Why a Bird in the Hand is Worth Two in the Bush — Especially When the Issue is Climate Change
Climate action is too urgent to insist on waiting for perfect solutions
It’s an ancient dispute: Should we compromise on half-measures, or hold out until we can get something a lot better? Idealists argue for holding out. Pragmatist argue that half a loaf is better than none. Rather than rehearse familiar arguments, I want to focus specifically on climate change. In my view, holding out for ideal climate policies makes no sense. Because of the nature of climate change, delay is just too costly. When your house is on fire, you can’t wait to act until Amazon delivers your order for the perfect fire extinguisher.
Climate change is a unique problem in many ways. One of those ways could be summed up by saying “Carbon is Forever.” Forever is only a bit of an overstatement: NASA says CO2 stays in the atmosphere three hundred to a thousand years. So today’s carbon emissions will still be warming the planet far into in the future.
This fact makes delays in climate policy really costly. If we wait to get the stronger policy, we’re accumulating emissions that will stay in the atmosphere for centuries — in other words, doing permanent damage to the climate. Having dug ourselves into a deeper hole, it will take years before we get any real benefit from later adopting the ideal policy.
In reality, we can never be absolutely certain that rejecting half a loaf today will produce a full loaf someday. Nor can we be certain that getting the half loaf now means never getting the full loaf. If we reject compromise, we’re gambling that we’ll get a policy someday that’s worth piling on years of extra carbon debt.
In short, time is of the essence in climate policy. We can’t afford to load up the atmosphere with more carbon just in the hope that somehow, if we wait, we can get some ideal policy. What we really need is to act quickly, and that means grabbing every possible tool as fast as we can, even if some are far from ideal.
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9 Replies to “Why a Bird in the Hand is Worth Two in the Bush — Especially When the Issue is Climate Change”
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About Dan
Dan Farber has written and taught on environmental and constitutional law as well as about contracts, jurisprudence and legislation. Currently at Berkeley Law, he has al…
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Thank You Dan, for finally realizing this fact of life. You are now the Best of the Best environmentalists in UC and we most desperately need you to become the spokesperson for Biden to inform,educate and motivate the peoples of earth to DEMAND ACTIONS TODAY.
Too bad academics refuse to communicate with the “impure” public, that dooms the human race.
I refer you to:
“Pouring Gas on a Five Alarm Fire”
Dan,you academics had better hurry, Gutteres says “world is on ‘highway to climate hell’”:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/05/climate/12-months-record-heat-un-speech/index.html
I greatly appreciate your excellent reporting and your viewpoints on climate change. Your two analogies sound good and are surely popular, but what if your house is on fire and you only have a kitchen-sized fire extinguisher. And what if your half a loaf is whittled down (as legislators often do) to a fourth of a loaf or an eighth or a sixteenth? A problem as massive as climate change requires a massive solution. Unfortunately, half measures will be of little avail.
There are immediately available steps that can be taken now, that that though nor enough, matter, especially in the Carbon Dioxide Reduction phase (which in turn must be powered at least by tax credit expansion, such as under IRS 45Q).
One very small example is kelp forest restoration which in turn requires sea otter recovery. If 45Q applied to Ocean CDR,every new otter in an expanded kelp forest would be worth $1,600 / year and doesn’t threaten anyone’s rice bowl.
Californian “otter” also check off and donate to otter restoration on their state income taxes.
Thanks for all of these interesting comments. If you think about it, you need to believe that passing up the half measure now increases the likelihood of the full measure later by so much that it outweighs the certainty of getting at least the half measure rather than nothing, AND the benefit of keeping years worth of carbon out of the atmosphere forever. If it were true that only the full measure has any value, that might make sense, as Tim Kehl suggests. But the science says that every ton of carbon that we can keep out of the atmosphere is beneficial.
DAN, UN SAYS TIME IS UP!!!
You academics keep failing to take your own advice: “What we really need is to act quickly”!!!
UN chief says world is on ‘highway to climate hell’ as planet endures 12 straight months of unprecedented heat
https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/05/climate/12-months-record-heat-un-speech/index.html
MORE INFO FOR YOU,NEWS JUST IN FROM NBC:
Severe weather leaves millions at risk as storms sweep across the South
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/weather/severe-weather-leaves-millions-risk-storms-sweep-south-rcna150823
Please act even quicker than academics keep failing to do!!!