Don't Even Think About It (26 page)

The ozone issue had first emerged in the mid-1970s, when satellites reported an extreme thinning of the stratospheric ozone layer over Antarctica. Like climate change, the invisible and otherwise harmless atmospheric gases that cause ozone depletion were the by-product of modern technology and lifestyles. Like climate change, they were damaging the planetary life support systems, especially at the poles. And like climate change, the only source of information was scientific experts and computer models, which were immediately championed by environmentalists and challenged by large corporations and libertarian think tanks. What is more, the main gases responsible for ozone depletion, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), are also powerful greenhouse gases.

Every one of these elements and players was remarkably similar to those of climate change and remarkably unlike those of any previous global threat. How could the two issues not become inextricably associated with each other?

Scientists learned the first lessons. In early 1992, ozone depletion over the Arctic turned out to be far less than NASA scientists had predicted. They were roasted by the conservative press for promoting a politicized environmental agenda. This chastening experience made the scientific community excessively cautious about making confident predictions on the climate issue that followed.

As the little girl in the TV commercial would like to know, looking up at Daddy, did the ozone story have a happy ending? Indeed it did, and that is what led it to exert such influence over the coming climate issue. The various actors played their prescribed roles—there was a David and Goliath struggle and a resolution that, as in all good myths, enabled the restoration of the status quo.

The model created by the ozone issue was one in which solutions lay in business-led technological innovation and the implementation of a market-based system of emissions permits enforced by binding international law: the 1987 Montreal Protocol. This is now regarded by the United Nations, which presided over the whole process, as “the most successful environmental protection agreement ever reached.”
Every single one of these elements was projected directly, and without challenge, onto the emerging issue of climate change.

So similar were the narratives of ozone and global warming that, for a long time, the public was thoroughly confused about which was which. A 1999 survey found that a quarter of Americans thought that ozone depletion was the main cause of global warming and, even thirty years after CFCs had been banned from aerosols, three-quarters of Americans still believed that spray cans caused global warming.

There was a third available precedent that promised a successful model for dealing with climate change: the success of market-based policies in reducing U.S. sulfur dioxide pollution. This, too, has uncanny similarities with climate change: gases (in this case sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides) that were the by-products of fossil fuel combustion were causing serious health problems and, in the form of acid rain, environmental damage across the United States.

Fred Krupp, the dynamic young director of the Environmental Defense Fund, had announced in a
Wall Street Journal
editorial the coming of a “third stage” for environmentalism that “respected growth, jobs, taxpayer and stockholder interests.” Krupp duly championed a market-driven solution for acid rain pollution in which utilities could purchase and trade pollution permits on the competitive market. This model of emissions trading chimed perfectly with the free market conservatism of the Republican administration and was described as the “the holy grail of environmental policymaking.” The reference to a mythical artifact is a strong hint that its appeal was in large part that of a culturally manufactured narrative.

Emissions trading embraced the free market as a means to reward innovation and protect powerful economic interests. Technology and engineering—in this case, scrubbers that would be applied to the smokestacks—could solve the problem. There was no need to abandon fossil fuels or constrain growth, and the demand for electricity grew by nearly a third over the next ten years. The problem was solved and the party could continue.

Five years later the world’s major nations met in Berlin to discuss ways to meet their commitments to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases. Following the Montreal Protocol, they looked to a binding international convention to be convened by the United Nations, this time to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. At the insistence of the United States (and with strong support from Vice President Gore), the approach to reduce these greenhouse gas emissions was transplanted directly from the acid rain legislation. Carbon would be given a market price by being converted into a tradable commodity so that countries could then swap their allowances. To this day, the U.N. declares that the “key tool for reducing emissions” will be the creation of the global market in carbon.

Carbon trading has become a deeply contested issue. Environmental activists adopted the phrase “carbon casino” and held demonstrations during the negotiations at which they threw photocopied banknotes into the air. Surprisingly, free market libertarians were equally disgusted, hearing in the words “market mechanisms” the code words for “market socialism.”

Emissions trading also turned out to be a mechanism of byzantine complexity that distributed responsibility and severed the connection between personal behavior and moral responsibility. With trading, it made no difference whether you flew or drove or whether you bought electricity from a wind farm or a coal plant—the emissions had already been decided and allocated as permits.

Nor did it even work. The over-allocation of permits and a flood of fraudulent Russian and Ukrainian gas offsets have led, in the words of leading analyst firm Thomson Reuters Point Carbon, to a “market meltdown” in the Europe trading scheme. By 2013 polluters had banked so many cut-price permits that they could expand emissions enough to outweigh the savings of all the European renewable and energy efficiency efforts combined.

In 2010 with a new elected president sympathetic to climate change issues, a concerted push was made to get climate change legislation within the United States. Once again Fred Krupp from the Environmental Defense Fund played a leading role and once again emission trading was presented as the only viable vehicle for reducing emissions.

As was found in the U.N. and Europe, the supposedly simple and efficient market mechanisms required a vast and verbose technical manual. When it finally limped out of the House Energy and Commerce Committee the American Clean Energy and Security bill had blown up into a 1,428-page epic of monitoring, evaluation, and allocation processes. Even with very generous allocations for large oil and coal interests to buy off their resistance, the bill was doomed to fail.

At an international level, the U.N. designed the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) for projects in developing countries to trade their emissions savings with northern polluters. It was described by the
Economist
magazine as a “shambles” with widespread allegations of fraud. More than half of its alleged savings came from a handful of Asian companies that were producing an obscure and very powerful greenhouse gas called HFC-23 largely so that they could claim credits for destroying it.

In 2012 the CDM executive board announced that credits could be awarded to coal-fired power plants in the developing world if they improved their efficiency. Now a new coal-fired power plant in Europe can “offset” its emissions by buying carbon credits from another new coal-fired power plant in India. This seems to be not so much robbing Peter to pay Paul as robbing everyone to pay them both off.

Reviewing this sorry history, academics Steve Rayner at Oxford University and Gwyn Prins at the London School of Economics concluded that arms reduction, ozone depletion, and sulfur emissions should never have been chosen as models for action on climate change in the first place. These were, they said, “tame” problems with well defined and achievable ends. Climate change, though, is a “wicked” problem of altogether more daunting scale, complexity, and uncertainty. “Experience,” they said, “can carry fatal baggage.”

Fatal indeed. There was cognitive error on a vast scale that, tragically, perfectly sums up all the flawed psychological processes discussed in this book. Decision makers and policy strategists are no different from anyone else and are bound by the same cognitive limitations. At each stage, they drew on the readily available precedents and made assumptions based on simplistic and metaphorical similarities. Through ever-more-energetic confirmation bias, they promoted a social norm to their peers that led them to keep repeating the same mistakes.

These precedents were on an entirely more manageable scale than climate change. The number of actors involved in both issues was very small—a mere 25 power utilities and 110 plants were involved in the Acid Rain program. Twelve companies and their subsidiaries accounted for the vast majority of the production of ozone-depleting chemicals—a quarter of global production was by DuPont alone. The CEOs of all these companies could comfortably have attended the same cocktail party.

What is more, the damage caused by ozone depletion and acid rain could, after the pollution was controlled, be reversed within a generation. These issues created an optimistic narrative of resolution and renewal that was entirely inappropriate for the irreversible and open-ended problem of climate change.

Frames do not just focus the attention: they define the areas for
disattention
. These precedents bound climate change to a limited set of meanings that actively excluded other approaches. They defined climate change as an environmental issue and therefore not a resource, an energy, an economic, a health, or a social rights issue. They determined that it would be best managed through emissions trading, and therefore not through regulation, taxation, and rationing. And the U.N., glowing from the success of its process to prevent ozone depletion, determined that climate change would be best controlled through international protocol rather than regional or multilateral agreements.

But the largest, most extraordinary, and damaging misframing of all acquired from the precedents of ozone depletion and acid rain was that climate change could be defined entirely and exclusively as a problem of
gases
.

This may well prove to be our fatal mistake.

32

Wellhead and Tailpipe

Why We Keep Fueling the Fire We Want to Put Out

In some ways, climate change
is actually quite simple. We find fossil fuels. We dig and pump them out of the ground. We process them and sell them. Then we burn them. The waste gases include carbon dioxide, which traps the heat in the atmosphere that leads to global warming. There is, of course, much more to it than this—other gases, sources, and sinks—but this is the basic carbon cycle, which represents the majority of the problem and appears in every textbook and informs every policy.

So, there is a chain, or, if you prefer, a pipeline. At the one end is exploration, development, and production—what I will call the
wellhead
(a term which will include the minehead). And at the other end is the sale and then combustion that leads to emissions—what I will call the
tailpipe
. Policies to manage climate change should, one would think, consider interventions at both ends and all stages in-between.

However, they do not. The focus on tailpipe gases and disregard for wellhead fuels has been the single most important factor in all government and policy framings. Radical environmentalists alone have attempted to connect two issues that, in the minds of most mainstream experts, operate in entirely independent realms. This does not, on its own, explain why we ignore the risk of climate change, but it does explain the fundamental disconnection that works through all narratives and policies on the issue.

It explains how a climate science funding body can subsidize exploration by oil and gas companies, and how the Science Museum in London can have a display on climate change funded by Shell. It explains how Norway, the world’s eight largest exporter of oil, can see itself as a champion of action on climate change. It explains how President Obama, speaking as usual in the first-person plural, can boast in a 2012 presidential debate that “even as we’re producing more coal we’re producing it cleaner and smarter, same thing with oil, same thing with natural gas” and then, just a few months later, say, “We need to act, but we can’t just drill our way out of the energy and climate challenge.”

It explains how Hillary Clinton, who calls the climate crisis “the chief threat of the 21st century,” could visit Norway in June 2012 to negotiate U.S. access to the nine hundred trillion dollars in Arctic oil reserves. Her internal dissonance came to a head on June 2. She started the day with a trip on a scientific research vessel to see the melting Arctic—an experience she described as “sobering.” Back on land, after a lunch of local seafood delicacies, she went straight into a roundtable attended by the CEO of Norway Statoil and the country director of ExxonMobil to plan the expansion of Arctic oil production.

In Britain, energy and climate change are combined into one government department leading to simultaneous action to reduce emissions
and
to boost oil production. One month the Minister of
Energy
and Climate Change brags about the allocations of new licenses to release twenty billion barrels of oil around British coasts. The next month the Minister of Energy and
Climate Change
announces an ambitious plan for the government to reduce its emissions by 10 percent.