It’s hard to keep track of the problems confronting Americans these days. But, just in case a reminder is needed, climate change is still a thing. Casual observers may have noted that US climate policy has been…underwhelming, see-sawing between ‘Build Back Better’ aspirations and climate denialism. Now climate policy wunderkind Varun Sivaram has called for a rethink on US climate (foreign) policy.
Noting the overall failure of US climate policy, Sivaram calls for ‘climate realism’. Claiming that “the very fact that climate has no political staying power is an indictment of the policy approach presented to U.S. voters” (more on this is a minute), Sivaram argues for a two-step change in approach. The first is to disabuse ourselves of four fallacies
- Climate goals are achievable. Sivaram says they aren’t and we should just accept 3°C or more this century.
- Reducing US carbon emissions matters. Sivaram says they don’t because most emissions going forward will come from the developing world.
- Climate poses manageable risk. Here Sivaram argues that the tail risks are both catastrophic and plausible. It’s worth noting that under a 3°C scenario, these aren’t just ‘tail risks,’ so he’s underselling the fallaciousness of this fallacy
- Clean energy transition is necessarily win-win. US is a major oil and gas producer, so clean transition will have some economic pain.
The second step, according to Sivarum, is to adopt the three pillars of climate realism:
- Prepare for warming of at least 3°C—mass migration, increasingly grisly natural disasters, greater competition for resources and military position. In sum, a greater emphasis on resilience and adaptation over mitigation.
- Invest in globally competitive clean energy technologies: Solid state batteries, advanced nuclear, next generation geothermal.
- Lead international efforts to avert truly catastrophic climate change. Elevate effort to avoid the worst, civilization-endangering impacts of climate change to a top national security priority. Specifically geoengineering—hello Promethean gap!
Ok that’s a lot to unpack. To start, there is no reason to believe that the failure of climate as a political project in the US is down to poor policy choice as Sivarum suggests. This matters because Sivaram claims that climate realism can work because it will implement policies with bipartisan support. But if the problem is politics not policy, then there will not be much bipartisan support to be had. That is, Sivarum elides the problem. It categorically cannot be the case that half the political establishment rejecting the idea that there is even a problem is the product of poor policy planning or execution. Policy isn’t the debate. The US hasn’t gotten past the first principles—political—stage of the discussion.
Take as a contrast Finland,* which had a monumental swing in political orientation between its last government (elected in 2019, led by the Social Democrats under Sanna Marin in coalition with the Green Party) and the current government elected in 2023, which is led by the center-right National Coalition in coalition with the populist-right Finns Party. That is about as large a political swing as is possible in Finland. And while the current government has changed some of the climate policies, the climate politics have remained largely settled in large part because the general public and the private sector in Finland accepts the need for and importance of climate action. So, right off the bat, Sivarum misapprehends the problem in the United States. That means that pillars 1 and 3 of his climate realism are not so realistic after all and will suffer the same oscillations as the rest of American climate policy (see for example the removal of climate change from the Annual Threat Assessment)
Pillar 2 might hang on, but only where such technologies have economic and political support outside the realm of climate and not as a product of climate policy. While there might be some spillover effects into climate, they will be incidental because the political and economic ecosystem won’t exist to apply the technologies at scale. As STS scholars have long argued, technology doesn’t just manifest; it is embedded in social, political, and economic systems that give it form and meaning. Hoping technologies developed for other purposes might be used to address climate change requires a political and social context where that use can be imagined.
By essentially giving up on mitigation, Sivarum pretends to be jettisoning ‘fallacies.’ But the thinking here has so many problems it is hard to detail them all. As Katharine Hayhoe has noted, we cannot adapt our way out of the climate crisis. Sivarum dramatically underappreciates the extent of the changes a 3°C or more scenario would entail. How would the international system deal with tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of refugees when domestic political systems are stretched to the breaking point by changes in agricultural productivity, weather patterns, storm intensity, freshwater availability, and so on? Would capitalism survive, and if not how would humans across the globe order their economic systems? Would the nation-state itself survive? By understating the consequences of abandoning mitigation, Sivarum isn’t embracing realism but rather fantasy.
While Sivarum is undoubtedly correct that the majority of carbon emissions going forward will be from developing countries, that doesn’t make US climate mitigation action meaningless. Even setting aside the moral obligation the US has as the largest historical emitter of carbon, abandoning mitigation is unrealistic for a range of reasons.
- US will have to pay for mitigation eventually. The longer we wait, the more we have to pay as we mitigate and adapt in the teeth of increasingly vicious climate change.
- Active mitigation policy by the US will create political space for subnational actors in the developing world that want to push mitigation measures in their own countries. We have seen this dynamic play out in the US during the first Trump administration when subnational actors in the US looked to Europe for inspiration and support to pursue mitigation on the subnational level.
- By pursuing ambitious mitigation the US can help shape the development and deployment of the advanced energy technologies of which Sivarum is enamored. Technology is ideas about form, function, and use of the material world. Countries will be far more willing to accept those ideas from a United States that has been in the fight against climate change than one that has abdicated its responsibility.
Readers at this point might ask if I have something better to offer. Honestly, no. I don’t know how to address the first principles problem of US climate politics. But hiding from that under the guise of ‘realism’ is anything but. And, perhaps more perniciously, Sivarum’s ‘realism’ offers to absolve Americans of our responsibility: Why bother to try to alter the politics around climate change if it isn’t ‘realistic’? Just give up, accept a world ‘full of horrors’ and continue as you were. International relations has and will continue to struggle to confront climate change as an analytical subject, but Sivarum’s surreal climate realism is surely not what we are missing.
*My time in Finland was made possible by Fulbright Iceland, Fulbright Finland Foundation, and the Fulbright/NSF Arctic Security Award.
Thank you for pointing out that at least someone in the United States is presenting reasonable policies in the face of climate change. Until now we’ve been presented with climate change denial from those who would allow CO2 emissions to continue unfettered by regulation, or hysteria from those on the left who present climate change as, quite literally, the end of the world. This hysteria is entirely unhelpful and is traumatizing for our young people with “end of the world” cult-like rhetoric similar to what religious fanatics have promoted for thousands of years. What this feverish outrage is doing to our youth is quite detrimental to our future leaders, as it impacts mental health across broad swaths of society. Varun Sivaram’s comments are prescient as we move forward and I would add that the climate alarmists are virtually ignoring a far worse threat humanity: the proliferation of plastic waste and associated chemicals on every inch of planet earth.
While climate alarmists worry about a non-toxic gas, they ignore the fact that over 13,000 chemicals in plastics have been identified, and more than 3,200 of these chemicals are known to be substances of concern. One of the most alarming aspects of the estimated 360 million tons of plastic waste generated annually comes from a new study published in Natural Medicine, which estimates the average human brain may hold the equivalent of a plastic spoon’s worth of microplastics. Microplastics are tiny plastic particles, less than 5 millimeters in size, that enter the environment from the breakdown of plastic waste and they are now completely unavoidable, having been found in the land, sea and air, across the food chain and throughout the human body.
At the same time, Varun Sivaram’s work at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) on the doctrine of “climate realism” is needed now more than ever as we contend with a United States government that is hostile to any and all reasonable approaches to climate change. A clear example of the consequences of misguided policies that are an outgrowth of those who promote massive public spending to prevent, rather than mitigate, climate change, is the fact that these policies and subsidies catapulted Elon Musk into being the wealthiest person on earth, while doing almost nothing to address the issue. Mitigation is something that can and will save lives, while improving the quality of life of those most impacted. Unfortunately, as with other issues we face, those most severely effected are often minority communities and marginalized groups which already contend with undue hardships.
While I disagree with Sivaram’s promotion of geoengineering as a solution, along with others who promote nuclear energy, which has never been and never will be economically viable as an energy source, it is imperative that we address building standards, hazard zones and embrace worthwhile projects. This includes community projects, like planting millions of trees in urban neighborhoods. Compared to the hundreds of billions of dollars spent subsidizing companies like Tesla, these projects generate visible improvements while generating employment in those communities most impacted by climate change.