This is Democracy – Episode 17: The Environment and Democracy

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Speaker 1: This
Speaker 2: Is democracy.
Speaker 3: A podcast that explores the
Speaker 4: Interracial, intergenerational, and intersectional
Speaker 1: Unheard voices living in the worlds
Speaker 2: most influential democracy.
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Jeremi: Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy. Today we’re going to talk about environmental policy making in a democracy. A topic that is receiving a lot of attention now with the fires in California, a recent federal report on the dire concerns of our environment, and a new conference that’s just opened in Poland with most of the major countries in the world, excluding the United States in some respects. We have with us, I think, probably one of the best people in the world to talk about this topic with, my colleague and friend Sheila Olmstead. Good morning, Sheila.
Sheila: Good morning.
Jeremi: Sheila is a professor at the LBJ School, she has also served on the Council of Economic Advisers in the White House. She has taught at a number of universities and writes, in particular, about the intersection of economics, the environment, market conditions, and the ways in which markets work with, and sometimes work against, environmental policy with regard to water and various other resources. Before we turn to that discussion though we have another poem from Zachary. Zachary what is the title of your poem this morning?
Zachary: It’s called “So Florescently Away.”
Jeremi: Okay, let’s hear it.
Zachary: I look out the window waking up at night, holding tight to my teddy bears. Watch the white, wooden whistle against the electric poles. You can see the green wilderness beyond along a sewage creek. I can feel the smell of the night creeping among the asphalt. I can remember the cold water in the bathroom in my parched tongue. I can still hear the BBC echo through my ears, the wildfire sirens. Earthquake images from decades ago flip like a slideshow through my mind. Sleeping and awake in the cold silence. Warming under my blankets as the globe slips through the universe and all oceans are all clear to me now. All the forested tundra frozen and grassland land it creeps, seeps like sleep into the clearing image of the globe and I am awakened it seems only a few minutes later by hard footsteps up the stairs. A jolt of the electric light and I walk into the school unto the florescence but when I close my eyes I can see the globe slipping, slipping so fluorescently away.
Jeremi: Wow, that’s great imagery, Zachary. What is your message about in the environment in your poem?
Zachary: That we see it in our everyday lives and we see the environment all around us, but we have trouble seeing the whole picture and seeing what’s happening to our globe. When we do see it we just want to look away.
Jeremi: Well, that’s a perfect point to transition to Sheila here. Why do we have such trouble with environmental policy? Everyone seems to care about having clean air and having nice parks, but yet we seem stuck. Why is that?
Sheila: Yeah, it’s a great question. I guess I would open by saying maybe to strike a little bit of a positive note and say that we’ve actually achieved just tremendous progress in the United States. Even in countries like China where population has pushed really hard for better and more air quality regulation due to really significant pollution problems, especially in the cities. If you think about where we were in the 1970s in the US, you know, air quality on the whole in US cities was so much worse than it is today. We’ve made a huge amount of progress but I think some of what Zachary is pointing to in his poem, and some of what you’re asking about, has to do with climate change which is the mother of all environmental problems. One could take a pessimistic view and say, “Well, if we can’t do something about that then why talk about the progress we’ve made in other areas.” I would say in a way it’s true to focus on that as something that’s different, and definitely harder than some of these other things that we’ve tackled.
The first president to ask for a report on climate change essentially was LBJ. We’re talking about 1965, you know, he made a speech to congress and he mentioned it. We’ve know about it since the late 1800s. There were Swedish chemists that kind of worked out essentially the basic physics and atmospheric chemistry behind the problem. So it’s true. We’ve known for a long time. It’s a very hard problem to solve. I would largely is because this is really a global problem. We could really do a lot to fix air quality in Los Angeles in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s by doing thing internally within the United States, and even just within the state of California to some extent, but this problem of climate change is something that essentially all countries have to kind of band together to do something about. Even though we’ve had this global process in place since 1982 with the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which is the meeting that you were talking about today, it’s one of many, many global meetings that have taken place. It’s just a really thorny problem to solve when essentially everyone has to work together to do it.
Jeremi: Right, and just to get it out there, how do we know climate change is occurring?
Sheila: Well we know climate change is occurring for a lot of reasons. Even if you go back to the sort of basic predictions in the 1890s by the original folks who thought about this in the physical sciences, a lot of what they predicted has come to pass. Obviously there’s lots of uncertainty but generally the idea is that we are emitting lots of gases that have this greenhouse effect, carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, and when we increase the stock of those gases in the upper atmosphere of the Earth when the sun’s radiation comes in less of it escapes. So we have this general warming trend. We know that that’s happened because we’ve tracked for many decades both the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide as well as global surface temperatures worldwide. We can see this signal quite clearly of human induced warming since the mid-1800s, since industrialization, in that data in lots and lots of places. The most famous, and maybe the most well-known, because it’s been tracked the longest, is the Mauna Loa observatory data. It has this sort of famous graph right showing this increase. Other things are consistent with that we see increased acidification of oceans and fresh water resources. We see other things that are consistent with the story of that kind of human-induced warming like more severe storms, more frequent down pours in some parts of the world, longer and more severe droughts and so on. As scientists get better and better at what’s called attribution science, really taking these individual events like the California drought, or Hurricane Harvey, or Super Storm Sandy, and kind of working out the probability that these events would have been that severe in the absence of human-induced warming and finding that that probability is really, really small. We get better at saying what specifically the current results of that warming trend are and also better at predicting what might happen in the future.
Jeremi: So, if it is so obvious, and there are still some who deny, but if it is so obvious why doesn’t that mobilize global action? Why is it so hard?
Sheila: Well, it’s a great question. My answer has two parts. One is that we actually do see it mobilizing a lot of action. I think one reason it’s hard is because one could argue that until fairly recently lots of Americans, lots of kind of citizens in other parts of the world may not have felt the impacts of that warming directly in their local communities, their households, in their firms if we’re talking about people running business. Since about half of the warming that has occurred since the mid-1800s, late 1800s has occurred since 1990, we’ve seen in recent decades this very rapid series of changes where people are now– they find it perceptible. Winters we’re just now getting as much snow or winters are warmer. We’re seeing seasons change earlier.
Jeremi: Bigger hurricanes.
Sheila: Bigger hurricanes. When we see these kind of effects that’s when people start to feel those things then in some ways we see more action. Even though it’s true that we’ve seen at the US federal level perhaps less action than some people would have wanted since the political change in 2016 when President Obama left office and President Trump came into office, we certainly have seen a continuation at the local level, at the state level. There’s still lots of We’re Still In movement, even though the United States has announced its intention to withdraw from the Paris Accords in 2020, when it’s possible for us to do that. Still, lots of folks that are taking action within the United States. I mean State of California is your classic example. You could say, “Well, California they’re all just kind of ahead of the curve on these environmental issues,” and one might write that off. I think it’s very hard to write off first of all the scale of attempts that California is making and the ambition of those attempts. Then also the fact that it’s not just California, there’s lots of places lots of cities that are taking significant measures, costly measures, to try to make a dent in this problem.
Jeremi: How does it make a difference because oftentimes people will say to me, “Well, it’s nice to do these small things but if the world is warming up around us, what difference will it make?”
Sheila: Well, you know it’s funny. As an economist maybe if you’d ask me 10 years ago I would’ve given you exactly that answer. I would’ve said, “It’s a drop in the bucket.” It’s really hard to be positive about those kinds of measures when I know the scale of the problem and that it really takes if we don’t tackle seriously emissions from countries like China and United States, that going forward we’re in real trouble but then what you see is collectively it’s actually quite impressive. It’s nothing an economist would’ve predicted. We think about game theory and strategic interactions, and political scientists think about this too. I think it’s very hard with our usual models to explain why this incredible flourishing of local efforts has happened, and also to note that when you add them up there’s something there. It’s not ideal, a bottom up approach to a problem that’s global in scale that really needs to be tackled at the global level, but I think you can also see it as kind of the beginning of a big wave that might just crash right over the national efforts and prompt more serious national efforts. I feel like I’m positive about that in the United States. I wish it weren’t so late in a way. I think another way of thinking about it is I’ve shifted a significant amount of my own research toward worrying about adaptation. If we know, for example, that the next few decades of warming are kind of baked in because of the long lasting nature of these emissions in the upper atmosphere, then what can we do now to help populations that are vulnerable to adapt to the changes that are likely to take place. At the same time still worrying about trying to enact change in terms of emissions.
Jeremi: So it’s a kind of dual approach. We have to try to limit the damage but also learn to live with some of the damage.
Sheila: Sure. I mean you have to think about it as a cheap insurance. It’s not cheap but it is insurance. Really thinking about what we can do to help people who are going to be strongly affected and don’t have a lot of recourse. Some of these recent events like the droughts and the hurricanes are really good examples. When you look at Hurricane Harvey and you think about the populations that were most seriously affected, and continue to be most seriously affected by being displaced from homes and so on, we can do a lot policy-wise that in a way has nothing to do with climate change. We don’t all have to agree about what’s causing it or anything like that to look at these projections of what’s going to happen to storms in coastal Texas, and think about how we help people prepare for that.
Jeremi: Right. How do we deal with the local inequalities? This is something else you’re obviously an expert on. Climate change tends to affect those in poorer communities most of all because they’re most vulnerable. Then when we ask for adaptation the costs are often highest for them. This happens at the global scale, it’s why the Indians criticize quite often American claims on these issues. It happens within cities like Austin if you look at what the cost of recycling is, and how people deal with that in different parts of the city. How do we think about that?
Sheila: It’s a really tough one. Here, again, there is a political process that determines the outcomes of those kinds of distributional arguments. When I talk to my own kids, I say, you vote. You think carefully about these things and you do more than vote. You really get out there and you try and talk to people in a reasonable way. Again, reasonable people can disagree about lots of things, but we can still sit down and have a conversation about how one helps those folks. At the end of the day, I think a lot of those discussions are about adaptation, and about vulnerability to global change, is very similar to conversations we have about vulnerability more generally. There is some things that are qualitatively different. For example, a lot of this has to do with uncertainty and exposure to these highly unlikely, but catastrophic events like Harvey. So the nature of that conversation may be somewhat different than you know day to day difficulty of being a low income household, or a household with someone who is disabled or has health issues. At the same time there’s plenty of evidence showing people with higher incomes, people that are in more economically secure positions are also more resilient to those kinds of shocks. That’s true, like you said, whether we’re in suburban Houston or whether we’re in a developing country where the weather shocks are quite different in nature, but it’s going to have the same kind of unpredictable and negative impact on households. The more we can do to vote and lobby for policies that help shore up those kinds of households in other ways, the better off they’ll be with climate change as well.
Jeremi: Are you also optimistic as many of my students are about how technologies can help us to alleviate some of these inequalities?
Sheila: Absolutely. We’ve seen so much of that already and that’s one of the things that makes it fascinating from an economic perspective as to why we’re kind of in this boat of denial, and kind of foot dragging on doing something. Really, there’s been a sea change in the cost of some really important technologies; things like renewable energy sources, like solar and wind energy, which has dropped dramatically over the past few decades in ways people could not have predicted. Even the fracking, the sort of shale gas boom, there are upsides and downsides to that but one big upside is that natural gas is a lot cleaner, not perfectly clean, but a lot cleaner than something like coal when we think about using it to generate electricity. Just those two things– the phenomenal drops in the cost of those kinds of resources have made it easier than it ever might have been, than we might have predicted a few decades ago, to reduce emissions and to make this kind of transition to lower carbon energy sources. We know that that works. We know that technology and technological change are critical pieces of the picture. The cheaper we can make it to control emissions and to adapt and so on, the better off we will be. We know the kinds of policies that we need to choose to put in place to encourage those kinds of innovations. So I think that’s a real positive aspect to this as well.
Jeremi: I guess that brings us back to the question of what to do now. So many young people come to me and they express enthusiasm for getting involved in these environmental organizations and movements, but such profound frustration that as the enthusiasm has risen the resistance seems to have risen at least equally as much.
Sheila: Yeah, it’s really tough. What I would say is I think you know a lot of us are joiners. We really enjoy kind of joining groups where we are talking with other folks that feel the same way that we do. That’s a wonderful thing in life– right? — is finding folks who are of like mind, but I think at this point having conversations, those really difficult conversations, with people are not of like mind is actually even more important. For our pleasure, sanity, and enjoyment we like to gather with folks that we agree with. But there are some really good scientists, I think of Katherine Hayhoe at Texas Tech, and others who have done an excellent job really trying to engage folks who are maybe less amenable at first glance to both thinking about climate change as a serious problem, and to thinking about policies that would actually help us mitigate and adapt.
Jeremi: So how do you do that? It’s so hard to get out of our settings. I had an argument with a very generous donor to the university a few months ago who was upset we didn’t have climate deniers at a conference at the university.
Sheila: Interesting, yeah.
Jeremi: On the one hand, we want to talk to other people, but we also don’t want to talk to other people who deny science. Right?
Sheila: Yeah, no, absolutely. It’s a huge challenge! This is an academic institution and I think you can set your boundary and just explain to people. I hear people say, “I don’t believe in climate change.” I say, well it’s not a religion. There is a really long, as I described earlier, a very long scientific record here that we can look to. Obviously, it’s often difficult to predict things in really tight ways but the general premise is there and is very well founded. I think it’s important to have that conversation, but again even if you can’t make progress on that front we still can look at the data, say over the past decade, and even folks who are not necessarily amenable to the argument that humans are causing this warming are clearly in many cases amenable to a discussion about what they’re observing, their weather. Farmers in the middle of the country are clearly in this boat. Residents of coastal cities. Residents of California who are experiencing yearlong fire seasons which are larger and more intense fires. So I think that’s where we find the common ground is, okay even if we can’t agree necessarily on what the causes are let’s talk about what’s happening, what you observe, and how that’s affecting your family or your business, and then go from there.
Jeremi: What is– because we want to be optimistic and there are many good reasons to be optimistic, what are the most positive things that young people can do? Obviously talking to others, but how? What are the settings that we should create for that? How can this sort of grass roots enthusiasm really continue to pick up momentum?
Sheila: Yeah, that’s a great question. I would say that in addition to voting and taking part in elections, obviously we’ve just had a midterm election. In two years we’ll have another important national election coming up, that’s important. Activity at your local level. So cities have policies, as we’ve talked about before right, we can engage at that level. Even just socially, sort of one person at a time having those conversations, I think we can’t deny how important that is going to be over time.
Jeremi: One thing that I’ve been excited by, and I think you see this every day, are the ways in which our students become educators to others. Some of that is, as you said, talking to people, but some of that is in our daily activities, our habits. Right?
Sheila: Right.
Jeremi: There’s no doubt that our generation, and then a generation younger than us, that they act in ways differently from those a generation or two older.
Sheila: Yeah.
Jeremi: So, I sometimes think about good habits. Yeah.
Sheila: Absolutely there is something to that. This idea that the more we set examples about driving less, setting the heat a degree lower, those kinds of things, the more we can train ourselves, our kids, their friends, and so on, in sort of ways that are going to step a little bit less heavily on the planet. At the same time, I think a lot of this has to do with incentives. If we don’t face the proper incentives even people who are very well intentioned have a hard time something with that discipline, and making decisions that will have a net benefit for the planet. So, it’s both. Certainly those habits are important but there’s also a lot of folks who have written about the fact that we can make ourselves feel good by walking an extra block to recycle an aluminum can. How much difference does that really make? Maybe thinking more carefully about what we can do–
Jeremi: We can walk that extra block but have two plastic bottles that we use. (laughs)
Sheila: Right, exactly! We still have to think about voting. We still have to think about policy at a grander scale. I do think individuals can– I mean it’s amazing that we have a lawsuit in federal court by kids suing the federal government essentially for endangering their future by not engaging in more significant climate mitigation. Whether that goes anywhere or not I think those– there’s just a wakeup call that younger people have given to us old folks, and that I think is really useful.
Jeremi: I think there’s no substitute for having leaders in office who make this a priority. Who understand, who are educated, and also prioritize. That’s part of what you’re getting at with elections.
Sheila: Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, what’s fascinating is that it’s easy to think about monolithic federal government that is now somehow opposed to climate mitigation in a way that the prior federal administration wasn’t. I think that’s a real mistake. It’s a real mistake when you look at the National Climate Assessment that came out the day after Thanksgiving, and you realize that that’s the culmination of work by hundreds of individuals, and teams of individuals, that have been building on work as I mentioned that’s gone on for many decades. Many of those individuals are working within the federal government. I’m not talking about a deep state. I’m talking about genuinely there are folks even at the highest levels that don’t necessarily agree with many of our current president’s choices, choices that he’s made about policy including things like withdrawing from Paris. Just having those conversations, getting trained, going into government service, being one of those folks that can have not a screaming conversation, but a reasonable conversation about what the evidence is, why we think that economically, environmentally that these are good ideas. The more of that that happens eventually I do think that when change happens, when the window opens, we’re ready without convincing arguments. Not just our opinions but our convincing arguments about why things need to change.
Jeremi: And people ready to step in. Young people ready to run for office and serve in these public roles.
Sheila: Absolutely! Things change on a dime. We had a carbon tax proposal that was debated in the US House right now. You don’t know exactly when those dramatic steps are going to take place and so just be ready. It can happen quickly.
Jeremi: That’s a wonderful note to close on. Zachary, what do you think? Are you and your friends ready to step in? Is this important issue for you?
Zachary: I don’t think there are any people of my age really who deny that recycling is a good thing to do, that it’s better to walk and exercise than drive a car. I think they’re ready to make a difference, but I’m not sure if they’re ready to commit themselves fully because it’s not much of a sacrifice to throw your aluminum can in a different bin than another one. It’s a whole different story when it comes to running for office.
Sheila: Yeah.
Jeremi: Do you think that your generation would vote for candidates who make this a priority?
Zachary: Yeah, I think so. I think we also saw it last presidential election like there were a lot of candidates, at least on the Democratic side, who are prioritizing environmental policy and placed that as one of their most important issues.
Jeremi: And you’re optimistic as well, Sheila?
Sheila: I’m optimistic as well.
Jeremi: Well thank you for joining us. I think this has been a fantastic conversation Sheila and Zachary. These are issues that we will continue to talk about. They are central to the future of our society and that’s why we’ve talked about them here on This is Democracy.
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