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The Death of Environmentalism at 20

June 21, 2024

The Death of Environmentalism at 20

Looking back at the impactful Shellenberger/Nordhaus essay

The bad boys of environmentalism

Twenty years ago, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus “dropped” (in Ted’s words) an essay at the annual meeting of the Environmental Grantmakers Association titled, The Death of Environmentalism (DoE). The DoE prompted a vigorous debate about environmentalism in the United States that continues today.

Here is how the New York Times characterized the reaction to the essay in 2005:

The leaders of the environmental movement were livid last fall when Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, two little-known, earnest environmentalists in their 30’s, presented a 12,000-word thesis arguing that environmentalism was dead.

The essay, and the reaction to it, led directly to the creation of The Breakthrough Institute, a small but influential Berkeley-based think tank that consistently punches well above its weight.1 After the DoE was released, Bill McKibben labeled Shellenberger and Nordhaus, “the bad boys of environmentalism.”2

The “bad boys” split a while back and have gone their different ways.3 Ted continues to direct The Breakthrough Institute, which today has established itself as a leading think tank on environment and technology.

As I write this I am in San Francisco, California at the well-named Breakthrough Dialogue — the 14th and final annual gathering of Breakthrough’s fellow travelers, constructive critics, and simply curious. Being the final Dialogue, it is focused on looking back at the past 20 years since the DoE.

With this post, I’ll share a few of my thoughts on the DoE and the very important debate that it started and continues to rage today over the meaning and future of environmentalism in the United States.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Birth Dearth or Baby Boom?

May 18, 2024

Birth Dearth or Baby Boom?

A new debate on where global population may be headed

Lots and lots of babies!

Writing in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week Greg Ip and Janet Adamy explored the possibility that the world’s population may peak and begin to fall far sooner than demographers have previously projected:

The world is at a startling demographic milestone. Sometime soon, the global fertility rate will drop below the point needed to keep population constant. It may have already happened.

Fertility is falling almost everywhere, for women across all levels of income, education and labor-force participation. The falling birthrates come with huge implications for the way people live, how economies grow and the standings of the world’s superpowers.

Source: UN 2022

The United Nations, in its World Population Prospects 2022, projected in its medium variant scenario that global population would peak in the 2080s at about 10.4 billion people. The WSJ reports that figure represents a substantial drop from U.N. projections just five years earlier: “In 2017 the U.N. projected world population, then 7.6 billion, would keep climbing to 11.2 billion in 2100.”

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington in 2020 projected a global population in 2100 of about 1.5 billion less than the United Nations:

In the reference scenario, the global population was projected to peak in 2064 at 9.73 billion (8.84–10.9) people and decline to 8.79 billion (6·83–11·8) in 2100.

Both the U.N. and IHME foresee projected 2100 population to be less than demographers had previously projected. The trend in population projections for these organizations is down.

In contrast, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in a recent update to its Shared Socioeconomic Pathways scenarios increased its 2100 population projection by more than 1 billion people in its “middle of the road” scenario:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Culling for Climate

May 17, 2024

Culling for Climate

Climate research and its misanthropic sect

It’s the smell

Over the weekend, Bill McGuire, an Emeritus Professor of Geophysical & Climate Hazards at University College London, set X/Twitter afire with the following Tweet, which foresees the “culling of the human population” as the “only realistic” way to address climate change — a Tweet which he later deleted:

climat

The issue of “overpopulation” is one that has long been present in the climate science community, but is rarely discussed in public in the stark terms employed by McGuire. Yes, I put the word “overpopulation” into scare quotes because it is not a meaningful analytical concept but it is one with a lot of symbolic baggage.1

I don’t want to be too harsh on McGuire as he simply articulated what some in the climate science community actually believe and had the unfortunate experience of committing a Kinsley gaffe. A view that climate change is really about overpopulation is not that uncommon among climate researchers.

Let’s go back in time.

Writing in 1990, only two years after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was created and two years before the Rio Earth Summit, atmospheric scientist and president of the National Academy of Engineering, Robert M. White2 warned that,

The climate warming issue has also become a surrogate for other agendas. . . [Proponents argue that] because population growth is at the root of the environmental pressures being experienced by the world, prospects for stabilizing the climate and arresting the deterioration of the habitability of the planet are hopeless, argue the proponents, without population control.

Indeed, writing just one year later, the late Stephen Schneider suggested several strategies for addressing climate change including “curtailing population growth” and

“in developing countries they involve forsaking fossil fuels as a basis for development, as well as dramatic slashing of population growth rates as a strategy for addressing climate change.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Do U.S. Presidents Matter for Carbon Dioxide Emissions Reduction?

April 30, 2024

Do U.S. Presidents Matter for Carbon Dioxide Emissions Reduction?

The answer is not what most people will expect

Rare glimpse of the Energy Policy control panel in the White House Situation Room

Pop Quiz!

Before reading on, please provide your best guesses matching the presidential administration with with the annual rate of carbon dioxide emissions reductions over each president’s term in office — dating to 2005, which is the baseline year commonly used to assess U.S. emissions reduction progress.

Source: US EIA, April 2024

I’ll provide the answers after sharing some data. The figure below shows overall U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from 2005 to 2025 (with 2024 and 2025 estimated in April 2024, via the outstanding U.S. Energy Information Agency).

Source: US EIA, April 2024

You can see that over the past two decades U.S. emissions have declined very steadily, with notable departures in 2009 (Global Financial Crisis, GFC) and 2020 (COVID-19 pandemic) only to snap back more or less on trend. The steadiness of the decline is remarkable given that these two decades saw two U.S. presidents who championed emissions reductions (Obama and Biden) and two who did not (Bush and Trump).

This raises a question: How much do U.S. presidents matter for the annual pace of emissions reductions?

To get a better sense of the answer to this question, let’s look at annual rates of changes in emissions, shown in the figure below.

Source: US EIA, April 2024

The biggest year-on-year changes were the years of the GFC and COVID-19, and respective bounce backs in the years following. The overall growth rate is negative, which is why U.S. emissions have decreased since 2005. But of note, there is no trend at all in the rate of change in that decline. There is no evidence of an acceleration in emissions reductions, due to policy or anything else, and no such indication is expected in the data before 2026.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Politics and Policy of a National Climate Emergency Declaration

April 27, 2024

The Politics and Policy of a National Climate Emergency Declaration

If climate and energy policy matter, then here are the three questions to ask instead

Yesterday, Bloomberg reported that the Biden Administration is once again considering declaring a national “climate emergency,” explaining that such a declaration could be used to “halt [fossil fuel] exports, drilling.” Today, I have extensively updated a 2022 piece I wrote on such a declaration. The consideration of such a declaration reveals a stark divergence between election-year politics and effective climate and energy policies. Rather than asking whether a “climate emergency” declaration makes sense, I recommend the three other questions to ask instead. Comments welcomed!

“A significant feature of American government during the last fifteen years is the expansion of governmental activity on the basis of emergency.” That is the opening line in a 1949 academic paper on “Emergencies and the Presidency.” The role of the president in declaring a state of emergency to achieve policy goals has been a policy issue that dates back at least to President Abraham Lincoln.

Today, President Biden is once again being called upon by his supporters to declare a national emergency on climate change. Rather than argue for or against it, in this post I’m going to explain the history of such declarations, what recent experience says about their effectiveness in policy, and suggest the three questions we should be asking instead.

A national emergency declaration may be a political end, but it is also supposed to be a policy means — a mechanism intended to achieve certain outcomes in the national interest. Apart from the politics of using an emergency declaration to signal affinity with certain political interests, below I recommend the policy questions that we should be asking instead.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How Climate Scenarios Lost Touch With Reality

July 31, 2021

How Climate Scenarios Lost Touch With Reality

A failure of self-correction in science has compromised climate science’s ability to provide plausible views of our collective future.

The integrity of science depends on its capacity to provide an ever more reliable picture of how the world works. Over the past decade or so, serious threats to this integrity have come to light. The expectation that science is inherently self-correcting, and that it moves cumulatively and progressively away from false beliefs and toward truth, has been challenged in numerous fields—including cancer research, neuroscience, hydrology, cosmology, and economics—as observers discover that many published findings are of poor quality, subject to systemic biases, or irreproducible.

In a particularly troubling example from the biomedical sciences, a 2015 literature review found that almost 900 peer-reviewed publications reporting studies of a supposed breast cancer cell line were in fact based on a misidentified skin cancer line. Worse still, nearly 250 of these studies were published even after the mistaken cell line was conclusively identified in 2007. Our cursory search of Google Scholar indicates that researchers are still using the skin cancer cell line in breast cancer studies published in 2021. All of these erroneous studies remain in the literature and will continue to be a source of misinformation for scientists working on breast cancer.

In 2021, climate research finds itself in a situation similar to breast cancer research in 2007. Our research (and that of several colleagues) indicates that the scenarios of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions through the end of the twenty-first century are grounded in outdated portrayals of the recent past. Because climate models depend on these scenarios to project the future behavior of the climate, the outdated scenarios provide a misleading basis both for developing a scientific evidence base and for informing climate policy discussions…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Five ways to ensure that models serve society: a manifesto

October 15, 2020

Five ways to ensure that models serve society: a manifesto

Pandemic politics highlight how predictions need to be transparent and humble to invite insight, not blame.
Cartoon of scientists and policymakers inspecting the inside of a black box that is outputting a policy document

Illustration by David Parkins

The COVID-19 pandemic illustrates perfectly how the operation of science changes when questions of urgency, stakes, values and uncertainty collide — in the ‘post-normal’ regime.

Well before the coronavirus pandemic, statisticians were debating how to prevent malpractice such as p-hacking, particularly when it could influence policy1. Now, computer modelling is in the limelight, with politicians presenting their policies as dictated by ‘science’2. Yet there is no substantial aspect of this pandemic for which any researcher can currently provide precise, reliable numbers. Known unknowns include the prevalence and fatality and reproduction rates of the virus in populations. There are few estimates of the number of asymptomatic infections, and they are highly variable. We know even less about the seasonality of infections and how immunity works, not to mention the impact of social-distancing interventions in diverse, complex societies.

Mathematical models produce highly uncertain numbers that predict future infections, hospitalizations and deaths under various scenarios. Rather than using models to inform their understanding, political rivals often brandish them to support predetermined agendas. To make sure predictions do not become adjuncts to a political cause, modellers, decision makers and citizens need to establish new social norms. Modellers must not be permitted to project more certainty than their models deserve; and politicians must not be allowed to offload accountability to models of their choosing2,3.

This is important because, when used appropriately, models serve society extremely well: perhaps the best known are those used in weather forecasting. These models have been honed by testing millions of forecasts against reality.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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