The Smokestacks Come Tumbling Down
Why momentum is building towards a clean economy boom.
Donald Trump is the best thing to happen for climate action in years.
That might sound crazy. These days, with the Trump gang on a smashing spree through America’s science and environmental laws, it’s easy to feel pessimistic. It’s easy to think that with progress being rolled back that took decades to put in place, we’ve lost the climate fight.
But I think that’s wrong. I think Trump and his carbon cronies are not displaying strength, they’re showing enormous weakness — and not only have they not won, they're actually doing us a unintended favor. They’re making it easier to win not the small increments of progress of the last three decades, but large-scale disruptive progress. They’re assisting in the birth of the low-carbon future.
In this piece, I want to explain why that’s true.
Climate action is not actually a choice
The first thing we need to understand is that, in practical terms, we have no choice about whether or not we cut emissions.
That’s because — when it comes to climate change — risks multiply with delay. The dangers of a hotter world don’t come in measured, steady intervals. As we heat the planet, the consequences of adding more heat become more dire, and the rate at which they become more dire accelerates.
Heating the Earth by 2º (Celsius) is not just a little worse than the 1.0-1.3º (or so) we’ve already warmed it; it’s much more dangerous. Three degrees is profoundly more dangerous. Four degrees means living on a frightening, chaotic planet, the like of which humans have never experienced.
Beyond 2º climate change is no longer an issue — the way say education or health care are issues — instead, it’s the kind of problem best described as a national security threat. Beyond 3º, climate change becomes a survival crisis for potentially hundreds of millions of our fellow human beings. Elon Musk supposedly describes the impacts beyond 4º as being “like losing all the wars ever fought” (to which others have added, “every year”). Beyond 4º, though, the risks of climate change become something for which we really have no words.
“Climate change is a potential existential threat to the entire world…” — President Obama
On top of this, the hotter it gets, the greater risk we face of crossing various thresholds — tipping points — where a long-stable system suddenly shifts into a very different kind of system, with terrible impacts. (For example, the IPCC tell us that at 450 ppm CO2, we have 0.3% chance of climate feedback loops taking us past the incomprehensible warming of 6°; but at 700 ppm, we have an 11% chance. That’s a better than 1-in-10 chance of winding up on a world I’ve heard described described as “too chaotic to support human settlements.”) There’s evidence we’re already seeing early signs of tipping points in Arctic ice loss, melting tundra, a spike in ocean temperatures and worsening Antarctic ice shelf instability. Time is running out.
This is why climate scientists like Kevin Anderson insist “we should avoid 4º at all costs” — because the kind of chaos a four-degree heating of the planet would unleash could cost us civilization itself.
Climate action is imminent (and steepening)
The fate of everything we love depends on limiting the amount of greenhouse gasses we pour into the sky. The more we limit our emissions, the better the chance we have of keeping the temperature within only seriously dangerous ranges. We call these limits carbon budgets.
Because a budget is a fixed amount, and we’re using it up, the longer we continue with business as usual, the less of it we have. That means that every year we delay climate action, the speed of action we need becomes faster. This is what I mean by steepening curves.
We are now entering the years where in order to avoid catastrophe, we’ll need wrenchingly rapid action. The question isn’t whether we’ll move to a zero-carbon future, but “when?” Unfortunately, unless we begin deep emissions cuts in the next few years, the answer to “when?” may be “too late.”
(Some say we should lean heavily on negative emissions — pulling carbon dioxide out of the air, which could, if it worked, allow us to exceed our carbon budget. But we’re not even vaguely sure pulling down such a huge amount of CO2 is possible. Indeed, a recent paper in the journal Science found that “Negative emission technologies are not an insurance policy, but rather an unjust and high-stakes gamble. …[we] should proceed on the premise they will not work at scale.”)
Yet, the smokestacks still pour smoke towards the sky. The tailpipes belch pollution. The gas pipelines leak. The forests burn. The cows graze. The curves grow steeper still. The horizon grows dark and ominous.
Already, the world is hotter than it’s ever been in recorded history.
The global politics of climate change have shifted
We talk about climate emissions in abstract terms, but the climate crisis isn’t causing abstract losses. These are real people’s lives being ruined, their livelihoods and businesses undermined, their governments’ funds squandered, their safety compromised, their nations’ futures threatened.
This is something our current political debate obscures: The threats being created by burning fossil fuels are threats to people. Huge threats to people. Even catastrophic impacts that we treat as distant (because they’re decades away) are coming for people we love.
When we hear of potential catastrophes in 2080 —low-lying cities being swamped by rising waters, the loss of most of the Amazon rainforest, droughts that last decades, hundreds of millions of climate refugees being displaced — they sound far away from our lives. But little kids alive today will still be in the workforce in 2080. People now alive will see the year 2100. When scientists worry about cataclysmic weather chaos, they’re worrying not about distant unknowable generations. They’re worrying about the kids all around us: the ones on their way to school, playing in the park, asking for a bedtime story.
Serious, responsible people take the duty of protecting those kids extremely seriously. Many are extremely motivated now to push through changes, at whatever cost.
We’re no longer talking about a handful of idealists, either. Those fiercely pursuing climate action include religious leaders (like the Pope, for instance), military generals and admirals, intelligence agencies, billionaire philanthropists, universities, scientists and (outside of the U.S.) political parties, labor unions and heads of state.
Public opinion is shifting towards climate action, even in the U.S.. Generational politics loom large here. Simply put, younger people have a stronger stake in our society taking bold climate action, and polls show that the younger Americans are, the more they want change. This alone is changing climate politics, since with every year, more older people opposed to change pass from the political scene, and more young people join it.
The biggest single sign of change, obviously, is the Paris Agreement. A year and a half ago, almost all the nations on Earth gathered in Paris and agreed to limit global heating to 2ºC (with an acknowledgement that 1.5ºC would be far smarter). Though it’s true that the Paris Agreement in practice is both less ambitious and less binding than would be ideal, it’s also true that it covers 99.21% of humanity’s CO2 emissions, and are some cause for real optimism that we’ll avoid catastrophic climate change.
Paris is the first time all the powers of the Earth came together an chose a specific future for the planet (and its climate). It will, I believe, continue to grow stronger. This is true even if Trump pulls the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement. (And even if Trump and the GOP pull America out of Paris, I don’t think America will stay out for long.) Indeed, the refusal of any other powers to drop out of the Paris when shows that there has been a real — I think permanent, even strengthening — change in global politics. (Some climate negotiators say global dislike of Trump has actually strengthened the process.)
Let’s be honest, though: the political change we’re seeing is vital, but it’s nowhere near enough.
To get on the steepening curves of climate action this planetary crisis demands, we have to do more than realign policies to incentivize marginal change over time.
We have to reforge the global economy. We have think in terms not of reforming the fossil-fuel dominated economy we have, but replacing it. That’s a gargantuan task. That said, the timing for an economic revolution has never been better, for four reasons.
1. The Carbon Bubble
To see how disruptive sustainability has become possible, we must first understand how massively unsustainable our fossil-fuel based economy already is — not just ecologically, but financially and politically — and remember that that which cannot be sustained always fails.
Recently, I wrote a piece Trump, Putin and the Pipelines to Nowhere, in which I explained the Carbon Bubble. You should read it. Here’s the short version, though:
Preventing catastrophic climate change demands limiting the fossil fuels we use. Even plans that accept a huge amount of risk now demand that most of the planet’s coal, oil and gas remain unburnt.
Fuels that can’t be burned aren’t worth much. In turn, the companies whose major assets are those coal mines, oil fields and gas wells, pipelines and refineries are worth much less money than their stock prices would indicate.
The difference between the valuations of fossil fuel companies and their true worth is so large that national banks, financial industry associations and esteemed investors around the world are warning that it represents a bubble potentially as large as the 2007 Subprime Crisis.
Indeed, many observers believe that the initial Paris commitments are themselves enough to trigger the popping of the Carbon Bubble. Certainly meeting it’s two degree target is. The bank Barclays, for instance, estimates that limiting emissions to 2º C drops the future revenue of the oil, coal and gas industries $33 trillion over the next 25 years. Citigroup estimates that the total value of stranded high-carbon assets “could be over $100 trillion.”
Of course, the price of anything is what you can get someone to pay for it. For investors who own coal, oil and gas companies, bolstering the perception that these companies will be profitable long into the future is now a multi-trillion dollar priority:
There is no long game in high-carbon industries. Their owners know this. They don’t need a long game, though: their investment horizons are years (or even months), not decades. Investors don’t even need successful companies, actually — as we’ve seen time and time again with hostile takeovers, pump-and-dumps, stock buybacks and other financial looting tactics. All they need is the perception of the inevitability of future profit, today. That’s what keeps valuations high.
Here’s something critical it took me a long time (and the patience of a few smart friends) to understand: the Carbon Bubble will pop not when high-carbon practices become impossible, but when their profits cease to be seen as reliable.
Most of us don’t know about the Carbon Bubble because almost everything said in the media about fossil fuels and the economy is nonsense. The media talk about “the economy” and “business” as singular things, things that have uniform, defined interests and needs. In particular, they believe this singular economy, this monolithic business needs fossil fuels. Pundits say things like “cutting greenhouse gas emissions will hurt the economy,” and other pundits nod along, as if this is a statement of fact. It’s not.
Fossil fuels have no future. Not only are fossil fuels not a prerequisite for a thriving economy (we’ll come back to this point), they’re completely unnecessary for most of the economy we have today. On the other hand, climate change is creating economic losses across the entire economy, and those losses are growing rapidly.
That doesn’t mean that fossil fuels will completely disappear — indeed, people will still be burning oil for years to come. What it means is that their dominance in our economy could collapse quickly. The Carbon Bubble can help us see why.
The Bank of England published a new white paper in January 2017, in which it shared findings that the bursting of the Carbon Bubble was “likely to be abrupt” and “likely to pose risks to financial stability.” This, in itself, is simply more confirmation of what we already knew: The Carbon Bubble will burst. It could happen quickly. It could have major impacts on markets and investors who are unprepared. But they also note that the bursting of the Carbon Bubble won’t hurt everyone equally, and that is a critical observation.
The Carbon Bubble is not just about financial losses for fossil fuel companies and the companies whose products are heavily dependent on fossil fuels. It also concerns the impacts of a “carbon crash” on a wider set of companies — ones that are dependent on cheap energy. The Bank of England calls fossil fuel companies “first-tier” assets, and describes them as most at risk. They call cheap energy companies “second tier.” Together, the Bank’s authors say, first- and second-tier companies make up 28% of global equity markets.
Even within the 28% that is at risk, though, there is a wide range of ability to adapt. Most automakers are fighting a long, losing battle to be allowed to keep making gas-burning cars. Other car-makers, though — like Tesla and China’s BYD — are geared up to benefit from a carbon crash. Some appliance-makers have resisted increasing energy efficiency; others have invested in it — people will still buy refrigerators in a world where fossil fuel prices rise, they just probably won’t buy energy-wasteful ones.
However most of the economy is in neither the first nor second tiers. Most of the economy (72% of the market) just doesn’t depend that much on fossil fuels. For these companies, the more rapidly the Carbon Bubble reckoning comes, the better, since the sooner it pops, the less damage there may be to broader financial markets. Indeed, for many of these interests, the economic costs of environmental damage already far outweigh the economic gains from burning fossil fuels.
2. High-carbon systems are costing us a fortune, now.
Fossil fuels are not cheap, not really — in fact, they're very costly… and growing more expensive, fast. Fossil fuels are only cheaply priced because fossil fuel suppliers and users don’t pay for the cost of burning them. We do. Fossil fuel energy is made profitable by taking away valuable things from the rest of us. Economists call these takings “externalities,” because externalities sounds better than “destruction for profit.”
Some of that destruction we’re used to hearing about — perhaps to the point of being lulled into a false sense of confidence in our ability to deal with it — comes from weather threats: the hurricanes, the long droughts, the floods, the wildfires, the deadly heatwaves. In 2016 — one of the hottest years experienced since the dawn of agriculture — weather disasters caused $175 billion in damages. Unchecked climate change would push those losses into the trillions and trillions of dollars.
Yet, as big as the losses from these “unnatural disasters” are, though, they’re not necessarily the biggest cost of fossil-fuel-driven climate change. The biggest immediate impact of climate chaos is the rapid erosion of stability. The world, reinsurance companies warn us, is now already partially uninsurable. Credit-rating agencies are struggling to incorporate unprecedented risks into their calculations. Lenders and institutional investors are working to figure out how to hedge themselves against sudden shifts in natural systems. This new lack of predictability raises costs for everyone, on everything.
But specific companies, places and systems are particularly vulnerable to sudden, deep failure when larger systems around them shift: we call them brittle.
Brittle systems often do not recover when they break. An ancient forest dried out by years of climate-driven drought is brittle: it can burn to ashes in a firestorm, and take centuries to re-grow. Bridges collapse, and are not easily raised. Towns are swept away in floods. Islands are lost to rising seas.
We are already surrounded by brittle things, but the higher greenhouse temperatures rise, the more places, businesses and livelihoods get baked into brittleness.
Vulnerable parts of our lives can be protected — they can be ruggedized against a wider range of shocks; toughened and hardened — but ruggedization at higher temperatures requires massive expenditures. Having to spend huge amounts of money simply defending what we have, not investing to make it better, is a form of loss.
Owners of brittle assets — for instance, real estate developers seeking to sell ocean-front property — have in general proven to be much more interested in trying to hide brittleness than respond to it. Indeed, here in the U.S. we’ve seen a push to suppress inconvenient science, gut agencies charged with studying future risk, even ban public servants from using the words “climate change.” It’s an ostrich policy, except the head they’re trying to keep in the sand is yours. Some folks count these brittle assets as part of the Carbon Bubble because of this.
Not all the costs of fossil fuels are climate related, either. We heavily subsidize coal, oil and gas — to the tune of $5.3 Billion a year, according to the International Monetary Fund. Many of those subsidies are direct — taxpayers’ money being channeled to giant corporations.
But the indirect non-climate costs are massive as well. The I.M.F. says that cutting the world’s fossil fuel subsidies would squeeze enough energy waste out of the world’s economy to cut pollution-related deaths in half and return $2.9 Trillion in health costs savings. Even after accounting for higher energy costs for consumers in fossil-fuel dependent local economies, the global economy would grow $1.8 Trillion more by burning less coal, oil and gas (a 2.2% rise).
Some economists argue that when you add the long-term, irreversible impacts of climate change to the known present costs of using fossil fuels (and factor in a moral discount rate), humanity as a whole is actually losing money with every boxcar of coal or barrel of oil it burns.
Most of the economy would already thrive in a zero-carbon world. The remaining part of economy that is completely fossil fuel dependent is about to implode, in part because it’s losing allies as its cost become clear, but in larger part because its competitors have grown fierce.
3. The shift towards low-carbon prosperity is accelerating
If you haven’t been paying close attention to developments in clean energy and sustainable design, you may not know just how rapid technological progress has become. I’ve been writing about sustainability for 25 years, and I find it mind-blowing. Here’s a quick snap-shot:
Clean Energy: The main objection to clean energy has always been cost. If we switched from burning things to using wind and solar energy — that argument goes — energy costs would rise. Because energy is used in essentially every aspect of modern life, that would means the cost of living will rise. Worse yet, we just couldn’t build enough clean energy (opponents say), so dumping fossil fuels would in fact mean “energy poverty” (i.e., having to give up modern life). None of this is true, not even now.
The carbon intensity — the amount of CO2 needed to make a dollar of profit — of nations, cities, industries and individual lives already varies wildly. We call the process of learning to produce more value with fewer climate emissions “decoupling.” This process is well underway and shows no signs of slowing down. Quite the opposite.
Can we completely decouple emissions from growth? Can we have a larger economy with close-to-no emissions? Absolutely.
The work of Stanford professor Mark Jacobson and others has shown that a 100% clean energy economy is entirely possible technically, even doable within the tight time-frames we face. Changing the entire world energy system is a herculean task, but there’s no real doubt that once we jumped to a clean economy, we’re capable of powering it with renewables.
This certainty is fairly new, and in part it’s a result of being able to see that something astonishing is happening with clean energy: It’s getting cheaper, fast. Not just cheap enough to out-compete fossil fuels when people are building new power plants, but increasingly cheap enough to justify shutting down existing coal plants and other high-carbon systems.
Others have written extensively about the technological revolution unfolding in the world of clean energy and energy efficient technology. I won’t belabor the point here.
I will note that technology observers say we're nowhere near the bottom of these curves, and that we can expect clean energy (indeed, cleantech in general) to get cheaper and cheaper in the years to come. Bloomberg New Energy Finance predicts that “Every time global wind power doubles, there’s a 19 percent drop in cost… and every time solar power doubles, costs fall 24 percent.” This kind of doubling effect is common in new technologies: making more of a new technology generally makes it cheaper. And because the current total amount of wind and solar built in the world is still so small, we have a number of doublings ahead of us.
(Energy futurists, I’m told, are taking an additional one-third drop in clean energy prices by 2025 as a baseline given. If solar and wind costs are certain to drop at least a third more, how disruptive would that be? Well, if energy policy suddenly became magically apolitical, it’s not clear that there would be a business case for building another large-scale fossil fuel power plant ever again, anywhere. That’s the the kind of jolting change these curves suggest.)
Electrification: The world is about to become rapidly electrified. All sorts of systems that have run burning on fossil fuels—transportation, manufacturing, home heating and more — will soon run on flowing electricity. (And that electricity will be clean energy.) Indeed, electrification is a core decarbonization strategy.
Because batteries are following a similar curve to clean energy, electric vehicles are seeing similar leaps forward. Even with the current rate of technological progress, the rise of electric cars running on clean energy could so undercut the demand for oil that it could make new fossil fuel development unprofitable by 2020, according to a study published last month by Imperial College London.
There’s a similar scale of technological change coming to buildings and the systems that make them work, as well. Breakthroughs are happening: smarter design and planning tools; modular automated building technologies that allow buildings to be raised far more quickly and built to much more exacting standards; new materials; even new ownership approaches. (Also, heat pumps.) Even some electrical utilities might better prosper in a low-carbon future.
Demand reduction: The demand for energy can be designed down. That is, we can find ways to provide a desired end, but deliver it in a system that uses far less energy.
Take cars. Add automation to electrification, for instance, and the potential exists for a massive reordering of the world’s transportation systems, in years, not decades. Autonomous vehicles don’t work like the cars we’re used to. They have an in-built bias towards providing access to mobility, not universal car-ownership. While the policies we choose could mean the societal benefits from AVs are bigger or smaller, in every likely future, AVs will greatly increase the availability of ride services, while dropping their cost, making it much easier for people in cities not to own cars. Reducing car ownership creates giant energy savings.
Take cities. Smart cities will densify, because being more compact is a gigantic advantage in a low-carbon economy. I’ve written a whole book about why compact cities are the most critical climate action strategy, so I won’t go much into it here, except to note that recent findings strongly reinforce our understanding that density is the key to urban sustainability. Dense buildings use less energy (and the people in them consume less). People living in dense communities own fewer cars and drive them less (and thus are a primed market for the rise of ridesharing and AV taxis). Dense communities can be served more frugally by infrastructure. To be honest, I think that when I wrote Carbon Zero, I actually underplayed the impact density can have in climate action.
These three forces for decoupling emissions from growth, though, are about to get supercharged by the 21st century’s biggest economic force: urbanization.
4. Rapid urbanization in a carbon-constrained world means stronger demand for decoupling
From 2025–2050, the world is expected to see the largest building boom in human history. Urbanization, of course, is already well underway, with the majority of the Earth’s nearly eight billion people now living in cities and perhaps a quarter million more people joining them every day.
The world faces an almost gobsmackingly large housing shortage. Credible estimates of the current shortfall range from 600 million to 1 billion homes, and UN Habitat estimate the gap will be 1.2 billion homes by 2030. That gap is caused by governance issues, structural economic problems, and most of all, by poverty itself.
Urbanization is making it possible, though, for billions of people to climb out of abject poverty. The term “global middle class” describes folks making between $10–100 a day, depending on where they live. The boundary line is simple: a household that makes enough money to save some and invest it in a better life. We all take this capacity for granted, so it doesn’t seem like much, but for the four-to-five billion people who will have entered the global middle class by 2050, it’s revolutionary. It means they can invest in education and health care, start a business, and find decent housing.
As billions of people become middle-class enough to afford decent housing, the building industry is expected to go into hyperdrive, beginning in roughly 2025. Because of the advantages of compact development, we can expect most of those homes to be in comparatively dense cities. That’s not all. We can also expect everything about these cities and the lives of the people within them to be radically different from those built in the 20th Century.
Even if no one in the developing world cared at all about climate change (and many do), planetary reality is that we cannot provide billions of people with urban, middle-class lives using high-carbon models. It would not only be crazy to do it, it can’t be done.
Indeed, the only way prosperity can be shared with all humanity is through new models of zero-carbon living. That demands new infrastructure. The Global Commission on the Economy and Climate estimates we’ll need to shift $90 trillion worth of new infrastructure spending to low- or zero-carbon models… and that doesn’t count spending to ruggedize in the face of climate impacts, which has been (super-conservatively, in my opinion) estimated to cost $20 trillion, for just world’s 100 largest cities. That’s a huge boom in new infrastructure.
People will also want access to the basic utilities and conveniences that make up modern prosperity. One part of this prosperity is what’s known as “the middle class suite” — a washing machine, a refrigerator, a stove, a smart phone, a heater/air conditioner/fan, and transportation like a scooter or electric-assist bike. There’s a huge need for a middle class suite that’s sustainable, frugal, affordable, reliable. The switch from products to services that we’ve seen in the wealthy world is rocketing forward in these emerging megacities, and will be propelled even faster by advances in fields like social enterprise and machine learning.
Because this demand just cannot be met using old models, it will instead, be met with new systems. But most Americans really have no idea how different these new systems will be from our (now very much out-of-date) conception of what prosperity looks like.
Indeed, the collision of difficult-to-grasp amounts of low-carbon housing and infrastructure being built, the market for providing billions with useful and enchanting services and the advantages of doing so in extremely frugal ways will shift whole systems. These system leaps will be shattering to our sense of normal — not only disrupting components within a system (as electric cars will disrupt gas guzzlers), but actively establishing new systems of components that work together in new ways to compete with current systems. [I’m working on another piece to explain this point, so if this doesn’t make sense, please just trust me on this and keep reading.]
The point is, the Global South can only achieve the prosperity it seeks if it rapidly decouples growth from fossil fuels. However, the degree of decoupling the emerging economies need is going to push innovation in orthogonal directions.
The rising demand for low-carbon systems is worldchanging, itself.
Personally, I find it hard to truly grasp the magnitude of the demand for low carbon systems in the next three decades — and this is my job.
The demand we’re talking about means a market pull that’s completely beyond anything we’ve ever seen. The closest analogy in U.S. history is the Post-War American housing boom, when factories were converted from manufacturing bombers to Buicks and the suburbs were built. Magnify that by roughly 40 times the size and that’s the scale we’re talking about. Since the world economy is expected to basically triple between now and 2050 — with most of that growth in emerging economies — the market for low-carbon, frugal prosperity is $100s of trillions.
That demand is itself worldchanging, providing incredible incentive to invest heavily in clean energy and new solutions. It has triggered bold action already:
First, the stronger emerging economies are already becoming leaders in clean energy and sustainable technologies. China alone plans to spend at least $360 billion on renewable energy by 2020.
(The emerging economies are not alone in investing in clean solutions, of course. The IEA says that it expects at least $24 trillion in additional investment in renewables from 2020–2040. The bursting of the Carbon Bubble, though, could easily push trillions of dollars into new solutions over the course of just a few years, as investors adjust to new economic realities and see that these solutions are currently profoundly under-capitalized compared to the eventual size of these markets.)
Second, emerging economies (again, especially China) are home to some of the world leaders in low-carbon, disruptive technologies, from electric cars to rapid building to bullet trains. These are the multi-billion dollar businesses of a low-carbon future.
Third, many emerging regions have a built in advantage: They’re not already as deeply committed to a high-carbon path as the Global North is. They don’t stand to lose as much when high-carbon assets are abandoned, and they don’t have the same sunk costs warping their economic policies. As a result, they have the capacity to leapfrog over fossil fuels to low-carbon models, just as many countries have skipped past landline phones and gone straight to mobile phones.
Large-scale investments, breakthrough innovations and leapfrogging industrial policies will change how the whole global economy works. There’s a good chance they will completely undercut the competitiveness of high-carbon systems.
I suspect most Americans don’t have any clue how much torque a rapidly growing and rapidly decarbonizing world economy will put on out-of-date high-carbon industries and fossil-fuel-dependent places here at home… or why that torque is a good thing for the American climate movement.
What holds back progress is unaccountable power.
Domestically, high-carbon industries have refused the opportunity to remake themselves into companies that could weather the coming storm of decarbonization.
Instead, they’ve fortified themselves with political influence. They’ve used that influence to grab massive public subsidies, but more importantly to erect high barriers that shield them from change. Those barriers protect profits. More importantly they protect the perception that fossil fuels and unsustainable practices are here to stay.
The same is true (in varying degrees) in most of the wealthy nations. High-CO2 parts of American society, though, are tribal in their opposition to climate action. We don’t have any actual, reasoned debate about energy, climate and industrial policy. Fossil fuel companies and high-carbon places are the GOP’s core economic constituency — from the Koch brothers’ Tea Party to the oil industry investors now filling the Cabinet — and the GOP’s stance on all these issues is unrelenting opposition to evolution.
We’re all well aware of what anti-climate politics are like, because that’s the 2017 Republican Party (aided by some key Democrats, of course). Indeed, the major reason why carbon emissions remain so high in the U.S. is the continued power of the Carbon Lobby. What’s not easy to see, though, is that the Carbon Lobby’s power hangs by a fraying line.
The power of the Carbon Lobby is ripe for collapse
First, the power of high-carbon systems themselves is on the wane. The long-term global trend is unequivocally towards greater and greater demand to act on climate. Big Carbon wouldn’t need to spend so much money and work so hard to control American politics if this weren’t so.
A carbon crash will mean a sudden loss of influence. Nobody loves bullies when they become weak, and by trashing so much hard-won progress, the Carbon Lobby and the GOP have completely destroyed any ethical case they might make that they deserve considerate treatment in future climate policies.
Based on the conversations I’ve had since the election, I think a lot of people in clean energy and sustainable business are done playing. The GOP’s combination of blatant disrespect and scorched-earth policies has radicalized a bunch of folks who (from what I’ve seen) haven’t in the past regarded their work in particular political terms, much less as openly partisan. As the pendulum swings back on this corrupt administration, it won’t stop at the flawed climate compromises we had in 2016. I think we’re in for one hell of a fight — a fight to not only level the playing field, but tilt it decisively towards the new economy.
Had Hillary Clinton won, we might well have had comparatively bold action at the Federal level. Then again, given Republican control of Congress, probably not. What we definitely would not have gotten is politically confrontational change, and it would have been difficult to demand it.
Trump in the White House frees us, in this sense. The Republicans are already all-in on climate denialism and delay. They’re doing everything they can to make sure Americans (and people elsewhere) burn as much coal, oil and gas possible. Neither those building the new economy nor the climate advocacy movement have anything — anything at all — to lose from making bold plays, now. That, my friends, is huge mistake on their part. The GOP’s binge politics have given us freedom of action.
Second, most of the economy (as we discussed above) already has more to gain than to lose from climate action. As awareness rises, more and more of these companies and institutions will become at least moderate climate action advocates. (We can already see a huge gulf in attitudes between companies with largely American investors and executives and the rest of the world — I strongly suspect that gulf will close.) What we might think of as the main bulk of the economy is already ready for rapid progress.
Third, decoupling is creating a larger and larger base of players that not only are harmed by inaction, but that benefit from the demise of fossil fuels and unsustainable practices. For these players, the political barriers that protect high-carbon industries represent targets.
The faster the high-carbon companies fail, the better off their successor companies will be. In a world where responsible policy can only lead to the end of fossil fuels, the politics of high- and low-carbon players are largely zero sum: what benefits one, hurts the other.
That means climate action is no longer a political fight between dirty industry and environmentalists, or even between a dead-ender Carbon Lobby and advocates for sane policy — it has become a contest between competing economies, competing futures. And given the technological and global economic torque on old systems, the new may well eat the old.
For here’s the great weakness of high-carbon systems: the same political barriers erected to protect them from change have made them fragile when exposed to the kinds of political and economic pressures unfolding around us. And those barriers are weaker than they look.
Because clean energy and sustainable solutions are currently still a small part of our economy, most of us have never given serious consideration to the question of what policies, regulations and taxes would look like if their goal was not just to incentive the use of fewer fossil fuels (and other unsustainable practices), but to take giant bites out of their business models.
We find ourselves now in the moment when a new climate movement — one which combines the moral power of “steep curve” climate advocacy and disruptive capacities of fast-moving businesses — could do just that.
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Continue reading here: The Last Decade and You
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