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Roger Pielke Jr. was quoted in May 29th Climate Collective
The triumph of climate pragmatism
by Michael Shellenberger & Ted Nordhaus
For the better part of two decades, a small group of policy scholars and climate policy advocates have argued that the United Nations’ climate treaty efforts were doomed. Caps on emissions, and other efforts that make fossil fuels more expensive, would fail in world where competitive alternative fuels don’t exist, and where billions of people need to consume more, not less, energy. As such, the recent call by former senators Tim Wirth and Tom Daschle to abandon binding emissions limits, and instead to embrace technology innovation to make clean energy cheap, can be fairly described as the triumph of climate pragmatism.
But it wasn’t until the collapse of United Nations talks in Copenhagen in 2009 that mainstream environmental leaders and policymakers started taking the criticism seriously. Now, two close environmental and liberal allies of President Obama, former senators Tim Wirth and Tom Daschle, have called for the whole treaty framework of mandatory emissions limits to be scrapped. In a long essay for the widely-respected environmental magazine, Yale Environment 360, they argue that the Kyoto climate treaty framework
“depends on national governments, whose first responsibility is to their own people and well-being. For that reason, the climate negotiations have faltered. Nations could not agree on who is to blame, on how to allocate emissions, or on projections for the future.” Read more…
