Curbing climate change was never going to be easy. The fundamental energy balance of a planet cannot be changed overnight; nor can a fossil-fuel-based economy that serves billions of people be replaced without furious political objections. But today the problem looks particularly hard.
None of this deprives the world of its technical ability to decarbonise a great deal of its economy; on that score things have never looked better. The cost of clean energy is tumbling, as the demand for it continues to grow.
The problem is politics. Many people do not believe that the strict “net zero” targets to which some governments have tied their climate policies are in their interest—or that they will bring benefits to anyone else. Some think they are being taken for chumps, paying good money to meet bad targets while businesses and people elsewhere are belching out carbon, chuckling as they do so. Seeing an ever-more-powerful China emitting more than Europe and America combined makes resentful Western voters seethe.
The scientific rationale for net zero is strong. An end to warming requires the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to stop increasing. That means either a world with no such emissions or one which takes as much greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere as it puts in (the “net” in net zero). The logic is inescapable. The political rationale is clear, too. Saying you will hit net zero by a certain date is a definite goal, easily articulated. Hard, ambitious targets have advantages: you never know for sure what can be done until you try.
However, reaching net zero in the nearish future would require emission cuts to be quick, deep—and painful. For countries which have not yet seen any decline in emissions—which, worldwide, is most of them—the steepest cuts would have to come very early. In many cases such scenarios are barely physically imaginable, let alone politically feasible.
If a target is so hard that it cannot win consent, then it needs to be changed. But how? For rich countries to abandon stringent net-zero targets outright would demoralise greens, energise climate nihilists and make sensible reforms harder. Better to find ways to ease them into the “more of a guideline” category. There will be resistance from those who believe that all problems can be solved by “more political will”, but as a famously iron-willed German once said, politics is the art of the possible.
Better to be Bismarck
Some politicians get it. Mark Carney, Canada’s prime minister and an economist, understands that, in many situations, the most efficient way to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions is to tax them. But many voters hate such taxes, so he has been quick to rescind the aspects of Canada’s carbon-pricing scheme that affect them directly.
Instead of charging for pollution, many governments have subsidised its avoidance. Some subsidies have borne fruit. Extra demand has driven the virtuous cycle of larger volumes and lower prices that have seen wind, solar and batteries become more available and cheaper. Costs are now so low that unstimulated demand will drive them even lower. That more or less guarantees a growing amount of decarbonisation come what may. Even post-Big-Beautiful-Bill America will see its emissions shrink, albeit more slowly than they could have.
Nonetheless subsidies still distort markets and reduce emissions less cheaply than a carbon price normally would. So it makes sense to charge for emissions when it is politically feasible (for example, when it does not affect voters directly). Governments should also scrap the many subsidies that harm the climate, such as those still applied to fossil fuels.
They should try harder to reduce the pain inflicted when decarbonisation involves lots of ordinary people. Do not bully them into buying heat pumps when there are too few technicians to install them. Make switching to an electric car easier by building charging infrastructure and letting in cheap imports from China. Apply the same pain-reducing logic to adaptation. Marine Le Pen, the leading French populist, struck a chord when she complained that France’s elite had air conditioning but its masses did not.
Voters everywhere prefer cleanliness to pollution and a future in which they can thrive to one that looks dangerous. Those are more potent rallying cries than an abstract target. Stories that make people feel they are participating in progress still play well. The idea of not being subject to swings in fossil-fuel prices is attractive, too. “The art of the possible” may sound flat. But a politics of new possibilities could put climate policy on a more sustainable footing, as well as offering hope. That is what those fighting climate change need to offer. ■