Climate Pragmatism Coverage

"Climate Pragmatism: Innovation, Resilience, and No Regrets," a new report* from the Hartwell Group, was released this morning. The report is based on the idea that the old paradigms for dealing with climate change -- global accords, abatement timetables, carbon pricing -- have either come up short or failed completely. Thus, a new pragmatic strategy must take hold, and the authors of "Climate Pragmatism" believe the have identified such a strategy. A pragmatic approach to dealing with the causes and effects of global climate change will rely on three general policy goals:

1. Energy Innovation
2. Climate Resilience
3. No-regrets Pollution Reduction

These three elements, often thought of as ancillary goals of what might be considered the more ambitious and sweeping paradigms that failed in the past, can add up to meaningful action on climate change, so say the authors**.

The report, available for only a few hours as of this posting, has already generated considerable coverage.

• Bryan Walsh at TIME Magazine: "What's needed in this long hot season is an oblique approach to climate change, one that sidesteps the roadblocks by taking advantage of popular, no-regrets actions that are worth doing even if global warming wasn't real. It's not as simple or as elegant as one global deal — but it might actually work."
• Teryn Norris at Americans for Energy Leadership: "Climate Pragmatism is an important and welcome contribution to the debate and will surely spark much-needed rethinking among energy and climate policy advocates."
• Michael Levi at the Council on Foreign Relations: "I have nothing against doing the things that the Climate Pragmatism authors recommend. It may even be true that society can’t do much more. But if that’s the case, we need to admit the full implications, so that we can start preparing to deal with the consequences."
• Walter Frick at the New England Clean Energy Council: "Yes, some policies will always be heavier lifts than others. But embracing pragmatism for the long-term means not only evaluating the “realm of the possible” in the short-term, but working to shape it over time."
• Marc Gunther via his blog: "I’m not persuaded that we should talk less about the climate–because we really haven’t began to have an honest debate about global warming...It leads me to wonder whether the authors of this report have the problem exactly backward."

Will update as further coverage comes in...

Click here [PDF] to read the whole report.
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*Full disclosure: I am currently employed as a policy fellow at the Breakthrough Institute, one of the publishers of "Climate Pragmatism."
**The full list of authors can be found here.

Hartwell

I feel it's about time I commented on the Hartwell Paper [pdf], a white paper written by 14 climate-energy experts who propose a new direction for climate policy.

The basic premise of the paper is that climate policy has been not only ineffective over the past 15 years, but a complete failure--the Kyoto Protocol achieved exactly none of its stated goals, perhaps because emissions reduction targets that are neither enforced nor really attempted are a poor method to fix the greenhouse gas problem. The proposed solution to this failure has become price on carbon, whether by cap-and-trade or carbon tax, that internalizes the cost of global warming pollution. Such market-based mechanisms for GHG reduction received support from influential economists like William Nordhaus and Nicholas Stern, as well as popular policy journalists like Thomas Friedman.

The Hartwell Paper, in short, argues that a price on carbon is insufficient to achieve the desirable climate goals that are implicitly and explicitly stated by climate activists the world over: energy security, an end to energy poverty, clean energy, etc. A modest carbon price that does not entirely internalize the cost of pollution would go mostly unnoticed by society, whereas a more comprehensive price in the $300/ton range that Stern recommended would too drastically disturb market conditions in every economic sector. The movement from dirty to clean energy must grow from a more holistic, positive and funcitonal base. From the Executive Summary:

The Paper therefore proposes that the organising principle of our efforts should be the raising up of human dignity via three overarching objectives: ensuring energy access for all; ensuring that we develop in a manner that undermine the essential functioning of the Earth system; ensuring that our societies are adequately equipped to withstand the risks and dangers that come from all the vagaries of climate, whatever their cause may be.

The functionality of the respective approaches to climate policy differs, according to the authors, in the framing of each argument:

To reframe the climate issue around matters of human dignity is not just noble or necessary. It is also likely to be more effective than the approach of framing around human sinfulness -- which has failed and will continue to fail.

As Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus wrote in their essay "The Death of Environmentalism,"

Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I have a dream" speech is famous because it put forward an inspiring, positive vision that carried a critique of the current moment within it. Imagine how history would have turned out had King given an "I have a nightmare" speech instead.

The strategy of scolding all human behavior has proved ineffective and not a tad condescending. We should aim for policy and behavior that appeals to our better angels, not actions and rhetoric that reprimand our perceived demons.