{"id":817666,"date":"2026-07-22T02:31:27","date_gmt":"2026-07-22T02:31:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/817666\/"},"modified":"2026-07-22T02:31:27","modified_gmt":"2026-07-22T02:31:27","slug":"the-lefts-climate-denial-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/817666\/","title":{"rendered":"The left\u2019s climate denial problem"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The Obama administration\u2019s cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline was hailed as a big win for environmentalists, even as the benefits to the environment remain unclear to this day. (Photo by Tom Pennington\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n

The Argument is thrilled to announce that John Thomason is joining our growing editorial team as our senior editor.<\/p>\n

John comes to us from Grist, the leading independent climate and environmental magazine, where he spent more than five years as the features editor on a team that won a 2023 National Magazine Award for general excellence. There, he commissioned long-form enterprise stories and argument-driven analysis, led much of the publication\u2019s news coverage, and edited features recognized by a Sidney Award, a Murrow Award, and inclusion in The Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology, among other honors. Before joining Grist, he ran the fact-checking desk at The Intercept.<\/p>\n

At The Argument, John will commission and edit essays, reported features, and cultural commentary; guide writers in sharpening their arguments; and write a regular column of his own. He will help set our editorial priorities, expand our contributor network, and mentor our junior staff and fellows, carrying forward the standard that defines us: sharp, rigorous arguments that confront the illiberal drift in our politics.<\/p>\n

To support The Argument\u2019s mission of revitalizing liberalism through public, rigorous debate, please consider becoming a paying subscriber. It\u2019s how we bring on talented new writers, commission original polling, and produce fantastic audio and video content.<\/p>\n

Join us. We\u2019re Libbing Out.<\/p>\n

– Jerusalem Demsas, editor-in-chief<\/p>\n

Climate policy is trade-offs all the way down. That\u2019s because we\u2019re trying to balance the harms of global warming with the benefits of modern energy and industry. If the only thing we wanted to do was eliminate carbon emissions, we would find a giant \u201coff\u201d button for the global economy and press it as fast as possible.<\/p>\n

The closest we\u2019ve come to realizing this hypothetical was in the spring of 2020. Daily global emissions plummeted by more than 15%<\/a>, compared with average 2019 levels, as the nascent COVID-19 pandemic shut down large swaths of commerce, travel, and education. Ultimately, nobody thought this trade-off \u2014 which involved unemployment, learning loss, and delayed or forgone health care \u2014 was worth the dip in pollution, so nobody has seriously proposed hitting the \u201coff\u201d switch again.<\/p>\n

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What the COVID experience revealed is that, whether environmentalists admit it or not, every climate policy implicitly involves what\u2019s called a cost-benefit analysis \u2014 an effort to tally up all the gains and losses of a potential policy and figure out which sum is larger.<\/p>\n

Cost-benefit analysis gets a bad rap among progressives because the Reagan administration made a big show of mandating the procedure<\/a> for major new regulatory actions. But that doesn\u2019t mean cost-benefit analysis is necessarily a right-wing framework; it\u2019s all about how you use it. One could just as easily use the method as a check on the deregulatory zeal of a conservative administration.<\/p>\n

The principles of cost-benefit analysis are useful for those of us who are climate-concerned because they force us to ask, as a very first step: Are our actions likely to reduce carbon emissions, relative to the counterfactual?<\/p>\n

As obvious as that sounds, this interrogation happens less often than you might think.<\/p>\n

Consider Obama\u2019s cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline, which environmentalists heralded as one of the defining climate wins<\/a> of the 2010s. This is despite the fact that Obama\u2019s own State Department, headed by noted climate hawk John Kerry, found that killing the pipeline would not<\/a> lead to a reduction<\/a> in global carbon emissions. That\u2019s because the Canadian tar sands oil in question would still reach the global market by rail. (In fact, emissions associated with transporting the oil might well increase in this scenario, as would the risk of spills given the very real possibility of train derailments.)<\/p>\n

While subsequent academic research<\/a> has challenged the State Department\u2019s claim \u2014 it projects some global demand destruction due to higher prices commanded by oil without the pipeline \u2014 even these researchers admit that there is no way to know if blocking the pipeline reduced global emissions. Compare that unknown (at best) emissions benefit to the millions and millions of philanthropic dollars expended \u2014 not to mention the countless hours devoted by smart, committed activists \u2014 on the campaign to block Keystone.<\/p>\n

Even actions that do clearly reduce emissions can benefit from the context of a cost-benefit analysis. One of the primary policies that U.S. states have used to decarbonize electricity generation is so-called renewable portfolio standards<\/a>, or RPS. These standards require that a certain portion of states\u2019 energy needs be met with renewable resources like wind and solar \u2014 in other words, that emissions-intensive forms of energy are directly substituted with carbon-free alternatives.<\/p>\n

The good news is that the most comprehensive academic research<\/a> on RPS found that the policies worked: States that instituted the standards saw an 11% to 24% drop in emissions after seven years and a 25% to 41% drop after 12.<\/p>\n

But to figure out whether this was worth the cost, you have to first do some other math to figure out how costly those carbon emissions actually are. And that\u2019s the really hard part.<\/p>\n

Because costs and benefits come in many different forms \u2014 when it comes to climate change, the costs alone might involve lives lost, labor forgone, damaged infrastructure, ecosystem destruction, and much more \u2014 the standard approach is to convert everything into dollar costs that can be measured against each other. Beginning during the Obama administration, all of these harms got tallied together into one big number called the social cost of carbon (SCC).<\/p>\n

A larger SCC will counsel larger and more dramatic interventions, so a lot rides on just how big you think the costs of climate change are.<\/p>\n

Obama set this number at $43 per ton<\/a>, and when Donald Trump took office, his administration dropped the number to under $10. Biden then proposed bumping the figure up to nearly $200. (Last year, Trump ditched the metric entirely<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Think about the multiples involved here. The Biden administration\u2019s claim was that the first Trump administration was underestimating the harms of climate change by a factor of at least 20, and it planned to make changes across federal policy to account for that.<\/p>\n

Suppose the Environmental Protection Agency was considering a regulation that would cost businesses and consumers $1 billion but prevent 10 million tons of carbon emissions \u2014 the equivalent of well over 1 million U.S. homes\u2019 annual energy use<\/a>. Under the first Trump administration, the rule would produce at most only $100 million in climate benefits and therefore fail the cost-benefit test. Under the Obama-era estimate, it would produce $430 million in climate benefits but still fail.<\/p>\n

Under the Biden administration, however, it would produce $1.9 billion in benefits and would therefore be justified.<\/p>\n

Now we can look back at the apparently successful renewable portfolio standards \u2014 the state-level rules that led to big drops in emissions \u2014 and see how they fared under these frameworks. The cost per ton of emissions avoided was $86 to $211, which exceeds the Obama administration\u2019s SCC (and perhaps even Biden\u2019s) and is much higher than abatement costs of other policies proven to reduce power sector emissions, like the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative<\/a>, a carbon pricing framework that many Northeast and mid-Atlantic states participate in.<\/p>\n

This suggests that, at worst, RPS policies may have caused more harm than they produced in climate benefits. And, at best, they were probably a worse use of resources than alternatives like cap and trade.<\/p>\n

Climate advocates sometimes chafe at this sort of analysis when it cautions against their side\u2019s policy aims, but they implicitly buy into it all the time. For instance, Greenpeace called<\/a> the Green New Deal a \u201cbargain\u201d because of the estimated $500 billion in annual climate damages the organization suggested the policy would prevent. Climate Power published an entire report<\/a> arguing that climate change \u201ccould cost the U.S. economy $14.5 trillion and result in a loss of 900,000 jobs annually by 2070.\u201d And it\u2019s a staple<\/a> of climate<\/a> journalism<\/a> to explain new projections of the economic cost of climate change.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re going to sound the alarm about a future decline in GDP, you can\u2019t justify ignoring the way the very remedies you\u2019re proposing entail GDP losses in the present. But this is standard in environmentalist discourse.<\/p>\n

John Kerry\u2019s State Department estimated that completing Keystone XL would contribute $3.4 billion to the U.S. GDP<\/a>. That doesn\u2019t necessarily mean it was worth it, but it is a fact that is worth considering in the \u201ccosts\u201d column \u2014 and comparing to the campaign\u2019s negligible and uncertain benefits.<\/p>\n

Luckily, there are plenty of ways to reduce emissions that also happen to be economically efficient \u2014 where it\u2019s the cost side of the ledger that is negligible, rather than the benefits. In fact, there are so many options here that you can really let your personal passions guide your final choice.<\/p>\n

Mad about bipartisan Sinophobia and distressed about saber-rattling toward China? You could campaign to legalize imports of the world\u2019s cheapest electric cars<\/a>. Are you an urbanist who hates personal car ownership? Why not ask your city council to welcome all-electric Waymos<\/a>?<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re disgusted with the fossil fuel industry, you could electrify your home<\/a>. If you agree with Bill McKibben that it\u2019s time for environmentalists to get out of the way of new clean energy projects<\/a>, you could call your representatives and ask them to support federal permitting reform.<\/p>\n

But while it\u2019s true that many of these avenues could reduce emissions while contributing to overall economic growth, it\u2019s not quite true to say that they don\u2019t have costs. Cheap electric cars will disadvantage U.S.-based automakers. Waymos will put taxi and Uber drivers out of work and cut into the business of car dealerships. And permitting reform will erode the veto power of U.S. landowners.<\/p>\n

I personally think these are costs worth bearing for the future benefit of all of humanity. An open question, however, is whether or not liberals think any interest groups are worth disadvantaging in pursuit of climate victories that are real rather than symbolic.<\/p>\n

Two fundamental facts about climate change counsel against despair. The first is that the problem is global in the deepest sense: The climate does not care where emissions come from. One ton of atmospheric carbon emitted in Alberta has the same effect as a ton emitted in Jakarta, which has the same effect as a ton emitted in Dubai.<\/p>\n

As a large, rich country that uses a lot of energy, U.S. emissions matter a great deal \u2014 but they won\u2019t come even close to being the primary determinant of the world\u2019s climate trajectory from this point on. (And on the global front, recent years have brought quite a bit of hope as renewable energy begins to crowd out fossil fuels<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

The second relevant fact is that the problem is fundamentally incremental. What matters for global warming is the total volume of carbon that accumulates in the atmosphere. More carbon is worse, and less is better.<\/p>\n

The same logic applies to global average temperature: Just as 2 degrees Celsius of warming is \u201cbetter\u201d than 2.1 degrees, 2.1 is better than 2.5, and 2.5 is better than 3. And because the impacts of climate change don\u2019t scale linearly with warming, each tenth or hundredth or thousandth of a degree avoided is a big, big win.<\/p>\n

There are no thresholds we need to avoid. We just need to eliminate as many emissions as possible.<\/p>\n

Everyone who\u2019s spent any amount of time on the issue knows these facts, but following their implications entails a dramatically different approach to climate activism than what dominates today. Long-shot efforts at systemic change \u2014 be it to abolish the fossil fuel industry or capitalism itself \u2014 do not present a clear path to reducing emissions. By far the most useful thing you can do as a climate-concerned citizen is push for the most efficient emissions reductions possible in whatever sphere you can influence.<\/p>\n

But when it comes to climate change, \u201cmost efficient\u201d is a tall order. So don\u2019t get too hung up on every single number in the cost-benefit ledger. If you are reasonably confident that 1) emissions will actually go down and 2) the social costs are negligible, then get to work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Obama administration\u2019s cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline was hailed as a big win for environmentalists, even…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":817667,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[49,48,295,66],"class_list":["post-817666","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-environment","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/817666","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=817666"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/817666\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/817667"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=817666"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=817666"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=817666"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}