Breaking the Global Warming Gridlock

Looking back at our Atlantic Monthly essay 25 years later

July 2000 cover of The Atlantic Monthly. Fangs out.

Twenty-five years ago this month, Dan Sarewitz and I published a widely read and discussed article in The Atlantic Monthly titled, Breaking the Global Warming Gridlock (unpaywalled version here). Today I quote extensively from it and share both my and Dan’s perspectives on it from 2025. We invite your views as well.

We began the essay with — what else — the ubiquitous claims that emissions reductions can reduce the societal impacts of extreme weather.

In the last week of October, 1998, Hurricane Mitch stalled over Central America, dumping between three and six feet of rain within forty-eight hours, killing more than 10,000 people in landslides and floods, triggering a cholera epidemic, and virtually wiping out the economies of Honduras and Nicaragua. Several days later some 1,500 delegates, accompanied by thousands of advocates and media representatives, met in Buenos Aires at the fourth Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Many at the conference pointed to Hurricane Mitch as a harbinger of the catastrophes that await us if we do not act immediately to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other so-called greenhouse gases. The delegates passed a resolution of “solidarity with Central America” in which they expressed concern “that global warming may be contributing to the worsening of weather” and urged “governments, ... and society in general, to continue their efforts to find permanent solutions to the factors which cause or may cause climate events.”

Our starting point was that whatever political benefits might result from the cynical association of disasters with greenhouse gas emissions, reducing greenhouse gas emissions was not a plausible route to reducing the impacts of disasters.

But if Hurricane Mitch was a public-relations gift to environmentalists, it was also a stark demonstration of the failure of our current approach to protecting the environment. Disasters like Mitch are a present and historical reality, and they will become more common and more deadly regardless of global warming. Underlying the havoc in Central America were poverty, poor land-use practices, a degraded local environment, and inadequate emergency preparedness—conditions that will not be alleviated by reducing greenhouse-gas emissions.

We focued on proposing a pragmatic way forward on climate change, by centering adaptation as a complement to a focus on energy policy:

The enormous scientific, political, and financial resources now aimed at the problem of global warming create the perfect conditions for international and domestic political gridlock, but they can have little effect on the root causes of global environmental degradation, or on the human suffering that so often accompanies it. Our goal is to move beyond the gridlock and stake out some common ground for political dialogue and effective action.

The framing of the climate policy debate into camps of believers and non-believers was, we predicted, destined to lead to continued gridlock. This framing — centered on climate science and especially on long-term predictions of climate futures — set the stage for a polarization welcomed by both sides. Climate was a perfect wedge issue.

In politics everything depends on how an issue is framed: the terms of debate, the allocation of power and resources, the potential courses of action. The issue of global warming has been framed by a single question: Does the carbon dioxide emitted by industrialized societies threaten the earth’s climate? On one side are the doomsayers, who foretell environmental disaster unless carbon-dioxide emissions are immediately reduced. On the other side are the cornucopians, who blindly insist that society can continue to pump billions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere with no ill effect, and that any effort to reduce emissions will stall the engines of industrialism that protect us from a Hobbesian wilderness. From our perspective, each group is operating within a frame that has little to do with the practical problem of how to protect the global environment in a world of six billion people (and counting). To understand why global-warming policy is a comprehensive and dangerous failure, therefore, we must begin with a look at how the issue came to be framed in this way.

We argued that the doomed framing resulted from the scientization of the climate debate.

Two converging trends are implicated: the evolution of scientific research on the earth’s climate, and the maturation of the modern environmental movement.

We argued that the legacy conservation and environmental movements collapsed into the issue of climate, which swallowed up everything.

Preserving tropical jungles and wetlands, protecting air and water quality, slowing global population growth—goals that had all been justified for independent reasons, often by independent organizations —could now be linked to a single fact, anthropogenic carbon-dioxide emissions, and advanced along a single political front, the effort to reduce those emissions.

We quoted Senator Tim Wirth (D-CO) who explained the political expediency of global warming as a sort of political Trojan Horse.

“What we’ve got to do in energy conservation is try to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, to have approached global warming as if it is real means energy conservation, so we will be doing the right thing anyway in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.”

We explained how climate policy became hostage to scientization. Scientists of course welcomed this, as it elevated the political significance of their research and many scientists lept at the chance to have (apparent) political influence and greater media visibility.

The IPCC defines climate change as any sort of change in the earth’s climate, no matter what the cause. But the Framework Convention restricts its definition to changes that result from the anthropogenic emission of greenhouse gases. This restriction has profound implications for the framing of the issue. It makes all action under the convention hostage to the ability of scientists not just to document global warming but to attribute it to human causes. An apparently simple question, Are we causing global warming or aren’t we?, has become the obsessional focus of science—and of policy.

We did not neglect the other side of the debate.

Finally, if the reduction of carbon-dioxide emissions is an organizing principle for environmentalists, scientists, and environmental-policy makers, it is also an organizing principle for all those whose interests might be threatened by such a reduction. It’s easy to be glib about who they might be—greedy oil and coal companies, the rapacious logging industry, recalcitrant automobile manufacturers, corrupt foreign dictatorships—and easy as well to document the excesses and absurdities propagated by some representatives of these groups. Consider, for example, the Greening Earth Society, which “promotes the optimistic scientific view that CO2 is beneficial to humankind and all of nature,” and happens to be funded by a coalition of coal-burning utility companies. One of the society’s 1999 press releases reported that “there will only be sufficient food for the world’s projected population in 2050 if atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide are permitted to increase, unchecked.” Of course, neither side of the debate has a lock on excess or distortion. The point is simply that the climate change problem has been framed in a way that catalyzes a determined and powerful opposition.

We also highlighted the importance of global inequities in energy access and consumption.

For the most part, the perspectives of those in the developing world—about 80 percent of the planet’s population—have been left outside the frame of the climate-change discussion. This is hardly surprising, considering that the frame was defined mainly by environmentalists and scientists in affluent nations. Developing nations, meanwhile, have quite reasonably refused to agree to the targets for carbon-dioxide reduction set under the Kyoto Protocol. The result may feel like a moral victory to some environmentalists, who reason that industrialized countries, which caused the problem to begin with, should shoulder the primary responsibility for solving it. But the victory is hollow, because most future emissions increases will come from the developing world. In affluent nations almost everyone already owns a full complement of energy-consuming devices. Beyond a certain point increases in income do not result in proportional increases in energy consumption; people simply trade in the old model for a new and perhaps more efficient one. If present trends continue, emissions from the developing world are likely to exceed those from the industrialized nations within the next decade or so.

Obviously, we did not foresee the rise of AI and data centers! We made two better predictions.

First, atmospheric carbon-dioxide levels will continue to increase. . . Second, even if greenhouse-gas emissions could somehow be rolled back to pre-industrial levels, the impacts of climate on society and the environment would continue to increase. Climate affects the world not just through phenomena such as hurricanes and droughts but also because of societal and environmental vulnerability to such phenomena.

Our diagnosis of the gridlock concluded as follows:

If these observations are correct, and we believe they are essentially indisputable, then framing the problem of global warming in terms of carbon-dioxide reduction is a political, environmental, and social dead end. We are not suggesting that humanity can with impunity emit billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year, or that reducing those emissions is not a good idea. Nor are we making the nihilistic point that since climate undergoes changes for a variety of reasons, there is no need to worry about additional changes imposed by human beings. Rather, we are arguing that environmentalists and scientists, in focusing their own, increasingly congruent interests on carbon-dioxide emissions, have framed the problem of global environmental protection in a way that can offer no realistic prospect of a solution.

In 2025, I know much more about energy policy, as my focus did not turn to those issues until a few years after this 2000 essay — so our discussion of mitigation was not as sophisticated as it would be later. My views have only strengthened that efforts to improve adaptive capacity in the face of climate variability and change and pragmatic energy policy are fully complementary, and are not tradeoffs. However, in the climate debate of 2025, many continue to suggest, falsely, that changes in energy policy can reduce or even prevent disasters, and adaptation is often presented as a cost of failed mitigation — costs which could be avoided if we were only to reach net zero in the near future.

Back in 2000, we proposed centering adaptation as a key element of climate policy, which would require moving beyond the outright opposition to adaptation from the climate lobby.

The idea of improving our adaptation to weather and climate has been taboo in many circles, including the realms of international negotiation and political debate. “Do we have so much faith in our own adaptability that we will risk destroying the integrity of the entire global ecological system?” Vice President Gore asked in his book Earth in the Balance (1992). “Believing that we can adapt to just about anything is ultimately a kind of laziness, an arrogant faith in our ability to react in time to save our skin.” For environmentalists, adaptation represents a capitulation to the momentum of human interference in nature. For their opponents, putting adaptation on the table would mean acknowledging the reality of global warming. And for scientists, focusing on adaptation would call into question the billions of tax dollars devoted to research and technology centered on climate processes, models, and predictions.

Yet there is a huge potential constituency for efforts focused on adaptation: everyone who is in any way subject to the effects of weather. Reframing the climate problem could mobilize this constituency and revitalize the Framework Convention. The revitalization could concentrate on coordinating disaster relief, debt relief, and development assistance, and on generating and providing information on climate that participating countries could use in order to reduce their vulnerability.

We argued that centering adaptation would not mean abandoning efforts to mitigate the emissions of carbon dioxide. In fact, we argued that centering adaptation might lead to greater support for mitigation policy.

[E]fforts to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions need not be abandoned. The Framework Convention and its offshoots also offer a promising mechanism for promoting the diffusion of energy-efficient technologies that would reduce emissions. Both the convention and the Kyoto Protocol call on industrialized nations to share new energy technologies with the developing world. But because these provisions are coupled to carbon-dioxide-reduction mandates, they are trapped in the political gridlock. They should be liberated, promoted independently on the basis of their intrinsic environmental and economic benefits, and advanced through innovative funding mechanisms. For example, as the United Nations Development Programme has suggested, research into renewable-energy technologies for poor countries could be supported in part by a modest levy on patents registered under the World Intellectual Property Organization. Such ideas should be far less divisive than energy policies advanced on the back of the global-warming agenda.

We concluded the essay with a return to Huricane Mitch.

[E]fforts to blame global warming for extreme weather events seem maddeningly perverse — as if to say that those who died in Hurricane Mitch were symbols of the profligacy of industrialized society, rather than victims of poverty and the vulnerability it creates.

Such perversity shows just how morally and politically dangerous it can be to elevate science above human values. In the global warming debate the logic behind public discourse and political action has been precisely backwards. Environmental prospects for the coming century depend far less on our strategies for reducing carbon-dioxide emissions than on our determination and ability to reduce human vulnerability to weather and climate.

Dan Sarewitz and I chatted about the essay recently, and he shared some comments on what holds up in 2025 and what we missed.

I think it holds up really well overall. In some ways I think we were overly cautious, e.g. in linking our “what is to be done” ideas to the UNFCCC, and in not focusing more on domestic US vulnerabilities (but, to be fair to us, this was before Katrina), and the brief suggestions about links to energy policy were pretty pallid (but, as I recall, we added those to satisfy the editor).

I agree. Speaking just for myself, I have less belief in 2025 that the UN FCCC is contributing very much to climate policy, however, I do think that its Paris Agreement is a useful mechanism for collectively assessing national policies. As I have argued, the UN FCCC would be far more effective by, for instance, focusing on a coal phase-out treaty with a much more tangible connection to emisisons intensity.

Dan suggests that we were politically naive. I agree. I don’t think we did a very good job at all of anticipating how readily many climate scientists would embrace and even promote the partisan framing of the issue — a dynamic which continues in 2025.

Maybe the big mistake we made was to totally underestimate how the politics of climate change were locked in to the identities of both parties, so that adopting a more adaptation-centric approach didn’t serve either party’s sense of its own political interests (we say this, but only in passing). Why, especially, has the Republican party never tried to co-opt (and re-orient) the climate agenda by making it about hazard reduction? Especially given red state vulnerabilities? But I think the analysis and argument are as strong and probably stronger than ever.

Dan continues, referencing the recent Texas flood tragedy:

Maybe D’s and R’s have been so dug into their assigned roles in the climate debate that they have failed to look after the nation’s interests to the extent that something so easily preventable as the Texas disaster was allowed to happen? What seems clear to me (getting back to what we got wrong) is that the idea that the two parties had any incentive to come together around a climate/weather hazard reduction agenda, an agenda that might seem like a political slam-dunk from a common good perspective, was naïve, since it required that one or both parties abandon what they view as a highly fruitful wedge issue.

Dan concludes with a call for leadership — from politicians but also from the scientific community, something you hear a lot about here at THB.

So what’s needed now is some actual leadership, from whichever party, and of course from the scientific community, that can build off the current [Texas] tragedy to embarrass both parties into acting together to impose an effective national approach to climate/weather/everything else hazard reduction. The Disaster Review Board would be one component of this but a more comprehensive approach would link that to a national strategy and state/local capacity building. (Earthquakes are a decent positive example of that kind of strategy, at least in California — though to be fair, we have not really had a Katrina-equivalent seismic event, so we can’t really yet assess the success of 50 years of earthquake hazard mitigation.) And an indirect benefit might be to actually show Americans that the parties can come together to solve a problem that should never have been sacrificed to partisan interests.

Dan is in my view the most brilliant and incisive scholar of science policy of the past 30+ years, and it has been a great privilege to have been friends and collaborators since we fist met in 1991 at the House Science Committee. Dan has a new book coming out early next year that is an anthology of sorts, but with many previously unpublished essays. It is titled How Good is Science? (I’m the editor). Lucky us — lots more to come on Dan’s new book here at THB.

You can read our 2000 essay excerpted above in full here. We invite your comments and critique!

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