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99 Foreign Aff. 176 (2020)
The Case for Climate Pragmatism: Saving the Earth Requires Realism, Not Revolution

handle is hein.journals/fora99 and id is 806 raw text is: The Case for Climate Pragmatism Saving the Earth Requires Realism, Not Revolution Hal Harvey The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming BY DAVID WALLACE-WELLS. Tim Duggan Books, 2019, 384 pp. Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? BY BILL McKIBBEN. Henry Holt, 2019, 304 pp. The Green New Deal: Why the Fossil Fuel Civilization Will Collapse by 2028, and the Bold Economic Plan to Save Life on Earth BY JEREMY RIFKIN. St. Martin's Press, 2019, 256 pp. Climate change is often described as a wicked problem, meaning that it resists easy definition and defies conventional solutions. It tran- scends political boundaries and cannot be solved by a single country, but interna- tional governance is a weak substitute. It is a collective-action problem that demands a collective solution, but it has instead led to a great deal of finger- HAL HARVEY is CEO of Energy innovation and a co-author, with Robbie Orvis and Jeffrey Rissman, of Designing Climate Solutions: A Policy Guide for Low-Carbon Energy. pointing. Its effects-rising seas, intense storms, desertification, and so on-are felt most acutely in developing coun- tries, far away from the industrialized nations that are most responsible for the problem. And government attempts to address such negative externalities (as economists call these nonmonetized costs for third parties) by forcing producers to shoulder the burden caused by their carbon emissions have fallen flat. In short, humanity uses the atmos- phere as a free dumping ground for pollutants, and deeply vested interests resist changing that. Climate change also confounds customary human timescales. The worst effects of today's emissions won't be felt for generations, which makes morally unsustainable behavior easier to rational- ize. And the harm done by humans induces natural systems to compound their sins: the rising temperatures are melting the Arctic's permafrost, which in turn unleashes further monstrous quanti- ties of carbon and methane into the atmosphere, speeding warming. Mean- while, thanks to the loss of ice in the Arctic Ocean, that once shiny ice mirror, which used to bounce solar energy back into space, is now transforming into a dark heat absorber, itself leading to rising temperatures. Rampaging fires in Australia-driven in large part by higher temperatures and droughts-have taken forests that absorbed carbon dioxide for hundreds of years and converted them into huge sources of it. Because the global community has dawdled in decarbonizing its energy systems, it has spent most of the carbon budget-the quota of carbon emis- sions, for all of civilization over all time, that must not be exceeded if warming 176 FOREIGN AFFAIRS

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