My personal view is that this is one input to a very complex cause prioritization question.
While it (a) certainly reduces the “naïve” importance of climate somewhat (though mind the fact that this is only about temperature here, it could be that changed views on the badness of different temperatures went the opposite way), (b) it also shows the incredible tractability and cost-effectiveness of a particular policy (technology-specific support and innovation policy) which underlies most of the change in expected emissions and which we can make more likely for sectors and tech that have not enjoyed widespread popularity but still need solving, and (c) the increase in societal resources dedicated to climate also means that advocacy to improve it is potentially more valuable.
So I would say evaluating this question would require a lot more work than this update on expectable distributions of emissions and warming and I don’t have strong and stable views on this.
Thanks Johannes for the reply. I agree with you on (a) and (c), but I’m a bit confused on (b). I understand (and for the most part) agree with your view that “technology-specific support and innovation policy” is a very promising route for philanthropic engagement to fight climate change, but I’m struggling to see how this recent shift in climate badness predictions adds additional support for this route of intervention vis-a-vis other mechanisms (rich-country policy advocacy concentrated on reducing domestic emissions, projects that directly reduce emissions in the short term, etc.)
Thanks Dan! Let me clarify. Whether or not that is additional evidence depends on what informs the prior view.
But if one digs deeper on “what are the causes for the change in emissions predictions?” almost all of those are related to technology-specific support policies, not (i) actions that were meant to maximally reduce emissions in the short term (which, in the early 2000s would not have been massive solar subsidies which were primarily motivated by love of solar and hate of nuclear, in the German case, not climate) nor (ii) rich country policy advocacy to reduce emissions domestically.
It is not that our means to reduce emissions in the short-term have improved dramatically (say, we now have cheap credible offsets and those drive lesser expected warming) nor that increased targets / domestic policy ambition is already reflected in those improved scenarios, what has changed is technology cost and that has been almost entirely driven by innovation policies of various kinds (including early-stage deployment policies), not target-setting or carbon pricing policies (saying this as someone who has worked in carbon pricing for half a decade).
I think it is also evidence for the importance of targeting policy effort, e.g. a lot of the contents of the infrastructure bill are focused on by now relatively mature technologies (accelerating the adoption of electric vehicles by a bit) which might accelerate some emissions reductions in the US but has relatively less spillover, but the more transformative parts of the bill are those that support technologies at earlier stages of development where the trajectory towards clean is not yet locked in. So, it wouldn’t be surprising if the most valuable parts of the infrastructure bill are those that do not reduce emissions in the US in the next 5 years, indeed this is what we should expect.
Thanks Dan!
My personal view is that this is one input to a very complex cause prioritization question.
While it (a) certainly reduces the “naïve” importance of climate somewhat (though mind the fact that this is only about temperature here, it could be that changed views on the badness of different temperatures went the opposite way), (b) it also shows the incredible tractability and cost-effectiveness of a particular policy (technology-specific support and innovation policy) which underlies most of the change in expected emissions and which we can make more likely for sectors and tech that have not enjoyed widespread popularity but still need solving, and (c) the increase in societal resources dedicated to climate also means that advocacy to improve it is potentially more valuable.
So I would say evaluating this question would require a lot more work than this update on expectable distributions of emissions and warming and I don’t have strong and stable views on this.
Thanks Johannes for the reply. I agree with you on (a) and (c), but I’m a bit confused on (b). I understand (and for the most part) agree with your view that “technology-specific support and innovation policy” is a very promising route for philanthropic engagement to fight climate change, but I’m struggling to see how this recent shift in climate badness predictions adds additional support for this route of intervention vis-a-vis other mechanisms (rich-country policy advocacy concentrated on reducing domestic emissions, projects that directly reduce emissions in the short term, etc.)
Thanks Dan! Let me clarify. Whether or not that is additional evidence depends on what informs the prior view.
But if one digs deeper on “what are the causes for the change in emissions predictions?” almost all of those are related to technology-specific support policies, not (i) actions that were meant to maximally reduce emissions in the short term (which, in the early 2000s would not have been massive solar subsidies which were primarily motivated by love of solar and hate of nuclear, in the German case, not climate) nor (ii) rich country policy advocacy to reduce emissions domestically.
It is not that our means to reduce emissions in the short-term have improved dramatically (say, we now have cheap credible offsets and those drive lesser expected warming) nor that increased targets / domestic policy ambition is already reflected in those improved scenarios, what has changed is technology cost and that has been almost entirely driven by innovation policies of various kinds (including early-stage deployment policies), not target-setting or carbon pricing policies (saying this as someone who has worked in carbon pricing for half a decade).
I think it is also evidence for the importance of targeting policy effort, e.g. a lot of the contents of the infrastructure bill are focused on by now relatively mature technologies (accelerating the adoption of electric vehicles by a bit) which might accelerate some emissions reductions in the US but has relatively less spillover, but the more transformative parts of the bill are those that support technologies at earlier stages of development where the trajectory towards clean is not yet locked in. So, it wouldn’t be surprising if the most valuable parts of the infrastructure bill are those that do not reduce emissions in the US in the next 5 years, indeed this is what we should expect.