One of my favorite sports is tilting at windmills. I know that USDA won’t pay much attention to any comments I might have about the reorganization (nor did the prior Admin). So I thought, if I’m going to be ignored, why not aim higher? This is the first of three posts on my comments on the DOE CWG report. The first post is “maybe climate folks could learn something from us”; the second is “ways to handle uncertainty” and the third “what about the wildfire section”?
It turns out that DOE produced a report by some climate scientists that looked at the climate modeling and impacts literature and stated that they wanted to open a discussion. Some say that the document is related to the EPA endangerment finding.. personally, I think that’s a legal question and will be resolved there. If you read about the report in the media, it’s a lot of “good guys” vs. “bad guys” talk. Scientists are supposed to disagree, and trying to maintain a line of “the right way to think or we’ll say bad things about you” hasn’t really worked.
But what neither side seems to be asking is “how can we move from debating the details of attribution, for example, into understanding the trade-offs of moving forward? Fundamentally, how can we expect the physical sciences of climate to answer the question of “what should we do”? Doing things, and not doing things, toward any end, requires trade-offs. Trade-offs that one discipline, or even a small set of subdisciplines, can’t describe, and don’t have the institutions set up to examine.
So I think both “sides” have it wrong in terms of discussing details of climate science instead of what we’re going to do about it. So I decided to take the report at face value, and first looked at the wildfire section.
From there, I noticed that the relationship of “climate science” and their arguments pro and con are very different from the way that say, wildfire scientists, or wildlife biologists are involved in policy in say, federal lands policy. Generally, managers and policy makers have questions, and then round up the relevant disciplines to answer the questions. With climate policy, it seems like the climate scientists have determined that it is a serious problem and then arrived at preferred answers. Chris Wright thinks it’s a problem, too, one of many, including energy access. So we all think it’s a problem, and then.. isn’t the question what to do about it? Which leads us to considering trade-offs, and the US has a model for considering trade-offs in analyses.
And we could also refocus climate science to be more user-centered. What if we asked ourselves “how accurate do climate projections have to be for my variable of interest in my specific location to make a difference in management choices?” And of course,once we had arrived at that, we could ask the climate scientists if their model results were accurate enough for those purposes. This view centers the information needs of specific decision-makers, not the climate science community. People have pointed out that the scenarios were originally designed for research purposes and then applied to policy. This is bad juju (we did the science without asking you and you must use it or you are not using the best science! ) in any field, but the stakes are especially high in climate world.
Opportunity to Reframe How Different Scientific and Engineering Disciplines Contribute to Policy.
In the policy sciences, we say that framing the issue is key to involving the right disciplines and stakeholders in developing the information needed for comparing approaches to solutions. It seems to me that all this discussion of “what climate science says” centers atmospheric and other physical sciences as the de facto arbiter of what “science” can contribute to public policy.
Instead, I would recommend that DOE (and perhaps more broadly; but DOE would be a first step), step way back from the current positions and debates and instead frame two
questions:
1) What is the best mix of energy sources to promote in the next 20 (or pick a time) years, considering:
a. Cost to consumer
b. Carbon
c. Other pollution
d. Environmental impacts
e. Impacts and costs of obtaining material and transmission
f. Social acceptability of placement of facilities and transmission
g. Ability to respond to disruptive events
h. National and other security
i. Workforce availability and training
j. What happens to materials afterward (recycle, storage)
k. Demand projections
l. Potential efficiency increases
m. Expected improvements in technologies
Many of these will change through time and maybe the analysis would have to be updated every five years. When I worked for the FS, this would have been much more useful to me (not the least of which would be to use in NEPA docs) than the National Climate Assessments.
The analysis should explicitly consider uncertainties, including climate model projections, economic uncertainties, and technology development and deployability uncertainty (the technology horserace). As a bystander, one of the most annoying things about this has been that some academics have arrived at the correct conclusion, in their eyes, without engaging explicitly with the experts on these trade-off questions.
It seems to me that a debate on the footprint of geothermal would be more easily resolved, and of greater utility, than a debate on different ways of projecting global average temperature in 2070. Having a NEPA like organizational framework for dealing with the alternatives and disagreements about various numbers and uncertainties seems more comprehensible to the rest of us, and is likely to lead to a less partisanized and more politically robust approach to decarbonization.
2) Since most agree that carbon is an international issue, and what other countries are doing, what should be the US’s unique role in energy leadership?
a. Natural gas to replace coal
b. Innovations for cheap, low carbon energy
c. ?
As the involved scientists, engineers and practitioners in all the relevant fields worked together to conduct this analysis, one question they might consider is “what questions can climate scientists answer that might influence our analysis?” and “what are the uncertainties around those answers?”
I expect that we might find that many of the contested topics in the climate science-including the ones in the CWG report-are only peripherally relevant to the questions as framed above. Any choice has trade-offs; and examining the trade-offs carefully is not the role of a particular branch of science. Such an effort is also likely to break down the current climate science battles that have already gone on too long, while the rest of us want to analyze the options and move on.