Fixing Global Warming

Fixing global warming isn't really all that complicated. Just stop burning fossil fuels. The complexity comes from the fact that fixing global warming isn't a goal that people want to pursue in isolation; we also want to maintain the economy and the economy is dependent on energy from burning fossil fuels.

A commonly proposed solution is to develop alternative energy sources, such as wind, solar, and nuclear, such that society can meet its energy demands without burning fossil fuels. Continuous advancements in alternative energy sources, however, have consistently failed to even slow down the increase in fossil fuel usage. This failure is the predictable result of Jevon's Paradox, which is that increasing energy efficiency increases energy usage because it brings new energy-hungry industries into existence by making them profitable. Under the current system, all sources of energy production will be absorbed by the market and the expansion of one source will have no effect on the relevance of another. Worse, alternative energy sources bring about their own harms (solar requires destructive mining, nuclear creates toxic waste and materials for weapons, and so on). And since Jevon's Paradox makes these costs additive rather than substitutive, they have arguably made our environment worse despite being intrinsically less harmful.

To be clear, I like renewables and believe that their advancement is good news, but it is important to understand what problem they are solving. Renewables do not protect the environment; their true purpose is to maximize economic development within environmental constraints. If society were to take environmental concerns seriously and reorganize itself into a sustainable form, renewables would have a very large role to play in making the transition less economically painful. Renewables are not a full solution, or even a partial solution (in the sense of making things somewhat better in the present context), but rather seem to be a potentially useful puzzle piece of a larger solution that doesn't exist yet.

Another common solution is to shift the burden onto individual choice. Recycle, buy local, consume less, and so on. At scale, this looks like building a cultural ethos around minimalistic living and then trying to expand the reach of that culture. Industry exists in service of consumers, so if those consumers demand less, then there is less energy usage, right? This idea has also been around for a while and has consistently failed to have any meaningful impact on global warming because it doesn't address the core drivers of the environmental crisis. It's not that people are greedy and don't care; it's that some people self-sacrificing because it is the right thing to do gives a power advantage to those who are not sacrificing and so the latter drive the course of history. If I run a sustainable business then I risk being put out of business by competitors who seek to maximize profit alone; if I foster a culture that shames members for using more than they need then that fuels a counter-culture that doesn't like being shamed.

Again, it is good for individuals to care about the world and to strive to bring their actions in alignment with their values. However, the importance of such values is not as a solution in itself, but as a way of developing our collective readiness for a solution that doesn't exist yet. It seems likely that a true solution may require material sacrifice and adaptation to a new way of life. Practicing for these eventualities will make us as citizens more willing to accept effective policies when they are proposed and less shocked when they are implemented.

So what will actually break the dependence of the economy on fossil fuels? A full solution, though perhaps aided by technology and culture, must ultimately rest on a foundation of enforced policy. Such policy will likely be composed of thousands of smaller solutions: grow food closer to where it is consumed, assemble products as much as possible in one place rather than relying on elaborate trade networks, make less stuff that isn't absolutely necessary, and so on. But the real complexity comes from the fact that many of these changes involve sacrifices to economic efficiency and all of them have potential unintended side effects and problems with enforcement. In other words, the current system was guided by free market forces and any attempt to guide the market from a central authority is going to incur major costs, in the form of inefficiency and also loss of freedom. An ideal solution is therefore simple, elegant, and works with free markets rather than against them.

Under this criteria, the best solution I am aware of is to tax carbon emissions. Better yet, base as much of the tax system as possible on internalizing externalized costs--rather than the current system of taxing money whenever it moves from one entity to another. High carbon emitting industries will pass much of their increased operating costs downstream, but this is a feature, not a bug. How to optimally distribute the cost burden across society is just the sort of fractally complex question markets are great at sorting out. And yes, anything involving a tax is not entirely a "free market," but that's true of all taxes: sales, income, property, whatever. As long as there are taxes, something is going to be inefficient and it seems a lot better to make destroying the biosphere inefficient than making work or commerce inefficient. Radical changes to the tax system, in any direction, raises the problem of economic disruption, but this can be mitigated by applying the tax progressively over time, starting with gradual removal of subsidies and ending when the tax rate matches the calculated value of the externalized cost. If we had started several decades ago when the impacts of carbon emissions were scientifically established, the transition could have been gradual enough to be practically painless; at this point, we will probably need to make significant compromises. Such is the cost of procrastination.

So far, we've re-derived standard economic advice that's been around for decades. Why hasn't it been done yet? In short, political inertia:
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• Oil companies have a lot of money and they stand to lose from the tax burden shifting to them. They might not lose as much as it might seem, since they could pass costs onto consumers, but this is still a big loss because they won't pass on all the costs and increased prices will lead to decreased demand (which, remember, is a good thing, because the whole point of a carbon tax is to reduce emissions).
• The US (and most other major governments) have a lobbying system where money can be exchanged for political influence, which can exchanged for policy that facilitates making more money.
• ​Institutions fight harder against change that hurts them than people fight for change that helps them.
• Corporate lobbyists are better coordinated than concerned citizens.
• Corporate interests that would emerge from a society with a carbon tax don't have any leverage because they haven't emerged yet.
• Policymakers don't balance the pros and cons of policy directly, but rather set policy based on the perceived balance of power of interested groups of people.

This is what is meant when people say "the system is broken": the government is supposed to choose policy based on what is best for society, but this purpose has been overwhelmed by narrow interests with excess power derived from exploiting a set of biases in the system that form a self-reinforcing feedback loop. This introduces a new problem: government has a monopoly on the power to enforce solutions to problems like global warming, but it has been captured by the interests that are causing those problems. This paradox resolves by shifting power from those interests towards the general public.

Let's review:

1. To fix global warming, we need to stop burning fossil fuels (or burn much less)...but this could wreck the economy.
2. ​To stop burning fossil fuels without wrecking the economy, we need to decouple the economy from their excessive use...but this could require government overreach.
3. To decouple the economy from fossil fuels without government overreach, we need to tax carbon emissions...but politicians won't do this because they would lose power.
4. ​For politicians to tax carbon emissions without losing their positions, we need to shift power away from corporate interests...

Notice that our focus has shifted from environmental and economic policy to the more general political question of reviving democracy. Exploring this new line of inquiry is a discussion for another day.

In the meanwhile, there are a few things that can be done for the environment directly, within the existing system. First, understand, and promote the understanding of, the bigger picture so that you can support real solutions as they enter the public discourse, ignore fake ones, and oppose changes that will make things worse. And second, recognize your autonomy and seek small victories. This essay has suggested that any conscience-induced inefficiency will result in power disadvantage that will drive you into irrelevance, and this seems to be true on a global scale, but on a micro-scale the real world is not so hyper-efficient. Countries, companies, and individuals can afford to lose a bit of their wealth to preserve a small slice of non-economic value without going under. You are the best judge of how much slack you have, but you probably have some, so use it.