by Olive Heffernan
Writing last week in The American Prospect, Peter Teague and Jeff Navin explain the complexities of U.S. public opinion on climate change and its implication for climate politics and policy:
Americans' anxiety over rising energy costs is a serious challenge to anyone seeking a solution to global warming. The anxiety is real, and the vast majority of Americans perceive these costs as causing financial hardship for their families. Proposals that raise energy prices risk triggering populist anger; Americans uniformly reject government efforts to increase the cost of gasoline or electricity as a way of encouraging certain kinds of behaviors.
Nobody disagrees that regulatory strategies alone will raise energy costs. And raising the price of carbon high enough to have a real effect on global warming -- by cutting emissions and by providing sufficient motivation for industry to invest in new technologies -- will raise energy costs significantly. . .
With a regulatory-only approach, we will end with a debate between environmentalists arguing about the cost of global warming, and industry economists telling Americans how much more they'll pay for everything from electricity to gasoline to consumer products. And they'll argue that these higher prices will result in job losses.
Policy makers are aware of this challenge and have added provisions to their regulatory bills that are aimed at easing voters' fears. There are proposals for tax rebates and offsets and even the creation of a "Climate Change Credit Corporation" to help voters with the anticipated increase in consumer energy costs. The trouble is that the bills either provide tiny amounts to authorize studies of the problem, or they remain silent about how much help voters can expect. It's important to remember that the proponents of [the failed California] Prop. 87 made a well-supported case that the initiative wouldn't raise energy costs at all. Its defeat demonstrates that it's going to take more than good intentions about global warming and vaguely-worded proposals to convince voters
Teague and Navin advocate an approach focused on large-scale public investment in technological innovation (and one that I personally support):
The kinds of large-scale, long-term investments that were instrumental in producing the Internet, the interstate highway system, and the biotech revolution came from government, and for a reason: Private capital won't stay in the game long enough, and the benefits of private investment are likely to be largely private. On the other hand, broadly shared costs have led to broadly shared benefits, and that's a recipe for strategies that can be maintained over time, politically and financially. Fortunately, the investments that are likely to speed the development of the right mix of new technologies, create a hundred-year's-worth of good jobs retrofitting our infrastructure, and take current technologies to commercial scale are also the key to a successful, long-term political strategy.
But mention of the "T" word - technology - in climate debate can itself be politically dangerous as it is also frequently invoked by the Bush Administration as its favourite approach (but at nowhere near the investment level recommended by Teague and Navin). Consequently, many on the U.S. political left are simply unwilling to say anything positive about any policy that has any remote connection to the preferences of the current administration, so technology is left out of the discussion. This might help to explain why Teague and Navin have observed little support for innovation among environmentalists (and stay away from the word "technology" altogether)...
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full at Climate Feedback -
<http://blogs.nature.com/climatefeedback/2007/07/understanding_the_politics_of_1.html>