Welcome back! This week I wanted to change things up a bit. Since creating Climate Politique I have received numerous questions from you all both face to face and on Quora, and I wanted to share some of my responses. The questions included requests for comment on current events and recent environmental policy changes (and some surprising decisions not to change environmental policy); others asked me to react to some climate-related articles circulating through the news cycle; and a few folks that came across as climate skeptics (though who asked me questions in good faith) wanted me to explain some of the basic concepts underlying climate policy and climate science. I’ve sifted through your questions & my responses, and posted below the ones I felt were most relevant, topical, or just happened to intrigue me (or hit one of my pet-peeves). So without further ado let’s get started, I hope you enjoy.
What impact will the executive order to cancel the clean power plan have on the progress made on climate change?
Well if the order indeed canceled the Clean Power Plan (CPP) then it would essentially eliminate any chances we had of meeting our emissions targets we pledged to achieve during the Paris climate talks; however, the EO doesn’t cancel the CPP, or at least not yet. Fortunately for us, Trump can’t just change all climate policy with a stroke of a pen. Even though the President just wants us to “give [him] clean beautiful and healthy air – not climate change (global warming) bull***t!”, all the radical policy changes Trump wants to make are almost all subject to judicial review. Without getting into too much jargon, legally speaking the President has an obligation to reduce GHG emissions (according to rules written by the EPA during the Obama administration) so he has to prove in court that either climate change isn’t dangerous (which is a ridiculous legal argument that will be thrown out by a judge just like his first immigration ban) or argue that the changes he wants to make will accomplish similar goals in terms of emissions reduction.
He can also argue that the CPP puts too much of a burden on coal companies but he would still have to come up with a reasonable alternative. Now, there are still some climate policies he can change without going through a judicial review but the CPP just doesn’t happen to be one of them. This EO, however, sends a damaging and demoralizing message to the rest of the world and can halt the substantial progress the international community has made toward finally addressing climate change in a more serious way. GHG emissions need to be radically reduced in order to prevent the onset of dangerous climate change. Keep in mind that we still would have been woefully behind schedule for avoiding a 2 degrees C+ future even if the CPP was fully implemented.
Why would Exxon Mobile ask the White House to honor the Paris agreement on climate change?
Let me make a quick aside. During the Obama administration, I had a chance to sit down with stakeholders discussing the approach that Commonwealth of Virginia would take to comply with the Clean Power Plan. The stakeholders included environmental groups like the NRDC (Natural Resource Defense Council) as well as the major public utilities, most notably Dominion Power, who are quite powerful in my state. However, this meeting took place after the courts stayed the former President’s CPP rule. The stakeholders had decided to work on the compliance plan anyway because they had already made significant progress in their previous discussions & they anticipated that in the end, some action would be coming regardless. I give that example because it shows that even though these oil & gas companies are primarily responsible for the warming we are experiencing today they still understand that climate change is a major issue that the international community has pledged to address it.
So even though they might not like these new regulations they rather have them stay in place as opposed to continuously getting scrapped and replaced. Continuity in energy policy is more important to them than fighting to re-establish the status quo. Also companies like ExxonMobil, or Dominion Power here in Virginia, are major players in the natural gas market but are not heavily invested in coal so in the short term CO2 emission reduction regulations push electricity demand away from coal to their natural gas assets (though the lowering cost of natural gas has already been accelerating the demise of the coal industry).
Which term is more accurate: “global warming” or “climate change”?
Climate change is the more “accurate” or correct term. Yes, average global temperatures are rising due to human activity, but the effects of global warming differ from region to region depending on the local geology and geography. Because of this, some regions of the planet will actually see a fall in average temperature, not a rise. For example, there is a phenomenon called the “cold blob” in the North Atlantic off the coast of Britain where average ocean temperatures are actually falling while the temperatures in the mid-Atlantic are warming dramatically. This effect is being caused by the melting of the Greenland ice sheet; the cold fresh melt is flowing into the nearby ocean and trumping the heating that has resulted from the emission of excess greenhouse gases by humans.
This phenomenon also has the potential to break down the jet stream that brings warm water from the tropics to Europe and without this jet stream, Britain and other Western European countries would be as cold Newfoundland and the northern regions of Canada along the same latitude. So even though these changes are all brought about by rising temperatures in the Arctic, which are responsible for the ice melt, the effects they manifest actually drive down average temperatures in the surrounding regions. So to avoid confusion experts in the field adopted the phrase “climate change,” which can be used to describe both warming and cooling effects.
In international relations, why does the USA have a responsibility to combat climate change?
Because the US, and the West in general, have contributed the most to climate change. The U.S. is second, only to China, in annual CO2 emissions and that has only been the case since 2005. In fact, over the last 150 years, the U.S has been responsible for nearly one-third of the total amount of CO2 emitted by humans, more than tripling China’s share. So you can think of our current situation like this, the U.S. and other developed countries burnt fossil fuels with reckless abandon since the mid-1800s in order to build up their economies and increase the standard of living of their citizens. Meanwhile, countries in the developing world have only become serious emitters after 1960 and now we, the rich countries, are telling them to peak their annual emissions which will subsequently slow down, or potentially stall their economic growth. As a result, many of their citizens will be stranded in poverty until renewable energy sources become cheap and accessible to them. It only seems fair that the country that has emitted the most CO2 and has become the wealthiest nation on the planet by doing so should be held most responsible for combating climate change, and that country just happens to be the U.S.
What one book will convice me that global warming is real?
Pretext: Yes, I know that in my very first post I said I’d let Bill Nye handle questions like these, but a piece on Vox.com by David Roberts presented a unique & insightful critique on the way conventional journalism has responded to extremism in American politics, and his argument seemed to be particularly applicable to the climate change issue & “debate” as well. So I applied his theory when crafting my answer to this question and as it turns out this response has been my most popular posting during my short time on Quora so I thought I’d share it here as well. (Disclaimer: the person who submitted this question upvoted my response but also wanted to let people know that he doesn’t consider himself a denialist)
I can’t really say. If you not a scientist with educated hypothesis that can prove the contrary is true (that climate change isn’t actually happening or that it’s not anthropogenic) or are deeply knowledgeable about the peer review process and can prove that it has failed to validate the science in this instance, then there isn’t much convincing to be done. I don’t say that because the scientific literature isn’t convincing but because the exact opposite is true. There is no credible data out there that refutes the science of climate change nor is there an active “debate” in the field of climate science over whether global warming can be attributed to human activity, all of that has already been settled. So it stands to reason that your disbelief stems from the fact that you won’t actually acknowledge the scientific consensus on climate change as it is now common knowledge that has been widely reported by the media (assuming you’re a climate skeptic of course).
Now there are many people out there who don’t accept the idea that science as a field can be trusted as an independent arbiter of facts, even though many of those same people trust their family doctor and feel safe driving across bridges designed by engineers. If you are in fact one of those people, then throwing a bunch of facts at you won’t do me much good. But whether or not you fall into that camp I think it would be useful to explain something about the nature of scientific inquiry to whoever may be reading this response (but first sorry for possibly coming off as a bit pretentious). Adherence to the scientific method, i.e. the process of peer review and the emphasis on the repeatability of experimental results, is a fundamental tenant of every field of science be it medicine, architecture, astrophysics, or climate science. So if 97% of all the peer-reviewed studies in a single field all validate a single conclusion or set of conclusions, like it does for the causal link between human activity & rising average global temperatures, then that consensus conclusion for all intensive purposes has become a rock solid facts that can’t be summarily dismissed. This is especially true when the consensus around said conclusion has been growing steadily decade, after decade, after decade. The scientific consensus around climate change is as strong as the scientific consensus around the fact that smoking cigarettes cause cancer.
Building on that analogy, there was a time when many people were convinced that cigarettes didn’t cause cancer, or at least thought they themselves wouldn’t get cancer if they smoked. Many of those people saw the science and rejected it, believing that if the tobacco companies themselves didn’t buy into the consensus then why should they. Nowadays it would be silly to even question whether cigarettes caused cancer; however, for those who ignored the initial warnings and smoked cigarettes anyway, it was too late. The tobacco they had been smoking regularly now for years, or even decades, had already done its damage, and the result was that many ended up dying early deaths because of their ignorance. The “debate” on climate change is very similar; the consensus is already rock solid, but by the time society has come to a point where it would be utterly ridiculous to even suggest that burning fossil fuels doesn’t cause climate change the damage would have already been done. So you can either accept the science today and fight for change, or look back at this point in time a few decades from now and ask why the hell didn’t we listen.
If you do, however, want to go deep into the science I would suggest reading the 2014 National Climate Assessment; also I would check out this video on why a former climate skeptic in the scientific community changed his mind.
And that will do it. Hopefully, you found this exercise to be helpful, and thank you to everyone who sought out my expertise to answer their questions, I greatly appreciate it. Also, I apologize to the people I haven’t yet responded to, everyone has had good questions but I just haven’t found the time reply to all of them. Hopefully, someday I can make a career out of this writing business so I’ll have more time available to reply to everyone. However, I’m doing my best with the spare time I have now so please continue to send me more questions, especially on Quora. Watch out for my next post where I’ll be outlining some of the immediate consequences of climate change that will and have already resulted from our delayed response to this crisis.
