Joe Romm responds at great length to my post on global warming vs. healthcare reform. I think we’re running into a simple disagreement of priority here. Romm is obviously very concerned with climate change. It is his specialty and his focus on the subject makes him more concerned with climate change legislation than with healthcare reform. That’s fine, we’re all entitled to our priorities.
I’m not going to go into great length countering each and every one of Romm’s points. Suffice to say, he – like many commenters here – sees the risk of not tackling climate change as a very real, clear and present danger. He has a great deal of scientific data which shows the possible effects of climate change now and in the future and it’s pretty scary stuff. I completely agree that something should be done, must be done. He also says that he never said healthcare reform shouldn’t be done at all. Likewise, I never said climate change legislation should never be done at all. We both were arguing over which should take priority. Romm seems to have twisted my argument in such a way as to imply that I don’t favor any action at all on climate change. On the contrary, I favor a carbon tax.
However, I don’t think climate change legislation was possible as the first priority and I think tackling it would have almost certainly killed healthcare reform as well. I think it can be done as a second-term, hopefully post-recession piece of legislation and it can be done through the reconciliation process, but not until there’s enough Democrats on board to get 51 votes in the Senate, and I don’t think there are in an election year.
In any case, I think this is something that can still be done. We should scrap cap and trade and push for a carbon tax. Since it’s too late now to do it in 2010, we’ll probably need to wait until Obama’s second turn when, I presume, the Democrats will take back the House. That’s just a wild guess, of course, but I figure the Republicans will only damage their own brand once they’re in control and the Democrats will come back swinging in 2012. So in 2013 I can see a comprehensive climate bill going through.
My point on people with large carbon footprints ‘not doing too bad’ was somewhat glib, but was used to point out that the people most responsible for global warming are also the least likely to support doing anything about it. This was used to illustrate the difficulty Obama would have faced pushing that bill. As some commenters pointed out in the original thread, if you thought the health bill was hard to push through, the climate change bill would have been much, much worse.
Beyond this, I think the rhetorical flare of Romm’s response is a little overwrought. This, for instance, seems a bit much:
The Ponzi scheme is going to crash unless we act now, which, apparently we’re not going to unless the anti-science, pro-pollution conservatives, and team Obama, and the status quo media wake up soon. The painful reality of what unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions mean is slowly dawning on countries like Australia and Russia, and in a few decades, every major country will be slammed with what used to be once-in-a-1,000-year droughts and floods and heat waves on a regular basis — and everybody will understand that we should have acted long ago when it was infinitely cheaper to do so and might have averted multiple catastrophes.
Again, Obama’s legacy — and indeed the legacy of all 21st century presidents, starting with George W. Bush — will be determined primarily by whether we avert catastrophic climate change. If not, then Obama — and all of us — will be seen as a failure, and rightfully so.
There would be no other way to judge all of us if we (and the rest of the world) stay on our current greenhouse gas emissions path, which risks warming most of the inland United States by nine degrees or more by century’s end and which could lead to sea levels 3 to 6 feet higher (rising perhaps a foot or more a decade after that), cause the Southwest — from Kansas to California — to become a permanent dust bowl, and transform much of the ocean into a hot, acidic dead zone (see “An introduction to global warming impacts: Hell and High Water “).
By the end of the third decade of this century, all of American life — politics, international relations, our homes, our jobs, our industries, the kind of cars we drive — will be forever transformed by the climate and energy challenge.
But I probably think that because I’m more concerned with things like healthcare reform than climate change. Perhaps I just haven’t devoted enough time to reading the literature and data that Romm has but have witnessed the effects of poor access to healthcare firsthand. Either way, I think Romm is wildly misunderstanding the political feasibility of tackling climate change in a meaningful way during a recession in Obama’s first term. Whether or not his description of the world in twenty to thirty years is correct, I’m simply not sure. I hope he’s wrong, and I certainly hope we can do things to avoid these predictions, but I’m also fairly certain that this issue will become more politically possible in the future when climate change becomes more tangible. Most people today do not see or feel or understand the impact of climate change. I don’t say that to write off efforts to curb global warming, but rather to point out that Romm is in the minority when it comes to passion over climate change, even if many Americans do support some vague action to help stop it. Romm responds to this by saying,
Even if that were true, that’s exactly why the so-called intelligentsia is supposed to take the time to educate themselves on matters of such grave importance so they can help inform the public. If you never spell out precisely what will happen if we stay anywhere near our current path of unrestricted emissions, then obviously for many people, what will happen will remain vague and abstract — at least until you get smacked in the head like the citizens of Russia or Australia.
Fine, the intelligentsia should do this. This does not change the fact that a climate change bill was nearly impossible at this moment in history, in this particular political climate during the worst recession we’ve seen in decades.
As the poll above shows, people are changing their minds on climate change, but we’re still a long ways off from a major consensus and this is reflected in the composition of the House and Senate.
This will likely change, but until then I don’t think there’s the political will here that Romm apparently thinks exists. And without the political will, all the hoping and wishing we can muster won’t change a thing.
Steve
It’s almost impossible to get Democratic consensus on a real climate change bill, not just because of Blue Dogs but because you have a lot of Democrats from coal country and the like. Unlike health care, it’s got to be at least somewhat bipartisan, which means it just ain’t gonna happen in this political environment.
No one has more scorn than me for the “if Obama didn’t do it, that means it couldn’t be done” school of political analysis, but I think Erik has the better of this argument.
cleek
we have a society where a great number of people have apparently been convinced that lowering taxes always increases government revenue. now, this is flat-earth level stupid. but these people include a good number of elected legislators. dumb is pervasive.
given that GW is much more complex and the fixes are much more painful, there is absolutely no way we will ever get a legislative fix here, there, or anywhere, to GW, until Florida is totally underwater.
we’re just too dumb, stubborn, greedy and short-sighted. as are all humans.
Poopyman
Re the Gallup poll:
Maybe it’s just that more respondents think their lifetimes will be shorter. I’m starting to feel that way myself.
Poopyman
Maybe I should be responding to Romm directly, but frankly I’m too lazy and I’ve got too much to do. Contradictory, I know.
Anyway, when he states:
This is precisely why and how Al Gore became an object of derision. People who have serious financial investment in keeping the status quo made sure that attacks on global warming “alarmists” were deafening and unrelenting. To somehow blame the “intelligentsia” for failing to raise an alarm is ignoring what has really happened in the last decade.
BR
I agree with you on the practical politics of it. However, it is the case that if we don’t start decreasing global emissions by around 2012, we’re fucked. As in > 2C of warming, which will likely become self-reinforcing and could take us as far as 6C at which point crocodiles live in the Arctic and we don’t live anywhere.
The sad part is that what I just described is well documented science. But because it sounds so dire, people automatically turn off. Never mind the fact that the situation is in fact that dire. Climate scientists I’ve talked to are past the point of despair in trying to get the word out. (I am in academia so I like to talk to scientists not in my area of expertise.) Basically our current problems line up like this:
Financial issues < Peak Oil < Climate Change.
This is true both from a perspective of impact and from a perspective of timeline. (Sovereign debt will probably implode in the next couple of years, peak oil will be felt by mid-decade and climate change will seriously start to scorch us by 2030 or so.)
mafisto
It probably seems like Romm is hysterical, but that’s mostly due to the fact that he actually has a clue to what is coming. The information is out there – no one’s hiding anything! – but like you said, there are other priorities.
Anyway, Romm is wrong on one key point: there is nothing that can be done to prevent catastrophe, not even the most heroic of legislative measures. The planet has been spinning up like an enormous flywheel, and all of that energy has to go somewhere.
I find discussion of this topic a little disturbing, because we’re effectively talking about the near sterilization of our planet and collapse of modern human civilization.
Martin
Climate change is going to cost. Either by way of taxes or direct costs as consumers replace energy consuming items and add energy producing ones. Proposing that in an economic downturn with a large deficit and an uncertain future in terms of government costs is really damn hard. You can do some things around the edges – stuff that won’t hit for 5 years and stuff that won’t cost much, but you’re going to leave the really meaningful bits out as a matter of pragmatism.
HCR was always going to be first and needed to be first. The goal was improve the horizon for govt spending and make it more predictable. Obama reiterated that very point this morning. With that done (and absent a bunch of fucking lunatics ranting about death panels) and depending on how successful it would be, it would open some ground to be more aggressive on climate change, and it would buy time for the economic recovery to do its thing and make the costs associated with the energy bill seem not so bad. Further, HCR was a much harder pill for the public to swallow – it’s very personal, and the political capital Obama carried in wouldn’t last for long.
In short, early HCRs success would provide more breathing room to be aggressive on climate change. Climate change, even if successful would likely doom HCR, and without that budgetary breathing room, it probably would be weak no matter what. Tactically, I just can’t see approaching the two pieces of legislation any other way.
IMO, HCR has been far more successful at meeting its initial goals than Dems give it credit. Where it fails for this discussion is that it took too long, and conservatives poisoned the well on the deficit benefits so it wasn’t able to help bring climate change to a vote. Further, it’s galvanized the GOP so strongly against Obama, that I can’t see them ever supporting it.
BR
@Poopyman:
There was an interesting but dire post at The Oil Drum the other day doing a population and energy analysis and it concluded that we will probably end up at about 1 billion people on the planet by 2070 just due to sheer resource constraints. Even if you allow for some miraculous technology doubling that, it still means that our lifetimes will be much shorter than the last few generations.
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6924
S. cerevisiae
Cleek has it right. By the time people realize that we have fucked up our climate it will be too late to stop it as the positive feedbacks from the melting permafrost kick in. You may call Joe Romm an alarmist, but dammit those that know have to be sounding the alarm right now. There is still an outside chance to avert complete catastrophe, but we should have started 30 years ago.
Nathanlindquist
Joe Romm and the whole climate change crew are wasting our time. The coming oil shortages will do more to reduce greenhouse gases than a 1,000 cap and trade bills.
Once I understood the reality of the peak oil situation, the whole “climate bill” debate of 2009/2010 became a laughable farce to me. Here we liberals were, fighting for the right solutions (renewable energy), but for the wrong reason (climate change). We had a much more sellable message sitting right in front of us, but couldn’t seem to grasp it even when in April 2010 the US military laid it out for us.
Once its clear that Peak Oil is upon us we will look back at the wasted time and wonder how the hell environmentalists and liberals missed it, and what the hell were we doing?
TJ
Well, if that 2005 Pentagon study is right, you’ll get about 1 year of new improved health insurance before the peak oil and climate change wars start in 2015. So there’s that.
BR
@Nathanlindquist:
See, here’s the problem. While you’re right that in an absence of any response, peak oil will diminish our emissions to lessen the climate impact, it won’t simply make climate change not an issue, for two reasons:
1. The most widely acknowledged and understood mitigation approach for peak oil is coal gasification and coal synfuel. These are really dirty and will worsen climate change, and we definitely have enough coal to go around.
2. Irrespective of replacing oil, coal is a primary contributor to the climate problem, and places like China are ever more reliant upon coal these days. They’re not going to be shutting down their coal plants any time soon.
mafisto
@Nathanlindquist: Not sure if you’re trolling, but oil represents a (decreasing) fraction of the total carbon load. Remember, the coal party is just getting started. Not that Peak Oil is not a potential issue, but it will not magically solve or become the source of all of our problems.
Nathanlindquist
Again, Romm being stupid:
“Again, Obama’s legacy — and indeed the legacy of all 21st century presidents, starting with George W. Bush — will be determined primarily by whether we avert catastrophic climate change. If not, then Obama — and all of us — will be seen as a failure, and rightfully so.”
No.
No, no, no, no, no.
They will not be judged on climate change; they will be judged on whether they got the economy off of oil in time.
Why do you think that Obama has stopped talking about climate change and started saying things like this:
“We have known for decades that the days of cheap and easily accessible oil are numbered.”
Brachiator
In the US, and all around the world, people don’t have jobs. They can’t feed themselves or their families, can’t afford to go to the doctor, even with health care.
And in less developed countries, people try to subsist on less than a dollar a day.
Climate change is a global issue, but no rational person anywhere in the world is going to be in favor of possibly “saving the world” 30 or 50 years from now if it means watching his family suffer today in the here and now.
Especially over something as vague as possible effects.
@Martin:
Not just damned hard. Impossible. You simply cannot sell people something that looks like a lowered standard of living on top of a recession.
patrick II
“That’s fine, we’re all entitled to our priorities.”
That’s fine, you are entitled to your priority, but priorities imply choice, and nature doesn’t really care. It is the inexorableness of the laws of the physical world and the immensity of the calamity that seems to await us that makes me profoundly disagree with you. Tragedy at this point seems nearly inevitable.
Oil companies are spending hundreds of millions if not billions on public relations furthering the proposition that climate change is a lie and that the scientists who warn of climate change are corrupt. A counter-argument must be made forcefully and on all fronts and in a way that accompanies major legislation.
There will always be something more doable politically than climate change. Most of it will be the equivalent of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Arclite
Peak oil and anthropogenic climate change are both catastrophic issues. Both have the potential to cause the collapse of modern civilization and mass death.
Oil is a unique product for which there is no reasonable substitute for the vast majority of uses with our current infrastructure and technology. Take that away, even slowly, and you will have a totally impoverished world that struggles to even feed itself. We need only look at countries with low per capita energy use, like poor African nations, to see how that might play out. Mitigating this requires a gargantuan coordinated effort over decades, and it’s just not happening. That’s frustrating.
Climate change is much the same. Habitable areas become uninhabitable. Disease spreads. Low lying areas flood. Some water sources dry up while others become salinated. Croplands turn to desert. Wildfires become more common, as do volcanic eruptions and earthquakes as rising seas pressure tectonic plates. Again, the world becomes impoverished dealing with these effects, and the world will struggle to feed itself. Again, mitigating this requires a gargantuan coordinated effort over decades, and again it’s just not happening.
So, while healthcare was probably all we could get politically, Peak Oil and Climate Change are absolutely the more threatening issues to our country and the world. At least with healthcare there was a system in place, flawed though it was. For PO & CC, there’s no system in place, and little action is being taken.
Historically, Obama and Bush will both be judged on what they did regarding these two issues (other issues, barring some other worldwide catastrophe, will seem inconsequential), as in 30 years, the world will be suffering the consequences of inaction. Bush will be castigated. What will Obama’s legacy be?
Sly
I would agree that climate change legislation would have been more difficult to do before HCR (or even ARRA), for the simple fact that it is not as immediate to the public as the economy or health care issues.
However, climate change legislation could not be handled through reconciliation, at least not in any meaningful way, since reconciliation bills can’t introduce any new provisions into law. Its only used to tweak existing tax or spending provisions, so that means any new regulation regarding CO2 would be out.
They could gut existing tax incentives for fossil fuel production and increase spending on clean energy programs, and that could be done through reconciliation, but the heart of the matter is setting a price on CO2 emissions and I’m having trouble seeing how that can be done without new legislation. As a frame of reference, COBRA was created through reconciliation by expanding upon the health insurance regulations in ERISA. What is there in current federal law that could be molded into a carbon tax or cap and trade system?
No, I think the obvious answer is that climate change legislation will be impossible without filibuster reform.
bh
you know most of us in the rest of the western world who have had universal health care for decades couldn’t really give a damn that your dysfunctional political system, media and society in general prevent you from having the same.
what sucks now is that this dysfunctionality is screwing up the rest of the planet as well as yourselves.
And when people like Kain here, who in theory, should really be pushing as hard as possible to make people realize how goddamn serious climate change is, start yammering on about “priorities” I figure we’re all fucked.
mclaren
Well, you know, those of us who look at the universe with a cold hard objective eye see things going just about perfectly.
Lack of health care reform will kill off an increasing number of Americans over time. With luck, some future Spanish Flu will cross with ebola or Marburg or one of those other filoviruses and become airborne and highly transmissible, and all Americans will die off. That will eliminate the endless wars, the resource hogging, the gigantic greenhouse emissions, and the tweets from Sarah Palin. Good news!
Even better news: greenhouse gas emissions result from modern industrial civilization, to which the human race currently has no alternative. Going back to subsistence farming means a Malthusian dieoff, since upwards of 90% of the world’s population survives by the bounty of Norman Borlaug’s green revolution — which essentially means using a shitload of petroleum to produce food at incredibly high yields per hectare.
So say hello to a global Malthusian dieoff. Excellent in the long run. This would be a really nice planet without the human infestation. Fortunately, Mother Nature has an answer for that. Hi, Mom! Bye, Mom! It’s been fun, but we’ve got to go now…
sparky
@mclaren: certainly all possibilities, though these days disease hysteria might well constrain any such outbreak.
it’s also possible (non-trivial probability) that this planet will encounter a non-trivial asteroid in the near future. so yes in one sense all bets are off.
but my question is more prosaic: what on earth is the point of this debate? perhaps someone can explain how this discussion differs from replaying the battles of the US civil war?