Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

ARTICLE: "Middle Stance Emerges In Debate Over Climate: Scientists Espouse Measured Response," by Andrew W. Revkin, New York Times, 1 January 2007, p. A16.

Great opening sequence:

Amid the shouting lately about whether global warming is a human-caused catastrophe or a hoax, some usually staid climate scientists are speaking up.

The discourse over the issue has been feverish since Hurrican Kattrina. Seizing the moment, many environmental campaigners, former Vice President Al Gore and some scientists have portrayed the growing human influence on the climate as an unfolding disaster that is already measurably strengthening hurricanes, spreading diseases and amplifying recent droughts and deluges.

Conservative politicians and a few scientists, many with ties to energy companies, have variously countered that human-driven warming is inconsequential, unproved or a manufactured crisis.

A third stance is now emerging, espoused by many experts who challenge both poles of the debate.

They agree that accumulating carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping smokestack and tailpipe gases probably pose a momentous environmental challenge, but say the appropriate response is more akin to buying fire insurance and new wiring in an old, irreplaceable house (the home planet) than to fighting a fire already raging...

Many in this camp seek a policy of reducing vulnerability to all climate extremes while building public support for a sustained shift to non-polluting energy sources.

Make that last sentence "least polluting" or "less polluting" and you've got me sold, because then you're just stating the obvious trend of the past half millennium--that of humanity moving progressively "down" the hydrocarbon chain (wood to coal to oil to gas to ...). This was our basic operating concept when Bradd Hayes and I put together the "economic security exercise" on environmental challenges in Asia with Cantor Fitzgerald back in the spring of 2001, which set the stage for our last NewRuleSets.Project conference atop World Trade Center 1 in June of that year.

Our operating premises were: 1) there's no turning back the enlargement of the global economy (the rising New Core); 2) that New Core's rising energy consumption would shape global foreign direct investment for decades (our first two workshops on energy and FDI); 3) that growth would send both regional pollution (the sort we've basically conquered) and global pollution (the CO2) jumping; 4) following our cap-and-trade schemes on regional pollution, Asia would logically surmount its problems (like all developed states before it), but in that growth trajectory, new opportunities would arise for solution sets to deal with global pollution problems, with global warming (the driver of the game) providing the impetus; 5) and that solution set would logically lie somewhere between the extreme positions of panic and denial (already clearly in view by 2001).

We had a great workshop, which, quite frankly, I never wrote the final report on, because just as I started briefing the results, 9/11 intervened and killed the project for all practical purposes. We had the head of the international UN climate change group, execs from major energy firms, and senior researchers from big environmental groups.

We played a game that predates Bjorn Lomborg's "Copenhagen Consensus" effort, basically using "Survivor" to vote off environmental problems in order of proportional plausibility of response-versus-apparent gain. Like Lomborg's current work, global climate change came in last place, with the winning spot going to clean water, followed by marine habitat, then land loss from population growth, then deforestation and diversity loss, and then acid rain/global climate change (there were two ties).

What was interesting about the ranking?

The ones that came out on top were the ones most currently (and in the near-term future) affecting the New Core (especially India and China).

What that told me was that the New Core would likely set the new rules on this subject, and that the serious roadblock in that emergence of--and the Old Core's cooperation with, and encouragement of--a suitable global rule set would be the wildly divergent discussion here on the subject: a debate of extreme positions.

Once the middle ground began to emerge, I believed serious cooperation with the New Core would be possible. I see that middle ground finally emerging, and it's timing couldn't be better, so long as generational shifts in leadership continue apace in both the West and the New Core East.

To me, then, this is very positive news. The faster we break down East-West mistrust, the faster the appropriate solution sets emerge on the environment.

So when I argue for Sino-American alliance, I argue not just in terms of preventing the loss of lives on our side in this Long War, but the preservation and betterment of life long-term. Put the U.S. and China together and you have the ultimate head-and-body superpower, capable of tackling the world's biggest problems in the context of shared vulnerabilities and desires (not the same values, mind you). Put them at odds because that's the only world your upbringing allows you to imagine, and watch the opportunities for positive global change evaporate in the same stupid stew that we were subjected to by the European empires over the past 500-plus years.