Why Solving Climate ChangeWill Be Like Mobilizing forWarAnd even then, victory is far fromguaranteed.Oct 15, 2015

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Zak Bickel / The Atlantic

As the 19th century entered its final decade, the War of

Currents was nearing its peak. On one side of this war wasThomas Edison, who had invested heavily in direct-current(DC) technology. Tesla and Westinghouse backed alternating-current (AC), which they believed (correctly) to be moreefficient.

In the spring of 1891, a seemingly small event in Telluride,Colorado, decisively turned the tide in favor of AC. The Ameshydroelectric-power plant, financed by mining entrepreneur L.L. Nunn, and built around equipment supplied byWestinghouse, began transmitting AC power to Nunnʼs gold-mining operations 2.6 miles away.

It was the first successful demonstration of ACʼs efficiencyadvantages over long distances, and it led to the unveiling ofAC at the 1893 Chicago World Fair, followed by Westinghousewinning the contract to build an AC-based power plant atNiagara falls. The rest is history. Edison lost the plot, and ACcame to dominate the story of electricity.

The victory of AC over DC, in the midst of a noisy debatefueled as much by misinformation and propaganda as byscience, is the sort of outcome under uncertainty that marketsexcel at delivering.

In 2015, the climate-change debate is where the War ofCurrents was in 1893. The December climate convention inParis, COP 21, is shaping up to be the most significant since

Kyoto in 1997. It might well do for clean-energy technologieswhat the Chicago World Fair did for electricity. It might be aninflection point.

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Except this time around, the drama centers on governmentand UN technocrats rather than technologists and privateinvestors. Rather than trusting market serendipity, climateexperts are hoping that strong regulatory forcing combinedwith aggressive government investment in energy R&D will dothe trick. In the November issue of The Atlantic, Bill Gatesmakes a persuasive case for just this approach.

Is Gates right that this dual-pronged attack is necessary?Probably. Can it work? Thereʼs a slim chance.

* * *

Itʼs clear that the market is unlikely to solve the problem ofclimate change on its own. If scientists are right, and there isno reason to think they arenʼt, averting climate change willrequire such large-scale, rapid action, that no single energytechnology, new or emerging, could be the solution. Neithercould any single non-energy technology, such as video-conferencing as a substitute for travel, solve the problem onits own.

There is always a possibility that a single cheap and effectivesolution will emerge, rendering expensive interventions moot,but few climate experts are willing to trust the future to thatunlikely prospect.

The challenge therefore, is one of rapid, concerteddeployment of a portfolio of emerging and mature energy andnon-energy technologies. This means accepting a certainlevel of attendant risks. The Volkwagen emissions scandalillustrates these risks well: Aggressive forcing, through EUpolicy instruments, of the adoption of diesel engines (whichare better suited to reducing emissions) created incentivesthat led to sophisticated gaming.

The Volkswagen scandal wonʼt be the last or the worst. Unlikemany of the other objections put forth by climate skeptics, theobjection that managing moral hazards at a planetary scalemight prove impossible is a solid one.

Assuming we do manage to significantly acceleratedeployment without cancerous levels of corporatistcorruption, if emissions targets still remain out of reach, somegrowth must be temporarily sacrificed. At the same time,investment across the portfolio of energy technologies willneed to continue.

In other words, we are contemplating the sorts of austeritiesassociated with wartime economies. For ordinary Americans,austerities might include an end to expansive suburbanlifestyles and budget air travel, and an accelerated return tohigh-density urban living and train travel. For businesses, thismight mean rethinking entire supply chains, as high-emissions sectors become unviable under new emissionsregimes.

What Gates and others are advocating for is not so much atechnological revolution as a technocratic one. One for whichthere is no successful peacetime precedent. Which is not tosay, of course, that it cannot work. There is always a first timefor every new level of complexity and scale in humancooperation. But itʼs sobering to look back at the (partial)precedents we do have.

Of the previous six energy revolutions of comparablemagnitude—wind, water, coal, oil, electricity, and nuclear—only nuclear power had anywhere near the same level ofearly-stage technocratic shaping that we are contemplating.

Among technological revolutions outside the energy sector,only space exploration, nuclear-weapons technology, andcomputing technology have had similar levels of bureaucraticdirection.

None of these are true comparables, however, for one criticalreason. In each historical case, the revolution was highlyfocused on a single core technology rather than a broadportfolio of technologies, and a managed transition ofinfrastructure at civilization scale. In the case of aerospaceand computing technologies, the comparison is even weaker:Those sectors enjoyed several decades of organic evolutiondriven primarily by inventors, private investors, and marketforces before technocrats got involved.

Even in the most relevant precedent, the response to ozonedepletion, the technical challenge was to develop substitutesfor one specific class of chemicals (CFCs) with a relativelynarrow range of applications in refrigeration and aerosols.

Precedents in public health, civil engineering, epidemiology,and public safety offer clearer examples of technocrat-ledrevolutions. But those transitions were far simpler,technologically, than a retooling of global energyinfrastructure.

Properly qualified, there is only one successful precedent forthe kind of technological mobilization we are contemplating:

the mobilization of American industry during World War II.

The proposed climate change war—and no other term issuitable given the scale, complexity, and speed of the task—requires a level of trust in academic and energy-sector publicinstitutions (including international ones) comparable to thetrust placed in military institutions during times of war.

The significant political difference is that climate changeoffers up no conveniently terrifying dictator, against whom torally the troops and general population. Without a sufficientlycharismatic narrative, casualties will go largelyunacknowledged, like the victims of the Spanish Flu epidemicof 1918 (which caused about twice as many deaths as WorldWar I, but is barely remembered today outside of public-healthcircles).

What climate change does offer in place of an evil dictatorthough, is a powerful appeal to parental instincts. The degreeto which we are able to prevent future pain will dependstrongly on the ability of politicians to establish the narrativethat we must allocate high costs today, while we can stillafford them, in order to save unborn generations fromavertable disasters.

In a time of war, the alternative to trusting the military anddefense establishments is leaving all action to guerilla militiasin occupied territories. In the war against climate change, the

alternative to trusting technocrats, regulatory machinery, andpublic institutions is to trust small-scale libertarian ingenuityto bail out Bangladesh in the event of large-scale climate-change. Thatʼs not likely to happen.

We either trust public institutions, based on specializedexpertise, and accept the risk that they might be wrong, as inthe case of the intelligence establishment and WMDs in Iraq—or we limit collective action to issues where it is possible toachieve informed consensus among laypersons. The last timethat was a realistic possibility in a major economy was beforethe rise of the Interstate Commerce Commission in the UnitedStates in 1887.

This is not a comforting conclusion, but then, no decision tomobilize on a large scale for a war-like collective action ever is.So it is important to understand that this is the decision underconsideration.

We are not being asked to understand, en masse, theintricacies of climate science and technology deployment anymore than the population of a nation at war is asked tounderstand the intricacies of intelligence gathering or militarycampaign planning. We are being asked to trust the integrityand declared intentions of institutions that do understand theintricacies. We are being asked to trust that despite any defacto ideological biases, professionalism will prevail.

In the war against climate change, powerful technocrats willbe far more consequential than energy-sector technologists.Think of Colonel John Boyd, widely regarded as the architectof modern American military strategy, and a renowned masterof bureaucratic warfare within the Pentagon. Think of AdmiralHyman Rickover, widely credited for the extraordinary safetyrecord of the U.S. nuclear-submarine fleet. Boyd and Rickoverwere exemplars of bureaucratic heroism. Both were highlyeffective, but largely anonymous technocrats, maneuveringimaginatively within public institutions to deploy publicresources. These will be the heroes in the war against climatechange.

To the extent that energy technocrats are able to maneuveraround bureaucratic inertia, investments at the levelssuggested by Gates might pay off, and the response toclimate change has a shot at success.

There are early signs that this is happening. Californiaregulator Mary Nicholsʼs battles with the auto industry toaccelerate the adoption of electric cars in California arereminiscent of Boydʼs legendary battles with the military-industrial complex in the development of highly effectivecombat aircraft like the F16.

Reposing this kind of trust in public officials can seemdangerous, but as the recent vaccine debates showed, it iseven more dangerous to trust uninformed, but ideologically

strident and media-savvy interest groups being misled bycharismatic non-institutional figures. Lay skeptics can berelied upon to tease out the hypocrisies and obvious lies ofpoliticians, but are far too easily misled on scientific matters.To rely on mobs to correctly interpret Sankey diagrams andocean-acidification chemistry is like trusting a high-schoolfootball coach to correctly interpret the battle plans for theinvasion of an enemy nation. Or trusting a Hollywood celebrityto meaningfully opine on vaccine biochemistry andepidemiological models.

Climate change is not a game for amateurs. The evolvingnature of the science, and the possibility (always present inscience) that some of todayʼs beliefs might be overturned bynew evidence and models, is not a reason to second guessscientists or trust conspiracy theorists instead. That doesnʼtmean we donʼt risk corporatist corruption, cronyism, andoutright wartime profiteering. But we do not yet know how toact beyond a certain scale and speed without those risks.

So a technocrat-led, government-coordinated internationalresponse is probably necessary. Can it work?

Like many technologists whose opinions have been shapedby Internet-era technologies, Iʼd like to see the institutions weare being asked to trust adopt some of the operatingmechanisms I have grown to trust. Like many, includingpresumably Bill Gates, I hope the climate war will be fought

with agile, open processes, networked organizational forms,and a great deal more autonomy for low-level actors thantechnocracies have historically been willing to cede.

Iʼd also like claims to professional authority on the part offrontline actors to be based on visible accomplishments ratherthan credentials. I hope the action (or inaction, rather) will notbe driven by gridlocked committees inching towardsineffective and expensive compromises with excruciatingslowness, after hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshis andSub-Saharan Africans have already lost their lives orlivelihoods.

But to base decisions on comparisons between imaginarymore-perfect institutions that might exist, and flawed, butslowly evolving institutions that do exist, is a perfect exampleof the nirvana fallacy. The pragmatic path is to trust that thetechnocrats in charge will fight the necessary bureaucraticbattles with sufficient skill and professionalism to actually winin time to make a difference.

Can this work? Thereʼs a slim chance, but itʼs probably thebest chance we have. And even a small chance of preventingmassive misery in parts of the world (and periods of thefuture) that did not cause the problem, is worth taking.

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Venkatesh Rao is a writer based in Seattle and the founderof Ribbonfarm.