Thread by @Zathras3

Short climate change thread. Earlier this month, "...scientists did not hide their alarm that an usually cool part of the Pacific northwest had been turned into a furnace." As a @guardian editorial warned, uncertainty about climate change goes both ways. theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

Some models may overestimate the effects of climate change. But even very good models can be wrong the other way, too: bigger changes hitting us sooner than we thought, and more difficult to reverse or adapt to.

If anything, climate models seem to underestimate, more than they overestimate, local effects of climate change. We are not prepared for this -- not only for the extreme weather events themselves, but for their lasting impacts.

God only knows what the ecological damage from an event as large as Oregon's #BootlegFire will be; we certainly don't. Entire areas of shellfish beds were depopulated on the US/Canada West Coast by spiking water temperatures during last month's heat dome.

And how do you reliably service a huge market for fruits and vegetables when you're reliant on irrigation, and persistent drought coupled with punishing heat takes the water away?

You don't.

Of course, climate change isn't only hammering the North American West Coast. @MichaelEMann helpfully catalogs climate-influenced disasters in the Northern Hemisphere just in the last few months. There are a lot of them. thehill.com/opinion/energy…

What kinds of things can we do about this? Generally speaking, there are three categories of policy to which we can turn: regulation, subsidy, and taxation. Regulation (like a clean energy standard promoted by the Biden administration) uses legal sanction to encourage....

....some activities and discourage others. Subsidy uses public resources to reduce the cost of desired activities, like the development of infrastructure for electric vehicles and growth of mass transit. Taxation raises the cost of undesirable activities, like carbon emissions.

The Biden administration is relying mostly on the first two policy categories -- regulation and subsidy -- believing (with some cause) that they can be popular as well as helpful. It has given up on taxation (tariffs excepted), believing increasing the cost of energy use....

....and carbon emissions would be unpopular. @yayitsrob dismisses this as a disappointment for economists and elite Beltway know-it-alls. @MichaelEMann, in the piece linked upthread, takes a different view. theatlantic.com/science/archiv…

The key question about a carbon tax has never been whether it could mitigate climate change by itself, but rather whether we can successfully mitigate climate change without it.

That explicit, direct taxation to discourage energy usage and carbon emissions is unpopular is not in doubt. Biden's emphasis on the economic benefits of a lower carbon economy -- "good-paying union jobs" and all the rest of it -- owes much to his understanding of this.

The climate does not care about the political environment. We either succeed in mitigating climate change, and adapting to what we cannot prevent, or we don't. More energy usage means more carbon emissions. People will use more energy when energy is cheap, less when it isn't.

This would be a mere debating point, or at most a question of economic efficiency, if I were writing in 2001 instead of 2021. As noted upthread, though, in 2021 the changing climate keeps punching humanity in the head, warning us we're facing an emergency, & running out of time.

I don't doubt Biden's political calculation. @KateAronoff correctly observes it is not only Republicans, in their obdurate if financially lucrative refusal to support even recognition that climate change is dangerous, who shrink from difficult measures. newrepublic.com/article/163026…

What I doubt is whether what Biden has proposed -- even if Congress enacts all of it into law -- will get the United States where we need to be, as quickly as we need to get there. Though I agree with almost everything he has promoted, it doesn't look that way to me.

I'd like very much to be wrong about this. Life in the future will be easier if I am. But I fear we will have to reconcile ourselves to the idea that the very best Congress can do this year with respect to climate is only a beginning, and a late beginning at that. [end]

Addendum to this climate change thread from the other day: a very good interview with @MichaelEMann by @lourdesgnavarro on why climate models are good at predicting weather patterns but not extreme weather events. kuow.org/stories/how-cl…