Time’s up! America must lead the world in confronting Climate Change
As it finally awakens to the climate crisis, America now must bring the world’s nations together with energy and environmental solutions
Published: October 2020
Climate change is here. Environmental and economic disruption from a warming planet is our new reality and with every missed opportunity has become more difficult and costly to reverse. After decades of warnings and accumulating evidence, most of the world can at long last see this challenge with their own eyes. For all but the most determined holdouts, the truth of worldwide climate change can no longer be ignored.
Sadly, the United States, like too many other industrial nations, had chosen to dismiss years of growing evidence and held steady to a path of denial and inaction. But despite America’s tardy awakening to the truth, it is not too late for our nation and the world to escape the worst of otherwise irreversible adversity.
Even at this eleventh hour, Two Paths America believes that a combination of wise public policy, international collaboration and swift, determined action – here at home and with our leadership across the world – can limit the impact of climate change. But success is possible only if every one of us takes the challenge seriously and works to shape effective policies across the political and geographical lines that have been barriers to constructive action for far too long. Success will also depend on constructive global leadership; which history tells us only a determined America will be able to provide.
Yes, there have been some nations and some public and private entities around the world that took early steps to limit their own contributions to climate change. But the world’s leading polluters – the United States among them – have been slow to make a difference. Because of their inaction, these laggard nations have paid a heavy price in environmental damage, even as their polluting industries profited. For example, in 2018 the United States – arguably the richest, most advanced nation on earth – ranked 27th in overall environmental health performance, 29th in the quality of its water and 10th in the quality of its air. Growing industrial powers like China and India expose their vast populations to even more appalling levels of pollution, while adding immeasurably to the global burden of greenhouse gasses.
But even nations in denial are beginning to see there will soon come a time to cut their losses and head off even worse disruptions lying ahead. Two Paths America says that time is now.
The Time Is Now – And the World Is Eager for Leadership
As the evidence of climate change grows and its consequences become more severe, arguments for denial evaporate. It has become increasingly clear that the time for action is now. Nations in growing numbers are signaling that they’re ready to address the climate challenge on an international level, while insisting that polluter nations join their efforts. What they are looking for is leadership to bring the world together and to make agreements stick.
For example, in 2018, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change made it clear that to avoid significant risks to the planet and civilization, the United States and other significant emitters must cut their carbon emissions to net zero by 2050. Similarly, the Paris Climate Accord of 2016 set a target of limiting global warming to under two degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. Earth has already warmed by about 1.1 degree C since the late 19th century. Given our current trajectory, another half-degree rise is all but inevitable before 2050.
According to the U.N. panel’s report, low-carbon technologies such as renewables and nuclear generation would need to generate more than 70 percent of the world’s electrical power by 2050 (an increase from one-third of the total these alternate energy sources produce today) in order to limit warming of the planet to under the Paris Accord’s two-degree ceiling. Nations of the world are far better off making investments that advance new technologies and build a low-carbon economy rather than spending money in ways that ignore the impacts of climate change.
Everyday Americans Are Joining the Chorus
Even in the United States, where denial has enjoyed some of its most tenacious support – from the White House, many in Congress and a wide swath of the business world – the tide of public opinion is shifting. A Pew Research Center survey in 2019 is among several polls to indicate that climate change is now one of the rare national issues on which Americans want a bipartisan solution. Two-thirds of U.S. adults told Pew researchers that the federal government is doing too little to reduce the effects of global climate change.
The Pew survey indicated a strong consensus among responding Democrats that the federal government is doing too little on key aspects of the environment, such as protecting water and air quality and reducing the effects of climate change. But among Republicans there were sizable differences in views by generation. For example, Millennial and younger Republicans are more likely than those in older generations to think government efforts to reduce climate change are insufficient (52 percent vs. 31 percent).
As for America’s private sector, more and more businesses in the United States are pushing for climate action, not solely because their customers and shareholders are demanding it, but also because of the hard facts of the changing climate’s impact on their bottom lines. The potential domestic economic toll is hard for business leaders to overlook when flooding, storms, wildfires and droughts are harming sectors as varied as real estate and agriculture. This damage will continue to grow if emissions remain on their current course. Everyone can unite around the need for a cleaner environment. They realize it is possible to have economic growth while at the same time improving the quality of our environment and turning back the threat of further climate change.
We Must Recognize Risks to Our National Security, Economy and Way of Life
The lack of an effective climate strategy at home and a failure of leadership on the world stage threatens America’s national security interests and weakens our influence in the international arena. Research has estimated that rising sea levels, increased flooding, and growing food and water insecurity will put millions of people in danger and could generate millions of climate refugees by 2050 – a global crisis that the United States will undoubtedly have to deal with. Additionally, the retreat of Arctic sea ice would dramatically shift the balance of power between the United States, Russia and China.
Of foremost concern is the disastrous impact of climate change on farming and agriculture, devastation that already being felt worldwide. If left unaddressed, the risk of widespread food shortages, increasing poverty, even famine, will grow and inevitably lead to geopolitical and military unrest in many regions of the world – if not our own. Wherever these occur, climate driven disruptions will present the United States with extraordinary national security issues. Allied nations look to us for leadership and protection while others seek to turn instability to their own advantage.
America’s Generational Divide
Two recent surveys demonstrate the wide generational divide in American public opinion toward climate change. A detailed breakdown of a 2019 Pew Research Center survey (referenced above) shows GOP Millennial and Gen Z adults are also less inclined than older Republican generations to prioritize fossil fuel development. For example, 78 percent of Millennial and Gen Z Republicans said U.S. development of alternative energy sources should be prioritized over the expansion of fossil fuel sources, compared with fewer Republicans (53 percent) in the Baby Boomer or older generations voicing the same priority. This poll also revealed that party affiliation is a stronger factor in a person’s climate-change beliefs than is their level of knowledge and understanding about science.The Pew Research Center’s evidence of the generational divide is reinforced by research commissioned by World War Zero, a bipartisan coalition launched in 2019 by former U.S. Senator and Secretary of State John Kerry to fight the climate crisis. Founding members of World War Zero are prominent Democrats and Republicans, military leaders and celebrities – and include three members of the Two Paths America advisory committee: former governors John Kasich, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Christine Todd Whitman.
A survey conducted by Hart Research was commissioned to help World War Zero understand and work to close the gap between ways America’s younger generation (Millennials and Gen Z) and the older generation (Baby Boomers) view the damage from the climate change. The survey is worth studying in some detail here. Its insights are instructive because those of the young generation have an opportunity to be more persuasive and impactful in conversations by learning, rather than assuming what matters to the older generations.
America Must Take the Lead Toward International Cooperation
The two most notable attempts at solutions built on international good faith and cooperation have not been as successful as hoped. For example, the Kyoto Protocol of 1997 and the Paris Climate Accord of 2015 each relied on voluntary arrangements based on complex economic structures, which over time led to counterproductive workarounds and abuses that made those agreements less effective. For example, the Kyoto Protocol established an international cap-and-trade system, by which each country’s greenhouse gas emissions were limited by the Protocol agreement while countries were permitted to buy and sell emission rights to other nations. By creating a market in emissions, this system was intended to give nations strong incentives to reduce their emissions at a lowest possible cost. But the Protocol’s binding obligations applied only to developed countries and not to those deemed to be undeveloped – including China and India. Some of the developed nations have not agreed upon the second-round emission targets and ultimately the Kyoto Protocol was rejected by the United States Senate.
An attempt to revive international cooperation on climate change, the Paris Climate Accord of 2015 aspired to hold the increase in global average temperatures to under two degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. The Accord has relied on a system of non-binding, nationally determined targets as opposed to legally binding targets. The voluntary nature of the Accord’s pledge-and-review system relied on the idea that the climate action has become mainstream around the world and is important for each member country’s reputation and global standing. Some experts argue that the lack of binding emission targets and an effective enforcement mechanism were responsible for America’s decision to withdraw from the agreement. The United States did indeed play a major role in negotiating the Accord and persuading other nations to accept this new paradigm of international cooperation. But in 2017 the United States decided to withdraw from the agreement, thus forfeiting its once strong and credible position in international climate negotiations. As a result, the future of the Accord is now uncertain.
These attempts at international climate treaties, however well intentioned, failed to meet their objectives, not only because their structures are difficult to make work and enforce, but also their voluntary nature has created multiple opportunities for counterproductive abuses that have defeated the framers’ intent. Even more damaging, these international agreements have been undermined by shortsighted political leaders who either failed to take the climate crisis seriously or saw no political profit in achieving real solutions.
Lessons learned from these two widely hailed but ultimately unsuccessful agreements show we must try again at international cooperation, but with stronger incentive structures accompanied by equally strong penalties on self-dealing abuses. First, the United States should reengage at the international level, making a commitment to its allies to take any future agreements seriously and to implement those agreements in a manner consistent with our nation’s founding principles. Second, the United States should use its dominant position in the world and its vast network of international alliances to persuade other major polluters to do their fair share. The combination of a domestic carbon fee and carbon tariff can be used to encourage our closest trading partners to join a carbon customs alliance. Canada, the United Kingdom and the European Union all have carbon pricing measures in place and would be good initial partners for such an alliance. Those countries combined account for nearly half of the world’s GDP, giving the alliance considerable influence over other economies.
The United States and like-minded nations should be working together to defend their collective advantage over more carbon-intensive competitors. There are compelling economic, geopolitical and national security reasons for the America to lead the world on climate policy. Well-designed national climate policies can replace economic vulnerabilities with opportunities. At present, companies based in the United States are at a severe disadvantage, forced to compete on an uneven playing field because nations like China, India and Russia allow their industries to operate under much looser standards. The solution is not to weaken our own standards, but to step up our game, raise our standards and penalize any trading partners who refuse to follow our lead.
What we do and how we live our lives has impact on our neighbors. Because of our social responsibility to our neighbors, decisive action to address the worldwide impact of climate change will require the United States and other industrial powers to admit their financial and moral obligations to nations with developing economies. America, along with allies in Europe and Asia, needs to bring together a coalition of international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund with regional development banks to encourage lending practices in the developing economies in line with net-zero emission goals.
Change Has to Begin at Home, with Clean Energy Solutions
While continued advances in clean energy technologies are essential for addressing climate change, the United States is falling behind in the race to put those technologies to use in our own industries and energy infrastructure. Tremendous clean energy breakthroughs are being made in America’s university labs and private-sector research centers, but not enough of that innovation is making its way into commercial use here at home.
There is no question that America has the resources, technological know-how and international standing to lead the world in this fight. All we need is the will – and the courage of our own political leaders. While the United States is falling behind in the clean energy race after decades of delay and denial, there is nevertheless a wealth of clean energy innovation and development taking place in this county. Unfortunately, too much of this good work has gone unnoticed and underutilized. The next generation of renewables and nuclear energy can drive down costs. The argument can be made that if the United States does not invest heavily in these sectors, we will be putting our global economic leadership position at risk. Described in brief, those sectors include:
Natural Gas
The United States has long been an innovator in natural gas exploration and production. To continue that leadership, the industry must find new ways to use horizontal technologies to drill for still-untapped gas resources, coupled with new technologies to find and close leaks, keep methane from leaking into the environment from pipelines and address other adverse consequences of drilling.
Electric Power
There have been major transformations in the generation of electric power in recent years as low-emission technologies have been introduced in the United States, other western nations, China and India. Policy decisions to encourage expansion of these alternatives – primarily those based on wind, solar, hydro and nuclear generation – could soon make the world’s power grids far less reliant on fossil fuels. When this occurs, additional environmental gains will be possible by designing more processes to run on these low-emission sources of electricity rather than requiring the combustion of carbon fuels.
Renewable Energy Sources
Renewable energy now accounts for a quarter of global electricity production. In the United States the cost of renewables has tumbled and continues to fall, offering tremendous opportunities to continue integrating renewables into our existing power grid structure. The challenge is to accomplish this without disrupting the existing power grid, which must strictly align supply with demand at all times to avoid blackouts. To be less vulnerable to blackouts, utility companies will need to expand the size of their power grids, so that each distribution network can draw on a larger and more diverse array of energy sources.
Public opposition to renewable-energy infrastructure and bureaucratic sluggishness are two major obstacles to increased use of alternate energy sources. For example, public opposition to wind turbines and wind farms has hampered expansion of wind generation in Norway and the eastern United States, just two examples of obstacles facing the industry. The same issue of public opposition arises when power companies move to upgrade their grids. New powerlines designed to transport renewable energy from the California desert to San Diego took a decade to build, rather than the anticipated two years. By contrast, China has been able to build dozens of ultrahigh-voltage lines across that country over the last decade. While no one wants the authoritarian approach of China, a middle ground must be found to overcome shortsighted “not in my backyard” opposition that halts or delays needed progress.
Nuclear Energy
To achieve the goal of net-zero emissions, the world will have to rely on a combination of alternative energy sources, with renewables and nuclear power playing an increasing role. To make this possible, the world will need to invest in small-scale nuclear power production, which is safer, deployable and much more flexible than the massive plants built decades ago. While older nuclear power plants are most efficient when they run 24 hours a day, modern plants can operate flexibly, making them able to fill power-supply gaps from wind and solar sources. This new breed of nuclear power plants can provide small sources of distributed power that help provide power regionally and maintain the voltage balance required for optimal performance of power grids.
Today many nations are able to import nuclear reactors from others, which makes commercial nuclear energy available in countries unable to develop and safety deploy nuclear-generated energy on their own. But while this model is helping fill clean energy needs in some nations, it also creates new risks associated with the safety and security of exporting nuclear materials.
Another challenge to the expansion of nuclear power as a clean energy alternative is a lack of sustainable and safe solutions for managing radioactive waste. About a dozen European nations are making efforts to address this problem, with plans for deep geological repositories for their nuclear waste. In the United States, government officials have long discussed storing the country’s waste in a repository beneath Yucca Mountain in Nevada, but support for those plans has fluctuated between pro and con with each change of the political winds. For now, nuclear waste accumulates primarily where it’s generated at the power plants and processing facilities – an untenable and unsustainable situation.
Other Alternatives to Oil and Coal
Transportation accounts for more than a quarter of global energy use, and nearly all of that energy comes from oil. The automotive industry is slowly reducing its dependence on gasoline and diesel fuels as electric vehicles become more available and affordable, and as charging-station networks expand. This trend is especially evident in localities where governments subsidize consumer incentives to encourage the purchase of electric vehicles. In Norway, for example, electric or plug-in hybrid vehicles accounted for more than 50 percent of new car sales in 2019, largely due to financial incentives for buyers. As the batteries used for these vehicles become more advanced and cost efficient, heavy-duty vehicles like electric-powered buses and trucks will soon become more prevalent on the world’s highways. For example, China already deploys thousands of electric buses with the help of state subsidies.
Heating for domestic needs and for industrial production accounts for a significant share of the raw energy used around the world – a great deal of that produced by burning coal. The urgent need for widespread use of cleaner sources of power must be accompanied by the investments and innovations in the power grids that generate and distribute electricity.
The United States has cut down on its carbon emissions thanks to innovations in horizontal drilling and fracking that have made it economically viable to extract natural gas for use in newly built gas-powered generator plants. Before these technologies were introduced, coal accounted for half of the electricity produced in the United States. Today, that share has been brought down to one-quarter of total electricity production, thanks to the use of much cleaner natural gas and renewable energy sources.
Long-Duration Energy Storage
The emerging technologies of Long-Duration Energy Storage (LDES) systems, essentially batteries allowing for off-peak storage of electrical energy for on-peak use, can be the driver for using more renewables and help achieve a net-zero-carbon electricity system by dispensing low-carbon power only when needed. LDES technology gives utilities the ability to integrate renewable energy into an electric grid while it encourages the generation of power from sustainable, low-carbon fuel sources and helps achieve a net-zero-carbon electricity system by dispensing low-carbon power only when necessary.
Carbon Dividends – a Cost-Effective and Equitable Solution
Two Paths America strongly endorses the Baker-Shultz Carbon Dividends Plan, proposed by the Climate Leadership Council, an international policy collaborative of business, opinion and environmental leaders who are working to promote a carbon dividends framework as the most cost-effective, equitable and politically viable climate solution. (Christine Todd Whitman, a member of Two Paths America’s advisory board, is also a founding member of the Climate Leadership Council).Named for two of its distinguished authors – former Secretaries of State James A. Baker III and George P. Shultz – the plan is built on four pillars:
- A gradually rising carbon fee: Incentivizing faster and greater emission reduction at lower cost to the economy than regulations or subsidies. The first pillar is an economy wide fee on carbon emissions, which if implemented by 2021 would cut U.S. carbon emissions in half by 2035. To ensure that this target is met, a mechanism built into the Plan will increase the fee faster if key reduction benchmarks are not achieved.
- Carbon dividends for all Americans: Returning the revenue from carbon fees directly to the American people on an equal and quarterly basis. This amount will grow as the carbon fee increases. The higher the carbon fee, the lower the carbon emission and the higher the dividend to the people.
- Significant regulatory simplification: In the majority of cases the carbon fee will offer more cost-effective solution and the fee will replace current regulations. Trading regulations for a carbon fee will promote economic growth and offer companies the certainty and flexibility they need to make long-term investments in a low-carbon future.
- Border carbon adjustment: A revenue-neutral system of tariffs and dividends designed to level the international playing field by applying the domestic carbon price to energy intensive imports. A well-designed system of border carbon adjustments will enhance the competitiveness of U.S.-based firms that are more energy-efficient than their international competitors, while preventing free-riding by other nations.
With certain adjustments required to meet the needs of each participating nation, the Baker Shultz Plan’s four-part framework offers a cost-effective and equitable climate solution for most major countries outside the United States.
To stimulate progress in each of these energy sources and firmly establish American leadership role in climate-change technology, policymakers must increase our investment in climate science and data collection, appoint scientists to key advisory positions and establish rigorous scientific standards across state and federal agencies. We must develop public-private partnerships in strategic sectors to invest in, test and deploy possible solutions. This will require tax credits, direct grants and pioneering green products, even if those solutions are initially more expensive than present alternatives.
The Bottom Line
As the nation best positioned to determine the economic and geopolitical balance of global power for decades to come, the United States must step up to become the global leader in clean energy development and deployment. By using energy as a tool of economic growth rather than a weapon of political ideology and gamesmanship, we have the capacity not only to solve our own energy challenges, but also to position our nation at the head of the table for positive and lasting climate action throughout the world. If the United States chooses to take a back seat and withdraw, others will surely fill the vacuum and the entire world will suffer with us. Two Paths America is convinced this is a challenge our nation must embrace and conquer.