Climate Will Change Faster Than We Will

Those who care deeply about addressing climate change now (or at least now-ish!) have a nasty little problem with which to contend. The short version of this problem is that “people don’t care enough about it.”

It’s trickier than that, though. When the economy collapsed in 2008, climate skepticism rose. It’s simple enough to understand: people just wanted their jobs back and were skeptical of the government commencing a long-term mission to solve something that wasn’t a viscerally obvious problem. In the last couple of years though, as the economy has been improving (however painfully, miserably slowly), climate skepticism has begun to recede again. According to a 2013 survey, the percentage of Republicans who worry a “great deal” about global warming rose back to 40 percent from its 2011 low of 30 percent—still not quite at the pre-recession 47 percent figure, which was strong enough for John McCain to include a cap-and-trade plank in his 2008 presidential platform, but getting back there. The percentage among independents, meanwhile, rose to 59 percent from its 49 percent trough. It’s always pretty high among Democrats.

Most of that concern is soft, though. It’s more a sort of “oh sure, yeah, that’s a problem I guess” concern instead of a “WE NEED TO FIX THIS SHIT NOW” concern. In a January 2014 poll, Pew found that dealing with global warming ranked second-to-last among the 20 issues it tested as top priorities for the president and Congress. Even broken down by party, the concern level only wavers between not-really-important to not-important-at-all: “”About four-in-ten (42%) Democrats cite it as a top priority compared to 14% of Republicans and 27% of independents.”

The political grounds for dealing with it in any meaningful way are gone, and barring some shock to the system, not likely to return anytime soon. Which is a bit of a pity, because the problem “climate change” itself isn’t going to take a pause. It’s already caused plenty of damage and the window for preventing further catastrophic damage is ever-narrowing. Here’s what the science people were saying just last month in the New York Times:

Nations have so dragged their feet in battling climate change that the situation has grown critical and the risk of severe economic disruption is rising, according to a draft United Nations report. Another 15 years of failure to limit carbon emissions could make the problem virtually impossible to solve with current technologies, experts found.

A delay would most likely force future generations to develop the ability to suck greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere and store them underground to preserve the livability of the planet, the report found. But it is not clear whether such technologies will ever exist at the necessary scale, and even if they do, the approach would probably be wildly expensive compared with taking steps now to slow emissions.

So climate change will keep on doing its thing and the political system isn’t equipped to do anything about it due to lack of popular support. That leaves one group of people left to do the heavy lifting: a smattering of rich elites for whom climate change is a pet issue. Like who? Like this here fella:

A billionaire retired investor is forging plans to spend as much as $100 million during the 2014 election, seeking to pressure federal and state officials to enact climate change measures through a hard-edge campaign of attack ads against governors and lawmakers.

The donor, Tom Steyer, a Democrat who founded one of the world’s most successful hedge funds, burst onto the national political scene during last year’s elections, when he spent $11 million to help elect Terry McAuliffe governor of Virginia and millions more intervening in a Democratic congressional primary in Massachusetts. Now he is rallying other deep-pocketed donors, seeking to build a war chest that would make his political organization, NextGen Climate Action, among the largest outside groups in the country, similar in scale to the conservative political network overseen by Charles and David Koch.

In early February, Mr. Steyer gathered two dozen of the country’s leading liberal donors and environmental philanthropists to his 1,800-acre ranch in Pescadero, Calif.—which raises prime grass-fed beef—to ask them to join his efforts. People involved in the discussions say Mr. Steyer is seeking to raise $50 million from other donors to match $50 million of his own.

What a swell guy. His heart’s in the right place. Who doesn’t love that? Hmm . . .

. . . A couple of potential problems here? For starters, it’s unclear how effective attack ads on politicians who don’t or won’t address climate change will be if, as we’ve already explained, the people watching those attack ads don’t get all that worked up about climate change anyway. You can’t throw money at apathy. Well, you can, and good luck, but there may not be a good return on the investment.

But this Steyer fellow can deal with his money issues on his own. A bigger issue is that Steyer gives climate skeptics and Republican politicians a bright new face to argue that global warming is merely a ginned-up concern of coastal elites who are out of touch with real, pressing problems. They’ve been successful at marginalizing Al Gore and Michael Bloomberg and various Hollywood celebrities as such already. And now once this summit of “the country’s leading liberal donors” meeting at an “1,800-acre ranch” gets out, the impression will deepen.

That’s the conundrum keeping action on climate change stuck in place: a reliance on elites to do the heavy lifting as the problem continues, which allows the problem to be painted as a frivolous concern of the elite.

If not this, then what, though? Well, the United States loves its goddamn markets, and it looks like this one will be left to the markets. Meaning, there won’t be action on climate change until it really is cheaper to avoid burning hydrocarbons than it is to burn them—and not because of some targeted government subsidy or whatever. Go forth, beloved markets!