive actions that are like impressive sand castles - beautifully built but just waiting for the tide or a batch of bullies. (Watch this 2017 Cambridge Science Festival panel for more.) I loved how Kelly Levin, Benjamin Cashore and colleagues sought strategies creating positive path dependency as a way to overcome fossil inertia and the "super wicked problem" of climate change.
I don't embrace the word "enforced." I think Roberts would agree that it'd be better to say "implemented and sustained"? This is because some of America's most successful environmental policies don't rely on enforcement. My favorite example is the Toxics Release Inventory program at the Environmental Protection Agency, which was launched after the Union Carbide catastrophe in Bhopal, India, in 1984, and continues to drive progress and innovation.
Here's a deeper point that I see emerging in Roberts' writing, and my own thinking: Quantification matters, but durable pathways pursuing a safer human relationship with climate and energy come from putting values in the foreground. (As always, I recommend reading his epic piece on the discount rate, and otters.)
We focus so often on what can be measured - metrics like carbon tons. But, as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry so eloquently put it in The Little Prince, "It is only with the heart that one can see clearly. What is essential is invisible to the eye."
There's much to like in Roberts - his ability to blend conversational, smile-inducing writing with technical analysis and philosophical sweep. But there's also the crowd he attracts and the discussions that ensue.
I pulled together a few such folks earlier this year for a Sustain What conversation when Roberts joined the new Canary Media energy-reporting team:
I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. We were joined by Canary managing editor Eric Wesoff (formerly of Greentech Media), Rebecca Cole of RMI (once the Rocky Mountain Institute), Kate Ricke, a climate and energy policy analyst at the University of California, San Diego, and Genevieve Guenther, the founder of End Climate Silence.
Here are two more lines of position - each focused on the importance of seeking diversity in shaping inquiry and seeking solutions facing vexing risks - one more from the climate realm and another with a wider view.
The Climate Diversity Problem
Ayesha Tandon, who recently moved to the vital climate-information hub CarbonBrief from Britain's Met Office, wrote a deeply disturbing report laying out in excruciating detail how little diversity - geographic, racial, gender - exists in climate research published in high-profile journals.
The package provides a vivid marker showing how far the world has to go to create a landscape of climate inquiry including people from nations and sectors of society where vulnerability is greatest. Here's the outline:
-'Colonial’ science-Publish or perish-The language barrier-Academic culture
-Women in STEM-Cultural norms and gender roles
This graphic shows the proportion of authors of the 100 most-cited climate science papers published from 2016 through 2020:
The percentage of authors from the Top 100 most-cited climate science papers 2016-20, from each continent – Europe (dark blue), North America (light blue), Oceania (yellow), Asia (red), South America (orange) and Africa (purple). Chart by Carbon Brief using Highcharts.
Don't miss the related CarbonBrief pack of essays by six early-career climate scientists working in Indonesia, Cameroon, South Africa, Brazil, Ghana and India.
For a closer look at climate science by Africans, read this commentary in The Conversation by five African researchers reacting to the much-debated Reuters "Hot List of 1,000 climate academics according to how influential they are."
Also read "Equity in climate scholarship: a manifesto for action," a Climate and Development commentary by a dozen scientists led by Lisa Schipper, an Oxford University researcher and lead chapter author in the upcoming impacts and adaptation report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Why seeking others' views is self serving
Jason Feifer writes the Build for Tomorrow newsletter on Bulletin.
Jason Feifer, the editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine, is also a podcaster and author focused on ways to thrive amid change, and now a fellow Bulletin writer.
His latest piece uses several great examples to illustrate why it's essential to pause to check assumptions and consider other angles on a situation, particularly ones that might initially feel uncomfortable.
As Feifer writes, "When we don’t seek outside perspectives, we needlessly limit ourselves." Sometimes it takes far too long to realize this.
In my first 18 years of climate journalism, from 1988 to about 2006, I focused almost entirely on the science of climate change and the technicalities of cutting carbon. I was a science writer, after all, and writing about climate. Talk to climate scientists, right?
I was rewarded with prizes and front-page play. But I failed to dig in on two critical questions.
First, I assumed that more writing, with more compelling imagery and graphics and the like, could lead people to recognize and act to cut climate risk and pursue clean-energy opportunities. I was so wrong. Read here for more. Once that sank in, I shifted ever more to open dialogue forms like my Dot Earth blogging, my Sustain What conversations and this dispatch.
Second, by focusing so much on melting ice, changing storm patterns and the like, I failed to look deeply at the societal drivers of climate risk. Once I did, a huge array of climate solutions opened up, and of course this is where climate justice/injustice lives. Read recent posts like this one for more.
The social climate
That wider landscape emerged thanks to prodding, some of it uncomfortable, by social scientists like Helen Ingram, Roger A. Pielke, Jr. (weigh his decades of peer-reviewed publications on climate risk against the attacks of, say, Joe Romm), Kari Norgaard and Robert Brulle, Matt Nisbet, Dana Fisher, and Lisa Schipper (and an amazing social-climate Twitter gaggle she's led me to).
As I've been saying of late, there's a phenomenon called "narrative capture" (yes, hashtag #narrativecapture) that has two forms: when someone with a motive sells you (as a reporter or citizen) a compelling narrative; and when you or your newsroom or social network get captured by a narrative of your own creation - even as countervailing evidence piles up.
I'll be writing more on this phenomenon. Please share your experiences being captured, and your efforts to widen your view.
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