Yesterday someone said to me: “Environmentalism is dead. The green movement has failed. Climate change is a technical problem and the solution to it is technological.”

There was something I didn’t like about that.

Some of my objection is emotional. I just don’t like the technological approach. I don’t like big kit. I don’t like the fact that you need big companies to build and operate big kit. I don’t like big companies or the institutions which fund them. They are bad for humanity.

It’s not very scientific to disagree with something for just emotional reasons. Then I figured that the technology-only approach might be less reasonable than it appears, since it, too, comes down to hunches. Hunches on two things: Incentives and build-out.

Broadly, the technology approach is to create economic incentives to encourage people to switch from carbon intensive technology to low carbon technology. Meanwhile, in the knowledge of those incentives and supported directly or indirectly by them, clever people come up with better and better technologies. Eventually the whole world is using low carbon technology and we breathe a sigh of relief.

We should question these two core elements of current climate change policy: (i) incentives and (ii) the development and implementation of technology.

First, incentives. The main incentive used in policy is to put a price on carbon emissions. We don’t know what happens when the price of carbon goes up to €40 or more because it has never actually been there. We expect that investors will pursue low-carbon technologies if they are confident about incentives; but we can’t be sure they will be convinced by fickle politics. We do know that when the price of oil goes up a lot, a few people start using their cars less. But we also know that when fuel duties go up then lorry drivers in England and tractor drivers in France start being disorderly.

So whether incentives will lead to innovation or riots or just have no effect seems to be based on a hunch. Have we seen numbers on this?

Second, the development and implementation of technology. I can believe that we will come up with better and better technologies. But implementation is where it falls down. We are talking mainly about renewable energy generation and efficient use of energy, industrial processes and agriculture. The challenge is something like this: we have x years within which to replace y pieces of infrastructure around the world.

How long does it take to develop a technology? How long does it take to reform markets so that new technology can be introduced despite the grumblings of incumbents (who will have to write off stranded assets)? How long does it take for infrastructural technology to spread around the world and replace all the energy inefficient assets (hint: houses, factories and power stations are bigger than, cost more than and have longer lives than mobile phones and Facebook accounts)?

It would be good to see some numbers showing that the time it takes for all that to happen is less than the time we have available to cut emissions.

These are some things, then, where we should work hard to get clear facts and figures to support the hunches:
– comprehensive data about the price elasticity of demand for energy (by country and culture)
– analysis about when it is that pricing has good outcomes (innovation) and when it has bad outcomes (riots)
– data on the rate of spread of infrastructural technologies, and perhaps
– the relationship between the size of incentives and the speed at which the incentivised technology spreads

I don’t know if policy makers have this data. That would be fair enough if they don’t, given the novelty of the situation. But if we are working on hunches, it would help to be open about that and be more ready to consider other hunch-based approaches.

This entry was posted in Climate change policy. Bookmark the permalink.

2 Responses to Unhunching

  1. RG says:

    There are two parts to your post that deserve comment. First the demise of environmental movement. Having reached an age where I am now worrying about my grandchildren I reflect on my own path. What I became long ago was a naturalist in the old school of Audubon and Muir and perhaps with a measure of Edward Abby thrown in. What the environmental movement has become is a radical anti-technology organic food political movement populated by people who have joined it as a political statement. The sad result is that the environmental movement is 99% focused on thought control and political power mongering. In this it's masters and minions are all too often every bit as despicable as those in the worst political movement. What we need is to get back to our roots of finding wonder and worth in seeing a great bustard by slogging through the wet at the break of day rather following some false bugle call of our club.

  2. RG says:

    Why technology is necessary. While it may feel comforting to believe that if only we curtail our carbon sins now and do better all will be well, that is simply not the case. There is a required penance that comes with such absolution. The burnings of the fossil fuel age have already released a first carbon bomb that is exploding all around us. Sure we are fueling a second carbon bomb with our continued emissions but if the first carbon bomb is lethal then what ought one focus on. I maintain the focus must be on providing the antidote to the poisoning of the first carbon bomb. It is of no use and in fact it is doom to lecture and debate with the patient as to why they should not take the second lethal dose while ignoring the effects of the first. The half life of CO2 in our air is several hundred years so what we are seeing today is just the beginning of the effects of the first lethal dose. We must administer the treatment and antidote against the effects of the first deadly dose and we must do so as fast as possible. We must remove the poison from the atmosphere, surely slowing the rate of additional poison will help but if we do nothing about the first dose emission reductions are all for naught. The path the poison takes is to first alter the chemistry, pH, of water on this blue planet, the second slower and less severe path is the alteration of the heat balance aka. global warming. We simply must address the lowering pH of our oceans which has only just begun and is already seen as having dropped by 30%. ONLY our best technological help to ocean photosynthesis has any hope for the energy used to create the trillion tonne lethal dose of CO2 in the air requires an equal energy application to chemically switch it back to living organic carbon instead of the no energy default path to deadly acid it is now on.

Comments are closed.