This scares me more than Zeke's last column. Do you honestly believe that socio-political problems are easier to solve than technical-scientific problems? They are orders of magnitude more complex, as any social scientist would tell you. We've long known the technical solutions to climate change. That was the relatively simple bit.
Some technical problems are incredibly hard to solve, and if we had to solve them to solve climate change, we'd be sunk. For example, we've been trying to create fusion energy for 70 years, and we're nowhere close. If that were required to address the issue, I would have zero hope.
In my mind, there's no doubt that we will come together and solve the problem. The question is how much damage we have to endure before we the people in power realize we need to ditch fossil fuels.
I remain hopeful that we'll start sooner rather than later, mainly because technological advancements in renewable energy and battery technology will make it glaringly obvious that these are the cheapest options and that fossil fuels will ultimately be politically unsustainable.
Technical problems can be incredibly complicated, some are complex, others are simply not feasible. But they're not wicked.
I also remain hopeful that more cooperation will emerge and work to widen the safe space in which humanity can flourish, at least for a time (and in the end, time is all we get). But the systemic barriers to successful cooperation are profound and don't reduce down to individual votes, especially in a political context where policy is more influenced by special interest lobbying and advocacy than by voters. The likelihood of society tipping in the other direction, toward increasing conflict and lifeboat strategies, is at least as strong as a tip toward more cooperation. Still 'hopefulness' is always available in unmeasured quantities and as long as it doesn't substitute for action, and helps people to sleep at night... I would argue though, that people don't need faux optimism to feel and act as if what they do matters. Because every cranking open of that space for human (and non-human) flourishing is worth it, no matter what the ultimate outcome is.
“Solve the problem”? What is the problem definition? Climate change is only one aspect of “the problem" of overshoot. It’s reductionist to talk of CO2 emissions as “the problem". The planetary boundaries framework encompasses all ecological systems and processes which interact to define the state of the planet. Planetary health needs to be the focus. But of course, that means things are significantly more dire and complex than if one were to think of the problem solely as one of energy (fossil fuels vs renewable, i.e. CO2 emissions).
The believe that we can solve our current predicament with more technology is commonly known as the "Techno-Fix".
Techno-fixers ignore the consequences of overshoot. The responsibility they show is fake responsibility; they don’t realise that Technology has often caused the problems.
Read Mumford or Ellul for an extensive analyses of Technology and its consequences.
Almost a century ago Mumfords' critique concluded with an explicit call to humanity to become aware of the threat to its survival posed by a possible ecological catastrophe or industrialised warfare. This remarkable foresight gets straight to the heart of the matter: the properties and consequences of the use of technology! Like Ellul, he saw that Technology is treated as an end in itself, rather than a means to an end. Mumford also saw how technical means have centralised power over the centuries, serving mainly the power elites. The modern age is characterised by centralisation, standardisation, ever greater efficiency and the reduction of the unique, organic living being to the calculable individual. He foresaw a totalitarian technocracy, centralising and enlarging its power complex, while ignore real human needs and values and produce a world fit only for machines: an inhumane world.
Mind you, this was written in the late 1960s, long before our lives would be laced with high-tech and long before the all-seeing eyes of social media and AI would become a frightening truth.
I think these few insights of more than 70 years ago perfectly describe our current times. Combine that with works like "Limits to Growth" (1972) and Catton's "Overshoot" (1980) in which our problems were well described together with possible ways out that we never applied, and you see where this will lead to.
I agree, that political probelms – given where we are at right now – do not seem solvable at all. It's for this reason, while I work every day to make it better, fundamentally, do not think modern civilization survives.
Markets are a fundamental concept in Economics: a subdiscipline of that transgenerational, cross-cultural enterprise of Science. Science isn't perfect, but without it there'd be far fewer of us, and we'd know far less in aggregate about anything than we do. To date, large-scale *political* struggles have temporarily placed constraints on otherwise-free markets, but have failed to abolish them globally. As far as Science knows, it's the ancient, ineradicable free market operating in a society of 8 billion humans with more aggregate wealth than at any time in our species' existence, not a waning faction of modern Economists, that's the problem.
Like all the Sciences, Economics doesn't know everything, but it does know some verifiable things. Two of those are: individual humans have agency, acting in their perceived short-term self-interests by default whether others want them to or not; and markets always socialize every transaction cost they can get away with, i.e. they too are "free" by default. Producers make their profits by charging all the traffic will bear while excluding the marginal social cost from the price. We consumers are happy to socialize our own marginal living costs, casually making involuntary third parties pay for them instead. Free of collective intervention, the Tragedy of the Commons emerges from these observed properties of human behavior in markets. Whether or not that's "neoliberal" economics, it's true AFAICT.
In the climate change context, the tragedy is in both the modern and classical senses: nobody is making fossil fuel producers or consumers pay for the marginal climate cost of their transactions on the "free" market, so they fall disproportionately on people who've socialized the least cost and have the least resources to pay with; and as long as there's profit to be made by transferring fossil carbon to our atmospheric commons by the gigatonnes annually, global heat content will predictably rise, and the cumulative cost in biodiversity, money and human grief will rise too, albeit less predictably, with uncertainty not our friend. If global warming is to be capped short of massive global human die-off, collective intervention - what Hardin called "mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon" - on at least national scales is required, to take the profit out of fossil fuels. Neoliberal or not, that's the consensus of Economics. Of course, mutual coercion takes place in the domain of Politics, the art of the possible. What's your political proposal?
Neo liberalism is the problem- frankly you seem totally informed. Is free market 'free market fundamentalism' . The top tax rate for the rich now as low as it was in September 1929? After this post by you- I have far less faith that our problems will ever be solved. A suggestion; read Peter Turchin's 'End Times' he sees our chances of coming out of this mess at about 15-20%- unless radical changes are made. And at this point neither political party wants to make these changes.
Heh. Did you actually mean to say I'm totally "informed", not "misinformed"? Do you not believe "this mess" is a Tragedy of the Commons? Whatever. I'm already fully convinced the chances are low that modern technological civilization will come out of the over-arching mess it's in, but it depends critically on how quickly the global economy decarbonizes, and that's a political problem. You do understand that politics is the art of the possible, and that no matter what I think, about half of my fellow US voters think the looming climate crisis, like all other common-pool resource tragedies, is a "liberal" (or else "neoliberal") preoccupation, don't you?
I, for one, only hope it's possible to avoid personal climate catastrophe until after I've lived out my medically-extended natural life. That might be as late as 2050, if I'm lucky. And if the global economy is well on its way to zero GHG emissions by then, I will hope that's bought time to make whatever additional changes are necessary for our population to peak and start to decline due to a reduced birth rate rather than an increased death rate. I'm looking forward to interesting times in the interim, while voting for the Democratic party at every opportunity. They have their own dependence on carbon capital to answer for, but they are currently the party of collective action in the US. If you want me to do more, you'll have to convince me of an alternative with a higher chance of keeping me alive until mid-century. Violent overthrow of the US government, IOW, is out.
I'm asking you again: given every individual human's often-infuriating agency, how do you propose to motivate the collective will for radical change, beyond citing doomer books? If you don't answer the question, I'll conclude you're only here to obstruct collective decarbonization. Your choice.
Excellent essay, Prof. Dessler. Thank you! You express my own, newfound optimism succinctly. The national elections this fall are critical for US decarbonization in the near term, but it looks to me like global market forces are driving the rest of the world to carbon-neutrality with alacrity. In this country, political trends like those of the "Six Americas" show a steady increase in the percentage of us who are "alarmed" or "concerned" about climate change in the last decade, and a steady decline in the numbers of the "doubtful" and "dismissive" (climatecommunication.yale.edu/about/projects/global-warmings-six-americas). I'd love to know what drove that trend; the extreme weather events of the past several years may have something to do with it, with the number of "cautious" people declining the most as the "alarmed" and "concerned" numbers mounted. The new, climate-reality-based majority may not be strong enough to win this election, but the trend is encouraging! A Republican victory this fall (I knock on my head in lieu of wood) would set us back a few years relative to the rest of the world, but even the immense power of concentrated carbon capital apparently can't fool all the people all the time.
Professor Dressler- just a question- to drive on a point- how has neo -liberal economics the last 45 years destroyed not only the USA- but much of the western world. Until we get rid of the power of banks, health care companies and last but not least- fossil fuel companies nothing is going to change. At least you colleague Michael E. Mann has said this. I do apologize for my earlier comment- My US Senator Chris Murphy in Connecticut has said neo liberalism has destroyed this country. Is the USA today living in 1850 with John Calhoun of SC or with Richard Russell of Georgia in 1950? With 47% of the population in the US willing to vote for authoritarianism- the ability to solve the climate crisis is small. We have fascism, racism, homophobia , massive inequality - and most of the population who do not see climate change as a problem. In any case I have little faith in American climate scientists. Kevin Anderson tells it like it is- many in this country (whats left of it) dream of hopium, techno fixes and capitalism to solve our
issues. You are a hell of a lot smarter than I will ever be- bit neither am I ignorant.
Mister Mizla, I'm not sea-lioning you, I sincerely beg your indulgence. I had a graduate education in Ecology, Economics, and Environmental Science before deciding I didn't want to work that hard for a living. If you'll explain what you mean by "neo-liberal" economics, I for one might even agree with you (newyorker.com/magazine/2023/07/24/the-rise-and-fall-of-neoliberalism; paywalled, but excellent if you're a subscriber). How much do you think "free-market fundamentalism" overlaps with the economic understanding of anthropogenic climate change?
Please, I'm genuinely curious: you say you have "little faith in American climate scientists." Do you agree Economics is a cross-cultural scientific discipline that, like all formal Sciences, relies on drastic methodological simplification but has accumulated some verifiable knowledge over the last few centuries? Do you think the "Tragedy of the Commons" metaphor is a useful term of art for anthropogenic climate change? Thanks for taking my interest seriously.
Here's where I might be sea-lioning a little: what would you ask the people of the US and the world, every one of them sovereign in their own minds according to J.S. Mill, to do collectively, right now?
So, as often happens, Mister Mizla and I may agree about more things than we disagree about. That New Yorker piece is a review by their erudite long-time staff writer Louis Menand, of a recent book by E. Conway and N. Oreskes titled "The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market". Menand's focus is on the waxing and waning of the political influence of Hayek, Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics on actual US government policies, not just lip service. After defining the neoliberal politico-economic system in detail, Menand concludes:
"It is the rise in inequality abetted by the neoliberal system that poses the most immediate threat to civil society. [British journalist Martin] Wolf doubts whether the United States will be a functioning democracy at the end of the decade. Either way, the sun has set on neoliberalism. Both parties have drifted closer to something like mercantilism; the language of the market has lost its magic."
I couldn't have said it better myself: good thing I'm not writing a national magazine article. Good thing, too, that the Democrats at least recognize the essential role of collective (i.e. government) action in correcting market failures, from child labor to global warming. Ideology aside, a genuine skeptic knows government is both the problem and the solution. And if American, he/she/they chooses the least evil alternative with every vote, or else hunkers in a fortified bunker awaiting the end.
It depends on the details subsumed by the label. The Tragedy of the Commons, for example, was introduced into the specialized vocabulary of Economics by Garrett Hardin* in 1968 (science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.162.3859.1243). It concisely describes a class of "environmental", i.e. social, problems with common-pool resource diseconomies, that are driven by the "free" market's ancient (ancestral to literacy itself), ineradicable tendency to socialize every transaction cost it can get away with. It explains why "mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon" (Hardin's phrase), i.e. collective intervention to take the profit out of fossil fuels by any means *politically* possible, is necessary if not sufficient to cap the otherwise open-ended social cost of anthropogenic global warming, which results from 8 billion people acting in their own self-interest. Is that neoliberal economics?
IMHO, economics denial is as bird-brained, i.e. intellectually unfounded, as climate-change or evolution denial.
* Ironically, Hardin's paradigmatic TotC was human population growth. The term "tragedy of the commons" was readily adopted by Economics scholars (dlc.dlib.indiana.edu/dlc/items/3bc51928-d1d6-45c6-82d1-1bab79788567/full), but it turns out human population growth isn't one, simply because women around the world are choosing lower fertility without coercion! Anthropogenic climate change, OTOH, fits the definition of a TotC nicely.
Contact a local competitive House or Senate candidate's campaign, ask about getting hooked into the Coordinated Campaign, to help make sure we don't get Trump selling the powers of the Federal Government to fossil fuel interests! Personally I will be spending the final few weeks of the campaign in Arizona, because my parents live there. But Pennsylvania would be good if you're on the east coast. And there are non-travel options like phonebanking and letter writing, with orgs like https://postcardstovoters.org/ and https://votefwd.org/
Like some others here, I think you’re painting an overly rosy picture of transition. Globally, fossil fuels still comprise around 80% of total primary energy use and 60% of electricity generation. Proportionately, fossil fuel use is declining with glacial slowness, but in absolute terms it’s increasing.
Sure, fossil energy companies have dragged their feet outrageously, but that doesn’t really explain the lack of progress. Physical input prices for renewables have decreased, but land, upfront capital and grid costs make them a typically poorer bet than fossils. As Brett Christophers argues in his book The Price Is Wrong, it’s the lower profits of renewables (which aren’t strongly correlated with changes in input prices) that’s stymying transition.
When you say “we can have a system that’s 90% clean energy by 2035” the ‘we’ appears to be the USA – but the key to global climate stabilisation lies mostly elsewhere among populous lower-income countries where there’s little movement out of fossils. In fact, the majority of new renewables capacity has been in just two countries – the USA and China, which probably has more to do with energy security concerns in relation to geopolitical power contests. This isn’t a path to wider global decarbonisation.
Throw in the difficulties of transitioning hard-to-abate sectors that are crucial to the existing economy like agri-chemicals, cement, plastics and metal manufacture and the reasons to be cheerful diminish.
Betting on an energy transition that permits business as usual in the rich countries seems unwise to me. Surely it’s better to emphasise radically reduced energy consumption and start working on what that would look like socially and politically?
I might add that the clean energy transition is fuelled by fossils, an explosion of mining raw materials and optimistic levels of recycling once the system degrades after 30 years.
I don’t see a path that doesn’t end energy abundant civilisation as we know it - I just hope it happens gradually enough to prevent total collapse. My real optimism for the future is the adaptability of humans to cope with far far less in their lives than they consider normal now, but I think the status quo economic system is indeed ‘doomed’.
Thank you Prof. Dessler! I was one of the comments you quoted. Since reading your article I have tried to dive into more productive and constructive avenues of thought and action. While “interesting,” I can’t do anything about how the planet responds to various forcings, feedbacks, and internal variability. As many of my friends have suggested, one has to build some stoicism into their life. One must use their ruminating mind wisely and healthily. I am very much enjoying learning about the energy sector, and the successes and challenges of supercharging the renewable energy revolution. The technology and capability is there. We just have to organize effectively around it.
I am a middle class dude in the U.S. who works in the public space sector, mostly park advocacy. For people in my cohort, large societal disruption is just extremely foreign. It’s what makes climate change and the prognostications that come with it so hard to grasp and to think clearly and healthily about. Obviously, this is not true for many in the world today who have experienced large societal disruption already and will experience more than me maybe in the future. What I am learning is, this is the time to toughen up and getting involved is the only healthy choice to make.
Really appreciate the shot in the arm, which reminds me I need to get that new covid shot.
Robert F.: "We just have to organize effectively around it."
Aye, there's the rub! I for one lack political organization skills, and tend to make things worse when I go door to door. I will, however, vote for Democrats as the party of collective action on climate change.
"The doomer death spiral"? It's not defeatism to see reality and act accordingly. Good reality testing is a sign of psychological health. All those putting down those who see things as they really are with a demeaning term "doomers" are the ones unable to come to terms with the political, social and physical reality.
It’s realistic to see that we’re at an existential inflection point, that we’re in a very tough spot of our own making, and that choices we make now - individually and collectively - can likely determine the fate of the human race and the larger biosphere for centuries or even millenia to come.
Believing and putting out there that we’re all already finished, and can’t change the doom spiral arc, is not only IMHO unrealistic and inaccurate. As Katharine Hayhoe forcefully argues, it’s a lame excuse for doing nothing, and creating a self-executing prophecy. It’s a crutch and a parlor trick for the lazy, the deliberately opportunistic (as there’s a cottage industry around fear porn), and the mentally ill.
Great article in frontiers "Regression analyses suggest that constructive hope and doubt predict increased policy support and political engagement, whereas false hope and fatalistic doubt predict the opposite". Fatalistic doubt and false hope are equally problematic. It is extremely simplistic and unhelpful, not to mention a strawman argument, to recast constructive doubt as 'doomism'. We need to take care to separate these strands out and bring a little nuance to the party, as we are mostly all on the same side
If constructive doubt is looking at all causes for optimism with a skeptical and empirical eye, I’m with you 110%. To me at least, doomism is “we’re all going to die in a planetary dumpster fire, it’s too late, so why bother?” The best time to wean ourselves off fossil fuels and overconsumption was 50-100 years ago. The best time in 2025, is right now. I can’t change the world, but I can better my own corner of it. If even a fraction of us took similar ownership, I think we would be a lot further on the road to recovery and renewal.
I totally agree re not giving into doom. But if James Hansen's ECS/ESS estimates are correct (even just if the CMIP6 "hot model" averages are correct, rather than the assessed range), isn't it practically guaranteed that we will exceed 3C? Additionally, if we elect Republicans this cycle, we can kiss the 2050 net zero target goodbye...
I totally agree that, eventually, solar and batteries are going to dominate our energy system. As it currently stands, the United States' electric car revolution is floundering. In that context, doom might not be appropriate but certainly pessimism feels warranted.
Archival Aardvark: "doom might not be appropriate but certainly pessimism feels warranted." Those are words of plain wisdom. All adults live with irresolvable ambiguity every moment of our lives. The only meaningful resolution of the climate crisis for me, is to vote for collective decarbonization by any means short of violent civil war, at least until I've lived out my natural life. I really hope my street-fighting days are over!
I see the article in Science by Judd and Tierney et al. just got published. I also see that the major newspapers have picked up the story and gotten people like Michael Mann weighing in, e.g., “While I applaud the authors for this ambitious and thoughtful study, I am skeptical about the specific, quantitative conclusions,” Mann said. https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/09/19/earth-temperature-global-warming-planet/
It would be great to hear your thoughts on the paper at some point.
the ESS number is larger than previous estimates, but I don't know what it really tells us about what's going to happen this century, which is mainly controlled by ECS.
But, Professor, doesn't the new work at least bound or constrain the problem to temperatures less than those predicted by Hansen? In your pipeline article I believe your interpretation of Hansens's work is that we could have an increase of 8 C at 420 ppm if we held it constant for millennia. If I understand the results with an "apparent" climate sensitivity of 8 C, wouldn't that require getting to 560 ppm and holding it there for millennia?
Is there a reference regarding the big assumptions of the mean-of-models?
Professor Kevin Anderson talks about how (most / all) IPCC models build in very optimistic assumptions:
* Large scale carbon removal and storage plans (similar scale to oil industry)
* Agriculture switching from source to sink
* Continuation of existing sinks: trees / ocean
* Ignoring the tipping points. You say "mostly stop emissions over the next few decades" and ZEC only comes in when we get to zero, so 20-30 years heating built in from human inertia, so we'll be well inside the zone for around 10 tipping points. We are already in the zone for GRIS, WAIS, LABC, Coral reefs and knocking on the door for AMOC, Mountain glaciers, boreal forest southern die back
* ECS being around 3C, and not Hansen's 4.8C
* Feedbacks. Presumably the abrupt Permafrost thaw and massive forest fires are going to make it harder to get to ZEC.
* Generally not being concerned about anything beyond 2100.
.. and that is just climate. The planetary boundaries look worse on each update from PiK.
In short are your "two facts that keep you grounded" based on a very low probability scenario, which requires a lot of good luck as well.
One of the things that dismays me about this kind of narrative is that there is no such thing as clean energy (except maybe foraged food). Using the adjective "clean" leads people to think that an economy powered 100% by so-called renewables (the infrastructure isn't renewable) would be sustainable with no environmental damage. This is untrue. Please stop using the word "clean" in this context. "Less damaging" would be more correct.
Currently, less damaging energy (LDE) is only adding to the energy mix, not replacing fossil fuels, so we aren't even transitioning to LDE.
Lastly, I recall seeing a reference to some recent research (though, sadly, I can't locate it now) which reset the expectation that warming would stop when emissions stop. There would still be some warming for a while. You did mention that some models do show continued warming. Also, once emissions of GHGs reach zero, emission of aerosols will also reach zero, and as such emissions slow, warming will be accelerated for a while. Is that true?
This is all too US focused, and making US politics the central issue. "We are good, and we can do it." Given it is a country a few minutes from civil war, it's hard to take seriously.
Prof Dessler is a US citizen, so of course this is US focused. And although it may look to motivated outsiders and insiders alike that the USA is "a few minutes from civil war", I for one am wary but not yet worried. Depending on where their information comes from, civil war prophets may have some justification for hyperbole, but IMHO that's all it is. Speaking as a senior US citizen with no family and modest means, I hold out hope to evade personal climate-related tragedy while I live out my medically-extended natural life (gotta love Medicare). I hardly expect to live past 2050, though, and I'm fully aware "the future's uncertain and the end is always near" (J. Morrison). I do look forward to living as long as possible, out of curiosity if nothing else!
That said: I never was a soldier, but I will take up arms against any attempt to overthrow the rule of law in my country.
I mostly agree with your analysis, but we are certainly not out of the woods yet. I suggest your readers check out Johan Rockstrom's latest TED talk. His analysis indicates we are slowly crossing a number of "planetary boundaries." It is important to stay within those boundaries if we wish to maintain the relatively stable environment of the Holocene.
If we're very unlucky and the uncertainties all conspire against us, it may be a very bad ride even if we do everything in our power to stop climate change. but I'm sure that the odds of it being a "very bad ride" go up *a lot* if we don't take action to reduce emissions today.
I am glad to read this additional comment, Andrew, because otherwise the article left me off kilter. On paper ... to professional clinate scientists who think in decadal chunks of time about data disconnected from life right now ... I am sure the trajectory can look optimistic. I am confident in 100 years it can be, if enough peoplemobilise to make it so.
But some of us are already deep inside that 'very bad ride', and for us there are many decades of hellacape ahead. Lived experience is vastly different to academic speculation.
We've now lived through catastrophic wildfires (that devestated everything in sucessive pyrocumuimulus assualts, born on the deepest dought in living memory and feed by moist air off the sea ... something the scientists confirm has never happened before), then catastrophic floods, then wildfires again in the insane vegetative regrowth because of the floods … and now a new drought (we've had less than half our average annual rainfall this year, as we head into a frightening Austral summer) ... all inside 5 years.
It's pretty hard, and probably unwise, to avoid a perspective of doom when you are already living the early curve of the ride many people are speculating will one day, maybe, happen. Doom for many of us equates to survival.
Regarding warming in the pipeline I got this recently from Richard Alley, “the models do at least attempt to have these feedbacks in. The remaining worry is that some of the uncertainties tend to have a long tail on the bad side—for climate sensitivity, ice-sheet shrinkage and sea-level rise, carbon loss from frozen soils, and maybe a few others, we expect some outcome, there are uncertainties, but those include a little better, a little worse, a slight chance of much worse, but not so much chance of much better. “
This scares me more than Zeke's last column. Do you honestly believe that socio-political problems are easier to solve than technical-scientific problems? They are orders of magnitude more complex, as any social scientist would tell you. We've long known the technical solutions to climate change. That was the relatively simple bit.
Some technical problems are incredibly hard to solve, and if we had to solve them to solve climate change, we'd be sunk. For example, we've been trying to create fusion energy for 70 years, and we're nowhere close. If that were required to address the issue, I would have zero hope.
In my mind, there's no doubt that we will come together and solve the problem. The question is how much damage we have to endure before we the people in power realize we need to ditch fossil fuels.
I remain hopeful that we'll start sooner rather than later, mainly because technological advancements in renewable energy and battery technology will make it glaringly obvious that these are the cheapest options and that fossil fuels will ultimately be politically unsustainable.
Technical problems can be incredibly complicated, some are complex, others are simply not feasible. But they're not wicked.
I also remain hopeful that more cooperation will emerge and work to widen the safe space in which humanity can flourish, at least for a time (and in the end, time is all we get). But the systemic barriers to successful cooperation are profound and don't reduce down to individual votes, especially in a political context where policy is more influenced by special interest lobbying and advocacy than by voters. The likelihood of society tipping in the other direction, toward increasing conflict and lifeboat strategies, is at least as strong as a tip toward more cooperation. Still 'hopefulness' is always available in unmeasured quantities and as long as it doesn't substitute for action, and helps people to sleep at night... I would argue though, that people don't need faux optimism to feel and act as if what they do matters. Because every cranking open of that space for human (and non-human) flourishing is worth it, no matter what the ultimate outcome is.
“Solve the problem”? What is the problem definition? Climate change is only one aspect of “the problem" of overshoot. It’s reductionist to talk of CO2 emissions as “the problem". The planetary boundaries framework encompasses all ecological systems and processes which interact to define the state of the planet. Planetary health needs to be the focus. But of course, that means things are significantly more dire and complex than if one were to think of the problem solely as one of energy (fossil fuels vs renewable, i.e. CO2 emissions).
https://www.pik-potsdam.de/en/output/infodesk/planetary-boundaries
The believe that we can solve our current predicament with more technology is commonly known as the "Techno-Fix".
Techno-fixers ignore the consequences of overshoot. The responsibility they show is fake responsibility; they don’t realise that Technology has often caused the problems.
Read Mumford or Ellul for an extensive analyses of Technology and its consequences.
Almost a century ago Mumfords' critique concluded with an explicit call to humanity to become aware of the threat to its survival posed by a possible ecological catastrophe or industrialised warfare. This remarkable foresight gets straight to the heart of the matter: the properties and consequences of the use of technology! Like Ellul, he saw that Technology is treated as an end in itself, rather than a means to an end. Mumford also saw how technical means have centralised power over the centuries, serving mainly the power elites. The modern age is characterised by centralisation, standardisation, ever greater efficiency and the reduction of the unique, organic living being to the calculable individual. He foresaw a totalitarian technocracy, centralising and enlarging its power complex, while ignore real human needs and values and produce a world fit only for machines: an inhumane world.
Mind you, this was written in the late 1960s, long before our lives would be laced with high-tech and long before the all-seeing eyes of social media and AI would become a frightening truth.
I think these few insights of more than 70 years ago perfectly describe our current times. Combine that with works like "Limits to Growth" (1972) and Catton's "Overshoot" (1980) in which our problems were well described together with possible ways out that we never applied, and you see where this will lead to.
I agree, that political probelms – given where we are at right now – do not seem solvable at all. It's for this reason, while I work every day to make it better, fundamentally, do not think modern civilization survives.
is neoliberal economics the problem?
Again, if TL;DR skip to the last sentence, but every paragraph develops my argument, so please read the whole thing before responding:
Who here is talking about "neoliberal" economics? To repeat myself: a salient class of the countless large and small tragedies humans have inflicted on other humans and the biosphere since we evolved 300,000+ years ago, are driven by the "free market", a population-level behavioral phenomenon at least as old as our species (si.edu/newsdesk/releases/scientists-discover-evidence-early-human-innovation-pushing-back-evolutionary-timeline).
Markets are a fundamental concept in Economics: a subdiscipline of that transgenerational, cross-cultural enterprise of Science. Science isn't perfect, but without it there'd be far fewer of us, and we'd know far less in aggregate about anything than we do. To date, large-scale *political* struggles have temporarily placed constraints on otherwise-free markets, but have failed to abolish them globally. As far as Science knows, it's the ancient, ineradicable free market operating in a society of 8 billion humans with more aggregate wealth than at any time in our species' existence, not a waning faction of modern Economists, that's the problem.
Like all the Sciences, Economics doesn't know everything, but it does know some verifiable things. Two of those are: individual humans have agency, acting in their perceived short-term self-interests by default whether others want them to or not; and markets always socialize every transaction cost they can get away with, i.e. they too are "free" by default. Producers make their profits by charging all the traffic will bear while excluding the marginal social cost from the price. We consumers are happy to socialize our own marginal living costs, casually making involuntary third parties pay for them instead. Free of collective intervention, the Tragedy of the Commons emerges from these observed properties of human behavior in markets. Whether or not that's "neoliberal" economics, it's true AFAICT.
In the climate change context, the tragedy is in both the modern and classical senses: nobody is making fossil fuel producers or consumers pay for the marginal climate cost of their transactions on the "free" market, so they fall disproportionately on people who've socialized the least cost and have the least resources to pay with; and as long as there's profit to be made by transferring fossil carbon to our atmospheric commons by the gigatonnes annually, global heat content will predictably rise, and the cumulative cost in biodiversity, money and human grief will rise too, albeit less predictably, with uncertainty not our friend. If global warming is to be capped short of massive global human die-off, collective intervention - what Hardin called "mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon" - on at least national scales is required, to take the profit out of fossil fuels. Neoliberal or not, that's the consensus of Economics. Of course, mutual coercion takes place in the domain of Politics, the art of the possible. What's your political proposal?
Neo liberalism is the problem- frankly you seem totally informed. Is free market 'free market fundamentalism' . The top tax rate for the rich now as low as it was in September 1929? After this post by you- I have far less faith that our problems will ever be solved. A suggestion; read Peter Turchin's 'End Times' he sees our chances of coming out of this mess at about 15-20%- unless radical changes are made. And at this point neither political party wants to make these changes.
Heh. Did you actually mean to say I'm totally "informed", not "misinformed"? Do you not believe "this mess" is a Tragedy of the Commons? Whatever. I'm already fully convinced the chances are low that modern technological civilization will come out of the over-arching mess it's in, but it depends critically on how quickly the global economy decarbonizes, and that's a political problem. You do understand that politics is the art of the possible, and that no matter what I think, about half of my fellow US voters think the looming climate crisis, like all other common-pool resource tragedies, is a "liberal" (or else "neoliberal") preoccupation, don't you?
I, for one, only hope it's possible to avoid personal climate catastrophe until after I've lived out my medically-extended natural life. That might be as late as 2050, if I'm lucky. And if the global economy is well on its way to zero GHG emissions by then, I will hope that's bought time to make whatever additional changes are necessary for our population to peak and start to decline due to a reduced birth rate rather than an increased death rate. I'm looking forward to interesting times in the interim, while voting for the Democratic party at every opportunity. They have their own dependence on carbon capital to answer for, but they are currently the party of collective action in the US. If you want me to do more, you'll have to convince me of an alternative with a higher chance of keeping me alive until mid-century. Violent overthrow of the US government, IOW, is out.
I'm asking you again: given every individual human's often-infuriating agency, how do you propose to motivate the collective will for radical change, beyond citing doomer books? If you don't answer the question, I'll conclude you're only here to obstruct collective decarbonization. Your choice.
Excellent essay, Prof. Dessler. Thank you! You express my own, newfound optimism succinctly. The national elections this fall are critical for US decarbonization in the near term, but it looks to me like global market forces are driving the rest of the world to carbon-neutrality with alacrity. In this country, political trends like those of the "Six Americas" show a steady increase in the percentage of us who are "alarmed" or "concerned" about climate change in the last decade, and a steady decline in the numbers of the "doubtful" and "dismissive" (climatecommunication.yale.edu/about/projects/global-warmings-six-americas). I'd love to know what drove that trend; the extreme weather events of the past several years may have something to do with it, with the number of "cautious" people declining the most as the "alarmed" and "concerned" numbers mounted. The new, climate-reality-based majority may not be strong enough to win this election, but the trend is encouraging! A Republican victory this fall (I knock on my head in lieu of wood) would set us back a few years relative to the rest of the world, but even the immense power of concentrated carbon capital apparently can't fool all the people all the time.
More neoliberal economics birdbrain?
Please be nice or your time on this substack will come to an end.
Professor Dressler- just a question- to drive on a point- how has neo -liberal economics the last 45 years destroyed not only the USA- but much of the western world. Until we get rid of the power of banks, health care companies and last but not least- fossil fuel companies nothing is going to change. At least you colleague Michael E. Mann has said this. I do apologize for my earlier comment- My US Senator Chris Murphy in Connecticut has said neo liberalism has destroyed this country. Is the USA today living in 1850 with John Calhoun of SC or with Richard Russell of Georgia in 1950? With 47% of the population in the US willing to vote for authoritarianism- the ability to solve the climate crisis is small. We have fascism, racism, homophobia , massive inequality - and most of the population who do not see climate change as a problem. In any case I have little faith in American climate scientists. Kevin Anderson tells it like it is- many in this country (whats left of it) dream of hopium, techno fixes and capitalism to solve our
issues. You are a hell of a lot smarter than I will ever be- bit neither am I ignorant.
Mister Mizla, I'm not sea-lioning you, I sincerely beg your indulgence. I had a graduate education in Ecology, Economics, and Environmental Science before deciding I didn't want to work that hard for a living. If you'll explain what you mean by "neo-liberal" economics, I for one might even agree with you (newyorker.com/magazine/2023/07/24/the-rise-and-fall-of-neoliberalism; paywalled, but excellent if you're a subscriber). How much do you think "free-market fundamentalism" overlaps with the economic understanding of anthropogenic climate change?
Please, I'm genuinely curious: you say you have "little faith in American climate scientists." Do you agree Economics is a cross-cultural scientific discipline that, like all formal Sciences, relies on drastic methodological simplification but has accumulated some verifiable knowledge over the last few centuries? Do you think the "Tragedy of the Commons" metaphor is a useful term of art for anthropogenic climate change? Thanks for taking my interest seriously.
Here's where I might be sea-lioning a little: what would you ask the people of the US and the world, every one of them sovereign in their own minds according to J.S. Mill, to do collectively, right now?
So, as often happens, Mister Mizla and I may agree about more things than we disagree about. That New Yorker piece is a review by their erudite long-time staff writer Louis Menand, of a recent book by E. Conway and N. Oreskes titled "The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market". Menand's focus is on the waxing and waning of the political influence of Hayek, Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics on actual US government policies, not just lip service. After defining the neoliberal politico-economic system in detail, Menand concludes:
"It is the rise in inequality abetted by the neoliberal system that poses the most immediate threat to civil society. [British journalist Martin] Wolf doubts whether the United States will be a functioning democracy at the end of the decade. Either way, the sun has set on neoliberalism. Both parties have drifted closer to something like mercantilism; the language of the market has lost its magic."
I couldn't have said it better myself: good thing I'm not writing a national magazine article. Good thing, too, that the Democrats at least recognize the essential role of collective (i.e. government) action in correcting market failures, from child labor to global warming. Ideology aside, a genuine skeptic knows government is both the problem and the solution. And if American, he/she/they chooses the least evil alternative with every vote, or else hunkers in a fortified bunker awaiting the end.
It depends on the details subsumed by the label. The Tragedy of the Commons, for example, was introduced into the specialized vocabulary of Economics by Garrett Hardin* in 1968 (science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.162.3859.1243). It concisely describes a class of "environmental", i.e. social, problems with common-pool resource diseconomies, that are driven by the "free" market's ancient (ancestral to literacy itself), ineradicable tendency to socialize every transaction cost it can get away with. It explains why "mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon" (Hardin's phrase), i.e. collective intervention to take the profit out of fossil fuels by any means *politically* possible, is necessary if not sufficient to cap the otherwise open-ended social cost of anthropogenic global warming, which results from 8 billion people acting in their own self-interest. Is that neoliberal economics?
IMHO, economics denial is as bird-brained, i.e. intellectually unfounded, as climate-change or evolution denial.
* Ironically, Hardin's paradigmatic TotC was human population growth. The term "tragedy of the commons" was readily adopted by Economics scholars (dlc.dlib.indiana.edu/dlc/items/3bc51928-d1d6-45c6-82d1-1bab79788567/full), but it turns out human population growth isn't one, simply because women around the world are choosing lower fertility without coercion! Anthropogenic climate change, OTOH, fits the definition of a TotC nicely.
"If you want to live in that better world, take action."
That's what we need.
Thanks Andrew!
Contact a local competitive House or Senate candidate's campaign, ask about getting hooked into the Coordinated Campaign, to help make sure we don't get Trump selling the powers of the Federal Government to fossil fuel interests! Personally I will be spending the final few weeks of the campaign in Arizona, because my parents live there. But Pennsylvania would be good if you're on the east coast. And there are non-travel options like phonebanking and letter writing, with orgs like https://postcardstovoters.org/ and https://votefwd.org/
Like some others here, I think you’re painting an overly rosy picture of transition. Globally, fossil fuels still comprise around 80% of total primary energy use and 60% of electricity generation. Proportionately, fossil fuel use is declining with glacial slowness, but in absolute terms it’s increasing.
Sure, fossil energy companies have dragged their feet outrageously, but that doesn’t really explain the lack of progress. Physical input prices for renewables have decreased, but land, upfront capital and grid costs make them a typically poorer bet than fossils. As Brett Christophers argues in his book The Price Is Wrong, it’s the lower profits of renewables (which aren’t strongly correlated with changes in input prices) that’s stymying transition.
When you say “we can have a system that’s 90% clean energy by 2035” the ‘we’ appears to be the USA – but the key to global climate stabilisation lies mostly elsewhere among populous lower-income countries where there’s little movement out of fossils. In fact, the majority of new renewables capacity has been in just two countries – the USA and China, which probably has more to do with energy security concerns in relation to geopolitical power contests. This isn’t a path to wider global decarbonisation.
Throw in the difficulties of transitioning hard-to-abate sectors that are crucial to the existing economy like agri-chemicals, cement, plastics and metal manufacture and the reasons to be cheerful diminish.
Betting on an energy transition that permits business as usual in the rich countries seems unwise to me. Surely it’s better to emphasise radically reduced energy consumption and start working on what that would look like socially and politically?
I might add that the clean energy transition is fuelled by fossils, an explosion of mining raw materials and optimistic levels of recycling once the system degrades after 30 years.
I don’t see a path that doesn’t end energy abundant civilisation as we know it - I just hope it happens gradually enough to prevent total collapse. My real optimism for the future is the adaptability of humans to cope with far far less in their lives than they consider normal now, but I think the status quo economic system is indeed ‘doomed’.
Thank you Prof. Dessler! I was one of the comments you quoted. Since reading your article I have tried to dive into more productive and constructive avenues of thought and action. While “interesting,” I can’t do anything about how the planet responds to various forcings, feedbacks, and internal variability. As many of my friends have suggested, one has to build some stoicism into their life. One must use their ruminating mind wisely and healthily. I am very much enjoying learning about the energy sector, and the successes and challenges of supercharging the renewable energy revolution. The technology and capability is there. We just have to organize effectively around it.
I am a middle class dude in the U.S. who works in the public space sector, mostly park advocacy. For people in my cohort, large societal disruption is just extremely foreign. It’s what makes climate change and the prognostications that come with it so hard to grasp and to think clearly and healthily about. Obviously, this is not true for many in the world today who have experienced large societal disruption already and will experience more than me maybe in the future. What I am learning is, this is the time to toughen up and getting involved is the only healthy choice to make.
Really appreciate the shot in the arm, which reminds me I need to get that new covid shot.
Robert F.: "We just have to organize effectively around it."
Aye, there's the rub! I for one lack political organization skills, and tend to make things worse when I go door to door. I will, however, vote for Democrats as the party of collective action on climate change.
Get away from neo liberalism, God are you dumb
Please stop helping.
THANK YOU for this. The doomer death spiral is easy to get sucked into, and it’s the worst and most unproductive kind of defeatism.
"The doomer death spiral"? It's not defeatism to see reality and act accordingly. Good reality testing is a sign of psychological health. All those putting down those who see things as they really are with a demeaning term "doomers" are the ones unable to come to terms with the political, social and physical reality.
It’s realistic to see that we’re at an existential inflection point, that we’re in a very tough spot of our own making, and that choices we make now - individually and collectively - can likely determine the fate of the human race and the larger biosphere for centuries or even millenia to come.
Believing and putting out there that we’re all already finished, and can’t change the doom spiral arc, is not only IMHO unrealistic and inaccurate. As Katharine Hayhoe forcefully argues, it’s a lame excuse for doing nothing, and creating a self-executing prophecy. It’s a crutch and a parlor trick for the lazy, the deliberately opportunistic (as there’s a cottage industry around fear porn), and the mentally ill.
Great article in frontiers "Regression analyses suggest that constructive hope and doubt predict increased policy support and political engagement, whereas false hope and fatalistic doubt predict the opposite". Fatalistic doubt and false hope are equally problematic. It is extremely simplistic and unhelpful, not to mention a strawman argument, to recast constructive doubt as 'doomism'. We need to take care to separate these strands out and bring a little nuance to the party, as we are mostly all on the same side
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/communication/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2019.00020/full
If constructive doubt is looking at all causes for optimism with a skeptical and empirical eye, I’m with you 110%. To me at least, doomism is “we’re all going to die in a planetary dumpster fire, it’s too late, so why bother?” The best time to wean ourselves off fossil fuels and overconsumption was 50-100 years ago. The best time in 2025, is right now. I can’t change the world, but I can better my own corner of it. If even a fraction of us took similar ownership, I think we would be a lot further on the road to recovery and renewal.
I totally agree re not giving into doom. But if James Hansen's ECS/ESS estimates are correct (even just if the CMIP6 "hot model" averages are correct, rather than the assessed range), isn't it practically guaranteed that we will exceed 3C? Additionally, if we elect Republicans this cycle, we can kiss the 2050 net zero target goodbye...
I totally agree that, eventually, solar and batteries are going to dominate our energy system. As it currently stands, the United States' electric car revolution is floundering. In that context, doom might not be appropriate but certainly pessimism feels warranted.
Archival Aardvark: "doom might not be appropriate but certainly pessimism feels warranted." Those are words of plain wisdom. All adults live with irresolvable ambiguity every moment of our lives. The only meaningful resolution of the climate crisis for me, is to vote for collective decarbonization by any means short of violent civil war, at least until I've lived out my natural life. I really hope my street-fighting days are over!
It depends on whether we have crossed irreversible tipping points before we make that choice.
I see the article in Science by Judd and Tierney et al. just got published. I also see that the major newspapers have picked up the story and gotten people like Michael Mann weighing in, e.g., “While I applaud the authors for this ambitious and thoughtful study, I am skeptical about the specific, quantitative conclusions,” Mann said. https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/09/19/earth-temperature-global-warming-planet/
It would be great to hear your thoughts on the paper at some point.
we cover part of it, at least, here: https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/warming-in-the-pipeline-decoding
the ESS number is larger than previous estimates, but I don't know what it really tells us about what's going to happen this century, which is mainly controlled by ECS.
But, Professor, doesn't the new work at least bound or constrain the problem to temperatures less than those predicted by Hansen? In your pipeline article I believe your interpretation of Hansens's work is that we could have an increase of 8 C at 420 ppm if we held it constant for millennia. If I understand the results with an "apparent" climate sensitivity of 8 C, wouldn't that require getting to 560 ppm and holding it there for millennia?
Thanks for your quick response!
Is there a reference regarding the big assumptions of the mean-of-models?
Professor Kevin Anderson talks about how (most / all) IPCC models build in very optimistic assumptions:
* Large scale carbon removal and storage plans (similar scale to oil industry)
* Agriculture switching from source to sink
* Continuation of existing sinks: trees / ocean
* Ignoring the tipping points. You say "mostly stop emissions over the next few decades" and ZEC only comes in when we get to zero, so 20-30 years heating built in from human inertia, so we'll be well inside the zone for around 10 tipping points. We are already in the zone for GRIS, WAIS, LABC, Coral reefs and knocking on the door for AMOC, Mountain glaciers, boreal forest southern die back
* ECS being around 3C, and not Hansen's 4.8C
* Feedbacks. Presumably the abrupt Permafrost thaw and massive forest fires are going to make it harder to get to ZEC.
* Generally not being concerned about anything beyond 2100.
.. and that is just climate. The planetary boundaries look worse on each update from PiK.
In short are your "two facts that keep you grounded" based on a very low probability scenario, which requires a lot of good luck as well.
Yes, how can we trace how these are deployed in various IPCC scenarios?
Also, predicted population growth to 2100.
I don't see why you feel you need apologise to Monty Python, I'm sure they'd be delighted.
I had no idea the system lags were so short. That is encouraging.
One of the things that dismays me about this kind of narrative is that there is no such thing as clean energy (except maybe foraged food). Using the adjective "clean" leads people to think that an economy powered 100% by so-called renewables (the infrastructure isn't renewable) would be sustainable with no environmental damage. This is untrue. Please stop using the word "clean" in this context. "Less damaging" would be more correct.
Currently, less damaging energy (LDE) is only adding to the energy mix, not replacing fossil fuels, so we aren't even transitioning to LDE.
Lastly, I recall seeing a reference to some recent research (though, sadly, I can't locate it now) which reset the expectation that warming would stop when emissions stop. There would still be some warming for a while. You did mention that some models do show continued warming. Also, once emissions of GHGs reach zero, emission of aerosols will also reach zero, and as such emissions slow, warming will be accelerated for a while. Is that true?
This is all too US focused, and making US politics the central issue. "We are good, and we can do it." Given it is a country a few minutes from civil war, it's hard to take seriously.
Prof Dessler is a US citizen, so of course this is US focused. And although it may look to motivated outsiders and insiders alike that the USA is "a few minutes from civil war", I for one am wary but not yet worried. Depending on where their information comes from, civil war prophets may have some justification for hyperbole, but IMHO that's all it is. Speaking as a senior US citizen with no family and modest means, I hold out hope to evade personal climate-related tragedy while I live out my medically-extended natural life (gotta love Medicare). I hardly expect to live past 2050, though, and I'm fully aware "the future's uncertain and the end is always near" (J. Morrison). I do look forward to living as long as possible, out of curiosity if nothing else!
That said: I never was a soldier, but I will take up arms against any attempt to overthrow the rule of law in my country.
I mostly agree with your analysis, but we are certainly not out of the woods yet. I suggest your readers check out Johan Rockstrom's latest TED talk. His analysis indicates we are slowly crossing a number of "planetary boundaries." It is important to stay within those boundaries if we wish to maintain the relatively stable environment of the Holocene.
If we're very unlucky and the uncertainties all conspire against us, it may be a very bad ride even if we do everything in our power to stop climate change. but I'm sure that the odds of it being a "very bad ride" go up *a lot* if we don't take action to reduce emissions today.
I am glad to read this additional comment, Andrew, because otherwise the article left me off kilter. On paper ... to professional clinate scientists who think in decadal chunks of time about data disconnected from life right now ... I am sure the trajectory can look optimistic. I am confident in 100 years it can be, if enough peoplemobilise to make it so.
But some of us are already deep inside that 'very bad ride', and for us there are many decades of hellacape ahead. Lived experience is vastly different to academic speculation.
We've now lived through catastrophic wildfires (that devestated everything in sucessive pyrocumuimulus assualts, born on the deepest dought in living memory and feed by moist air off the sea ... something the scientists confirm has never happened before), then catastrophic floods, then wildfires again in the insane vegetative regrowth because of the floods … and now a new drought (we've had less than half our average annual rainfall this year, as we head into a frightening Austral summer) ... all inside 5 years.
It's pretty hard, and probably unwise, to avoid a perspective of doom when you are already living the early curve of the ride many people are speculating will one day, maybe, happen. Doom for many of us equates to survival.
Regarding warming in the pipeline I got this recently from Richard Alley, “the models do at least attempt to have these feedbacks in. The remaining worry is that some of the uncertainties tend to have a long tail on the bad side—for climate sensitivity, ice-sheet shrinkage and sea-level rise, carbon loss from frozen soils, and maybe a few others, we expect some outcome, there are uncertainties, but those include a little better, a little worse, a slight chance of much worse, but not so much chance of much better. “