Environmental Leadership Program: ELP News: Fall 2001: Climate Change Perspectives

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newsletter Fall 2001

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Focus on: Climate Change by James Gustave Speth
Organizational Information
Fellowship Class Lists
Climate Change Perspectives by Brad Guy, Jonna Higgins-Freese, Michelle Knapik, Paul Sabin, Donnan Steele
Fellow Profiles: Janice Varela, Dan Gruner, Jacob Park
ELP Retreat Highlights: August 2001 and Vallecitos
Activity Fund Updates
ELP Newsmakers

Climate Change Perspectives

PAUL SABIN is executive director of ELP, coordinating program design and implementation and organizational development. He is also a senior research associate at Yale Law School and a visiting fellow at Yale's Whitney Humanities Center. During the past two years, he has taught environmental and western history at Yale University and business-government relations at the Harvard Business School.

As a historian, I study the origins of our national dependence on burning petroleum and natural gas, two leading sources of carbon dioxide emissions. I am writing a book about how state and federal public policies and politics shaped California's oil economy in the early twentieth century. California is a particularly fruitful state to examine. For many, it symbolizes our national love for the automobile and petroleum consumption. Additionally, California has produced tremendous quantities of oil from fields in the San Joaquin Valley and Los Angeles Basin, and along the Pacific Coast. California battles over oil spills, refinery pollution, freeways and smog also have shaped national environmental politics profoundly.

My book examines some of the ways that governments established the overall framework for oil production and consumption. These include distributing access to petroleum resources, exercising regulatory power over production, investing public funds in highway development, and making tax policy decisions about how to raise government revenue. Understanding these historical dimensions to our energy economy and natural resource politics will allow us to develop an effective policy response to climate change today. How can we extricate ourselves without knowing how we got into this fix?

One conclusion from my research is that environmentalists need to accelerate the trend of focusing on public policies whose connection to the natural environment is not immediately clear. These policies include industrial regulation, trade and tax policy, zoning and land use planning, and transportation development. A closer look at the history of the petroleum economy underscores that most public policy decisions that shaped the oil market were made within an economic or social framework, not an environmental one. If we hope to tackle problems as central to our economy as energy production and climate change, which go to the heart of the Industrial Revolution, then we must revisit many past policy decisions to create a new market framework for energy, with new incentive structures.

The policy framework that guided our economy towards petroleum and natural gas during the past century built fossil fuel consumption into the very landscape and design of the nation. Rather than just eliminate current subsidies for the carbon-based economy, we will need to promote new energy and transportation systems as aggressively as we promoted fossil fuel production, automobiles, and other key activities during the past century. This will threaten entrench interests. But so did the policies that undermined our streetcars and railroads in the 1920s and 1930s.

Climate change is not just a policy problem. For historians as with the general public, our society has made it possible for many of us to distance ourselves from the natural world and from key components of the economy, such as energy production. As part of reconnecting us to the energy that powers our daily lives and that is altering the world around us, we need to talk more openly about how climate change is happening and begin to relate it to our daily life and policy decisions. I would hope that this heightened awareness might create a new conversational norm, one that takes climate change more as a given and that moves our society towards what we will do about it. This would allow us to talk more effectively about how climate change will impact our daily life, and that of our descendants.

The most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change included fairly detailed predictions of climate-related ecological change at the regional level. We might use this information more effectively. Take, for example, the milder New England winters lately. I remember ice-skating and cross-country skiing as a child around Boston. Today, ponds rarely freeze for long and the snow is wet and doesn't stick. Will my son be exhilarated by pond hockey and skiing in the woods? I similarly cherish memories of New England's dazzling red, orange and brown forests. Climate data suggests that the northern forests will undergo a significant change in species, with important consequences for our renowned fall foliage.

These local environmental changes have petty human consequences compared to melting ice caps, rising seas, increased incidence of disease, and increased drought, but they are important cultural markers that I see in the world around me. They might provide ways to recruit regional small businesses into supporting climate change action. They also may help climate advocates tug at the heartstrings of regional politicians and powerbrokers.

Studying history can provide us with a framework for thinking about our options and challenges. It doesn't provide a clear road map. The good news on climate change and energy policy, however, is that we know a great deal about how we got here. We also have developed many of the technologies and policy tools that can shift our economy away from carbon. When we find the political will to act, we can.

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