How did the obsession with decarbonization arise?

The current obsession with decarbonization had its roots in the reaction to the amazing post-WW2 period, when ordinary workers were able to own a house and a car. I was a student in the 50s and early 60s. Mockery of the poor taste and materialism of these people was endemic.

With the Vietnam War, things got amplified, as the working class got drafted while students sought draft deferments (students, during this period, were still a relative elite; the massive expansion of higher education was only beginning). They justified their behavior by insisting that the Vietnam War was illegitimate, while ignoring the obvious fact that Vietnamese people were fleeing south rather than north. It was fashionable to regard the US as evil and deserving of overthrow. Opposition often turned to violence with groups like the Weathermen and SDS (Students for a Democratic Society).

In 1968, I was teaching at the University of Chicago. We were spending the summer in Colorado, and we had a student house-sitting our apartment. When we returned, we found a police car monitoring our apartment. The house-sitter had apparently turned our apartment into a crash pad for the SDS during the Democrat Party Convention. Our apartment was littered with their literature, which included instructions for poisoning Chicago’s water supply.

This period seemed to end with Nixon’s election, but we now know that this was just the beginning of the long march through the institutions. Currently, there is great emphasis on the march through the educational institutions: first the schools of education and then higher education in the humanities and the social sciences, and now STEM. What is usually ignored is that the first institutions to be captured were professional societies. My wife attended a meeting of the Modern Language Association in the late 60s, and it was already fully ‘woke.’

While there is currently a focus on the capture of education, I think it would be a mistake to ignore the traditional focus on the means of production. The vehicle for this was the capture of the environmental movement. Prior to 1970, the focus of this movement was on things like whales, landscape, clean air and water, and population. However, with the first Earth Day in April of 1970, the focus turned to the energy sector, which, after all, is fundamental to all production, and relatedly, involves trillions of dollars.

This shift was accompanied by the creation of new environmental organizations, such as Environmental Defense and the Natural Resources Defense Council. It was also accompanied by new governmental organizations – the EPA and the Department of Transportation. Once again, professional societies were easy pickings: the American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union, and even the honorary societies such as the National Academy of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

There was a bit of floundering to begin with. The movement initially attempted to focus on global cooling, due to the reflection of sunlight by sulfate aerosols emitted by coal fired generators. After all, there seemed to have been global cooling between the 1930s and the 1970s. However, the cooling ended in the 1970s. There was an additional effort to tie the sulfates to acid rain, which was allegedly killing forests. This idea also turned out to be a dud.

In the 70s, attention turned to CO2 and its contribution to warming via the greenhouse effect. The attraction of controlling CO2 to political control freaks was obvious. It was the inevitable product of all burning of carbon-based fuels. It was also the product of breathing. However, there was a problem: CO2 was a minor greenhouse gas compared to the naturally produced water vapor. Doubling CO2 would only lead to warming of less than 1°C.

A paper in the early 70s by Manabe and Wetherald came to the rescue. Using a highly unrealistic one-dimensional model of the atmosphere, they found that assuming (without any basis) that relative humidity remained constant as the atmosphere warmed would provide a positive feedback that would amplify the impact of CO2 by a factor of 2. This violated Le Chatelier’s Principle, which holds that natural systems tended to oppose change, but to be fair, the principle was not something that had been rigorously proven.

Positive feedbacks now became the stock in trade of all climate models, which now were producing responses to doubling CO2 of 3°C and even 4°C rather than a paltry 1°C or less.  The enthusiasm of politicians became boundless. Virtue signaling elites promised to achieve net zero emissions within a decade, or 2, or 3, with no idea of how to do so without destroying their society. Ordinary people, confronted with impossible demands on their own well-being, have not found warming of a few degrees to be very impressive. Few contemplate retiring to the Arctic rather than Florida.

Excited politicians, confronted by this resistance, have frantically changed their story. Rather than emphasizing miniscule changes in their temperature metric, they now point to weather extremes – which occur almost daily some place on earth – as proof not only of climate change but of climate change due to increasing CO2 (and now also to the even more negligible contributors to the greenhouse effect like methane and nitrous oxide), even though such extremes show no significant correlation with emissions.

From the political point of view, extremes provide convenient visuals that have more emotional impact than small temperature changes. The desperation of political figures often goes beyond this to claiming that climate change is an existential threat, even though the official documents produced to support climate concerns never come close to claiming this. I should note that there was one exception to the focus on warming, and that was the ozone depletion issue. However, even this issue served a purpose. When Richard Benedick, the American negotiator of the Montreal Convention which banned Freon passed through MIT on his way back from Montreal, he gloated over his success, but assured us that we hadn’t seen anything yet; we should wait to see what they would do with CO2. In brief, the ozone issue constituted a dry run for global warming.

Of course, the attraction of power is not the only thing motivating politicians. The ability to award trillions of dollars to reorient our energy sector means that there are recipients of these trillions of dollars, and these recipients must only share a few percent of these trillions of dollars to support the campaigns of these politicians for many election cycles.