Climate summit a success? State experts upbeat
Two days after the end of the United Nations climate conference in Scotland, with a new global agreement in hand and thousands of pledges to cut greenhouse gas emissions by governments, corporations and big institutions such as Yale, you’d have to figure the people who played a key role would suffer a bit of a comedown.
Let’s say they’re influential professors at Yale, named Daniel Esty and Anthony Leiserowitz. They’ve returned to the real world from a gathering of 40,000 people who, for all their disagreements, flew to Glasgow (yeah, burning a lot of fuel) to find a way out of the environmental meltdown that will happen in a few decades if we don’t take dramatic action.
They realize the 26th U.N. Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) didn’t go far enough, with China not even present and plenty of fossil-fuel-extracting forces bending the conversation. And, worse, they’re returning to a world of such doubt and cynicism, such inaction, that even deep-blue Connecticut couldn’t muster a legislative vote in 2021, let alone a victory, on joining a modest, multistate effort to reduce transportation emissions.
And as if on cue, the governor said Tuesday he won’t bring the climate bill back in 2022. That could raise the price of gasoline by — gasp — as much as 10 cents a gallon! Can’t have that!
Well, I spoke to those two eminent profs from the Yale School of the Environment, both of whom presented their ideas in Glasgow. And I was way wrong. It’s far from a comedown even though progress seems too slow.
They’re back in Connecticut energized and optimistic that the humans of Planet Earth just might avert the disaster that would come from a 2-degree Celsius rise in temperatures from preindustrial levels.
Why? Both Leiserowitz and Esty, coming at climate change from different angles, described to me a sea change in attitudes, technology, finance and on-the-ground corporate and government practices such as the rush to all-electric vehicles. It’s a change they have not seen in decades.
We’re far, far from breathing free, they both said. Still, here’s the key: People are ahead of governments on climate change, and that’s good news. Glasgow might have even been a tipping point if we want to rally show some optimism.
“While the government conversation was slow and plodding and fraught with challenges of coming to consensus, there was a whole lot of energy and enthusiasm in these side events,” Esty said to me Monday. “So significantly, that I think the main event receded somewhat in importance. And what might have been seen as the sideshow not that long ago, has, has taken center stage as really where the energy is, and where the signals of transformative change emerging, can be found.”
Leiserowitz used secret weapon to gain an upbeat view. “My expectations were actually quite low,” he told me. “I was very concerned that it was going to be a complete disaster like the 2009 COP in Copenhagen turned out to be, and I was actually quite pleasI
antly surprised.”
He added, “You have to retain some level of optimism to get up in the morning on this issue. And the good news is there is plenty of phenomenal work being done by people all over the world.”
New attitudes, new rules
The key to a turnaround is a lot of forces happening at once: Political will for climate action, investment decisions that reward lowemission results and punish polluters — something Esty talks about a lot — and the cost of clean electricity generation finally coming down.
Esty, Hillhouse professor of law and environment, talks about “a new framework” of rules that force polluters to pay for the true environmental effects, the hidden costs, of their activities. That starts with requiring extensive reporting by companies on how they’re doing when it comes to environmental, social and governance progress — the subject of his recent book, “Values at Work: Sustainable Investing and ESG Reporting,” co-edited with Todd Cort of the Yale School of Management.
“There's a lot of harm being caused that’s imposing real costs on all of us,” said Esty, who who heads the Yale Center
for Environmental Law and Policy and, you might recall, was commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection under former Gov. Dannel P. Malloy. “It’s just that it’s hidden. And as a result, it’s harder to get people’s minds around how to respond and the willingness to pay for that response.”
He added, “That means it should no longer be the case that if you’re running a factory, you can send smoke up a smokestack, or effluent out of pipe into the nearby river or, you know, greenhouse gases into the atmosphere without paying for them.”
That’s easy enough to say but harder to design in a way that works across national borders. And it’s damn near impossible to enforce — especially in the countries battling the idiocy of climate change denial, which, Leiserowitz said, is pretty much limited to the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia.
Yale had about 20 faculty and students at the conference and UConn almost that many. Esty and Leiserowitz, while holding on to their well honed skepticism, see changing attitudes — which is what Leiserowitz studies, as founder and Director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. He presented findings that are sobering — 44 percent of survey respondents in 31 countries know little or nothing about climate change — but hopeful.
‘Totally changing the ballgame’
As soon as Thursday, Leiserowitz’s program will present a survey of American attitudes that shows more people accepting hard answers, even in the land of Trumpism.
“What we’re seeing finally is the slow building, and it’s late, the slow building of what we call public and political will for climate action. We are not lacking for a supply of solutions. We have all the solutions we need right now. We don’t need to invent cold fusion to solve climate change,” Leiserowitz said.
figured we were pretty much doomed, as I see even self-described liberals unwilling to turn down the air conditioning a notch in their 4,000-square-foot houses. But, who’d have thunk it, advancements such as electric grid-scale battery storage and practices such as reforestation are bubbling up.
And the cost of clean energy is dropping below the cost of coal.
“That’s totally changing the ballgame,” Leiserowitz said. “We’re in the middle of this historic transition from basically continuing to dig stuff out of the ground and set it on fire ... to a 21st century energy system which is harnessing the energy that’s blowing around us all the time. It’s the sun, it’s the wind, it’s the tides, it’s the heat beneath our feet.”
But he said, “the huge challenge of this century is, will we make that transition fast enough to avoid blowing through the 2-degree limit?”
Their answer is maybe. I can’t help thinking Connecticut’s failure to join the multistate climate effort is a bad sign for America’s ability to stay under the 2-degree jump. Leiserowitz and Esty both said no, that’s just one example, there’s a lot underway.
I’m not convinced, but I’m glad these guys have more optimism than I do. Esty reported on Glasgow Tuesday night to members of his church, the 1st Congregational in Cheshire, along with an interfaith coalition. He’s enthused by the grassroots energy, though that group is hardly the ones who need convincing.
“I think you're you've got people who are beginning to .... understand that they are not going to have to give up on the modern life that they know and like, in order to achieve deep decarbonization and movement towards a clean energy future.”
It might even pay economic rewards, Esty mused.
We’ll see progress if that message reaches the Republicans who will hear none of it or the Democrats so afraid to act that they might as well be Republicans.
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