Climate Change: a Crisis or a Problem?

It's not just a matter of semantics. [Long post]

We’re in a “crisis” crisis.

The repeated word is by choice. There are so many crises that the word may have become diluted. “Crisis” is the go-to word for anything that seems to demand immediate remedy.

Among the applications of the word can be “an emotionally significant event or radical change of status in a person's life,” as in provoking a mid-life crisis. It may refer to “an unstable or crucial time or state of affairs in which a decisive change is impending,” as in a financial crisis.

Or it can denote “a situation that has reached a critical phase,” such as a climate crisis.

It is this last application that I want to address, not with the definition of crisis but its application to climate.

Maybe “crisis” overstates it

I want to propose that the world is not dealing with a climate crisis as generally portrayed by the loudest alarmists. Let me be VERY clear: there is irrefutable evidence that the global climate is currently warming. But given how this is somewhat predictable, gradual, and the effect likely to be incremental and spread out over decades, it might be more appropriate to call this a problem. Or an issue that needs to be addressed. But not a crisis.

I can understand the politics of a “crisis.” As we have seen time and again, whether with federal shutdowns over budgets or union-management confrontations, we often need to be at the brink— or a bit beyond—to agree to make hard choices and compromises that resolve the crisis at hand. Making climate change a crisis is a way to motivate policymakers as well as the rest of us who are called upon to make personal changes and must elect those who will make government policy. Or to build support for management from stockholders to make decisions that are expected to further public policy goals.¹

The downside of so often shouting “crisis” is that it is numbing. Then Congressman Al Gore used “crisis” to apply to climate change in the 1980s. So we have lived with a “crisis” for at least 40 years. It’s one thing to see the crisis caused by a wildfire in destroying a town in Maui. It was sudden, the results on people and property are obvious, but we know that with a finite amount of money and in a finite time span the immediate crisis will be remedied, those displaced will be placed, property will be rebuilt. As I write, there is another federal budget crisis. But we know—we know—it will be resolved in days or weeks—not over decades.

A climate crisis offers no such moment of start and expected end. It is mostly a series of events—rising waters in some places, more frequent droughts in some places, more rain in other places, possible extinction of some species—a long list of things to fear. But not tomorrow. Not next year. Of course, this is a key reason why it has been so hard politically to effect revolutionary change.

The success of energy policy in reducing fossil fuel use

If it evolves incrementally over decades, modest steps toward both mitigation and adaptation may temper the crisis aspect. Indeed, over the past five decades, a series of modest regulations phased in over years has resulted in substantial energy productivity without resorting to life-changing requirements. For example, the National Appliance Energy Conservation Act set standards for energy use of major appliances, the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) legislation more than doubled auto miles per gallon, and national and local building energy codes², the first of which passed Congress in 1976, made buildings more energy efficient, reducing energy generation needs. Some specifics:

• Between 1970 and 2010, U.S. economic output expanded more than

  300% while demand for energy grew only 50%. According to calculations of data from the U.S. Department of Energy, despite the growth in average home size, more and bigger vehicles driven more miles, and the rapid growth in all kinds of energy-consuming devices, from air conditioners to computers to air travel, energy used per American has actually decreased over the last several decades.

• Consider the changes made over the past 50 years in auto miles per gallon. Congress passed the CAFE in 1975, in response to a different crisis—the 1973-74 oil embargo by Middle Eastern oil-producing countries. It established standards for passenger cars and light-duty trucks. Ten years later, when the first round of standards had been implemented, cars had to average 27.5 mpg. My 1966 Plymouth Belvedere got about 12 miles per gallon around town, maybe 15 mpg on the highway. My current car, an Audi, is rated at an average 31 mpg. That’s a 130% improvement.

• According to the U.S. Department of Energy projections, the energy saved from the transition from incandescent lighting to LEDs could equal 348 terawatt hours by 2027. That's electricity we won't need anymore -- equivalent to roughly 8.5% of the total amount of energy generated in the US in 2019, or the annual energy output of 44 large-sized power plants.

Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration, Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS)

I should point out that these earlier regulations were motivated by a goal of reducing the U.S. dependence on Middle Eastern oil. It was not about slowing climate change. However, as most of our energy was derived from fossil fuel, these massive improvements in energy use are in reality a contributor to lessening CO2 emissions from what they would have been without the changes.

Think adaptation, not just mitigation

The requirements of the legislation I described and most of the recommendations and policies for the future are about mitigation: lessening CO2 by replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy, carbon pricing, reforestation, burying CO2, and the like. What has been considered less frequently is adaptation—of people, flora and fauna, or the environment itself. Most models of what life might be like in a warmer climate tend to be static—not accounting for changes we will make incrementally.

• Drought-resistant crops and varieties, many existing, and others that could be developed, are an adaptation to future water scarcity in existing agricultural regions.

• The U.S. Global Change Research Program, has a legal mandate to help the nation and the world understand, assess, predict, and respond to global change.

• To the extent the long-term impact of climate change is predictable, we are already planning in many areas how to protect coastlines and deal with sea-level rise, how to best manage land and forests, and how to protect energy and public infrastructure.

• The transition to lower or zero carbon fuel sources, nudged by government policy, is well underway. In 1990 52% of electricity was derived from coal. In 2020, it was 20%, while renewals nearly doubled to 22%. Nuclear, also zero carbon, has remained at just below 20% over that time, despite the shut-down of multiple plants with few new plants constructed.³

• Millions of people have voluntarily sought out some of the hottest places on earth only because we have adapted to climates that otherwise were inhospitable to life and commerce. Cities such as Phoenix, Miami, Singapore or Dubai (summer temperatures reach 122F, population 3.3 million) would unlikely have grown to encompass millions of residents if air conditioning had not been invented and made cheap enough to be widely installed.

A warmer climate will actually reduce temperature-related deaths globally

Although we regularly hear about the negative outcome of a warm Earth, we rarely hear about what may be some positive results:

• Heretofore arid regions that may someday support greater agriculture,

• The opening of the Northwest Passage would greatly reduce the carbon emission of ship-borne commerce now having to pass through the Panama Canal to traverse between Asia and Europe.

• The reduced deaths from cold. According to a 2021 study published in The Lancet Planetary Health, cold is far more deadly. For every death linked to heat, nine are connected to cold.

During the 2000-2019 period examined in the study, while heat-related deaths rose, deaths from cold exposure fell. And they decreased by a larger amount than the increase in heat-related fatalities. Overall, researchers estimated that approximately 650,000 fewer people worldwide died from temperature exposure during the 2000-2019 period than in the 1980s and 1990s.

Finally, the major difference between earlier measures to respond to energy-reduction goals is that by and large they did not call on individuals to change their lives in any meaningful way. When I traded in my 1966 car, the next one got better mileage. And the one after that even better. I just had to fill the tank less often. The same goes for replacing my refrigerator every 15 years—each one with less CO2 impact, but used as before.

Why more political resistance to mitigation requirements

Many of the changes being asked of societies to respond to a climate “crisis” are far more far-reaching. In a few years, we are told, you’ll have to plug in your car. You'll be urged to get a fast charger if you live in a single house in the suburbs. Or, with the current technology, you’ll need to sit around at a “filling station” for 30 or 40 minutes, maybe keeping your kids occupied if you’re on a road trip. In some communities, you may be told that if you replace your oven, you will also have to upgrade your electric panel and learn to cook with induction. In some cities strong political coalitions are making it more difficult to use a car as the streets are being converted to favor bicycles and buses. There is concern about turbine farms as the seascape. Many localities have banned the use of plastic bags when shopping in favor of reusable bags shoppers need to carry with them. Single-use bottles of water are being restricted here and there. More to come.

This all has consequences that some politicians are exploiting where large segments of voters feel “put upon” by governments for a “crisis” that most don’t feel is imminent,

A chronic problem suggests a different mindset than a crisis

So let’s be realistic. Despite good faith efforts to reduce reliance on fossil fuels and their attendant emissions, we will need them for decades to power our jet planes that speed us to our vacations and business meetings, to move the ships that provide the goods we need or supply to others…and to run many of the generators that create the electricity to charge our electric cars and power our heat pumps. That means living with CO2 and the rest. They can’t—and won’t be— eliminated.

Let me wrap up near where I started. And that is agreeing that climate change is real. A response is appropriate. However, I am suggesting—as the other side of the pancake—that this should be approached not as a “crisis” that has us scurrying around afraid that the next rainstorm is the apocalypse. It is a chronic problem. We should accept that the climate will change measurably through this century. But we should not assume that our children and their children cannot deal with change. We need not agonize that the Earth in 100 will be different than it was 100 years ago. The dinosaurs became extinct without humans to affect their environment. Over time, species die, species evolve. Humans adapt.

We have dealt with much greater pockets of extreme heat historically, through technology, gradual migration, mitigation, and adaptation. The climate “crisis” was with us 40 years ago, 10 years ago, and today. At some point, we should admit that if we’ve survived the “crisis” this long, it isn’t really a crisis. It’s a chronic problem. We can deal with it without the need for constant adrenaline.

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1. An immediate case in point: the Inflation Reduction Act which makes government funds available to nudge automakers to accelerate electric vehicle transition.

2. These energy-focussed building codes can also work against another social objective—increasing costs for constructing more affordable housing.

3. Nuclear energy, which could have replaced far more fossil fuel if had been encouraged over the decades, was set back by the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear plant meltdown in the former Soviet Union. It was caused by a poorly designed response to a problem at a poorly designed reactor. Many people recall an incident at the Three-Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania in 1979. However, that resulted in an insignificant amount of radioactive material released. There were no injuries, deaths or direct health effects.