Another Pillar of Climate Advocacy Collapses
The 2004 "stabilization wedges" paper wrongly told the world that we had all the technology we needed to solve climate change. We just learned it was ghost-written by BP. Here is the bigger picture.
A blockbuster ProPublica investigation published last week revealed that a fossil fuel company helped shape and even ghostwrite one of the most influential climate papers ever published.1
That 2004 paper — Stabilization Wedges: Solving the Climate Problem for the Next 50 Years with Current Technologies by Stephen Pacala and Robert Socolow of Princeton University — argued that humanity already possessed all the technology needed to solve the climate problem well into the 21st century.
We didn’t then and we still don’t today.
This post traces the story of the “Wedges” paper, including the scientific debate over technological readiness that the Wedges paper sought to end, the political and economic motivations behind the paper, the philanthropic machinery built on top of it, and the ruthless campaign to silence those who questioned the notion that we had in hand all the technologies needed to solve climate change.
Those efforts set back efforts to accelerate decarbonization for a generation.
Grab a coffee and settle in . . .
On one side: Successful climate mitigation requires innovation
In 2002, Martin Hoffert, Ken Caldeira, and eighteen co-authors — including Christopher Green and Tom Wigley — published a paper in Science titled “Advanced Technology Paths to Global Climate Stability: Energy for a Greenhouse Planet.”
They argued that stabilizing CO₂ concentrations in the atmosphere was fundamentally an energy problem. Meeting mid-century power requirements without CO₂ emissions would demand several times what the world then derived from fossil fuels, even with efficiency gains. They explained that the technologies then available were not nearly up to meeting that challenge.
Hoffert and colleagues argued that the risks associated with climate change were serious enough that false reassurance about technological readiness could lead to flawed policy by redirecting attention and investment away from the innovation most urgently required.
Not long after, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger — who would go on to found The Breakthrough Institute in 2007 — reached a closely related conclusion from the direction of political strategy. Their 2004 essay “The Death of Environmentalism” argued that the climate movement had trapped itself in a politics of limits and regulatory incrementalism incapable of building a coalition needed for large-scale policy action.
Their 2007 book Break Through made the case for large-scale public investment in clean energy R&D — which they characterized in terms of a new Apollo program. Time magazine named them “Heroes of the Environment” in 2008, calling Break Through “prescient” for its prediction that climate policy should focus on making clean energy cheap rather than making fossil fuels expensive.
On the other side: we already had all the needed technologies
In 2004, Princeton academics Stephen Pacala and Robert Socolow published “Stabilization Wedges: Solving the Climate Problem for the Next 50 Years with Current Technologies” in Science.
Each wedge in the Pacala-Socolow framework represented a strategy that, if deployed and scaled up over 50 years, would avoid the emission of one billion tons of carbon per year by 2054. A full portfolio of seven wedges would together hold global emissions flat at 2004 levels rather than allowing them to follow the projected upward trajectory, thereby stabilizing atmospheric CO₂ concentration levels below a doubling of the pre-industrial baseline. At the time, climate policy focused on stabilizing concentrations, not temperature targets or net-zero emissions.
Their paper explained:
Wedges can be achieved from energy efficiency, from the decarbonization of the supply of electricity and fuels (by means of fuel shifting, carbon capture and storage, nuclear energy, and renewable energy), and from biological storage in forests and agricultural soils. Below, we discuss 15 different examples of options that are already deployed at an industrial scale and that could be scaled up further to produce at least one wedge.
They argued that achieving implementation their wedge strategy would constitute climate policy success, and that doing so was possible with technologies already in existence:
“Humanity already possesses the fundamental scientific, technical, and industrial know-how to solve the carbon and climate problem for the next half-century.”
Three clarifications about what they were arguing:
First, the paper was about stabilization of atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, not net zero. Net zero emissions was a concept that entered climate policy discourse only much later.2
Second, the timescale was 50 years, not a few decades. Each wedge represented a half-century deployment challenge, not anything that could succeed over years or even a decade.
Third, the paper’s ambition was limited. Seven wedges held concentrations at roughly 500 ppm. Wedge advocates later inflated this into claims about achieving 450 ppm or even 350 ppm stabilization — targets the paper never addressed.
Al Gore featured the Wedges framework in his 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, presenting it as proof that we already had all the technology we needed. The problem, as Gore characterized it, was simply a matter of political will.
The paper has more than 4,500 citations in the scientific literature. It was cited in assessment reports. It showed up in college classrooms for a generation of students. Someone made it into a board game.
Much more significantly than any academic impact, in the climate advocacy world, Wedges became the intellectual centerpiece of lobbying, philanthropy, and the basis for efforts — largely successful for a time — to shut down any discussion of the framework’s weaknesses and shortfalls.
The political function of a scientific claim
Pacala later disclosed the paper’s political motivation. In 2008, he explained that its purpose was,
. . . narrow and simple — we wanted to stop the Bush administration from what we saw as a strategy to stall action on global warming by claiming that we lacked the technology to tackle it.
I saw it as an unhealthy collusion between the scientific community who believed that there was a serious problem and a political movement that didn’t. I wanted that to stop and the paper for me was surprisingly effective at doing that.
Whatever shortfalls in the Bush administration’s broader posture on climate, its emphasis on energy R&D was on target. Pacala was acknowledging that the Wedges paper’s core scientific claim — that existing technology sufficed — was constructed to win a political argument with policy makers that he disagreed with, using the authority of science to do it.
What neither the scientific community nor the public knew at the time — and what ProPublica’s investigation exposes — was that the Wedges paper was motivated not just by politics but by hidden funding and influence of a major fossil fuel company, BP.
The problem here is not that a fossil fuel company sponsored research, but that executives played a major role in conceiving of and ghost writing the Wedges paper, and none of this was disclosed. In my view, if the reporting by ProPublica holds up, Science should retract the paper.3
BP funded Princeton’s Carbon Mitigation Initiative to pursue research into addressing climate change without abandoning fossil fuels. Until now,the BP role was hidden, and included collaborating on paper drafts as they were passed back and forth with the Princeton researchers.
In fact, BP chief executive John Browne suggested the paper’s central metaphor — “wedges” — during a London meeting at which Pacala pitched the framework. ProPublica provides amazing detail (emphasis added):
Pacala, whom a colleague described as an expert “pitchman,” presented his chart of ideas: Use oil and gas more efficiently. Replace coal-fired power plants. Reduce emissions, ultimately, by capturing them and burying them underground. Each action, he said, would take “slices” out of the total amount of future carbon pollution.
Browne listened attentively. The straightforward framework made a complex problem seem manageable. But the “slices” terminology confused him. “They’re kind of wedges, aren’t they?” Pacala recalls him saying.
“We’re like, ‘Yeah, whatever you want,’” Pacala remembers thinking. “‘You’re paying the bills, buddy.’”
Coincident with the publication of the Wedges paper in Science, Browne published an endorsement of the paper in Foreign Affairs, citing it as evidence that oil and gas had “sustainable futures.”
Neither the funding nor the ghost authorship was disclosed in the coordinated communications campaign.
Socolow told ProPublica the paper would likely never have existed without BP’s funding. BP held a direct financial stake in the answer to the question the paper was purportedly answering.
As Caldeira and Hoffert had written two years before the Wedges paper appeared, the technologies that the paper focused on were not mature, and the paper obscured rather than resolved the technology challenge.
In 2013, Davis, Cao, Caldeira, and Hoffert formalized that critique in “Rethinking Wedges” in Environmental Research Letters:
“Pacala and Socolow gave us a way to believe that the energy-carbon-climate problem was manageable. An unfortunate consequence of their paper was to make the solution seem easy.”
The Wedges quickly moved to the center of the climate movement
The Wedges claim that we had all the technology we needed became the intellectual foundation for a major coordinated philanthropic enterprise focused on a promoting one perspective on climate policy while silencing all others.
Thanks to the work of Matthew Nisbet, then at American University, we have a picture of how this movement developed. Nisbet documented the dynamics in his important 2011 report, Climate Shift, which examined the financial resources, strategies, and communication choices of the dominant organizations advocating for action on climate change.
Nisbet explains that in 2007, the Packard, Doris Duke, Energy, Joyce, Oak, and Hewlett Foundations commissioned a report” Design to Win: Philanthropy’s Role in the Fight Against Global Warming. The report treated the Wedges perspective on available technologies as fact.
The report explained that for climate advocates, the top priority was political and regulatory — block fossil fuels, promote efficiency and renewables, win the political fight. R&D and innovation were treated as secondary at best to the political and regulatory fight — or worse, as cover for opposition to climate policies.
The Hewlett, Packard, and McKnight Foundations then launched ClimateWorks Foundation with more than $1.1 billion in committed funding to implement the Design to Win strategy.
Questioning whether the Wedges analysis was correct or discussing the need for technological innovation risked serious professional repercussions, as well-funded and powerful climate advocates of the era were quick to punish anyone deviating from orthodoxy.
Of course, I was not shy in my critiques of Wedges, my informed belief that Hoffert, Caldeira, Wigley and colleagues were correct, and in promotion of the need for broad-spectrum technological innovation in energy production and consumption if deep decarbonization were ever to be possible.
“Dangerous Assumptions” and the furious response
My 2008 Nature commentary (with Tom Wigley and Christopher Green) — “Dangerous Assumptions” — built directly on the 2002 Hoffert et al. analysis. We made the case that all of the IPCC’s baseline emissions scenarios,4 — including those with lower cumulative emissions and those with very high cumulative emissions5 — had embedded enormous assumed rates of spontaneous decarbonization. That is, an assumption that future progress in energy and carbon intensity reductions would occur at a rate far beyond that observed historically, as if magically on its own, without directed policy.
The implication that we drew was fully consistent with Hoffert et al. and directly contrary to the Wedges analysis: enormous advances in energy technology were required. Our paper was well received and widely discussed:
Nature ran a companion editorial signaling the commentary’s significance.
Vaclav Smil said “I largely agree, but I fear that the situation is even worse than the authors imply.”
Marty Hoffert called it a “bombshell.”
Carnegie’s Christopher Field said: “Given recent trends, it is hard to see how, without a massive increase in investment, the requisite number of relevant technologies will be mature and available when we need them.”
Our paper, and its acceptance by leaders in the field was a direct challenge to the Wedges framework and thus much of the climate advocacy movement, to which billionaires and foundations were supporting with over a billion dollars of support.
The Center for American Progress (CAP), a progressive political advocacy group, put their senior fellow Joe Romm in charge of delegitimizing our paper and me in particular. Romm — a prolific and combative blogger who at the time was widely infuential — called the paper “pointless and misleading if not outright dangerous.”
He labeled it:
“the standard ‘Technology, technology, blah, blah, blah’ delayer message developed by Frank Luntz and perfected by Bush/Lomborg/Gingrich.”
A typical strategy of delegitimization at the time was to associate anyone who deviated from the climate catechism to Republicans — which was a particularly effective technique of delegitimization in professional circles, as the scientific and academic community increasingly associated itself with Democrats, the political left, and the climate movement.
Romm devoted well over a hundred posts at CAP to attacking my work (figure above).6 He instructed journalists not to quote me in their coverage, and most listened and for many years, some still do. Based on Romm’s fatwa, in 2012 former New York Times reporter Andy Revkin likened me to Voldemort.7 Romm refused to debate the substance, saying he had no interest in elevating the arguments.
As the Breakthrough Institute documented: Romm regularly advised his readers not to read the articles and books he criticized, and often acknowledged proudly that he had not read them himself.
Nisbet’s Climate Shift report, which documented some of these dynamics in 2011, received the same treatment. Romm broke the publication embargo before the report’s release and attacked it as “an error-riddled, self-contradictory, demonstrably false report.” One academic reviewer who had seen the draft was so disturbed by Romm’s characterization that he returned his honorarium and withdrew his name.
It may be difficult in 2026 to understand the power wielded by the Center for American Progress and its attack dog Joe Romm almost 20 years ago, but when he ordered climate advocates to jump, they jumped. The Breakthrough Institute appropriately characterized Romm’s campaign of personal and professional destruction as Climate McCarthyism.
Over a decade ago, Romm largely disappeared from the climate issue, leaving CAP to pursue other interests, including working with Michael Mann at the University of Pennsylvania.
A full accounting of the harm inflicted on climate discourse, science, and policy by CAP, Romm, and their fellow travelers is still to be written — and from someone other than me, having been one of their primary targets,
What the record shows
Both science and policy are self-correcting, even if it takes too long sometimes. With the advantage of hindsight, we now know incontrovertibly that not only was the Wedges paper just wrong, but it was also deeply compromised from the start to advance a political and economic agenda.
Energy system evolution that has occurred over the past two decades has depended on technological innovation. For instance, solar and wind power at current costs required decades of R&D, manufacturing scale-up, and policy-supported deployment to achieve incredible reductions in costs. Battery storage continues to advance as an area of intense innovation. Grid integration at high renewable penetrations requires ongoing technical development. Hard-to-abate sectors — steel, cement, shipping, aviation, industrial heat — still lack affordable, deployable low-carbon solutions at scale.
The need for continued technological innovation remains. The IEA and the IPCC now treat it as a necessity, not an option. Ironically, this was the same position that got researchers labeled “deniers” and “delayers” and subjected to coordinated campaigns of professional delegitimization and outright harassment.
Good science and better policy are winning out. That is good news.
Lessons of Wedges
The wedges episode holds some lessons.
Scientific claims designed to serve predetermined political conclusions carry risks even when — or maybe especially when — the underlying cause is broadly viewed to be legitimate or virtuous. The Wedges paper’s political purpose did not make climate change less real or less serious. But it did produce a paper whose analytical honesty suffered for its political ambitions, and that paper then became a tool for suppressing legitimate inquiry that over the course of time proved correct.
Philanthropy should do a better job supporting honest brokering — clarifying and expanding policy choice, not simply picking one approach to promote above all others and attacking others as political enemies. Political advocacy without a grounding in policy effectiveness is just pathological politics.
Here is what I wrote back in 2011, which has stood the test of time:
What explains the adherence to bad ideas in the form of bad policy? I'm not entirely sure but it just so happens that groups such as the Center for American Progress have been funded under the Design to Win strategy to spread its message. Apparently that includes a healthy dose of efforts to delegitmize alternative points of view and to poison what otherwise might be characterized as a healthy public debate over policy options. To the extent that these efforts succeed, climate policy and the broader environmental movement suffer.
Despite the policy set-back engineered by climate activists, the work of developing, scaling, and deploying the full suite of low-carbon technologies the world requires continues.
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