Teach nuance and pragmatism on climate change

An alternative to both doomerism and denialism in the classroom, as we get ready to welcome students back for the fall semester.

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This is a re-post (with permission) of an article I wrote for Profectus last fall. Profectus is a very interesting online publication from the Archbridge Institute, which describes itself as sitting at the “intersection of academic literature, public policy, civilizational progress, and human flourishing”.

As professors and teachers of any subject, it’s our responsibility to teach students rigorous habits of mind, to make them aware of un-rigorous and unhelpful mental pitfalls, and to provide them with knowledge and skills. If we’ve done our job right, students can translate the knowledge and skills they learn in our classrooms into productive careers, and hopefully also into making the world a better place. When it comes to climate change—an increasingly important subject, both to young people personally and to the world—I worry that we have some work to do to help our students in these areas.

Climate change discourse is full of false dichotomies. Some people say it’s no big deal. Others say it’s an existential threat to human existence. It’s probably neither.

Some people say capitalism and markets are to blame for our carbon emissions, and therefore for climate change. Others say capitalism and markets have been central to the history of global progress in human well-being and are essential to building climate solutions. Both are probably true.

Some people say climate change harms the world’s poor the most. Others say the world’s poor have the greatest need for cheap energy, which still largely comes from fossil fuels. Again, both are true.

We should be teaching our students how to spot false dichotomies and dichotomous thinking, and we should help them learn to dispel the false dichotomies above in our classrooms.

Climate change discourse often has a frustrating combination of catastrophic urgency and unpragmatic posturing—as if climate change is going to kill us all, but the solution is either creating or destroying art. When I taught environmental studies, I would sometimes ask my students: “Raise your hand if you think that the rate-limiting step in the energy transition is that there aren’t enough 20-year-olds holding signs.” Most of the students would laugh, and very few would raise their hands. But I worry that, in some classes and programs, we’re teaching our students to be sad and angry without teaching them enough concrete solutions.

I also worry that we don’t teach our students enough about how to navigate tradeoffs and hard policy choices. For example, it’s true that ambitious infrastructure projects in America’s past often had unintended negative environmental consequences, and they were designed and built highly inequitably. We designed modern regulation, permitting, and litigation processes partly to prevent these types of harms. But it’s also true that we need to build infrastructure much faster than we have recently if we want to meet both our emissions-reduction and climate adaptation goals, and slow permitting is one of the major reasons infrastructure is built so slowly today. Our future leaders—today’s students—will need to figure out how to navigate this tradeoff and others.

Our influencer culture celebrates the Greta Thunbergs and Al Gores of the world, who have no doubt made important contributions by raising awareness about climate change. But to actually solve the problem, we’re going to need a lot more people working on technological solutions like decarbonizing cement, steel, and aviation; improving energy efficiency in buildings, transportation, and computing; and making batteries and renewable power cheaper, more reliable, and more material efficient. We’re going to need a lot of people working in unglamorous blue-collar ‘building’ industries like mining rare-Earth metals and building power lines to expand the grid as we electrify transportation and heating and add new renewable electricity.

There might be no individual who has made greater contributions to decarbonizing the economy than Elon Musk, but you won’t see him speaking at major climate conferences anytime soon. You won’t see construction workers and miners either.

Young people are scared, sad, and angry about climate change. Some argue that the solution then is more climate-conscious therapy and mental health services. These services might help, if done right (or make things worse, if done wrong). But there are lots of rational reasons for young people to be optimistic about the future, especially in countries like the United States. There are groundbreaking solutions waiting to be discovered. There are well-paying clean technology and construction jobs waiting to be created, perhaps especially in the U.S. heartland. Teaching our students about these things might help with climate anxiety, too.

Encouraging Facts

Here are some encouraging facts about the world and our climate future that, in my experience teaching, many sustainability students don’t know:

Damage and death rates from natural disasters are falling, and they are falling fastest in lower-middle- and middle-income countries. Between the late 1980s and the mid-2010s, the global death rate fell by 6.5 times, and the global damage rate (compared to GDP) fell by 6 times. The reason is adaptation and development. As societies get richer and technology improves, our infrastructure gets better. Lower-middle and middle-income countries are adapting fastest (compared to where they were) because they are growing the fastest economically. Learning from experience with natural disasters further improves our infrastructure and institutions.

Climate impact projections reported in the media disproportionately come from unrealistically hot scenarios. The most widely used scenario in climate impacts research imagines a world that becomes four-to-five degrees Celsius warmer than pre-industrial times by 2100. Such a scenario could be catastrophic, but it turns out to be out of step with past trends, and it requires extreme and unrealistic assumptions about the future. More realistic scenarios project two-to-three degrees of warming, which is still a cause for concern, but less likely to be catastrophic.

Greenhouse gas emissions have been falling in developed countries for over a decade, and they may be at or near a global peak. Emissions in developed countries have been falling since the mid-2000s—to levels not seen since the 1980s—even as our populations, economies, and energy demands have grown. In fact, our land footprints in developed countries have also shrunk over this timeframe, despite producing and consuming more food—a sign that economic development may be starting to decouple from human impacts on biodiversity, in addition to climate. Several studies now project that global greenhouse gas emissions are at or near their peak and will start falling this decade.

Renewable power, electric vehicles, and batteries are being deployed at an exponential rate and are already cost competitive. Progress in improving and deploying clean technologies continues to vastly outperform the expectations of most major forecasters. This makes both the economics and the politics of clean tech better. For example, how many of our students know that the U.S. produces more electricity from renewable sources now than it does from coal? Or that Texas is the U.S. state that produces the most renewable electricity? Or that there have been over 100 bipartisan state-level decarbonization bills, and that one of the largest caucuses in the U.S. House of Representatives is the Conservative Climate Caucus?

The energy efficiency of the world economy doubled in the past 50 years, and this trend is likely to continue. Global primary energy use per dollar of global real GDP declined by about half from 1965 to 2015. This trend is likely to continue throughout the rest of this century.

You can save large amounts of money by making your home more energy and carbon efficient. It’s not just big businesses that can gain from clean technologies and waste reduction. You can, too. The average American can save 20 percent or more on their utility bills by upgrading insulation, lighting, and heating systems. Switching home heating to an electric heat pump and installing rooftop solar can also save most Americans money and reduce household emissions.

The world is getting better, and most people fail to notice this. Throughout the lifetime of anyone alive today, global poverty has fallen, literacy and education have increased, the burden of preventable disease has fallen, gender equality has improved, and the fraction of people living in a democracy has increased, along with many other improvements. If you live in a developed country, chances are your exposure to pollution is decreasing, too.

Yet, most people—especially those in rich countries—wrongly think that the world is getting worse. People in rich countries are also much more pessimistic about the future than people in poor countries, on average. How can this be?

Negative media bias (especially online) and slower per-capita economic growth probably contribute. But I suspect privilege and status competition among a saturated chattering class play a role too. (See Musa al-Gharbi’s excellent new book for more on this.) Members of the chattering class clamor for limited prestige and attention by offering grand narratives in which the world is in peril and they are the hero—there is a ‘new climate war’ and literature professors can save us from it by reframing words. Average citizens of rich countries (especially the well-off ones) fall for apocalyptic narratives and despotic calls for radical change (to their societies that are the safest and most prosperous in world history), on both sides of the political spectrum, because, ironically, most of them have never lived through the turmoil of actual despotic radical change.

Marketable Skills

In addition to teaching our students these important facts about the world (and others), let’s also make sure we’re teaching them the skills they need to thrive in the emerging clean economy. Here are some (non-exhaustive) skills that climate solutions increasingly demand:

Skilled trades and manufacturing. When asked to picture a climate hero, do you picture an H-VAC (heating and cooling) specialist, a construction worker, a power-line installation or maintenance specialist, or a car manufacturer? Well, you should. The energy transition will require an enormous amount of building and retrofitting of power grids, buildings, homes, and cars, to make them more energy efficient, cleanly powered, and resilient to changing climate and weather patterns. It will require a substantial amount of mining to keep up with material demands. This comes on top of an already-severe shortage of skilled tradespeople in the U.S. and a crisis of meaning and life outcomes among men and boys (who make up the majority of tradespeople).

Engineering. There is a debate among climate researchers about whether or not we already have good enough technology to solve the climate problem. Regardless of who is right, further technological improvements in key areas will undoubtedly improve the economics and political will—and therefore the speed—behind the energy transition. What’s more, whichever country develops key clean technologies first will get to export them to everyone else at a huge profit. This turns the tragedy of the commons on its head—into a race to the top. Batteries, renewable and nuclear energy, carbon capture and storage, mining, clean transportation, computing, and—perhaps most underrated of all—efficiency, are several growing clean-technology areas that will create a high demand for engineers.

Computing and data science. How can we harness the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution to speed up transitions to clean technology? How can we identify the most promising areas for clean technology development and deployment? Which communities have the greatest need for, and potential to support, new jobs and benefits of the clean economy? These are a few among many questions that computer and data scientists will need to answer. These skills will be in demand in all sectors (government, business, non-profits, etc.).

Entrepreneurship. The clean tech businesses of the future won’t build themselves. We will need young entrepreneurs who are literate in business, engineering, policy, and environmental science to build the companies that will scale climate solutions at the necessary pace. They won’t do that if we teach them that capitalism is the root of all evil. Let’s instead ask our students: who among you is going to build the next climate unicorn?

Law and policy analysis. Both the government and the private sector will need smart analysts who can keep up with rapidly changing environmental and clean-tech policy landscapes at local, state, national, and international levels. Most of our students know about the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act. But do they know about 45Q (the federal incentive program for carbon capture)? Do they know about NEPA (the National Environmental Policy Act, which creates key obstacles to permitting clean energy projects)? Do they know about the Production Tax Credit and the Investment Tax Credit for renewable energy projects? Those are just U.S. federal examples. The climate and clean-tech law and policy marketplaces are complex, and students who understand them will be in demand.

Climate change is a serious challenge that deserves our attention. It’s great that our young people are so engaged, increasingly across party lines. With the right skills and can-do, optimistic mindsets, America’s young people can lead global solutions, as they so often have in the past, and they can lead flourishing lives while doing so. As their teachers and professors, let’s make sure we’re setting them up for success.