cwick (Chadwick Matlin, features editor): 🎵 Summertime, and the livin’ is really freaking hot. People are jumping into the sea in Greece to avoid wildfires. The temps are higher than they’ve ever been in Japan. California is dealing with the biggest wildfires it’s ever seen. The heat even has Andean flamingos laying eggs for the first time in 15 years.
The consequences of climate change are growing more undeniable than ever. Which leads me to wonder: What now?
Christie and Maggie, thanks for joining the Slack chat to answer that totally simple question.
christie (Christie Aschwanden, lead science writer): “simple” question 😂
cwick: Editors pride themselves on asking giant questions and demanding simplified answers.
maggiekb (Maggie Koerth-Baker, senior science writer): Glad to be here, Chrad.
Chad
cwick: Off to a great start, Meggie.
maggiekb: I pride myself on my typing skills.
cwick: I want us to try tackling the question in a few different ways:
cwick: So let’s start with politics — much was made that President Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate accord. But is there any line to draw between the hot summer we’re having and Trump’s decision?
christie: Well, there’s a line to draw, but it’s not between this hot summer and Trump’s decision. The heat of this summer was set with the emissions we’d already spewed into the atmosphere.
The goal of the Paris climate agreement was to keep the overall average temperature of the planet from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius, and some estimates suggest that we’ve already put out enough greenhouse gases to exceed 1.5 degrees. To keep our emissions within the 2-degree “carbon budget” will require countries to leave 80 percent of coal, 50 percent of gas and 33 percent of oil untouched until at least 2050.
maggiekb: There’s a gap between immediate news and climate consequences. Arguably, one of the big problems with the politics of climate change is that the results and the risks play out on different time scales than the politics.
cwick: Maggie, I think that’s a sharp insight about why political action has been so hard to come by on climate change. (Corporate interests have also played a role, of course.) What’s a politician to do about that dynamic?
maggiekb: Oh, corporate interests have DEFINITELY played a role. But what I think is particularly interesting is how they played a role. One of the things I’ve written about in regard to the Paris agreement is that, 30 or 35 years ago, it probably would have been a bipartisan, no-debate sort of thing. Starting around 1990, environmental legislation became WAY more divisive.
christie: And I would argue that one reason that happened is there were real efforts underway to do something about it, the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, for instance. But then the corporate interests swooped in…
maggiekb: What made the corporate interests successful is that they were able to convince enough conservatives that climate science was a backdoor to oppressive, statist, globalist government.
cwick: Was it just conservatives? Obviously they’ve been more vocal about climate denialism, but Democrats are just as susceptible to corporate influence.
maggiekb: My point here isn’t that conservatives are bad, bad, bad. My point is that we keep having these debates about climate science … while ignoring that what the debate is actually about is political philosophy.
christie: What happened was that climate change became an identity issue. As Dan Kahan at Yale has documented, “What people ‘believe’ about global warming doesn’t reflect what they know; it expresses who they are.”
maggiekb: You can’t show people enough charts to make them believe climate change is a real threat if they feel like accepting what they see in the charts is going to hurt them and their family. And I think that’s the fundamental political problem here. What the corporations did right (for their purposes, not for the planet) is to turn the science (that you can’t argue about) into a proxy for political philosophy (which you can).
christie: And they used the “sound science” strategy to enlist science to muddle the debate. Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway document this in their book, “Merchants of Doubt.”
maggiekb: And so scientists and politicians who care about climate change spend all their effort now trying to explain uncertainty spreads and the greenhouse effect when the conversation that we actually should be having is, “OK, how can we tackle this problem in a way that is philosophically acceptable to the most people?”
cwick: So given all that, what are climate-minded voters in the U.S. to do right now? Should they be focusing on state-level legislation instead of federal?
christie: Chad, a bunch of governors have banded together to take action. What’s happening now is a bottom-up kind of approach that’s happening on local and state levels. Washington Gov. Jay Inslee told Yale Environment 360, “We heard the president wanted to run up the white flag of surrender. We wanted to send a strong message to the world: We’re not going to surrender.” (...)
Also, when a city or state adopts climate-friendly technology and regulations, that can have a ripple effect. For instance, California’s market is big, so when it makes stricter rules for fuel efficiency, manufacturers are nudged into producing the necessary products to meet them.
When a city looks to improve energy efficiency in its buildings, it creates a market for those products too.
christie: Everyone has to pitch in, so it’s not at all insignificant that cities are doing that.
Also, when a city or state adopts climate-friendly technology and regulations, that can have a ripple effect. For instance, California’s market is big, so when it makes stricter rules for fuel efficiency, manufacturers are nudged into producing the necessary products to meet them.
When a city looks to improve energy efficiency in its buildings, it creates a market for those products too.
maggiekb: That reminds me of this article, which shows how the growing size of American homes (and the growing number of electrical appliances in them) all but canceled out gains in home energy efficiency.
christie: Oh, yes, the beer fridge problem! You get a new, energy-efficient fridge and then keep the old one in the garage. Or, what happened to me was that I got a very fuel-efficient car, and I felt less guilty driving so I did more of it.
by Chadwick Matlin, Christie Aschwanden, Maggie Koerth-Baker | FiveThirtyEight | Read more:
The consequences of climate change are growing more undeniable than ever. Which leads me to wonder: What now?Christie and Maggie, thanks for joining the Slack chat to answer that totally simple question.
christie (Christie Aschwanden, lead science writer): “simple” question 😂
cwick: Editors pride themselves on asking giant questions and demanding simplified answers.
maggiekb (Maggie Koerth-Baker, senior science writer): Glad to be here, Chrad.
Chad
cwick: Off to a great start, Meggie.
maggiekb: I pride myself on my typing skills.
cwick: I want us to try tackling the question in a few different ways:
- By talking about the politics of climate change, of course.
- By discussing whether the dire reality of climate change means that scientists’ roles in public discourse ought to change going forward.
- And by answering the question of what comes next: Are all these ecological changes the new normal or just a waypoint on an even more dangerous trajectory?
cwick: So let’s start with politics — much was made that President Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate accord. But is there any line to draw between the hot summer we’re having and Trump’s decision?
christie: Well, there’s a line to draw, but it’s not between this hot summer and Trump’s decision. The heat of this summer was set with the emissions we’d already spewed into the atmosphere.
The goal of the Paris climate agreement was to keep the overall average temperature of the planet from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius, and some estimates suggest that we’ve already put out enough greenhouse gases to exceed 1.5 degrees. To keep our emissions within the 2-degree “carbon budget” will require countries to leave 80 percent of coal, 50 percent of gas and 33 percent of oil untouched until at least 2050.
maggiekb: There’s a gap between immediate news and climate consequences. Arguably, one of the big problems with the politics of climate change is that the results and the risks play out on different time scales than the politics.
cwick: Maggie, I think that’s a sharp insight about why political action has been so hard to come by on climate change. (Corporate interests have also played a role, of course.) What’s a politician to do about that dynamic?
maggiekb: Oh, corporate interests have DEFINITELY played a role. But what I think is particularly interesting is how they played a role. One of the things I’ve written about in regard to the Paris agreement is that, 30 or 35 years ago, it probably would have been a bipartisan, no-debate sort of thing. Starting around 1990, environmental legislation became WAY more divisive.
christie: And I would argue that one reason that happened is there were real efforts underway to do something about it, the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, for instance. But then the corporate interests swooped in…
maggiekb: What made the corporate interests successful is that they were able to convince enough conservatives that climate science was a backdoor to oppressive, statist, globalist government.
cwick: Was it just conservatives? Obviously they’ve been more vocal about climate denialism, but Democrats are just as susceptible to corporate influence.
maggiekb: My point here isn’t that conservatives are bad, bad, bad. My point is that we keep having these debates about climate science … while ignoring that what the debate is actually about is political philosophy.
christie: What happened was that climate change became an identity issue. As Dan Kahan at Yale has documented, “What people ‘believe’ about global warming doesn’t reflect what they know; it expresses who they are.”
maggiekb: You can’t show people enough charts to make them believe climate change is a real threat if they feel like accepting what they see in the charts is going to hurt them and their family. And I think that’s the fundamental political problem here. What the corporations did right (for their purposes, not for the planet) is to turn the science (that you can’t argue about) into a proxy for political philosophy (which you can).
christie: And they used the “sound science” strategy to enlist science to muddle the debate. Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway document this in their book, “Merchants of Doubt.”
maggiekb: And so scientists and politicians who care about climate change spend all their effort now trying to explain uncertainty spreads and the greenhouse effect when the conversation that we actually should be having is, “OK, how can we tackle this problem in a way that is philosophically acceptable to the most people?”
cwick: So given all that, what are climate-minded voters in the U.S. to do right now? Should they be focusing on state-level legislation instead of federal?
christie: Chad, a bunch of governors have banded together to take action. What’s happening now is a bottom-up kind of approach that’s happening on local and state levels. Washington Gov. Jay Inslee told Yale Environment 360, “We heard the president wanted to run up the white flag of surrender. We wanted to send a strong message to the world: We’re not going to surrender.” (...)
Also, when a city or state adopts climate-friendly technology and regulations, that can have a ripple effect. For instance, California’s market is big, so when it makes stricter rules for fuel efficiency, manufacturers are nudged into producing the necessary products to meet them.
When a city looks to improve energy efficiency in its buildings, it creates a market for those products too.
christie: Everyone has to pitch in, so it’s not at all insignificant that cities are doing that.
Also, when a city or state adopts climate-friendly technology and regulations, that can have a ripple effect. For instance, California’s market is big, so when it makes stricter rules for fuel efficiency, manufacturers are nudged into producing the necessary products to meet them.
When a city looks to improve energy efficiency in its buildings, it creates a market for those products too.
maggiekb: That reminds me of this article, which shows how the growing size of American homes (and the growing number of electrical appliances in them) all but canceled out gains in home energy efficiency.
christie: Oh, yes, the beer fridge problem! You get a new, energy-efficient fridge and then keep the old one in the garage. Or, what happened to me was that I got a very fuel-efficient car, and I felt less guilty driving so I did more of it.
by Chadwick Matlin, Christie Aschwanden, Maggie Koerth-Baker | FiveThirtyEight | Read more:
Image: Paul Zinken/Getty
[ed. This seems to be an important point: how substative issues of fact become matters of political philosophy (and how much corporations, lobbyists, media, the religious industrial complex, etc. exploit that dynamic. See also: U.S. Catholics 'sickened' by sex abuse report, stand by their faith.]
[ed. This seems to be an important point: how substative issues of fact become matters of political philosophy (and how much corporations, lobbyists, media, the religious industrial complex, etc. exploit that dynamic. See also: U.S. Catholics 'sickened' by sex abuse report, stand by their faith.]
