Is the Economic Crisis Good for Global Warming?

When scientists or economists or activists show graphs of future greenhouse gas emissions, they label the line that rises most steeply and most quickly as "BAU" or "business-as-usual." It is the certain path to temperature rises of 5 degrees or more and to climate catastrophe. There is no argument that to halt the progress of global warming, what is required is an end to business-as-usual.

If you are concerned about global warming, "business -as-usual" is a four-letter phrase. It's abbreviated as "BAU" and that's a four-letter acronym. No matter the form it takes, it's a dirty word that succinctly and precisely names the enemy.

So what is worth talking about -- since nobody else appears to be -- is that the current global economic crisis has put a temporary halt to business-as-usual. The two great carbon-spewing economies of the globe -- the US and China -- are now spewing a lot less greenhouse gas. Together, they account for half of the world's emissions.

It's probably safe to wager that the economic downturn will be doing more to reduce global GHG emissions than all the real effort and well-intentioned rhetoric of the last two decades. It would be useful and illuminating if someone with the requisite expertise would redraw the trajectory of BAU on a graph, taking into account the financial meltdown, so we can see by just how much.

This would be good news were it not for the prolonged suffering of ordinary people that is the corollary. But there is a sad irony here. Anti-regulatory free market types -- vociferous opponents of climate action -- predicted economic doom if carbon got priced. My, my. Look at the mess they've gotten us into all by themselves, the effect it's had and what the way out is.

The economic catastrophe -- the final fruit of decades of deregulation -- is reducing emissions, and almost everybody seems to think recovery and stimulus lie in a clean and green direction. Let's make sure that we don't rebuild business-as-usual, now that it is temporarily down for the count. Time for a knockout punch.

The US and China are like twins joined at the back. One is addicted to consumption, and relies on it to fuel its engine of economic growth; the other is irrevocably committed to production, and feeds its people's growing expectation of prosperity with uncontrolled industrial expansion. Their gazes are fixed in opposite directions. They cannot survive without each other as they share the same circulatory system. The deep national debt of one body provides the credit that oxygenates the other. They were joined as twin culprits of global warming -- not at birth -- but through opportunistic infection feeding on the culture of business-as-usual.

It's a sobering image that illuminates the scale of the challenge. David Leonhardt, writing in the New York Times today, frames it this way:

.....the stimulus package under discussion would bring no more than $150 billion in new government spending. The difference between a good year for consumer spending and a really bad one is about $400 billion. So 2009 could turn out to be fairly miserable. The American consumer, long the spender of last resort for the global economy, may finally be spent.

In other words, an immediate $150 billion spending stimulus will not do much to move the economy to health. It is the same amount of money that president-elect Obama has proposed spending over the next 10 years on clean energy development. His is one of the most ambitious proposals out there, yet it won't hardly make a dent in BAU. The balance of power still seems to be directed at a resurrection of BAU, not a sustainable transformation.

The newspapers are filled with stories about the work being done to revive the collapsed global economy, and the hundreds of billions of dollars being spent to keep the pieces from shattering into fragments. It is as if the first order of business is restoring business to its usual self -- to make it possible for Americans to consume again as before, to fuel the growth of all the world's economies, including China's. In the emergency, there is talk of reconstituting order on a green footing, but it is still largely talk. The main effort is still directed at piecing Humpty Dumpty back together again.

The next moment soldiers came running through the wood, at first in twos and threes, then ten or twenty together, and at last in such crowds that they seemed to fill the whole forest. Alice got behind a tree, for fear of being run over, and watched them go by. She thought that in all her life she had never seen soldiers so uncertain on their feet: they were always tripping over something or other, and whenever one went down, several more always fell over him, so that the ground was soon covered with little heaps of men.

General Motors is on the brink of bankruptcy, so all the king's soldiers are now focusing on a rescue of the US auto industry -- long the backbone of the economy -- the employer of millions of Americans. Even the auto industry's champion, John Dingell, is singing about green recovery. He said that:

he was working with other Michigan lawmakers on a measure to help the industry “re-emerge as a global, competitive leader in fuel efficiency and in new, path-breaking, energy-efficient technologies that protect our environment.”

Not sure what to believe from the lawmaker that has done more than any other to protect Detroit's habits of business-as-usual. Sounds like the mad hatter to me. Let's see if Waxman can unseat him from his powerful committee perch. Dingell is a shining example of BAU's own Siamese twin -- PAU, or politics-as-usual -- which still has its final weeks on stage before closing night on January 19.

Then, the show will be all Obama all the time. Will it be BAU and PAU all over again, or the change we need? Already likened to FDR, he has the opportunity to rebuild anew from catastrophe instead of trying to put the egg back together again. As Alice said to Humpty Dumpty:

`Don't you think you'd be safer down on the ground? That wall is so very narrow!'

`What tremendously easy riddles you ask!' Humpty Dumpty growled out. `Of course I don't think so! Why, if ever I did fall off - - which there's no chance of -- but if I did....' The King has promised me -- with his very own mouth -- to -- to -- '

`To send all his horses and all his men,' Alice interrupted.

Not so fast!

Maybe it's time to think again about the wisdom of seating an egg upon a narrow wall. After all, as the nursery rhyme even reminds us:

All the king's horses and all the king's men

Couldn't put Humpty Dumpty together again.

See also

The Climate for Change (Al Gore op-ed in the NYT)

President Obama's Big Climate Challenge (Bill McKibben in Yale e360)

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