Global warming, local benefits

The international dimension of climate change is what makes it so hard to solve

Since the 2008 presidential campaign and the 2009 UN climate summit in Copenhagen, I feel like there’s been significant unlearning of the fact that addressing climate change involves a complicated global coordination problem.

This problem is extremely difficult to solve, and as a result, it basically hasn’t been.

The response of much of the climate advocacy community, its associated lobbying apparatus, and much of what passes for climate journalism has been to ignore the global coordination aspect of the problem and bluster ahead. This leads to bad judgment about specific issues, to a tendency to set incorrect priorities, and also to a lot of confusion.

Last week, I was talking to someone who doesn’t follow policy closely, who voted for Biden in 2020 but isn’t sure about 2024. She told me her top issue is climate change, which she described in fairly apocalyptic terms. I told her that Biden had enacted historic climate legislation and that Democrats had made this their top priority. She said if they’d really solved climate change, she would surely have heard about it. At which point I tried (and failed) to convince her that climate worst-case scenarios were, in fact, now off the table, while also conceding that Biden’s climate actions had only a modest impact on global average temperature projections. But that’s not because the IRA energy provisions aren’t a big deal. It’s because the United States has a modest (and falling) share of global emissions.