With the Lieberman Warner Climate Security Act (CSA) on the floor this week, senators from both parties are worried about how their constituents will react to higher energy prices. According to our calculations, this Kyoto-style cap and trade proposal would cost the average family of four, $2,360 a year. Some politicians are turning to “revenue recycling” as a way to offset these costs. Senator Bob Corker and Rep. Ed Markey have both introduced bills that would return half or more of the auction revenue to households to compensate for higher energy costs.

Revenue recycling is a form of cap and trade that auctions pollution permits and then returns some percentage of the revenue to consumers each year. One such proposal, Sky Trust, would return 100 percent of the revenue to consumers. The money raised from auctioning the permits would be divided up equally between Americans at the end of the year, so each individual’s dividend would be equal to the national average increase in energy prices. Under Sky Trust, if you chose to continue your normal energy use habits, you’d initially see a rise in prices, but you’d get all the money back at the end of the year. If you curtailed your energy use, you’d still get the same check as the guy who didn’t, and you would end up making money.

Peter Barnes, a Sky Trust advocate, explains it this way:

[T]he revenue doesn’t go to the government – it goes to all of us, one person, one share…

If you assume the atmosphere belongs to whichever companies grab it first, then cap-and-trade makes sense. If you assume the atmosphere belongs to government, then cap-and-auction is your choice. If you assume the atmosphere is a gift to everyone, then cap-and-recycle follows.

The way Barnes puts it, Sky Trust seems like progressive Robin Hood-ing at its best: tax the big polluters, give the money back to the people, and solve global warming in doing so. The sky belongs to all of us collectively, and it doesn’t seem fair that big business or government should reap the profits.

But if we want to protect the atmosphere for generations to come, revenue recycling is a giant step backwards, squandering funds that could be better used to drive down the price of clean energy. Programs like Sky Trust rely on market forces to invest in renewables, assuming that as the carbon cap falls, pressure to switch to clean energy will rise. But there are major obstacles to creating a clean energy economy that only government investment can overcome. Private firms can deliver groundbreaking new solar panels or wind turbines, but these are orphan technologies if we don’t have transmission lines to put them into use.

Unlike private firms, government is in a unique position to create these kinds of enabling infrastructure and technology. By removing infrastructure barriers, a major federal investment would set the stage for increased private sector investment, and drive innovation that addresses climate change on a global scale.

Revenue recycling might seem like a fair way to help American consumers, but it could never have an impact in China, where emissions surpassed our own last year. For that, we need an investment-centered approach to make solar, wind, and other renewables cheaper than the coal that developing countries rely so heavily on.

Revenue recycling isn’t just bad idea for the climate – it’s also bad politics. Voters are nervous about rising energy prices, and they’re not confident the money will be returned to them. In a recent survey [PDF] conducted by American Environics with the Nathan Cummings Foundation, barely 50 percent of respondents supported the Sky Trust proposal, and that support dropped to 31 percent after they heard arguments against it. “The key to passing substantive limits on carbon emissions is to couple those limits with specific policies to make clean energy cheaper,” noted Jeff Navin, a political analyst who worked on the survey. “Unless advocates can address the real anxiety Americans feel about the cost of energy, passing substantive limits on carbon emissions will prove extremely difficult.”

A better strategy is to use pricing mechanisms to fund investments in social goods that are directly related to the activity being priced; for climate legislation like the Climate Security Act, that would mean directing the majority of auction revenue to clean energy RDD&D. As it stands, clean energy gets just six percent, while consumer rebates, at 31 percent, are the bill’s second-largest expenditure.

Voters overwhelmingly support a strategy that invests to make clean energy cheap – Gallup found last year that 65 percent of voters support spending at least $30 billion a year to do it. And in the Nathan Cummings study mentioned above, 84 percent supported an Apollo-style investment centered approach. Even after attacks, a majority still supported Apollo. Revenue recycling doesn’t deliver a good that is particularly salient to voters, but Apollo does: it gets us off foreign oil and closer to energy independence, it creates new jobs, and invests in future clean energy industries.

The solution is sitting right in front of us. Whether it’s an auction, a carbon tax, or the various safety valve schemes proposed in most of the Congressional cap and trade legislation, there is a substantial revenue stream sitting there to be directed toward clean energy investment. The trick is to orient the proposals and messaging around delivering goods that voters actually want. It’s win-win all around for Americans, the developing world, and the climate.

Three weeks before the Senate is scheduled to vote on global warming legislation, presidential candidates John McCain and Hilary Clinton have both called for temporarily suspending the 18-cent gasoline tax. The proposal is anathema to anyone who is pushing for disincentives on dirty energy. But instead of just railing against political pandering, we should take this as an opportunity to rethink our politics. The big question is: how do we finance the transition to a clean energy economy?

The Center for Climate Progess’s Joe Romm answers that a carbon price is not enough. Environmentalists often look to Europe – and its $38 per ton carbon dioxide price – as the gold standard of climate legislation. But Romm warns that the U.S. lacks the political will to reach that high of a carbon price anytime soon. What’s more, the New York Times reported last week that Europe has been experiencing a surge in new coal plant construction, despite its high carbon price.

Romm’s solution is an immediate moratorium on the construction of new coal plants while we wait for the carbon price to render coal economically irrelevant. But a moratorium on coal would increase energy prices – a tough sell politically during a recession. So how do we motivate people to pay more?

The traditional environmental response is to emphasize the gravity of global warming. If people just understood how serious the problem was, the thinking goes, then they would support price increases that went towards solving it. But opinion research suggests that an approach based on simply educating the public may not garner support for price increases. A 20-year poll by Gallup showed that public concern about global warming hasn’t changed much, despite the popularity of films like Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. And an ABC News/Time/Stanford poll from 2006 that asked voters whether they would support a gasoline tax to convince people to drive less found that 68 percent opposed the measure.

A carbon tax does not have to be framed as a way to change behavior; in this week’s Breakthrough Interview, Monica Prasad advocates for a very high carbon tax that funds clean energy. The caveat is that all the revenue generated go toward clean energy, and not to any of the special interests vying for a piece of the pie. The point of the carbon tax is to make itself go out of existence, so it would be counterproductive for interest groups to be lobbying to keep the cash flowing.

Breakthrough believes the price for carbon should be high enough to make low-cost technologies like wind immediately viable, while raising sufficient funding for clean energy (e.g. $30-$80 billion/year). A much higher price for carbon could potentially raise more money for clean energy, and bring down the coal hegemony faster. But at a time when voter anxiety about the economy is rising, legislation focused centrally on raising energy prices to deal with global warming is bound to be a hard sell.

Given the circumstances, what’s the best strategy to transition to a clean energy economy as quickly as possible?

Our answer is that we need to stop framing public policy as a response to global warming apocalypse. Instead, we should start talking about how to create a new clean energy economy that also addresses voters’ concerns about energy prices, jobs, and national security. When the gas tax is reframed as a funding mechanism for clean energy, voter support increases. Asked in the same survey as above whether they would support a gas tax that would fund renewable energy research, 64 percent of voters approved. The lesson: making clean energy cheap is much more popular politically than making dirty energy expensive.

Making clean energy actually – not just relatively – cheaper than dirty energy is a solution that deals with global warming not only in the U.S., but also in China, where emissions surpassed our own last year. We could shut down every coal plant in the U.S., but there is little reason to believe that China would follow our example. Only when the real, unsubsidized cost of clean energy drops below that of coal will the developing world abandon its coal plants. Until then, we can hardly begrudge them for using the cheapest energy possible to pull their people out of poverty.

There is a lot that Romm, Prasad, and Breakthrough agree on. We’re concerned about people looking to the carbon price as a panacea, we’re concerned about an environmental politics that is vulnerable to slumps in the economy, and most of all, we’re concerned about how to foment a global transition to a clean energy economy as quickly as possible. These are complicated issues, and a lot of open questions remain. We’d like to hash things out with our readers – regulation, taxation, and investment can all play a role, but what would you put at the center of your strategy?

Under the current protocol, Russia is well within its emissions targets. Kyoto mandates reductions from 1990 emissions levels, and due to economic collapse of most former Soviet Union economies, growth and energy use have remained relatively low.

But Russia brusquely rejected any change in the framework that would put a check on its economic growth:

Asked if Russia would resist capping the use of fossil fuels, which emit the planet-warming gas carbon dioxide when burned, under a new climate deal after 2012, [Russian official Vsevolod Gavrilov] said:”In the foreseeable future, this will not be our model, no.”

Supporting the rise of Russia’s middle class is a more pressing concern for the country than staving off global climate change. Said Gavrilov,

Energy must not be a barrier to our comfort. Our emerging middle class… demands lots of energy and it is our job to ensure comfortable supply.

Sound familiar? It should. A Chinese official recently reminded us, “You cannot tell people who struggling to earn enough to eat that they need to reduce their emissions.” Russia’s people may not be starving, but for both the developing and the developed world, the economy is the bottom line.

The Russians may not be struggling in the same way as the Chinese, but the two countries’ statements speak to an obvious truth about politics: governments are under a lot more pressure to grow their economies than to be green and reduce emissions. Ignoring this basic political truth is akin to banging your head against a brick wall. If the Kyoto framework insists on reducing emissions by pure muscle, throwing desire for growth and prosperity to the wind, than it is doomed. Gavrilov gives us a much more sensible way to think about it:

We see (Kyoto) as a means, not as an end in itself… It is a way to get new technology for our industries.

It’s not that these countries want to pollute — but it must make economic sense for them to avoid doing so. That’s why Russia has called for other industrialized nations to invest in innovation, as China recently did. We’d be wise to heed that call. Developed nations can reduce their own emissions all they want, and they certainly should — but if the choice continues to be between reduced emissions and economic growth, then we’re fighting an uphill battle. The United States has the resources to invest in cheap energy solutions, and doing so would be the biggest possible impact we could have on the climate challenge.

Environmental activists couldn’t work out a compromise with unions and industry groups that feared the plan would cost jobs.

The sticking point was how Maryland would achieve reductions in greenhouse gases blamed for climate change. The bill called for dramatic reductions in carbon emissions — and a goal of slashing them 90 percent by 2050 – but the bill was vague about how that would happen.

The Department of Environment was charged with enforcing the cuts, and industry groups worried the enforcement could bring draconian measures that would put factories out of business.

More than 50 steelworkers wearing hardhats greeted lawmakers as they came to work Monday, and they whooped 12 hours later when they learned the bill was rejected.

–AP

Those 50 cheering steelworkers foreshadow the struggle we should anticipate when we try to pass cap and trade at the national level. Most major environmental groups have been calling for a bill that avoids giveaways to Big Oil and Big Coal, but the case in Maryland is a reminder that these monolithic bad guys aren’t the only things standing in the way of getting strong legislation on climate. What’s missing is a significant package to address the economy and energy prices — without it, this may turn into a fight between environmentalist elites and the working class.

In the comments section of one of Romm’s posts yesterday, Ted pleaded to elevate the level dialogue:

If you would stop with the hysterical character assassination and slander, we might actually be able to have a serious debate about the proper mix of pricing, regulation, and public investment in U.S. climate policy – one that might actually contribute to the policies that the next president and the next congress might actually enact.

What ensued was the beginning of the level-headed, honest critique of each other’s ideas — what we had wanted to begin with. Romm responded,

I think I have stopped calling you two “delayers” a while back. If not, I’m sorry. Anybody who supports Obama’s plan is not a delayer. I disagree with some of the things you are doing — and plan to point that out.

It’s time for the folks at Grist, Climate Progress, and Breakthrough to realize that we all have the same end goal in mind: a livable climate that can support the aspirations of human civilization. We have different ideas about how to get there, but Breakthrough is the first to acknowledge that our way isn’t the one true way. There is no divine authority here, and an open conversation is the best chance we have at finding a way to success.

Pielke and his coauthors have presented a series of important, honest questions for the environmental movement to grapple with. Rather than “debunk” this effort, we need to start dealing with these questions:

Will carbon pricing be able to reduce emissions enough?
Do we have all the technology we need?
How much should we invest in clean energy?
How much should go to development/demonstration/deployment?

Here’s hoping that we can put behind us the destructive attacks on the credibility and character of those who, in good faith and with the goal of protecting humanity and the planet, ask hard questions about how we are attempting to address the problem. We commend Romm’s shift in tone and appreciate his apology and look forward to an open debate that focuses on these challenges.

Environmentalists have long believed that a price for carbon is the obvious answer to this question; “just pop in the economic incentives and watch them work their magic,” as Monica Prasad put it in the New York Times. The idea is that penalizing dirty energy will give clean energy enough of a push to topple the reign of the carbon-emitters. But it’s not that simple. A growing number of environmental thinkers are taking a critical look at the true impacts of Kyoto, the fast pace of international development, and the slow pace of clean energy development and deployment, and they’re asking a question that shakes the foundations of conventional climate policy wisdom: is a carbon price ecologically irrelevant?

Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, is part of this paradigm shift. In a recent Scientific American op-ed, he wrote:

A trading system might marginally influence the choices between coal and gas plants or provoke a bit more adoption of solar and wind power, but it will not lead to the necessary fundamental overhaul of energy systems.

The recent spike in oil prices is evidence that a price for carbon doesn’t deserve to be at the center of climate policy. Though prices have tripled since 9/11 — creating a de facto carbon price — we haven’t converted the American auto fleet to electric. There may have been a slight increase in the number of hybrids, but it’s nothing even close to a wedge.

In order for a carbon price to have an appreciable effect on clean energy technology, it would need to be so high that no politician would dream of supporting it. To make solar competitive with coal, we would need a carbon price $220; Congress is having a hard time passing something in the $7-$12 range. Breakthrough refers to this catch-22 as “the Gordian Knot.”

The second blow to the carbon price way is the realization that the IPCC underestimated both the emissions reductions challenge, and the technology gap between fossil fuels and clean energy. Just how big is that gap? Socolow and Pacala’s famous “stabilization wedges” illustrate the immensity of the chasm. Their list of wedges include ending all deforestation worldwide; doubling our nuclear power capacity (we haven’t built a single new plant in 30 years); and a 700-fold increase in solar power capacity. This is a small sampling of a list that comes out to 18 wedges in total, most of which represent massive engineering challenges. Socolow and Pacala assume 11 of these wedges to be “embedded in the baseline scenario,” meaning that if we continue business as usual, a big portion of the heavy lifting in terms of carbon emissions reductions will occur automatically. Environmentalists are confident that the “remaining” wedges will be easily achieved with a price for carbon, but this is complacency.

A small price incentive isn’t enough; we need a real technology policy. Among those of us who believe climate change is the biggest challenge mankind has ever faced, it’s still unclear how that policy will take shape. Will we disagree? You bet. There is plenty of room for nuance and interpretation. But the climate cold war is finally thawing, and it is time to begin an open, honest discussion about the best policy solutions.

This is a big step in the right direction, but now Gore needs to come to terms with two more inconvenient truths about climate change: First, that trying to make Americans care more about global warming is a losing battle — with the ailing health care system, the slumping economy, and the Iraq war, there simply isn’t room to prioritize everything, especially when ecologic issues are pitted against economic and social ones. Second, a price for carbon alone is ecologically irrelevant. We need a policy agenda that includes a government investment commensurate to the monumental size of the challenge.

While he knows how to bring his cause into the limelight, Gore keeps missing the mark when it comes to an effective policy agenda. This year’s presidential campaign is focused on the concept of “empty” rhetoric, but it’s a charge that Gore deserves more than Obama. While this latest effort may come in different packaging than the gloomy Inconvenient Truth, the policy agenda is none changed. Nowhere in the extensive website literature is there a call to invest in clean energy R&D. What we get instead is the soothing mantra that we already have all the technology we need:

The technological and policy solutions for the climate crisis already exist.

This is the clean energy economy we can adopt with today’s technologies, resources, know-how…

We can…ensure that future energy projects take advantage of the clean renewable resources available.

The way he puts it, you almost believe we have a long row of clean energy darlings, politely waiting their turn out in the hallway. The strategy that goes along with this way of thinking focuses on garnering public support as a sign to leaders that we’re over our carbon “addiction” — we’re ready for politicians to start calling in those patient clean energy technologies.

The problem with this approach is two-fold. First, it assumes that Americans are very concerned about global warming. But when asked about their top priorities, Americans consistently rank global warming near the bottom of the list; a recent Pew survey found that “dealing with global warming” ranked 20th out of 23 given policy priorities. When the question is open-ended, no one responds with global warming. Even during the increased media attention to global warming that accompanied the release of An Inconvenient Truth, the percentage of people who ranked global warming as an important issue fell. If the environmental movement had 15 minutes of fame, that was it — what makes Gore think that this ad campaign is going to succeed where his feature film failed?

It is here that the We Campaign suffers a failure of imagination — they insist upon framing the issue as an environmental one, rather than making it about something that Americans actually care about. The environment may not be high on Americans’ policy priority list, but energy independence is. Studies show that voters strongly support large investments into clean energy sources to achieve energy independence and deal with global warming. Issues-based politics miss the opportunity to meet voters where they are — always a more effective strategy than appealing to values that they don’t share.

The second problem with the We Campaign is that in failing to advocate for substantial investment in technology innovation, it underestimates what it will take to counter global warming — just as the IPCC did in assuming a trend of global decarbonization, as reported by Breakthrough Senior Fellow Roger Pielke in Nature today. In both cases, the result was the same: policy recommendations far short of what’s actually needed.

Everyone agrees that switching over to renewable energy is a good thing, but if it were easy, we would have done it already. Our current level of technology is not be capable of both reducing carbon emissions and supporting global standards of living, and it will not become capable of doing so spontaneously. From development to deployment, there are still many hurdles to implementing new clean energy systems, and it is going to take technological breakthroughs to clear those hurdles. Any serious attempt to address global warming must put an aggressive technology R&D agenda front and center, and despite its aspirational rhetoric, the We Campaign fails in this regard.

Then there are those of us who think technology development ought to be at the center of climate change policy. We think this problem is too big for our current energy system to handle, and we will need to devote tremendous resources to creating a new energy infrastructure that can one day support the aspirations of nine billion inhabitants of the planet. We believe that a carbon price can play a role in an R&D-driven agenda, but on it’s own, it will not be near enough.

A slew of thoughtful articles this week questioned the central role cap-and-trade has played thus far in policy discussions. First there was Tony Blair, quoted in the New York Times, saying that he doubted cap-and-trade without a global carbon regime would work. Given that China and other developing nations have made perfectly clear that they’re not interested in joining the Kyoto bandwagon, Blair is implying that emissions trading doesn’t cut it as a solution to the carbon problem.

Then there was Monica Prasad’s op-ed in the Times yesterday describing the failure of Norway’s carbon tax, and the success of Denmark’s. Denmarks carbon tax was effective only because the revenue subsidized technology R&D, rather than being snatched up by programs like Sky Trust, which would divert the money to things like health care on consumer rebates. The carbon price’s raison d’etat, Prasad argues, is to fund clean energy so that we can phase out carbon-based energy. Some amount of investment in clean energy must come before carbon pricing, because only when we have cheap and effective clean energy will we gain the political leverage necessary to implement a carbon price.

Wind power in Denmark provides 18.5 % of the nation’s electricity.

Finally, Jeffrey Sachs hit the nail on the head with his short but powerful piece in Scientific American this week. He acknowledged what energy experts have been trying to tell us for years: a price for carbon isn’t enough. Even if we took advantage of every possible energy efficiency opportunity available to us, today’s level of technology cannot support the dual aspirations of reducing emissions and increasing prosperity. If we try to meet these new-world aspirations using old-world technologies, we will stifle economic growth for ourselves and for billions in the developing world — not to mention fail at curbing global warming.

To Sachs, global warming isn’t about cutting back, and it isn’t about each of us doing our own small part. Maximizing the efficiency of our outdated energy system won’t be enough. What we need now is a complete overhaul of our energy system — we need multiple breakthroughs at every level of development of a diverse array of alternative technologies.

Ask anyone from an environmentalist to an oil executive if they support clean energy, and you can bet the answer will be yes. But what we really need is support where it counts — technology R&D should be the number one item on our agenda, and the recipient of the majority of our resources. As Sachs puts it,

It is difficult to see how coal-based developing economies such as China and India will subscribe to tight targets on emissions until they know whether CCS actually works. It is difficult to set highly restrictive emissions goals for major industries, such as automobiles, without knowing more about which low-cost technologies will actually work and at what cost. Confidence in the low-emission technologies will feed back into political acceptance of tighter permit systems or higher emissions taxes.

Sachs frames a daunting task, achievable if we devote immense resources to developing cheap, clean energy technology. Contrast Sachs’ statement with what Grist’s Dave Roberts wrote yesterday:

Why not spend…to cushion the blow of higher energy prices on low-income and working families? Why not use it to reduce the (regressive) payroll tax? Why not use it to help train workers laid off in fading industries? Why not use it to fund weatherization and retrofitting of existing buildings, to reduce energy use? Why shouldn’t social and economic justice enter the picture?

Roberts misunderstands — or simply chooses not to respond to — the argument that a carbon price only makes sense if it is funding clean energy. If carbon price revenue goes to various worthy, but unrelated, causes, an incentive is created to keep the tax in place and keep funding those causes. This is backwards policy; the end game of the carbon price is to produce no revenue at all, because eventually there should be no carbon-based energy to tax.

A carbon price makes fine complementary policy to an investment-driven agenda, but it has its limits. The jury is still out on whether carbon trading will have any effect on emissions reductions in Europe, and there is a lot of reason to believe that it will not. But one thing it most definitely cannot do is to generate large-scale research, or develop, demonstrate, and deploy breakthrough technologies.

Let’s hope that 2008 will mark the end of the carbon price orthodoxy, and the beginning of getting down to the real business of investing in a new energy system.

Gore the environmentalist

But the former vice president has been many things over his political career, and one of those permutations is worth revisiting. Al Gore the high-tech aficionado may have been the butt of jokes for his claim that he “invented” the internet, but what he actually said was true:

During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country’s economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our education system.

His 1991 High Performance Computing and Communications Act led to what is now known as the “Information Superhighway,” and was a springboard for the development of the commercial Internet. The “Gore Bill,” as it was often referred to, played a major role in helping to hoist an obscure military project across the technology valley of death, and Gore has been hailed as the first political leader to recognize the Internet’s importance. His early support of the Internet — which dates back to the 1970s — is evidence of wise foresight.

A younger Gore

Gore should call upon these faculties in his work on climate change. The best he has been able to offer us in terms of a solution are small, individual acts like “use less hot water” and “drive less” — acts which don’t even begin to address the huge challenge he characterizes so vividly in “An Inconvenient Truth.” The heavy emphasis on sacrifice doesn’t leave any room for big, aspirational goals like investing in a new clean energy economy (see Breakthrough’s “The Investment Consensus”). Where is the faith in human ingenuity he displayed back when he was romping around “inventing” internets? It’s certainly not to be found in his statement that the truth about climate change is “an inconvenient one that we are going to have to change our lives.” Nowhere does he suggest that he means a change for the better.

Gore frames the issue as one that will require great sacrifices if humanity is to have a chance at survival; it’s ironic, then, that he also underestimates what it will take to address the climate change. He emphasizes that global warming is not really a technological challenge — in other words, global warming wouldn’t be such a big deal if more people would just trade in their Hummers for Priuses already. As Roger Pielke pointed out earlier this month, Gore has suggested that $2 billion dollars is all we need to invest in clean energy technology. That paltry sum betrays Gore’s optimism for technological complacency — all the more frustrating given his tech-savvy background.

Of course, if we follow Gore’s logic out to it’s end, he’s absolutely right: if we’re as naive as Pollyanna about what it will take to confront this problem, the outcome might well look like doomsday. His sacrifice-focused agenda underestimates human ingenuity, undermines the aspirations of those in the developing world, and is not enough to stop climate change. At the Breakthrough Institute, we don’t think we have all the technology we need, but by investing in improved technology, we offer up our own dream: equalizing worldwide living standards and defeating global warming. A tall order, to be sure, and while light bulbs and Priuses can play their part, they won’t be enough. It’s the visionary, techno-savant, expansive dreamer that should be up there on the pedestal.

He argues that any effort to reduce emissions must take into consideration consumption just as much — if not more than — production. Otherwise, we’ll wind up like the U.K., for whom, if you factor in carbon outsourcing to developing countries like China and India, emissions actually rose by 19 percent, rather than falling by 15 percent. Helm is absolutely right; it’s a mistake to put too much faith in the regulation-centered approach of cap-and-trade. It is so full of holes like these that it’s almost certain to descend into ecological oblivion, even as ratifying nations pat themselves on the back for reducing their carbon footprint.

What’s more, he points out, our technology isn’t up to scale, and any attempt to address the climate problem will need to focus heavily and getting it there, and fast. Helm sets himself apart from those environmentalists like Al Gore who would argue that we have all the technology we need to deal with climate change, and a regulation-centered approach is the way to go.

But even as Helm rails against the Gore-esque blind faith in taking the regulation route, he ends up shoulder to shoulder with Gore when it comes to the sacrifice it will take to deal with the climate challenge. Despite Joe Romm’s claims to the contrary, Al Gore is quite clear when it comes to what the “inconvenient truth” is:

“The truth about the climate crisis is an inconvenient one that means we are going to have to change the way we live our lives.”

You can be sure he doesn’t mean change our lives for the better. No, this doomsday message is that we must lower our standards of living or suffer the consequences.

Just when I was expecting Helm to further break with Gore by proclaiming that by massive investment in technology R&D, we can improve the lives of everyone from China to Brazil, he hits me with a dose of Gore-style melodrama:

The U.S. and Europe refuse to acknowledge that halting the relentless rise in the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will take a significant slice out of economic growth. It will probably mean living standards will have to be cut if our consumption is going to be environmentally sustainable. We are simply living beyond our — and the planet’s — means. This is not a welcome message for politicians to give their voters. But it happens to be what is required to tackle this global crisis.

And that was all. No inspiring call to action, no leading us out of the darkness, just doom and gloom to the very end. Spelling out the fatal flaws of Kyoto, he had set himself up perfectly to unveil sparkling new recommendations for what we ought to be doing. But instead, he chose to remind people that they’re probably not sad enough, given how much global warming is going to hurt humanity. Maybe we have a chance of beating it, he implies, but only if we give up the comforts of development, and keep our fingers crossed that the Chinese and Indians don’t want it too badly either.

Helm does a great job of what a visionary alive during the birth of this unfortunate environmentalist rhetoric so aptly pointed out:

“You say you’ve got a real solution? We’d all love to see the plan.”
- John Lennon