Abstract
In previous chapters, we have presented the main empirical and theoretical reasons behind the proposals for adaptive governance introduced in Box 1.1. The proposals outline one approach to opening the established climate change regime, to help advance the common interests of the world’s many diverse communities. It should be reemphasized that opening the regime does not mean replacing it. In this concluding chapter, we promote careful consideration of the proposals in the continuing evolution of the climate change regime, recognizing that they will be controversial in some quarters but not in others. Careful consideration begins with an introduction to issue expansion and contraction in climate change politics. Issue expansion promotes the aspirations of scientific management, while issue contraction serves to defend them against adaptive governance.1
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Notes
On expansion and contraction dynamics in symbolic politics, see Harold D. Lasswell and Abraham Kaplan, Power and Society: A Framework for Political Inquiry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), 1950, 104–107. See also E. E. Schattschneider, “The Contagiousness of Conflict,” in The Semisovereign People: A Realist’s View of Democracy in America (Hinsdale, IL: The Dryden Press, 1975), Ch. 1, 1–19.
Paul Hawken, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History Is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beauty to the World (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2007), 18.
For example, to address problems of coordination and continuity in veterans care, the report of the President’s Commission on Care for America’s Returning Wounded Warriors in July 2007 “recommended creating a ‘recovery plan’ for seriously injured military personnel and assigning one coordinator for each patient and their family to help them navigate the process of recovering and returning to duty or retiring from active service.” Jim Rutenberg and David S. Cloud, “Bush Panel Seeks Upgrade in Military Care,” New York Times (26 July 2007). On direction centers, see Garry D. Brewer and J. S. Kakalik, Handicapped Children: Strategies for Improving Services (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1979). A more recent example is Centrelink in Australia, “an ambitious project that draws together under one roof a variety of social services from eight different federal departments as well as from various state and territorial governments. The goal is to offer one-stop shopping across a variety of services for citizens.” Centrelink is one example of “Joined-Up Government” mentioned in Stephen Goldsmith and William D. Eggers, Governing by Network: The New Shape of the Public Sector (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2004), 15–17.
See Victor F. Ridgeway, “Dysfunctional Consequences of Performance Measures,” Admin. Sci. Quart. 1 (1956), 240–247; Nancy Cochran, “Grandma Moses and the ‘Corruption of Data,’” Evaluation Quart. 2 (1978), 363–373; Nancy Cochran, “Society as Emergent and More than Rational: An Essay on the Inappropriateness of Program Evaluation,” Policy Sciences 12 (1980), 113–129; Nancy Cochran, Andrew C. Gordon, and Merton S. Krause, “Proactive Records: Reflections on the Village Watchman,” Knowledge: Creation, Diffusion, Utilization 2 (September 1980), 5–18; W. Edwards Deming, Out of the Crisis (Cambridge, MA: MIT Center for Advanced Engineering Study, 1986); and the Congressional Budget Office, Using Performance Measures in the Federal Budget Process (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Budget Office, 1993). For an introduction and supplements to this literature, see Ronald D. Brunner, “Context-Sensitive Monitoring and Evaluation for the World Bank,” Policy Sciences 37 (2004), 103–136, especially 127–128. See also the work of Martin Landau cited in Ch. 4.
U.S. General Accounting Office, Global Warming: Difficulties Assessing Countries’ Progress Stabilizing Emissions of Greenhouse Gases, GAO/RCED-96-188 (November 1996), 4, 5. A subsequent report in December 2003 suggested improvements in emission reporting based on four economically developed and four developing nations, but drew no general conclusions. U.S. General Accounting Office, Climate Change: Selected Nations’ Reports on Greenhouse Gas Emissions Varied in Their Adherence to Standards, GAO-04-98 (December 2003).
U.S. Government Accountability Office, Carbon Offsets: The U.S. Voluntary Market Is Growing but Quality Assurance Poses Challenges for Market Participants, GAO-08-1048 (August 2008), Highlights.
PricewaterhouseCoopers, Building Trust in Emissions Reporting: Global Trends in Emissions Trading Schemes (February 2007), 5. PricewaterhouseCoopers is a global network of legally independent consulting firms. Evidently, the report promotes services for developing “a new Global Emissions Compliance Language.” The authors are identified as Jeroen Kruijd, Arnoud Walrecht, Joris Laseur, Hans Schoolderman, and Richard Gledhill.
Susan Moran, “Carbon Detectives Are Tracking Gases in Colorado,” New York Times (2 December 2008).
Quoted in Cochran et al., “Proactive Records,” 6.
Congressional Budget Office, Using Performance Measures in the Federal Budget Process (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Budget Office, 1993).
The NOAA Coastal Services Center sponsored the workshop, “Toward a Community Resilience Index: Exploring the Conceptual Framework,” held 7 July 2006 in Boulder, CO. These observations are from the first author’s participation and notes at the workshop.
Christina M. Cromley, “Community-Based Forestry Goes to Washington,” 221–267, at 235, in Ronald D. Brunner, Toddi A. Steelman, Lindy Coe-Juell, Christina M. Cromley, Christine M. Edwards, and Donna W. Tucker, Adaptive Governance: Integrating Science, Policy, and Decision Making (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2005).
Crockett Dumas, quoted in Toddi A. Steelman and Donna W. Tucker, “The Camino Real: To Care for the Land and Serve the People,” 91–130, at 118, in Brunner et al., Adaptive Governance.
Bob Muth, quoted in Lindy Coe-Juell, “The 15-Mile Reach: Let the Fish Tell Us,” 47–90, at 58, in Brunner et al., Adaptive Governance.
Kira Finkler, a staff member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, quoted in Cromley, “Community-Based Forestry Goes to Washington,” 237.
David Obey, ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee, as quoted in Brunner et al., Adaptive Governance, 293, from the Congressional Record (16 June 2004), H4259.
Paul Polak, Out of Poverty: What Works When Traditional Approaches Fail (San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler, 2008), 40.
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 4, 3.
Ibid., 51.
Ibid., 12.
Ibid., 15. According to Scott, p. 14, scientific forestry “originally developed from about 1765 to 1800, largely in Prussia and Saxony. Eventually it would become the basis of forest management techniques in France, England, the United States, and throughout the Third World.”
Ibid., 19.
Ibid., 23.
Ibid., 24.
Ibid., 47.
Ibid., 24.
Ibid., 51–52, from the Introduction by J. L. Heilbron to Tore Frangsmyr, J. L. Heilbron, and Robin E. Rider, Eds., The Quantifying Spirit in the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991), 22–23.
Ibid., 4, 3.
Ibid., 5.
Ibid., 4.
Scott, Seeing Like a State, 4. As noted in Ch.1, this ideological faith survives in constructs such as “Managing Planet Earth” and “Spaceship Earth.”
Ibid., 353–354.
Ibid., 343. Emphasis in original.
John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West (New York, NY: Vintage, 1993), 26.
Ibid., 15.
Ibid., 111. Voltaire is the name François-Marie Arouet (21 November 1694–30 May 1778) adopted in 1718 both as a pen name and for daily use.
Ibid., 6.
Ibid., 7. Emphasis added. As Saul conceived it, on p. 112, “The heart of reason is logic, but Voltaire had imagined this logic well anchored in common sense.” Common sense, on p. 54, was conceived as “careful emotion or prudence….”
For example, consider Voltaire in The Philosophical Dictionary, from the edition published in French in 1843, and selected and translated by H. I. Woolf (New York, NY: Knopf, 1924). “The real vice of a civilized republic is in the Turkish fable of the dragon with many heads and the dragon with many tails. The many heads hurt each other, and the many tails obey a single head which wants to devour everything.” Obtained from the Hanover Historical Texts Project, Hanover College Department of History.
Saul, 15. Compare George E. Brown, Jr., “Guest Comment: The Objectivity Crisis,” Amer. J. Phys. 60 (September 1992), 779–781, at 779–780, who found it “troubling … that we have elevated science—or, more precisely, scientific knowledge—to a position of predominance over other types of cognition and experience; that we have, unconsciously and ironically, imbued science with more value than other types of understanding which are overtly and explicitly value based.”
Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards, 42.
Ibid., 47.
Ibid. Compare Herbert A. Simon, Reason in Human Affairs (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983), 7–8: “[R]eason is wholly instrumental. It cannot tell us where to go; at best it can tell us how to get there. It is a gun for hire that can be employed in the service of whatever we have, good or bad.”
As documented by William Church in his classic history, Richelieu and Reason of State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972).
Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards, 24; see also p. 48.
Ibid., 319.
Ibid., 25. See also p. 40: “Napoleon had ridden in on the back of reason, reorganized Europe in the name of reason and governed beneath the same principle. The subsequent effect was to bolster the rational approach, not to discourage it.”
Ibid.
Ibid., 40.
Ibid., 20.
Ibid., 81.
Ibid., 82.
Ibid., 83–84.
Ibid., 25. Saul warned, “The great danger, when looking at our society, is that what we see encourages us to become obsessed by individual personalities, thus mistaking the participants for the cause.”
Ibid., 85.
Ibid., 27.
Ibid., 17.
Ibid., 21.
Ibid., 135.
Ibid.
Ibid., 36.
Ibid., 136.
Ibid., 137.
Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York, NY: Harper & Brothers, 1911), 130. Emphasis in original. Taylor, p. 115, provides a more elaborate summary that consolidates the second and third principles into one, and emphasizes more the subordination of workmen. At the end, p. 140, Taylor summarizes scientific management as a combination of dichotomous alternatives to what came before: “Science, not rule of thumb. Harmony, not discord. Cooperation, not individualism. Maximum output, in place of restricted output. The development of each man to his greatest efficiency and prosperity.”
Ibid., 25.
Ibid., 36.
Ibid., 26.
Ibid., 10. Emphasis added.
Ibid., 83. Emphasis in orginal.
Scott, Seeing Like a State, 337.
Ibid., 348.
Ibid., 99.
Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards, 120.
Ibid.
Judith A. Merkle, Ideology and Management: The Legacy of the International Scientific Management Movement (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980), 244.
Vaclav Havel, “The End of the Modern Era,” New York Times (1 March 1992), E15.
Brunner et al., Adaptive Governance, and Ronald D. Brunner, Christine H. Colburn, Christina M. Cromley, Roberta A. Klein, and Elizabeth A. Olson, Finding Common Ground: Governance and Natural Resources in the American West (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002).
William Easterly, The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (New York, NY: Penguin Press, 2006), 11. See also, William Easterly, “Was Development Assistance a Mistake?” Amer. Economic Rev. 97 (May 2007), 328–332. Amartya Sen, “The Man Without A Plan,” Foreign Affairs 85 (March/April 2006), 171–177, argues that Easterly’s book, while oversimplified, “could serve as the basis for a reasoned critique of the formulaic thinking and policy triumphalism of some of the economic development literature. The wide-ranging and rich evidence—both anecdotal and statistical—that Easterly cites in his sharply presented arguments against grand designs of different kinds deserves serious consideration.”
Easterly, The White Man’s Burden, 5–6, specifies the ideal types more fully: “Planners announce good intentions but don’t motivate anyone to carry them out; Searchers find things that work and get some reward. Planners raise expectations but take no responsibility for meeting them; Searchers accept responsibility for their actions. Planners determine what to supply; Searchers find out what is in demand. Planners apply global blueprints; Searchers adapt to local conditions. Planners at the top lack knowledge of the bottom; Searchers find out what the reality is at the bottom. Planners never hear whether the planned got what it needed; Searchers find out if the customer is satisfied…. A Planner believes outsiders know enough to impose solutions. A Searcher believes only insiders have enough knowledge to find solutions, and that most solutions must be homegrown.”
Ibid., 14–15. See also Sanjay Reddy and Antoine Heuty, “Global Development Goals: The Folly of Technocratic Pretensions,” Develop. Policy Rev. 26 (2008), 5–28.
Easterly, The White Man’s Burden, 22.
See, e.g., Richard J. T. Klein, E. Lisa F. Schipper, and Surage Dessai, “Integrating Mitigation and Adaptation into Climate and Development Policy: Three Research Questions,” Environ. Sci. Policy 8 (2005), 579–588; and Sarah Bruch and John Robinson, “A Framework for Explaining the Links Between Capacity and Action in Response to Global Climate Change, Climate Policy 7 (2007), 304–316, in which response capacity “represents a broad pool of development-related resources that can be mobilized in the face of any risk” (304).
Paul L. Doughty, “Ending Serfdom in Peru: The Struggle for Land and Freedom in Vicos,” in Dwight B. Heath, Ed., Contemporary Cultures and Societies of Latin America: A Reader in the Social Anthropology of Middle and South America, 3rd ed. (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 2002), 225–243, at 227. The other major source for this account is Allan R. Holmberg, “The Role of Changing Values and Institutions of Vicos,” in Henry F. Dobyns, Paul L. Doughty, and Harold D. Lasswell, Eds., Peasants, Power, and Applied Social Change: Vicos as a Model (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1971), 33–63. Holmberg added that “Records show that all protest movements of Vicos had been squelched by a coalition of landlords, the clergy, and the police…. The rule at Vicos was conformity to the status quo” (43).
Some of the implications of human dignity were specified by Harold D. Lasswell in A Pre-View of Policy Sciences (New York, NY: Elsevier, 1971), 42–43, using the eight value categories listed in Box 4.2 and the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Holmberg, “The Role of Power,” 44–45.
Ibid., 44. The value categories listed in Box 4.2 were specified for the Cornell-Peru Project, with emphasis added: “The principal goals of this plan thus became the devolution of power to the community, the production and broad sharing of greater wealth, the introduction and diffusion of new and modern skills, the promotion of health and well-being, the enlargement of the status and role structure, and the formation of a modern system of enlightenment through schools and other media. It was hoped that … this focus would also have some modernizing effect on the … institutions specialized to respect [including status], affection (family and kinship), and rectitude (religion and ethics), sensitive areas of culture in which it is generally more hazardous to intervene directly.”
Doughty, “Ending Serfdom in Peru,” 228.
Holmberg, “The Role of Power,” 45.
Ibid., 45–46.
Ibid., 55.
Ibid., 45.
Ibid. 46.
Ibid., 47.
Ibid., 48. Doughty, “Ending Serfdom in Peru,” 230, concurred: “[B]y 1956, when the community began to operate the estate directly for itself, serfdom had been abolished and the hacienda lands became community lands, with work done under the emerging elected community council.”
Holmberg, “The Role of Power,” 48–49.
Ibid., 49.
The celebration in Vicos that day, along with Holmberg and the project, were the subjects of a half-hour documentary by CBS News, So That Men Are Free, broadcast in 1962 as part of the series The Twentieth Century. Unfortunately, the documentary showed Holmberg looking down on dancing Vicosinos and supplied a Cold War framing to the event.
Holmberg, “The Role of Power,” 56.
Ibid., 57. Doughty, p. 234, reports, “In the summer of 1960, as two students watched with horror, a detachment of police passed through Vicos to enter the adjacent hacienda of Huapra where the colonos of that estate were trying to build a school like that of Vicos, over the objections of the landlords. The police confronted the serfs in a wheat field and shot the defenseless colonos, leaving three dead and five wounded….”
Doughty, “Ending Serfdom in Peru,” 231.
Dobyns, Doughty, and Lasswell, Peasants, Power, and Applied Social Change, 14, from the Introduction by the editors, who review the shifting politics at the national level as they affected the Vicos experience. On reactions to the Cornell-Peru project by anthropologists, see Paul J. Doughty, “Vicos: Success, Rejection, and Rediscovery of a Classic Program,” in Elizabeth M. Eddy and William L. Partridge, Eds., Applied Anthropology in America, 2nd ed. (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1987), Ch. 19, 433–459.
Doughty, “Ending Serfdom in Peru,” 242–243, systematically compared changes in Vicos by value category from the 1952 baseline to the project decade 1952–1962 and the postproject changes to 1997. This documented an impressive record of sustained development in all categories, beginning with power. The record was corroborated by the equivalent of a multiparty evaluation, the Vicosinos’ reaction to Doughty’s public slide show on life in Vicos during the project, p. 238: “For the older people, it was a chance to ‘provers to youthful skeptics how they lived in the old days; for everyone under 50 it was the first time they had actually seen what the hacienda had been like, and how much Vicos had changed…. From their reactions of delight and curiosity, it seemed clear enough that this community, like so many others, needs to treat the past as a living experience which might inform contemporary decisions.”
Holmberg, “The Role of Power,” 61–62.
Doughty, “Ending Serfdom in Peru,” 236.
Holmberg, “The Role of Power,” 61–62.
Harold D. Lasswell, “The Transferability of Vicos Strategy,” in Dobyns, Doughty, and Lasswell, Eds., Peasants, Power, and Applied Social Change, 167–177, at 176. Lasswell (p. 167; emphasis in original) anticipated efforts to contract the significance of Vicos; “After all, the objection runs, only two thousand villagers were involved, while the number of peasant hamlets and villages on the face of the earth is in the millions. Part of the reply is this: The program as a whole is transferable with little change to many social and physical environments.”
Patrick Breslin, “Thinking Outside Newton’s Box: Metaphors for Grassroots Development,” Grassroots Development 25/1 (2004), 2.
Ibid., 7.
Ibid., quoting complexity theorist Chris Langton.
Ibid., 8.
Ibid., 7.
Ibid., 3.
Ibid., 8.
Ibid., 9.
Ibid.
Easterly, The White Man’s Burden, 382–383, which includes “guiding principles” in a six-part strategy.
Frank J. Penna, Monique Thormann, and J. Michael Finger, “The African Music Scheme,” in J. Michael Finger and Philip Schuler, Eds., Poor People’s Knowledge: Promoting Intellectual Property in Developing Countries (World Bank and Oxford University Press, 2004), 95–112, and other documents under Penna’s name at www.WorldBank.org.
That their advocacy was unsuccessful is one reason why Reynolds told her story at the World Bank, at the request of President Karzai. Reynolds ’s story is retold and analyzed in Brunner, “Context-Sensitive Monitoring and Evaluation in the World Bank.”
Polak, Out of Poverty, 40. The “only realistic path” becomes “one realistic path” when a broader base of experience is taken into account.
Ibid., 46. In Ch. 1, Polak presents “Twelve Steps to Practical Problem Solving.” Doctors Without Borders and Engineers Without Borders have direct and sustained contacts with poor people on the ground and rely on them as participants. See also Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World (New York, NY: Random House, 2004), a best-seller that reports on Farmer’s hospital to care for the rural poor in central Haiti; and Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin, Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace … One School at a Time (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2007), a bestseller on Mortenson’s mission to build schools for girls in remote regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Easterly, The White Man’s Burden, 30, advises his readers not to expect “a Big Plan to reform foreign aid. The only Big Plan is to discontinue Big Plans. The only Big Answer is that there is no Big Answer.”
Consider, e.g., Amitav Ghosh, “Death Comes Ashore,” New York Times (10 May 2008), A19, on “Mauritius, a small Indian Ocean island in a zone that meteorologists call a ‘cyclone factory.’ The islanders have evolved a sophisticated system of precautions, combining a network of cyclone shelters with education (including regular drills), a good early warning system and mandatory closings of businesses and schools when a storm threatens. It’s been a remarkable success: Cyclone Gamede of 2007, a monster of a storm that set global meteorological records for rainfall, killed only two people on the island…. Mauritius is a country that has learned, through trial and experience, that early warnings are not enough—preparation also demands public education and political will. In an age when extreme weather events are clearly increasing in frequency, the world would do well to learn from it.” Another partial exception is Peter Newman, Timothy Beatly, and Heather Boyer, Resilient Cities: Responding to Peak Oil and Climate Change (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2009). 129. See Ashley Lowe, Josh Foster, and Steve Winkelman, Ask the Climate Question: Adapting to Climate Change Impacts in Urban Regions (Washington, D.C.: Center for Clean Air Policy, June 2009). For example, it concluded in part (35), “Urban Leaders partners are proving that with the right leadership, organizational structure and information, local governments can make tangible progress in improving resiliency to the impacts of climate change…. While many ‘Levers of Change’ exist for local governments to advance adaptation efforts from the bottom up, the CCAP Urban Leaders partners and other local governments also need support from other players at the national and state level to achieve full resiliency.”
Ibid., 2.
See the proposed American Recovery and Reinvestment Act announced on 15 January 2009 by Rep. David Obey, chairman of the House Committee on Appropriations.
Consider the call for both feedback and support from the bottom up in Barack Obama’s speech announcing his candidacy in Springfield, IL, in February 2007: “But too many times, after the election is over, and the confetti is swept away, all those promises fade from memory, and the lobbyists and the special interests move in, and people turn away, disappointed as before, left to struggle on their own. That is why this campaign can’t only be about me. It must be about us—it must be about what we can do together. This campaign must be the occasion, the vehicle, of your hopes, and your dreams. It will take your time, your energy, and your advice—to push us forward when we’re doing right, and to let us know when we’re not.” “Illinois Sen. Barack Obama’s Announcement Speech (As Prepared for Delivery),” Associated Press (10 February 2007).
On this possibility, see Noam Cohen, “The Wiki-Way to the Nomination,” New York Times (8 June 2008); Lawrence Downes, “Obama’s Call to Change: What Is Everyone Waiting For?” New York Times (10 November 2008); and Jim Rutenberg and Adam Nagourney, “Retooling a Grass-Roots Network to Serve a YouTube Presidency,” New York Times (26 January 2009). On a related possibility, the Serve America Act, see Bruce Reed and John Bridgeland, “Volunteers to Save the Economy,” New York Times (23 January 2009); and an editorial, “The Moment for National Service,” New York Times (25 January 2009). Christopher Twarowski, “Localities Make a Pitch for Energy-Efficient Projects,” Washington Post (11 December 2008), B8, reported on lobbying for local public works projects that are environment friendly. “‘We want the president-elect to know that local governments are uniquely positioned to put the president’s vision and plan into action,’ said Ken Brown, executive director of Climate Communities, a national coalition of local governments, a sponsor of the event.” The event was cosponsored by ICLEI.
Hansen as quoted in Dana Milbank, “Burned Up about the Other Fossil Fuel,” Washington Post (24 June 2008), A3.
A related article in the same volume by David Cash and Susanne Moser, “Linking Global and Local Scales: Designing Dynamic Assessment and Management Processes,” Global Environ. Change 10 (2000), 109–120, was cited 59 times according to ISI. All of these numbers obtained from the ISI Web of Knowledge have uncertainties but should be compared to the thousands of citations of the “classic” climate policy articles.
David G. Victor, Joshua C. House, and Sarah Joy, “A Madisonian Approach to Climate Policy,” Science 309 (16 September 2005), 1820–1821, plus a letter in response in Science 311 (20 January 2006), 335–336.
“Major world publications” includes hundreds of newspapers and magazines (e.g., The New Yorker, Newsweek, The Economist) worldwide as well as trade publications (e.g., Waste News) and BBC overseas broadcasts.
See “in the press” at www.energiakademiet.dk.
The raw counts from Lexis Nexis Academic were adjusted to avoid double counting of stories listed twice in the same publication. The search for stories mentioning Samsø was complicated by the system’s acceptances of “Sam” for “Samsø or Samso.” The results were reduced to a manageable number by adding “wind turbines” to the search terms, then checked one by one to delete those stories that mentioned “Sam” only.
Similarly, the U.S. Climate Change Action Plan, introduced by President Clinton and Vice-President Gore in October 1993, was relatively neglected in major U.S. newspapers. Only 14 of the stories in the New York Times and Washington Post that referred to “climate change,” “global change,” “greenhouse effect,” or “global warming” also referred to the Action Plan from January 1992 through June 1997. The average for that period was about 20 stories per month, excluding the peak at more than 90 per month around the Earth Summit in Rio in June 1992. For more details see Ronald D. Brunner and Roberta Klein, “Harvesting Experience: A Reappraisal of the U.S. Climate Change Action Plan,” Policy Sciences 32 (1999), 133-161, at 138–139 and Fig. 1. The Action Plan was formally established under the UNFCCC, but major parts of it predated the UNFCCC and operated effectively outside the regime’s main agenda: The Action Plan relied on existing science and technology to assist people on the ground—in business, government, and the military—directly and voluntarily in reducing emissions and energy costs based on fossil fuel consumption.
Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 46.
Ibid., 166. Skowronek noted the attempt to rise above politics: “By transforming ideological conflicts into matters of expertise and efficiency, bureaucrats promised to reconcile the polity with the economy and to stem the tide of social disintegration.” Schools of public administration and think tanks like the Brookings Institution came later, to institutionalize the search for improvements in this pattern of governance.
There is nothing unusual about this. Compare Harold D. Lasswell, A Pre-View of Policy Sciences (New York, NY: Elsevier, 1971), 65: “The tendency of every group is to narrow its frame of reference, chiefly because quick and easy individual payoffs so frequently come by adding minor and rather obvious amplifications to the field of common reference. Hence the focus of attention needs to be redirected to neglected areas.”
David M. Herszenhorn, “After Verbal Fire, Senate Effectively Kills Climate Change Bill,” New York Times (7 June 2008), 12.
Elizabeth Rosenthal, “Amid a Hopeful Mood, U.N. Talks Set Countries on Path Toward a Global Climate Treaty,” New York Times (13 December 2008), A7.
John M. Broder and Andrew C. Revkin, “Hard Task for New Team on Energy and Climate,” New York Times (16 December 2008), A24. Rosenthal, “Amid a Hopeful Mood,” reported from Poznan that “Perhaps contributing most to the hopeful mood were signs from high-level United States officials that the incoming administration of President-elect Barack Obama would be ready to hit the ground running with a new United States climate policy.”
Andrew C. Revkin, “Hard Task for New Team on Energy and Climate,” New York Times (16 December 2008), A24 Ibid. 148. Quoted in Charles J. Hanley, “U.N.: Financial Chills are Ill Wind for Climate,” Associated Press Financial Wire (9 October 2008). See also Vanessa Gera, “U.N.: Financial Crisis a Burden on Climate Change,” Associated Press Financial Wire (27 November 2008).
Hanley, “U.N.: Financial Chills are Ill Wind for Climate.”
Andrew C. Revkin, “Years Later, Climatologist Renews His Call for Action,” New York Times (23 June 2008), A18.
Thomas L. Friedman, “Win, Win, Win, Win, Win …,” New York Times (28 December 2008), WK8.
Bob Inglis and Arthur B. Laffer, “An Emissions Plan Conservatives Could Warm To,” New York Times (28 December 2008), WK10.
John M. Broder, “In Obama’s Team, 2 Camps on Climate,” New York Times (3 January 2009), A10.
John M. Broder and Andrew C. Revkin, “Hard Task for New Team on Energy and Climate,” A24.
Bjorn Lomborg, Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 121.
Ibid., 117.
Andrew C. Revkin, “A Shift in the Debate Over Global Warming,” New York Times (6 April 2008), WK3.
Quoted in ibid.
Ibid.
Quoted in ibid.
The passive house uses the amount of energy consumed by a hair dryer to meet all of its needs for heat and hot water, at a construction cost that is 5% to 7% more than conventional houses in Germany. For more details, see Elizabeth Rosenthal, “No Furnaces but Heat Aplenty in ‘Passive Houses,’” New York Times (27 December 2008), A1.
Søren Hermansen quoted in Robin McKie, “Isle of Plenty,” The Observer (London) Magazine (21 September 2008), 30. Hermansen continued: “For example, Shell [the international oil company] heard about what we were doing and asked to be involved—but only on condition they ended up owning the turbines. We told them to go away. We are a nation of farmers, of course. We believe in self-sufficiency.”
Lomborg, Cool It, 122.
Gregg Marland, “Could We/Should We Engineer the Earth’s Climate?” an editorial introducing the special issue of Climatic Change 33 (1996), 275–278, at 275.
See the Environment Pollution Panel, President’s Science Advisory Committee, Restoring the Quality of our Environment, Report to President L. B. Johnson (November 1965); and the Panel on Policy Implications of Greenhouse Warming, Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy, National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine, Policy Implications of Greenhouse Warming: Mitigation, Adaptation, and the Science Base (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1992). For more on the history, see James R. Fleming, “The Climate Engineers,” Wilson Quarterly (Spring 2006), 46-60.
Stephen Schneider, “Geoengineering: Could—or Should—We Do It?” Climatic Change 33 (1996), 291–302, at 296.
More than half the articles in the peer-reviewed literature using the term “geoengineering,” coined in the mid-70s by Cesare Marchetti, have been published since 2006.
Paul J. Crutzen, “Albedo Enhancement By Stratospheric Sulfur Injections: A Contribution To Resolve A Policy Dilemma? An Editorial Essay,” Climatic Change 77 (2006), 211–219, at 212.
John P. Holdren, “Presidential Address: Science and Technology for Sustainable Well-Being,” Science 319 (25 January 2008) 424–434, at 431.
From a commentary by Peter G. Brewer, “Evaluating a Technological Fix for Climate,” Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 104 (12 June 2007), 9915–9916, at 9916.
Edward Teller, Lowell Wood, and Roderick Hyde, “Global Warming and Ice Ages: I. Prospects For Physics-Based Modulation Of Global Change,” UCRLJC-128715, preprint (15 August 1997), prepared for invited presentation at the 22nd International Seminar on Planetary Emergencies, Erice (Sicily), Italy, 20–23 August 1997, 16, with emphasis added.
James R. Fleming, “The Climate Engineers,” 46–47. Fleming continued: “Wood advanced several ideas to ‘fix’ the earth’s climate, including building up Arctic sea ice to make it function like a planetary air conditioner to’ suck heat in from the midlatitude heat bath.’ A’ surprisingly practical’ way of achieving this, he said, would be to use large artillery pieces to shoot as much as a million tons of highly reflective sulfate aerosols or specially engineered nanoparticles into the Arctic stratosphere to deflect the sun’s rays…. Far-fetched as Wood’s ideas may sound, his weren’t the only Rube Goldberg proposals aired at the meeting.”
Fleming as quoted in the transcript of an interview with presenter and producer Wendy Carlisle, “The Climate Engineers,” on Background Briefing (6 April 2008), an ABC Radio National program broadcast in Australia. The transcript is available at http://www.abc.net.au/rn/backgroundbriefing/stories/2008/2204410.htm.
Ralph J. Cicerone, “An Editorial Comment: Geoengineering: Encouraging Research and Overseeing Implementation,” Climatic Change 77 (August 2006), 221–226, at 221. In Carlisle, “The Climate Engineers,” Wally Broecker mentioned that he had coauthored a paper on climate model experiments with one approach to geoengineering in the mid-1980s. Then “we sent it around to prominent people in the field, and they said, ‘By all means don’t publish this; the world is not ready for it.’ So we just put it on the shelf.”
Daniel Bodansky, “May We Engineer the Climate?” Climatic Change (1996), 308–321, at 310 and 320, respectively. See also Stephen Schneider, “Geoengineering: Could We or Should We Make It Work?” Philos. Trans. Roy. Soc. London, A—Mathematical Physical and Engineering Sciences 366 (November 2008), 3843–3862.
Alan Robock, “20 Reasons Why Geo-Engineering May Be a Bad Idea.” Bull. Atomic Sci. 64 (May/June, 2008), 14–18, at 17. The reasons were first written down at NASA’s conference “Managing Solar Radiation.” Teller and colleagues in “Global Warming and Ice Ages,” note 5, anticipated concerns like Robock’s and attempted to counter them: “While it may be argued that uncertainties in the accuracy and fidelity of modeling tools are sufficiently great that they should not be relied upon to forecast reliably the effects of enhanced sunlight scattering on the climate … it is these same modeling tools—not the presently quite ambiguous observations of the actual climate—that are considered sufficiently robust to motivate the present level of concern about man-made climate change.”
Keith as quoted in Carlisle, “The Climate Engineers.” Ambivalence of a different kind came up in a poll of 80 leading international climate scientists at the end of 2008. About 54% “agreed that the failure to curb emissions of CO2 … has created the need for an emergency ‘plan B’ involving research, development and possible implementation of a worldwide geoengineering strategy.” About 35% “disagreed, arguing that it would distract from the main objective of cutting CO2 emissions, with the remaining 11 per cent saying that they did not know whether a geoengineering strategy is needed or not.” For more details, see Steve Connor and Chris Green, “Climate Scientists: It’s Time for ‘Plan B,’” The Independent (London) (2 January 2009).
Al Gore, “The Climate for Change,” New York Times (9 November 2008), WK10, from which we quote extensively below. At 1423 words, the op-ed is almost twice the normal length. The length still forced Gore to leave out many relevant details but also to select what was more important to express his perspective.
Amory B. Lovins, “Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?” Foreign Affairs 55 (October 1976), 65–96, at 65. Lovins developed his ideas in subsequent books beginning with Soft Energy Paths: Toward a Durable Peace (Cambridge, MA.: Ballinger Publishing, 1977).
For example, see John M. Broder, “Geography Is Dividing Democrats Over Energy,” New York Times (27 January 2009), A1.
Lovins, “Energy Strategy,” 74.
For example, we quoted the IPCC’s Second Assessment Synthesis, secs. 5.2 and 5.3, in Ch.1: “Significant reductions in net greenhouse gas emissions are technically possible and can be economically feasible…. The degree to which [this] technical potential and cost-effectiveness are realized is dependent on initiatives to counter lack of information and overcome cultural, institutional, legal, financial and economic barriers which can hinder diffusion of technology or behavioral changes.” See also Elizabeth Rosenthal, “No Furnaces but Heat Aplenty in ‘Passive Houses,’” on institutional barriers to diffusion of passive house technology in the United States.
Lovins, “Energy Strategy,” 80–81. ERDA was the Energy Research and Development Administration, soon to be folded into the new Department of Energy.
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© 2010 Ronald D. Brunner and Amanda H. Lynch
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Brunner, R.D., Lynch, A.H. (2010). Reframing the Context. In: Adaptive Governance and Climate Change. American Meteorological Society, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-935704-01-0_5
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