In 2009 and 2010, I had many discussions with people about the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). At the outset let me explain that health care reform would have been expanding Medicare to every American. It has the lowest overhead of any service and would have resulted in providing health care to everybody regardless of income or any other metric. My fallback position was a Medicare opt-in as part of state-based or national-based health exchanges. Let the private for-profit corporations compete against Medicare in the free market. As conservatives usually say (but ran away from in this instance), let the market decide. Well, we all know how non-free the market is. Conservatives and Libertarians love to pick winners: as long as they’re winning.
Instead, President Obama spent two years’ worth of political capital on a search for his First Grand Bargain. And make no mistake: he got exactly what he wanted. Instead of health care reform, Americans were saddled with a health insurance giveaway. Millions of Americans won’t be allowed to make a choice in the market; they will be forced to buy something. That is a disgusting development in our country’s history.
Here is an anecdote that demonstrates the fundamental weakness of the “reform”: “While it might reduce health care spending, for many people it doesn’t reduce the cost of care.” If you’re healthy, things will be great because you’ll receive free or cheap preventative care. If you’re really sick, things will get worse because you’ll pay more and more for the same care you’ve been receiving. Oops. As Joan says, “if you have a serious health issue and were previously uninsured because of your pre-existing condition, you can at least get insurance now.” Note the critical missing piece in that sentence: you won’t get quality care; you’ll get insurance. Which, depending on your socioeconomic status, means you could get good care or crappy care. That is the big reform as part of the President’s Grand Bargain.
Joan goes on to say, “The actual health care they receive needs to be made less expensive. That’s where the next steps in reform have to be made.”
Um, duh. But just when we make those next reform steps? That was the elephant in the room in my 2009-2010 discussions with Obamacare zealots. Nobody was willing to say how they would make those next steps … or when. The only thing they would say was it would eventually happen because incrementalism was the proper strategic political choice. It became clear to me later that incrementalism works for folks in the establishment. It keeps them employed for years and decades as tiny steps are taken every decade or two. Meanwhile, Abbey and Casey Bruce’s bills will double in cost. How many millions of Americans face higher medical bills in 2014 because the establishment folks decided incremental steps are the best? President Obama and a bunch of other folks were reelected in 2012. Are they pushing additional health care reform? No and they won’t either. They did health care reform. We’ll have to wait until some undetermined point in the future to try for true health care reform again.
Even as some studies suggest the potential for double-digit warming across the globe, the media has been stubbornly silent, treating climate change as an issue that is still up for political debate, instead of a scientific reality.
That is a dangerous viewpoint to hold and to operate from. This isn’t an either-or choice to make. Politics and science are two very different enterprises for many different reasons. Would these same advocates accept dictated political attitudes based on religious reality? Of course they wouldn’t. So why should others blindly adopt their viewpoint?
This is but one example of climate advocates trying to silence others’ opinions, the same charge that they accuse the fossil fuel industry of doing to them. Which leads us to a rather inevitable conclusion: the fight isn’t about “reality” vs. politics (note the frame – if you don’t agree, you’re not a part of someone’s “reality”). The fight is over value systems. Many climate activists are using science as a proxy in a battle which demands other tools.
Another note: if the media isn’t paying “enough attention” to your BIG problem, perhaps the problem lies in your messaging and not the media’s bias. Doubling down on used-up rhetoric isn’t going to sell your story any better.
I could write a dissertation on this topic and spend the rest of my life researching and publishing on it. I will have to settle for a short blog post for now, because my own research is in need of my attention.
People posted a number of tweets and articles on how “Political ideology affects energy-efficiency attitudes and choices“, which is the title of a new PNAS article. The upshot: ideology trumps the free market. This isn’t a surprise to me anymore – I’ve studied plenty of cases in the past two years that demonstrate this phenomenon. In this case, peoples’ purchases of energy-efficient light bulbs were most influenced by what the bulb’s labeling stated. The study made two stickers available: “Protect the Environment” or blank. In both cases, the researchers made the same bulb benefits (energy use & cost) available to each potential purchaser. The only difference was the presence of a blank or pro-environment sticker on the packaging. With the pro-environmental sticker, conservatives were less likely to purchase the CFL bulb. Without it, conservatives and liberals were equally likely to purchase the CFL bulb. That’s not rational, which is a significant assumption of modern economic theory. The result shows, unsurprisingly, that peoples’ behavior depends on their personal ideology and value system. This has obvious implications for climate change activists: you have to operate in the value system of your targeted audience if you want them to receive your proposals well. Beating the same drums harder won’t make conservatives care about climate change.
Climate groups are willfully failing elsewhere. A new Yale Project on Climate Change Communication and George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication poll demonstrates that increasing numbers of Americans are drawing incorrect conclusions from recent weather events to climate change. The warmest year on record in the US (2012) was made more severe due to global warming, according to 50% of respondents. A similar number believe the ongoing US drought is worse due to global warming. The results go on and on.
Here is the rub: these beliefs have no basis in scientific fact. 2012 US temperatures were largely influenced by natural interannual variability. It was warmer than 1998 by more than 1°F, which is significant. But identifying a global warming signal in one year’s temperature data for the US is beyond the current capabilities of science. We can say more robustly that the 2000s were significantly warmer than the 1990s, which were warmer than the 1980s, etc. 2012′s temperatures were extreme and it had implications that are still being felt by human and ecological systems. The important point there is this: are existing systems capable of handling today’s weather extremes? If not, we should do something.
The belief in climate change enhanced drought is also unsupported, as I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. Initial findings from a NOAA-led team were unable to detect a global warming-related signal in either the onset, magnitude, or extent of the extraordinary 2012 drought. This isn’t particularly surprising when you consider the last two droughts of similar extent and severity occurred in the 1950s and 1930s – prior to much anthropogenic forcing. Specifically, they found that “The interpretation is of an event resulting largely from internal atmospheric variability having limited long lead predictability.” Again, this drought is producing effects, but it isn’t directly attributable to climate change. The question remains: are existing systems capable of handling these types of extreme events? If they aren’t, we should do something about them, not draw unscientific causal linkages in an effort to build support for change.
The IPCC’s SREX report (Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation), issued just last year, reinforces this message. There is a detectable global warming signal in a few measurable parameters such as temperature, water vapor, and sea level change. But the climate system retains a great deal of natural variability which scientists do not fully understand. Climate conditions will change in the next 90 years, but the likelihood of those changes varies. Weather conditions may or may not change. Their inherent transience makes it difficult to ascribe causal factors behind any changes. Note further that climate projections of the 2090s are not climate conditions of the 2090s or 2010s. Identifying likely future changes does not translate to detecting those changes today.
Yale and George Mason should digest their poll results along with the latest guidance from scientific peer-reviewed literature to help guide their communication efforts moving forward. Given the results of this latest poll, they have their work cut out for them. Framing, whether it is related to selling CFLs to a diverse public or differentiating between weather and climate, is critically important in climate communication.
A quick word and some questions on a SkepticalScience post that discusses yet another warming analysis that comes up with the same answer than other studies have. The post itself is good if you want a paper summary. Where I think it needs attention is the “so what” part. I’ll start with the concluding paragraph because it is what triggered a desire to actually write something about the post instead of walking away from it.
How much more evidence do we need? The accuracy of the instrumental global surface temperature record is essentially settled science at this point. The Earth is warming, it’s warming very fast, and continuing to deny this fact is a waste of time.
Many researchers and activists won’t like my answer: we don’t need much more scientific evidence. Indeed, I would argue that the science largely weighed in years ago and additional information has only provided small-scale refocusing on parts of the issue. Scientists haven’t discovered anything truly transformative in many years. Are fields advancing as a result of new observations, methodologies, and expertise. Yes, but that doesn’t answer Dana’s question. What climate field advancement will be the one that magically triggers a switch in skeptics’ minds? What new data set or analysis technique will do the trick? I argue that no such advancement will ever occur. Do we really believe that nobody has yet been smart enough to develop the one advancement that unlocks universal understanding of a complex topic? That’s clearly an absurd assumption, but it seems to permeate this and other similar posts. The spectrum of people who care about this topic have made up their minds (whether through tribalism or critical thought). I will not convince any large number of skeptics to accept my argument any more than Hansen, Gore, or McKibben. And here is where things get raw: strategies that those activists and most others have employed will not convince those people who don’t care about this topic. As voices get more shrill and combative, more people tune the arguers out.
So if the evidence isn’t the problem, what is? I believe the problem is the use of climate science as a proxy for a values fight. Most people are unwilling to identify and fight about their values; it is much easier to throw climate science in the middle of the ring to fight for them. Skeptics challenge the “facts” because of their beliefs and value system. Advocates challenge the skeptics because of their beliefs and value system, not because of the “facts”. Both groups try to bludgeon each other with “facts” and in so doing talk past each other, not to each other. What concerns do skeptics have regarding climate change; how can advocates listen and address those concerns and vice versa. Bypassing others’ concerns is the thing that wastes time. So why do advocates and skeptics do it so much?
The White House strategy on the sequester was built around a familiar miscalculation about Republicans. It assumed that, in the end, they would be reasonable and negotiate a realistic alternative to indiscriminate cuts. Because the reductions hurt defense programs long held sacrosanct by Republicans, the White House thought it had leverage that would reduce the damage to the domestic programs favored by Democrats.
Obama chose excellent election staffs throughout his political career.
He did not choose competent political strategists. He himself is not a competent political strategist. His team spent 18 months on health insurance legislation, during which he gave away concession after concession without getting anything of value in return. Why? Because he wanted a Grand Bargain as part of his political legacy. One result of this shortsightedness was the Republican wave election of 2010, when state legislatures and governorships flipped from Democratic to Republican control. The Democratic base didn’t think Obama had done much for them for 2 years, so they didn’t show up to vote. The biggest problem with this: your average Republican wasn’t elected; the far right-wing fringe of the Republican Party was: enter the Teabaggers to the US Congress, governorships, and state legislatures.
Obama’s team made multiple deals on financial items: the debt ceiling (Republicans don’t want to pay for the bills they charged up), the Bush tax cuts (expired after 1 extension), and the 2011 deal to initiate blind spending cuts because the Republican-led House of Representatives can’t execute their Constitutional duty to pass an annual budget on time. Hence the leading NYT paragraph.
Time after time after time, the Teabagging Republicans have refused to negotiate or work with President Obama or Democrats. How many times will it take before Democrats take the Teabaggers at their word: despite the trillions of debt run up by their party in the 2000s, they won’t allow Obama to run up any more debt, regardless of the cost to the US economy or its citizens. Well, it will take at least one more time, apparently.
The President this morning had important statements on what the group to be led by Vice President Biden will do in the wake of the Newtown terrorist attack. After his announcement, the press asked many questions regarding the fiscal curb negotiations. Here is a gem of a response from President Obama (emphasis mine):
I have gone at least halfway in meeting some of the Republican concerns.
Did Americans vote for President Obama to go more than halfway in meeting Republican concerns? They did, even if they didn’t consciously think about it beforehand.
This is a frightening admission. The start of fiscal curb impacts won’t start for another two weeks and Obama has already given up more than half the field to his opposition. How many football games would you win if you let the other team start at your 45-yard line? In the last four years, Obama’s defense hasn’t kept Republicans out of the end zone when he should have been scoring his own points. How far will Obama yield just to satisfy his own intense desire to make a deal with anybody, no matter how ridiculous they are? The American people are on the record rejecting Republican fiscal proposals, yet Obama continues to add them to his own proposal. If the stakes weren’t so high, it might be entertaining to watch how this unfolds.
We heard plenty of rhetoric from Obama super-supporters leading up to the November election: how we had to vote for Obama because crazy ol’ Mitt Romney would destroy the country. It turns out Democrats are just as eager to scare-monger as Republicans are when it comes to protecting those in power from accountability. Largely left unsaid was what Obama would do if re-elected. I argued with many friends about this topic. I saw what the first-term was all about: taking progressive policies off the table prior to negotiation, negotiating for too long, yielding concession after concession while not getting anything of equal value in return from Republicans who only wanted to see him lose the 2012 election.
Now that Obama has been reelected, a political “crisis” that Obama and Congress purposefully created for themselves needs our attention. The fiscal curb is approaching. For a couple of weeks, Obama made a good show of touring the country and showing voters how smart they were to vote for him, because he wasn’t going to capitulate and concede on tax cuts for the obscenely rich or the Big 3: Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Social Security doesn’t add to the deficit because it has a guaranteed revenue stream. Medicare and Medicaid could be made solvent for decades with minor adjustments that have nothing to do with things Republicans think they do.
I had no doubt we would see the following. Obama made the following proposal yesterday: in exchange for extending middle-class tax cuts, raising the debt limit, extending unemployment benefits, and new spending on infrastructure, he would continue Bush’s high-income tax cuts for income up to $400,000 and would cut Social Security benefits. That’s $1.3 trillion in revenue for $850 billion in spending cuts. Obama has already given up on raising taxes for incomes over $250,000. And he threw Social Security under the bus. For nothing in return.
Mark my words: the Big 3 will take massive hits. And unlike in 2005 when the country resisted a Republican President doing it, a Democratic President will do it in 2012. Republicans will successfully get even more spending cuts in programs that need only slight tweaks while raising the income limit that gets subjected to a return to tax rates under Clinton than is present in this offer. How do I know? Speaker Boehner quickly rejected the President’s offer. Why? Because it ensures that Obama will continue to foolishly engage with the Speaker in closed-door meetings instead of speaking in front of the American people. If he did the latter, as was his initial strategy, Boehner would have to agree to the President’s proposal. Because Republican plans consist of everything Americans don’t want to see: slashing unemployment insurance, tax hikes on the middle class while the rich walk away untouched, cuts to the Big 3, etc.
And here is why that will happen: Barack Obama wants his legacy to be defined by his ability to make deals with Republicans. The specific details don’t matter that much to him. He wants to be perceived as someone who gets things done, regardless of who came up with the idea in the first place. Health care? Let’s try the Republican plan Mitt Romney got through in Massachusetts. Climate Change? Let’s try the Republican plan from the 1990s. Budget balancing? Let’s try what Republicans have wanted for decades: no social programs and lots of defense spending.
The best part? We’ll all do it together! Yay! Be happy, Democrats! You prevented the world-ending Mitt Romney from being elected and now your party’s President will dismantle the most successful programs that kept millions of Americans out of poverty in the 20th century. Because we all had to vote for the lesser of two evils. Phew, disaster was narrowly avoided, wasn’t it?
Nature Climate Change‘s most recent issue included a paper by Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows entitled, “A new paradigm for climate change” [subs. req'd]. Kevin works at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, School of Mechanical Civil and Aerospace Engineering and Alice works at the Sustainable Consumption Institute, School of Mechanical Civil and Aerospace Engineering, University of Manchester. The discussion and arguments in the paper aren’t exactly novel if you’ve paid attention to the policy side of the climate change topic but bears examination as much as other works on the climate-policy interface, in which I am very interested.
I think the paper has some serious flaws in its assumptions, which detracts from the policy prescriptions offered. Prime among the flaws is this:
We urgently need to acknowledge that the development needs of many countries leave the rich western nations with little choice but to immediately and severely curb their greenhouse gas emissions
The latter part of this statement simply will not happen, barring additional severe economic distress. The first part represents progress from the scientific community: developing nations want and deserve higher living standards, of which energy is a primary input. But developed nations cannot and will not “immediately and severely curb their greenhouse gas emissions”. There is a choice that these nations make every day: their own economies will grow and they will do so with the cheapest energy possible.
The U.S. recently achieved something through price signals that scientists and environmentalists have failed to achieve via policy for a generation: a significant reduction in overall CO2 emissions: 7.7% since 2006, the largest reduction of all countries or regions. This is after Congress failed to get a climate-energy bill passed in 2010. Why did the decrease occur? Because old coal-fired plants (the most polluting type) grew much more uneconomical to operate in the past few years compared to natural gas-fired plants. There is a problem moving forward and that is there is nothing substantially cheaper than natural gas on the scale necessary to further reduce U.S. emissions. Effectively, there is a new baseline from which the U.S. will operate for the next generation. But natural gas, as most readers are familiar, still pollutes far more than renewable energy sources. So U.S. emissions will continue to be quite high and more CO2 will accumulate in the atmosphere.
Despite the early flawed assumption, the papers’ authors quite correctly state the following:
[...]any contextual interpretation of the science demonstrates that the threshold of 2°C [increase in average global temperatures] is no longer viable, at least within orthodox political and economic constraints. Against this backdrop, unsubstantiated hope leaves such constraints unquestioned, while at the same time legitimizing a focus on increasingly improbable low-carbon futures and underplaying high-emission scenarios.
I have written many times on the false hope that low- and moderate-emission pathways represent (given the unfortunate reality that our actual emissions are on a substantially different orientation) and lamented that even climate scientists misdirected their energies by rarely analyzing high-emission scenarios, thereby depriving policymakers with the required scope of potential futures from which we choose.
The authors do present this somewhat accurate portrayal:
At the same time as climate change analyses are being subverted to reconcile them with the orthodoxy of economic growth, neoclassical economics has evidently failed to keep even its own house in order. This failure is not peripheral. It is prolonged, deep-rooted and disregards national boundaries, raising profound issues about the structures, values and framing of contemporary society.
Rather than demonizing neoclassical economics, the authors should look for opportunities within such a framework that would actually result in emissions reductions. But the authors’ do identify issues that really do lie at the heart of climate policy: the values of contemporary society. If those values were more robustly analyzed and respected for what they were as a foundation to climate policy, we would have made meaningful progress on the issue.
The lack of such effort is evident in one of the authors’ concluding paragraphs:
It is in this rapidly evolving context that the science underpinning climate change is being conducted and its findings communicated. This is an opportunity that should and must be grasped. Liberate the science from the economics, finance and astrology, stand by the conclusions however uncomfortable. But this is still not enough. In an increasingly interconnected world where the whole — the system — is often far removed from the sum of its parts, we need to be less afraid of making academic judgements. Not unsubstantiated opinions and prejudice, but applying a mix of academic rigour, courage and humility to bring new and interdisciplinary insights into the emerging era. Leave the market economists to fight among themselves over the right price of carbon — let them relive their groundhog day if they wish. The world is moving on and we need to have the audacity to think differently and conceive of alternative futures.
This thrown gauntlet is full of high-minded rhetoric but short on grasping the realities of the world. I don’t know of any climate scientist who is afraid of making academic judgements. But it is folly to accuse skeptics of unsubstantiated opinions and prejudice when advocates for climate activism also display their own set of opinions and prejudice – those opinion and prejudices arise through psychological lenses which themselves are rooted in biological constructs. Insulting one another has done and will continue to not to anything to solve this problem. Nobody has the “truth” market cornered. The “new” paradigm championed by the authors bears remarkable resemblance to other recommendations from legions of climate activists before them. What has such a stance accomplished? Emissions continue to grow, concentrations continue to accumulate, temperatures continue to rise, etc.
Many of the same people who rail against unsubstantiated opinions and prejudice also vehemently dismiss new articulated paradigms. I see nothing in this paper, or many others like it, that advocate for the rapid growth of developing economies based on 21st century technologies and innovations, even though such an effort is clearly needed while developed nations work at finding ways to decarbonize their own economies. Quite simply, this is the least expensive path forward – it leverages opportunity within the economic framework in which we operate. It strikes me as senseless to continue the same fight that has not achieved meaningful decarbonization in the last two generations.
The state of Colorado wants to do everything it can to facilitate fossil fuel development, even if that means putting drilling rigs in the middle of housing areas. The city of Longmont doesn’t think drilling should take place amidst residential areas, but the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission doesn’t care about local controls – they’re pro-drilling no matter the consequences. So the Boulder County DA is suing Longmont to invalidate the city’s common sense regulations.
And he should be concerned, considering the history of the institution in the past 200+ years. There has been a recent resurgence of bench activism, with Bush v. Gore and Citizens United providing two highly memorable examples.
Chief Justice Roberts took something to heart that is critically important, IMO. If the populace loses faith in the Court’s decisions, the populace will grow to resent those decisions and actively work to undermine the Court’s authority. What would happen in Americans refused to acknowledge the Court’s legitimacy? 9 hollow shells whose actions mattered not a whit does not bode well for a functioning democracy.
I think Roberts tried to walk the Court back from the step or two with the Obamacare ruling. The other right-wing extremists would have taken the Court even closer to the edge, if not a little bit over it.
Congress might want to learn a little bit of the same lesson for its own good. Both parties seem primarily interested in getting elected and re-elected, not governing. The Democrats have done a slightly better job of governing, but not much – and what kind of bar am I comparing them to? Some of the most extreme bunch of folks to ever control any kind of power in US government. Thus, my statement should not be taken as a ringing endorsement of the Democratic Party or its so-called “accomplishments”.
To the contrary, the Democratic establishment continues to try to play the Democratic base for fools with their fear-mongering of the Republican Teahadists. I want to see real progress made on every critical issue of our time. What I’ve come to realize is the Democratic establishment doesn’t want that any more than the Republican establishment does. Doing actual work would distract us from the scary “others” out there that need to be constantly fought. No, what I and millions of other Americans want are effective political movements – the kind which were squashed in the 1960s with all of the assassinations of the previous movements’ leaders and high-profile supporters. We have seen what the lack of those movements has meant for America: stagnation on multiple different fronts. Sure, I can buy lots of crazy cool crap, but is my life really significantly better than the average Americans’ life at the end of the 2nd third of the 20th century. I don’t think so.
So Roberts took a small step back – good for him. The question is: will it be enough? How many more decisions have to be made; how many more elections have to be held until most Americans not only realize the establishment isn’t working for them, but are willing to actually do something about it?
